[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.

                          ____________________