Post by Flash on Apr 24, 2008 10:24:13 GMT -5
ANZAC Saying no to war should mean just that
*
I am writing this before Anzac Day in a fast food restaurant in suburban Kichijoji, Musashino City. It offers a place to find space to write in busy Tokyo, as everyday life goes on in a city of 20 million people.
Earlier I had gone to a talk by Raymond "Hap" Halloran, an 86-year-old survivor of a shot-down B-29 bomber and former prisoner-of-war in Tokyo in the last year of wartime Japan. He had come to talk to the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (itself founded in 1945) in Tokyo, but, as the chairman noted, his audience in fact seemed as much "a reunion of World War II veterans".
They were mainly Japanese veterans who had survived the war and lived into old age. Halloran recalled the war and the horror of his imprisonment, at times tied and hooded. He also recalled the moments of goodness: the fighter pilot who came back to circle his parachute and instead of killing him, saluted him; the villagers who were kind even though the bombs were wreaking huge destruction on them as well as the target, a munitions factory in Musashino; the prison camp guard who brought him an English Bible despite it being a risky thing to do; and the guard who wanted to learn English, and later studied in the United States, visiting Halloran's home, as he had visited the guard's home. These memories contrasted with the deprivations and the wilfully repressive guards and interrogators.
Like him, his former enemies who were there were able to forgive, and sometimes even forget, horrors such as the fire-bombing of Tokyo, which killed 100,000 people. Halloran, too, had experienced it as a POW. He recalled that his fellow airmen did not all share his views; that many could neither forget nor forgive. In fact, his 11 trips to Japan since 1984 were in part a way of learning to live with what he had experienced, something he once sought just to blank out.
When I am in France around Remembrance Day or in Germany, France or Japan around Anzac Day, inevitably I think about what happened not just to Australians, but to everyone, including civilians, given the barbarism of modern warfare. The World War I toll of 10 million or more dead and the 60 million corpses in World War II give pause for more than a minute's silence. So do the 1937 Japanese Rape of Nanjing, the 100,000 people killed by the fire-bombing of Tokyo or the probable 35,000 people killed by "Slaughterhouse-Five", the fire-bombing of Dresden - that last figure is approximate and is also close to the number of Australians killed in all the fighting from 1939 to 1945
Not that it ended in 1945: 58,000 Americans, 469 Australians, 4060 South Koreans, and more than 1.7 million Vietnamese perished in the Indochinese conflict - deadly statistics that everyone should know and remember.
On Anzac Day, while we talk of peace and no future wars, and reiterate words such as Halloran's profound remark "there are no winners in war", we glibly participate in the Iraq invasion force, as we have joined in eight border wars since the Sudan in 1885, leaving aside our more defensible participation in the two world wars. We reflect on personal suffering, we respect and seek to understand those who served, and we wish for peace, but fail to take full account of the catastrophe of war. If Australians did know about the wars in history (as well as the so-called "history wars") then Anzac Day would be a different kind of national day, a much darker and greyer day than it is now.
Halloran, already getting on in years, came back to Japan in 1984 to come to terms with his experience.
When asked if he were young today, whether he would have supported the US incursion into Iraq, he replied: "No!"
However, when I asked if he had any thoughts on why the West (he thought I meant California) knew about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but knew little of the firebombing of Tokyo or other Japanese cities, he remarked that the busy person on the street in Ohio, where he had grown up, probably did not have time to consider such matters. Yet he prayed daily, for his family, his friends in the US and Japan, and "for good things to happen to you all", which did not include war.
In Australia today, while we are aware of the forces in Japan that do not wish to recognise the past, we are less aware of the other side: the several apologies given by Japanese leaders for Japan's role in the Pacific war, and its atrocities, of Japan's very strong peace movement, and of article nine in its constitution, which forbids it to go to war. Its defence force engineers went to Iraq, protected by Australian and other troops, but only to do reconstruction work in "non-combat zones", if they exist.
For us, at the end of the Pacific, not hard to attack, almost impossible to invade and certainly impossible to occupy, perhaps we need on Anzac Day to think more about committing to another war. Next time, at the start, we need, like Hap Halloran, to think about the past and the human suffering.
We need to remember, as we see Iraq grow into a cauldron - because of the disruption that resulted from the invasion - and the death toll mount, that in war, eventually the bloody means becomes the end.
We need to say "No!" Lest we forget.
alomes@deakin.edu.au
Dr Stephen Alomes, a historian at Deakin University, is staying in Musashino City while researching in Tokyo. His father fought in Greece, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific.
*
I am writing this before Anzac Day in a fast food restaurant in suburban Kichijoji, Musashino City. It offers a place to find space to write in busy Tokyo, as everyday life goes on in a city of 20 million people.
Earlier I had gone to a talk by Raymond "Hap" Halloran, an 86-year-old survivor of a shot-down B-29 bomber and former prisoner-of-war in Tokyo in the last year of wartime Japan. He had come to talk to the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (itself founded in 1945) in Tokyo, but, as the chairman noted, his audience in fact seemed as much "a reunion of World War II veterans".
They were mainly Japanese veterans who had survived the war and lived into old age. Halloran recalled the war and the horror of his imprisonment, at times tied and hooded. He also recalled the moments of goodness: the fighter pilot who came back to circle his parachute and instead of killing him, saluted him; the villagers who were kind even though the bombs were wreaking huge destruction on them as well as the target, a munitions factory in Musashino; the prison camp guard who brought him an English Bible despite it being a risky thing to do; and the guard who wanted to learn English, and later studied in the United States, visiting Halloran's home, as he had visited the guard's home. These memories contrasted with the deprivations and the wilfully repressive guards and interrogators.
Like him, his former enemies who were there were able to forgive, and sometimes even forget, horrors such as the fire-bombing of Tokyo, which killed 100,000 people. Halloran, too, had experienced it as a POW. He recalled that his fellow airmen did not all share his views; that many could neither forget nor forgive. In fact, his 11 trips to Japan since 1984 were in part a way of learning to live with what he had experienced, something he once sought just to blank out.
When I am in France around Remembrance Day or in Germany, France or Japan around Anzac Day, inevitably I think about what happened not just to Australians, but to everyone, including civilians, given the barbarism of modern warfare. The World War I toll of 10 million or more dead and the 60 million corpses in World War II give pause for more than a minute's silence. So do the 1937 Japanese Rape of Nanjing, the 100,000 people killed by the fire-bombing of Tokyo or the probable 35,000 people killed by "Slaughterhouse-Five", the fire-bombing of Dresden - that last figure is approximate and is also close to the number of Australians killed in all the fighting from 1939 to 1945
Not that it ended in 1945: 58,000 Americans, 469 Australians, 4060 South Koreans, and more than 1.7 million Vietnamese perished in the Indochinese conflict - deadly statistics that everyone should know and remember.
On Anzac Day, while we talk of peace and no future wars, and reiterate words such as Halloran's profound remark "there are no winners in war", we glibly participate in the Iraq invasion force, as we have joined in eight border wars since the Sudan in 1885, leaving aside our more defensible participation in the two world wars. We reflect on personal suffering, we respect and seek to understand those who served, and we wish for peace, but fail to take full account of the catastrophe of war. If Australians did know about the wars in history (as well as the so-called "history wars") then Anzac Day would be a different kind of national day, a much darker and greyer day than it is now.
Halloran, already getting on in years, came back to Japan in 1984 to come to terms with his experience.
When asked if he were young today, whether he would have supported the US incursion into Iraq, he replied: "No!"
However, when I asked if he had any thoughts on why the West (he thought I meant California) knew about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but knew little of the firebombing of Tokyo or other Japanese cities, he remarked that the busy person on the street in Ohio, where he had grown up, probably did not have time to consider such matters. Yet he prayed daily, for his family, his friends in the US and Japan, and "for good things to happen to you all", which did not include war.
In Australia today, while we are aware of the forces in Japan that do not wish to recognise the past, we are less aware of the other side: the several apologies given by Japanese leaders for Japan's role in the Pacific war, and its atrocities, of Japan's very strong peace movement, and of article nine in its constitution, which forbids it to go to war. Its defence force engineers went to Iraq, protected by Australian and other troops, but only to do reconstruction work in "non-combat zones", if they exist.
For us, at the end of the Pacific, not hard to attack, almost impossible to invade and certainly impossible to occupy, perhaps we need on Anzac Day to think more about committing to another war. Next time, at the start, we need, like Hap Halloran, to think about the past and the human suffering.
We need to remember, as we see Iraq grow into a cauldron - because of the disruption that resulted from the invasion - and the death toll mount, that in war, eventually the bloody means becomes the end.
We need to say "No!" Lest we forget.
alomes@deakin.edu.au
Dr Stephen Alomes, a historian at Deakin University, is staying in Musashino City while researching in Tokyo. His father fought in Greece, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific.