Opinion on "Gen Barefoot"/My opinion about dropping a bomb on Hiroshima

Next archival text ;).

In the beginning, I will add that I am not a super expert when it comes to history, but the 2nd World War in the Pacific is quite good. If I still commit a mistake or allow myself to be simplified too much, I am sorry.

A few weeks ago, I watched Gen Barefoot for the first time in its entirety. A classic from 1983 from MadHouse studio. Perhaps you have once seen the recommended in YT "the most interesting" fragment from this production, i.e. the moment of dropping the atomic bomb (or platoon bomb, I am often mistaken with the bomb dropped on Nagasaki) on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The beginning of anime is a quick and very general summary and a summary of the Pacific War. The creators, like Wojciech Smarzowski in the movie "Wolyń", do not evaluate the attitude or actions of Japanese and Americans. They also make us understand that not all Japanese were blindly staring at the God-Emperor. They simply showed the facts as they are, without unnecessary emotions or powdering reality. The actual action is observed from the perspective of a young boy, Gen Nakaoka, who was one of the inhabitants of Hiroshima before it was razed to the ground. We observe the city, Gen's family, elements of everyday life a few days before the unfortunate August 6, 1945. That day he was entrusted with the mission of taking care of the family in place of his father. In circumstances that we wouldn't wish for the worst enemy. The young boy tries his best to cope with difficult circumstances and provide the best conditions for his family. I don't want to spoil too much because I would have to cite specific scenes. In general, imagine some well-known city to you (Wrocław, Gdańsk, Kraków ... there, it would hit the geographical location, Poznań, Łódź, Lublin, etc.) in Poland, put it to those times, adding the consequences, which I wrote below. Our life problems are nothing.

While I can explain the sense of the attack itself, the explosion of the bomb above the ground was in my opinion an unnecessary bestiality. This caused the so-called "overlapping wave effect". If somehow someone survived the first, the second would often shoot him. In addition, the temperature immediately rose to gigantic sizes, which resulted in the melting of the skin and the loss of eyeballs from the eye sockets. In addition, black rain (with radioactive water), high pollution, poisoning a large part of food and water. The film very well and sometimes extremely painfully shows the consequences of the bomb exploding in various ways (I tried to empathize with the role of one of the soldiers who "embraced" the city the day after the attack). The studio did a really good job, you can't see that this production is 35 years old. Maybe except for a few moments when at least I felt that this title was from a different era. But these are just a few scenes, really few with many really emotional and well-presented segments.

As for the sense of the attack on Hiroshima, if I were the US President or the commander-in-chief of the army (yes, I know, the president is, but you know - it is a "general general", the most experienced in the army), I would not hesitate to take such decision. Japanese soldiers and scientists have repeatedly demonstrated bestiality by murdering and mutilating not only soldiers but also civilians, whom they often considered subhuman. Don't get me wrong, admittedly I'm a vindictive man and I can't hide my grudges, but civilians are rarely guilty of war. They are often the same victims as us. However, I can understand people who take revenge for the wrongs they have suffered. I also understand "morally just retaliation," if such a thing exists at all, and it's not just a simple excuse (like carpet raids on Dresden or Tokyo) for the damage dealt. Unfortunately, that's life. Sometimes we have a hopeless choice - evil and even greater evil. The consequences of each of them are just as frightening, and the choice must be made. The Japanese were often willing to sacrifice themselves as a last resort to kill as many victims at the expense of their own lives. However, they often brutally mutilated enemy soldiers, making them life-long cripples. Those who are curious will find a lot of information on the internet, books or probably even in movies. Some Japanese were so determined and devoted to their Emperor that they could not accept defeat and commit suicide when they were found years later in the forest and reported that Japan lost the war. To better visualize this, imagine the situation as the Emperor passes through the village with an ironworks. He meets an ordinary villager there and tells him to jump inside and die a brutal death. This one smiles, bows low and with a sense of a higher mission dives to meet death. This was confirmed by my friend, Hyrule <people "from the stage" can associate his anime translations> who knows Japanese quite well, this country, the mentality of the Japanese and their culture. Although we as Poles are supposedly similar to them (I met with such an opinion from the Japanese), but in many respects, they are totally different from us. First of all, they have a completely different approach to death, but this is a topic for a different text. For commanders, it was a higher level of space in general, because they were ready to sacrifice not only their lives but the whole country with its inhabitants. As one of them said - "Japan's sacrifice will be like a beautiful flower that others will look at" or something like that. Quote probably (I'm not 100% sure, I saw some Japanese paintings on this subject, I wanted to know their point of view) comes from the movie "Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku" ("Kamikaze - the Divine Wind"), without the problem can be found on YouTube.

I highly recommend, as I usually criticize Japanese cinema, I really like this movie. Along with "Man behind the Sun" (about the branch "731") they show well ... sorry, but I have to write it, they then fucked up and a sense of superiority over others. Familiar, right? "Roles" of Poles, Jews, Gypsies, and other nations. Americans and Chinese "played". If you don't know, I will summarize to you what the Japanese did. They took twins, one drugged him so that he had visions that he was in the land of the Unicorns and cut him, and the other they did the same but live. Then they pulled the guts out of them and examined with watches in their hands how much the body would withstand without specific organs and whether they could be put again without consequences for the victim (and if not, they checked other possibilities on others). There was another variant with the twins - 1 was sober, and 2 "was in another dimension" and they were rigged with deadly viruses that murdered them in cruel pain. Or they took and tied almost naked people (they usually wore a rag as a shirt and slightly larger boxers) in the high mountains, where there was a lot of snow and beat them with wooden clubs every few hours to see if they still felt pain. In turn, the mothers took the babies and threw them into the snow to freeze to death there. So, as you can see, the Japanese didn't really differ from the Germans of WWII. I would even risk saying that they were even worse than the Nazis.

The Americans, therefore, had all the options on the table. For example, the invasion of the islands along with the Russians, the gassing of the Japanese and extermination with chemical and biological weapons, further raids with flying fortresses that destroyed more than 10% of Tokyo and successively bombed Japan. They chose the atomic bomb for several reasons. They had to reckon with the fact that with the end of the war, another rivalry would start, but this time with the USSR, so it was necessary to present a new weapon (by the way, the Russians and Germans also developed it, the Americans were simply the first) in an impressively destructive way to hit hard with the shoe (which, by the way, did not touch Stalin at all). In addition, the Japanese did not want to give up (they were so stupid that they ignored the warnings of the Americans about the second bomb), so they had to "break their spine", like Bane Batman, to get to them that no one would play with them and that they would not they are in a position to say anything but "yes, we give up unconditionally." However, it is also worth noting that thanks to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have relative peace (in our part of the world) to this day. Paradoxically, the most terrible weapon we know (today's Satin from Putin, or other American super bombs are developed forms of that concept) has contributed to peace in this part of the world. Nobody decides to open conflict, as the opponent has atomics. Unless he's crazy, like Kim from Korea, but that's a topic for another discussion.