Hiroshima Dissected

The two dominant and contrasting views of Hiroshima are on display today at Real Clear Politics.

Marianna Torgovnic writes in the Boston Globe that Hiroshima might not have been about ending the war at all, but of displaying bravado before an increasingly threatening Stalinist Russia. Here's revisionism at its best, ignoring the overwhelming reality of the moment to embrace an anti-American view. In the end, Torgovnic sees us as the villain:

So, my fellow Americans, in this summer of World War II anniversaries, enjoy films like ''The War of the Worlds" with their disruption of ordinary families and domestic life plot lines. Watch civilization disappear around American characters in what has become an annual summer ritual. But be aware that maybe the anniversaries that pass quickly each August are reenacted, in disguised and distorted terms, in our summer disaster films.

Remember, too, that Japan actually experienced the devastation of cities and the willful creation of a nightmare-world, and that the giants in the machines were, on that occasion, us.

Contrast her position -- monsters of destruction -- with Victor Davis Hanson's. In his straightforward style, he reminds us of the historical context -- it was not a fear of Russia, it was an exhausted anger with the Japanese. It was one month after Okinawa, with 50,000 US and 200,000 Japanese/Okinawan deaths. It was concurrent with a weeklong battle in Manchuria that had already resulted in 8,000 Russian and 80,000 Japanese deaths.

And it was five months after Curtis Lemay's firebombings of Japan, which had killed at least 600,000.

Against these staggering numbers, the fear of endless war and the ache to end it must have been overarching. As Hanson points out:

The truth, as we are reminded so often in this present conflict, is that usually in war there are no good alternatives, and leaders must select between a very bad and even worse choice. Hiroshima was the most awful option imaginable, but the other scenarios would have probably turned out even worse.

I was in Hiroshima a few months before the 25th anniversary of the bomb. What I saw was a city that embraced American culture as much as it stood as a memorial to the bomb. Cokes, jeans, movies, haircuts -- there was no shunning of America there.

With the Japanese culture, you never really know what's going on underneath because the calm exterior is celebrated. But before likening us to heartless aliens in doom machines, we should take a moment to look at us then, them then, us now and them now. That's where the history lives.