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This was the true nature of the enemy we faced. The Japanese military considered surrender a dishonor to one’s self, one’s family, one’s country, and one’s God, and thus they showed no mercy.
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The fall of Corregidor and the resulting treatment of Allied prisoners of war dispelled any remaining doubt about the inhumaneness of the Japanese army even in the context of war. Many, if not all, died without ever knowing why. Arizona that sits on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Seventeen hundred sailors are still entombed in the hull of the U.S.S. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, timed for Sunday morning to inflict the maximum loss of ships and human life, thrust the United States into a war in the Pacific whose outcome then was far from certain. In the end, they would kill over 20 million of their Asian neighbors.
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Without the slightest remorse or hesitation the Japanese military slaughtered innocent men, women, and children. Yet during the years when my generation and our parents were struggling through the Great Depression, the Japanese were engaged in the conquest of their neighbors. There is no warrior class, no master race, no Samurai. Like the overwhelming majority of my generation I did not want a war. I just could not believe that the Smithsonian, an institution whose very name signifies honesty and integrity in the preservation of American artifacts, could be so wrong. My first reaction was, as you can imagine, personal disbelief. It was obvious to me that the Enola Gay was being used to advance a theory about atomic missions and the United States’ role in World War II that transformed the Japanese into victims and cast the United States as a vengeful aggressor engaged in a war to destroy an ancient culture. It was a crisis in which the forces of evil were clearly defined, or at least I thought so until last fall when I read the first accounts from the Air Force Association of the proposed script for the exhibit of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution. Six days after Nagasaki the Japanese military surrendered and the Second World War came to an end.įifty years ago millions of my fellow citizens served our country in a time of national crisis - a crisis which engulfed our panel a crisis in which the forces of fascism were poised to extinguish the democracies of the world. I flew the instrument plane on the Hiroshima mission, and 3 days later on Augcommanded the second atomic mission over Nagasaki. I am the only pilot to have flown on both atomic missions. Sweeney, United States Air Force, retired. Sweeney (1919~2004) and the Japanese version of his memoir “WAR’S END:An Eyewitness Account of America’s Last Atomic Mission”