America's March Madness (Mickey Z.)

[Tace]

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

Feb. 28, 2007 -- Last month, I touched on a fraction of February's forgotten history vis-à-vis America's long history of global brutality. Here's a small taste of March's madness:

March 1945

In WWII's Pacific theater -- cheered on by the likes of Time magazine, which explained that "properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves" -- U.S. General Curtis LeMay's Twenty-first Bomber Command, laid siege on the poorer areas of Japan's large cities. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, the target was Tokyo, where tightly packed wooden buildings took the brunt of 1,665 tons of incendiaries. LeMay later recalled that a few explosives had been mixed in with the incendiaries to demoralize firefighters (96 fire engines burned to ashes and 88 firemen died). The attack area was 87.4 percent residential. By May 1945, 75 percent of the bombs being dropped on Japan were incendiaries and LeMay's campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives. In a confidential memo of June 1945, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, an aide to General MacArthur, called the raids, "one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings on non-combatants in all history." Secretary of War Henry Stimson declared it was "appalling that there had been no protest over the air strikes we were conducting against Japan which led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life." Stimson added that he "did not want to have the United States get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities." After the "good war," LeMay admitted: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."

March 1946

After learning of the horrors his bomb had wrought on Japan, atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer began to harbor second thoughts, and he resigned in October 1945. In March of the following year, Oppenheimer told President Truman: "Mr. President, I have blood on my hands." Good ol' Harry replied, "It'll come out in the wash." Later, the president told an aide, "Don't bring that fellow around again."

March 1968

"In all my years in the Army I was never taught that communists were human beings," said U.S. Lieutenant William Calley. "We were there to kill ideology carried by -- I don't know -- pawns, blobs of flesh. I was there to destroy communism. We never conceived of people, men, women, children, babies."

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