Tom Hanks has been saying a lot of things recently about our motivations for going to war with Japan during World War II. He suggests that racism played a big part in our decision to fight the Japanese; no mention of Pearl Harbor. His words brought back a lot of memories for me; my dad was in the Pacific during World War II.
Anyway, I started thinking about my father and what I knew of him, how he always stopped on his way to the store to ask the widow next door “is there anything I can bring you or would you like to come along”? How he took care of my mother through multiple years of illness. How he would shovel out the car really early on Sunday mornings so he could give anyone who needed it a ride to church, even though he was an agnostic. My grandfather said my dad became an agnostic during the war, he would mumble something about my dad seeing too much in the war that no man should ever have to see.
I remember asking my father and my uncles if they were heroes in the war and I found it amazing that they all had exactly the same response. They would gaze off into the distance, shake their heads and say “No honey, the heroes are still over there.” It took me a few years to understand that they meant the soldiers who were buried all over Europe and the Pacific.
I remember the bouts of malaria that would attack my father for the rest of his life. He never complained, would only say that he was “one of the lucky ones.” I remember one summer visiting my paternal grandfather and we came upon some letters that my dad had written home from the military hospital where he was being treated. Dad said he was getting better and was expected to recover, that was the good news; he also wrote about the rumor circulating through the troops that they were being readied to invade Japan. As we know now, the United States was preparing to invade Japan and the military predicted casualties of a million U.S. soldiers, only the development of the atomic bomb saved them.
I have also heard in recent months that the United States used the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but not on Berlin or Rome because of racism. The truth is we used the atomic bomb as soon as it was ready; it had nothing to do with the race of the people we were bombing. In fact, the United States contacted Japan and told them to surrender or we would be forced to unleash a terrible new weapon that had just been developed. Japan declined to surrender and the United States used its new advantage to end World War II. I”m not sure what would have been accomplished had we been forced to invade. Soldiers on both sides and many civilians would have perished. Were we wrong to try to save our soldiers the onerous task of invading Japan after they had already spent four years fighting their way through most of Europe and Northern Africa?
I think Mr. Hanks is a wonderful actor, but I don”t understand why he feels it necessary to label my father or my country as racist because we fought back after Pearl Harbor and did everything we could to end the war swiftly and save as many American soldiers as possible. Actually, I think you can tell a lot about the American people if you consider the way we treated Japan after its defeat. Gen. Douglas MacArthur occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952 and during that time the United States poured $2 billion in economic aid into Japan. Today Japan is not only a strong democracy, it is the strongest, richest economy in Asia and my dad wouldn”t have wanted it any other way.
Mary Becker is a retired San Francisco business owner, originally from Minnesota, who recently moved to Lake County.
