[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 127 (Tuesday, September 13, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: September 13, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
HISTORIANS MUST REMEMBER OUR HONORED VETERANS
______
HON. DUNCAN HUNTER
of california
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, September 13, 1994
Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to encourage my colleagues to
read the following editorials on the proposed Enola Gay exhibit at the
Smithsonian. The commentaries underscore the importance of that mission
to our honored veterans, and reflect sentiments that must not be
forgotten by historians.
[From the Wall Street Journal, Aug. 29, 1994]
War and the Smithsonian
The Smithsonian Institution's mania for revising American
history is in evidence again, this time in the National Air
and Space Museum's proposed exhibit on the Enola Gay, the B-
29 that delivered the atom bomb to Hiroshima. In presenting
the Japanese as the prime victims of the Pacific War, and
American museum has rewritten history as never before.
Now this is saying a lot considering that the Smithsonian
curators' allegiance to the current canons of political
virtue and related humbug have been evident since the
National Museum of American Art's 1991 exhibit on the
American West. There the show's creators outdid one another
in absurdity with commentaries attacking the Pilgrims as
capitalists lacking ``true pioneer spirit,'' the Western
settlers as rapacious brutes, and the founding and
development of America generally as a criminal capitalist
venture.
More recently, this page took note of a Smithsonian TV
special inviting multicultural admiration of a New Guinea
tribe for whom cannibalism is ``a well-functioning example of
how a complete criminal justice system works.'' The program
made, as it were, no bones about its view that we ``can learn
from people like this.''
What we can learn from the proposed Enola Gay exhibit
scheduled to open in May is a question that has already
evoked furious protest from veterans and military historians.
The picture that emerges from the script is of a besieged
Japan yearning for peace. This Japan lies at the mercy of an
implacably violent enemy--the United States--hell-bent on
total victory and the mass destruction of women and children.
And why? ``For most Americans, this war * * * was a war of
vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their
unique culture against Western imperialism.''
Now removed from the script--though only after the Air
Force Association and other critics weighed in--the line
tells everything about the mind-set behind the show. So does
the script's not-so-subtle suggestion of the Nuremburg war
crimes defense in its reference to the American pilots who
were just ``following orders.'' The scriptwriters disdain any
belief that the decision to drop the bomb could have been
inspired by something other than racism or blood-lust.
The show's assemblers evidently want no truck with facts
like the massive Japanese buildup on the southern island of
Kyushu and plans for a battle to the death, revealed by the
ULTRA code-breakers, that would by all estimates have
resulted in more than a million American casualties and the
deaths of more Japanese than perished at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. In the show's original plan, Japanese imperial
adventures get comparatively slight mention. For the
planners, indeed, the war and its carnage seem to have begun
in August of 1945.
Under mounting pressure, museum director Martin Harwit
agreed that more balance was needed. The script has since
been altered somewhat--but its spirit remains intact. What
can't be altered is the clear impression given by the
Smithsonian that the American museum whose business it is to
tell the nation's story is now in the hands of academics
unable to view American history as anything other than a
woeful catalog of crimes and aggressions against the helpless
peoples of the earth. Mr. Harwit gave an interview a few
years ago in which he explained that ``We just can't afford
to make war a heroic event where people could prove their
manliness and then come home to woo the fair damsel.''
It is a curious view, this--that it is the role of a
national museum to exclude, in the interest of our moral
betterment, any recognition of heroism in battle. Given this
view it is especially curious to note the oozing romanticism
with which the Enola show's writers describe the kamikaze
pilots. These are the Japanese suicide pilots whose noble
rituals, rites of purification, letters to their mothers and
general spiritual beauty are adoringly detailed in the
script. These were, the script elegiacally relates, ``youths,
their bodies overflowing with life.'' Of the youth and life
of the Americans who fought and bled in the Pacific there is
no mention.
Under fire from Members of Congress, the architects of the
Enola Gay exhibit now promise still another effort at a
balanced script. The real question is not whether these
tortured and reluctant efforts finally succeed. The question
is what is going on at the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian--and
for how long it is going to be allowed to continue.
____
[Letters to the Editor]
They Would've Fought to the Death
The Smithsonian Institution's proposed exhibit on the Enola
Gay is an insult to all veterans and especially to me (``War
and the Smithsonian,'' Review & Outlook, Aug. 29). When the
atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, I was a prisoner of war
in northern Japan working in a copper mine. I had served on
Bataan, made the Death March and survived 42 months of brutal
treatment by the Japanese. In my prison camp in Hanawa,
Japan, in late June, machine guns were brought in the camp to
kill all the American and British prisoners. All camp
commanders were ordered to ensure that our liquidation would
occur when American troops landed in Japan. That order, which
I have read, was issued by Field Marshall Count Hisaichi
Terauchi. That order, which would've resulted in the killing
of more than 400,000 POWs, was not implemented due to the
bomb drop that stopped the war.
The bomb not only saved me and other POWs, but it also
saved Japan. I saw the caves; I saw the spears; I saw the
bunkers--all for the purpose of fighting to the death.
Invasion by American troops would have resulted in millions
of deaths in Japan.
John R. Wood
Sarasota, Fla.
____
I lived in Japan from September 1944 until after the
surrender. My own ivory tower of observation of the Japanese
people was not as high as the Smithsonian Director Martin
Harwit's is today.
In August 1944, all Japanese women aged 18 through 40 were
to make themselves available for wartime service wherever
needed. By the spring of 1945 all females left out of this
group were being trained for home defense. The summer of 1945
found the roads choked with marching and screaming civilians
consisting of children as young as 10 and women in their 60s
and often older.
They were armed with bamboo spears, bows and arrows, and
kotchas, a kind of lethally shaped garden hoe. As they
marched they screamed their songs of allegiance to the
emperor. It was an awesome sight to see these fanatics so
eager to die for their cause. I believe that no amount of
jawboning would have swayed them from their course.
J.D. Merritt
St. James City, Fla.
____
One might think that the spectacle of this country's
national history museums being rife with anti-American bigots
would be an only-in-America sort of thing. In fact it's not.
Fully a 110 years ago, Gilbert and Sullivan, in ``The
Mikado,'' found the phenomenon so plentiful that they put on
the Lord High Executioner's list of candidates for deserved
oblivion the ``idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone/All
centuries but this, and every country but his own.''
John Steele Gordon
North Salem, N.Y.
____
Even the revised Smithsonian script engages in pseudo-
history by insinuating that the United States is to blame for
the unfortunate sufferings of the Japanese people rather than
those really responsible; the leaders of wartime Japan,
including Emperor Hirohito.
The exhibit's bias is particularly deplorable when
considered within a broader context. As you correctly ask,
how do the planners account for their arrant disregard of the
historical record? Inconceivably, the original plan
overlooked the atrocities committed by Japan and its army,
which were legion: the colonization of Korea, the invasion of
Manchuria, the subsequent Rape of Nanking, the surprise
attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazilike medical experiments on
Chinese prisoners, the Bataan Death March, the drafting of
Asian men into forced labor camps and Asian women into
enforced prostitution.
For these and other misdeeds several Japanese military and
political figures were tried and convicted of war crimes.
Likewise, why does the exhibit ignore interpretations that
the use of the atom bomb was justified? Notwithstanding the
lamentable civilian casualties, the Enola Gay's mission
ensured the speedy end of World War II, and thus saved
countless American, as well as Japanese, lives.
Most disturbing, the tone of the display reinforces
Japanese revisionism about the war. Just one month ago, Shin
Sakurai, minister of the environment, publicly asserted that
Japan ``did not intend to fight a war of aggression during
the Second World War.'' Further, he implied that there were
positive dimensions to his country's occupation of several
Asian nations. This outbreak of historical amnesia correctly
cost him his job, but the damage had been done; Mr. Sakurai's
insensitive comments opened old wounds throughout the region.
More so, they followed on the heels of an audacious remark by
another Japanese minister claiming that recent studies have
exaggerated the severity of the Rape of Nanking.
Tomichi Murayama, the new Japanese prime minister, is
trying to correct these views; he knows that otherwise Japan
will never assume a more responsible role in international
relations. Nevertheless, despite growing pressure from its
neighbors, the Japanese government has not yet compensated
the thousands of Korean, Thai Filipino and Vietnamese
``comfort women'' coerced into prostitution by the Japanese
army, nor those men herded into labor camps. Plus, the
ministry of education refuses to revise high school history
textbooks that downplay Japanese aggression; for example,
they label Japan's invasion of Manchuria an ``advance.''
It is clear, then, that the organizers of the Smithsonian
exhibition are rewriting the past; they do so to further
their own agenda, not that of the American people, whom they
are meant to serve. You are right to demand that the final
exhibit be historically accurate. Our nation's sacrifices
during World War II--a war that the U.S. did not start, but
with the help of its allies finished--deserve nothing less.
Joseph Morrison Skelly
Stamford, Conn.
____
The Smithsonian officials admiring the last-ditch,
desperate Kamikaze actions after the Japanese navy and air
force had virtually ceased to exist, while giving no thought
to the Americans they killed, is unbelievable.
My navy cruiser Houston was torpedoed in October 1944. The
A-bomb saved hundreds of thousands of my compatriots from
death or injury in the projected home-island invasion. They
estimated a half-million Japanese would also die. These are
far greater numbers than those Japanese killed in the two
cities that were bombed.
I'm so glad my friend Pat DiGiacomo, who survived the
Bataan Death March and spent four years of the war as a slave
working in the coal mines in northern Japan, is no longer
alive to hear this drivel.
Mr. Harwit, do not tell me of Hiroshima. Tell me of the
initial imperialist aggression at Pearl Harbor, the
Philippines, Corregidor, and yes, tell me of Hong Kong,
Singapore and the Rape of Nanking.
James E. Potter
Albany, Ga.
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