Bombs, Baseball, and Bigotry
I recently visited my brother. On a wall in his house is this small display in remembrance of our father’s war experience (see photo below). My dad was a gentle guy, he became a general practitioner who made house calls in the middle of the night. I believe he worked too hard for his patients because he not only worked everyday including weekends (from my childhood memories), but because he died of a heart attack at 42. Somehow he ended up in the Marines during WWII. He never fired his gun at a human being, though from his letters he did enjoy shooting. He was trained as a radar operator and sent to Tinian Island (the top image). He arrived there after the fighting ceased. He saw dead bodies of Japanese soldiers and took a bayonet home as a souvenir, though they were often booby trapped. The only action he saw was from Japanese aerial attacks. He did witness several crashes of American bombers returning to the base which in later life made him afraid to fly.
From top to bottom: Tinian, my dad, his unit in training camp, and a Japanese souvenir.
Many decades after my father’s passing I had a conversation about the use of the atomic bombs during the war with my mother. She saw the absolute necessity to use them to save the lives of American soldiers like my dad (though they were not a couple at that time). She showed no remorse for the tens of thousands of civilian deaths. I suspect that she was influenced by anti-Japanese propaganda though she had a love of Japanese gardens and design in general. See examples of this propaganda below. The clear goal was to dehumanize the Japanese people, depicting them as small (they were but grew taller with better nutrition after the war), sullen, buck toothed and ugly.
The war propaganda depicted Japanese people as small, sullen, buck toothed and ugly.
How to Spot a Jap (1942) pamphlet.
I have been a serious baseball fan since childhood. I
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