Saturday

THE BEGINNING




The day the Japanese became the Japs.

The Japanese war lords were rampaging across Asia, making their intention to control the continent evident. The Americans knew what they were up to, but the country was divided into preparing for war and/or staying out of it and hoping it would go away. In December 1941 the politics of non-intervention still held sway, even though Roosevelt saw the inevitability of it all.

On December 6, Admiral Nogumo, the task force commander of the invading force, opened a top secret message that said 'climb mount niitaka', the coded message that set into motion the attack on December 7, 1941 upon Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian islands.


On December 7 the attack that decimated the American fleet of battle ships commenced at 7:55 in the morning and was completed 110 minutes later. It filled the American people with a hate that continued until August 1945 when President Truman authorized two atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima first, and then Nagasaki, which ended the second world war.

It took arguably decades for the American people to revert to the more polite term of Japanese so deep was their hatred. But the war that started in violence against an unprepared country, ended with violence against the hostile Japanese from a previously unknown weapon. The age of the atom was born.

WWII deaths suffered by the nation of Japan-2,700,000
WWII deaths suffered by the nation of USA-418,500

War is an abomination, and a last resort for civilized peoples.

THE END

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