An American Lion

The Enola Gay

There may or may not be a flap over whether or not President Obama should visit Hiroshima, Japan, but there is one thing I can tell you—apologizing for certain things doesn’t accomplish a damned thing.

I can tell you what President Norman Rogers would do (stop laughing and bear with me here).

President Rogers would gladly visit Hiroshima, and tour the museum and look at the displays. It is a terrible horror to use such weapons. The inhumanity of war is something we should all give sober consideration.

Then, when the visit was complete, and when the media were assembled, President Rogers, me, in other words, would say, “I am honored to have been able to visit this site, but I have one thing to say to the Japanese people: start another war like the one you started in 1941 with the United States, and I can guarantee you, your whole country will look like Hiroshima. You say Hiroshima, I say Nanking—hey, let’s call the whole thing off. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m on my way to visit at least a dozen or more museums throughout the Pacific Rim that testify to the brutality of your military and what it did to millions of innocent people until we put a stop to it.”

I’m sure the Japanese people would just love that. See, there’s an article out today that sort of puts the bombing of Hiroshima in a slightly different historical context:

Marine researchers have found a pair of Imperial Japanese Navy submarines on the sea floor off Hawaii’s Oahu Island – vessels so advanced for their day they would provide plenty of fodder for a fresh novel by Tom Clancy.

Known by their vessel numbers, the I-14 was a 375-foot submarine aircraft carrier – its crew capable of assembling and launching two float-plane bombers in roughly 20 minutes. The other craft, the I-201, was an attack submarine, twice as fast as any in the US fleet and faster than subs in any other Navy during World War II.

“This is one of the most significant marine-heritage findings in recent years,” according to Hans Van Tilburg, a marine archaeologist who is the maritime-heritage coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Sanctuaries in the Pacific. The find was announced Thursday.

“These submarines are 60-year-old time capsules offering first-hand insight into a military technology that was far ahead of its time,” he says. The subs were so advanced, Mr. Van Tilburg continues, that had they appeared earlier in the war and in larger numbers, “the submarines had the potential to turn the tide of war.”

Among the approaches Japanese designers used: a rubbery coating on the outside of the hull and conning tower to absorb radar and reduce the likelihood that sonar aboard US destroyers or subs would pick up sounds from inside the Japanese vessels.

The aircraft-bearing subs were designed to bring the war to the US mainland and strategic choke points such as the Panama Canal by hiding offshore and releasing the single-engine bombers on what would be one-way missions. The tactic Japanese war planners envisioned provided a chilling foretaste of tactics the US and Russian navies would use with their ballistic-missile submarines during and after the cold war.

That fact, plus the fact that the Japanese were sending up balloons filled with explosives, the fact that they fought literally to the last man on Iwo Jima, and the fact that Japan was under the control of a military dictatorship sort makes Harry Truman’s decision look like nothing I’d want to apologize for.

Now, I might want to have my speech writers work on an apology for my diplomatic faux pas, which I would then have delivered to the Japanese embassy by the deputy Secretary of State’s personal driver and wrapped in a pair of underwear, or I might just say that we can pass on the apology, since Japan can’t seem to figure out how to properly apologize to the Koreans and the Chinese and to all of the other people who suffered under their brutal occupation. You see, I have a slight problem with historical revisionism and Japanese nationalism. They’re making a comeback, and have been for years, and that has a lot of people nervous.

And, really, this is why the United States should never start a war, but should always finish a war.