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Determined to fight
I read with interest your generally fine article on Okinawa (MHM October/November 2020). I do want to take issue with one statement, a very important one.
Alexander Izza wrote: ‘However, Japan was not planning to fight into oblivion.’ This is false. It is false notwithstanding the views of Professor Sheldon Garon of Princeton. This point of view attempts to blame the United States or President Truman for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In fact, the Japanese leadership was determined to fight to the end. Indeed, all evidence indicates they even wanted to fight on after the two atomic bombs were dropped, only to be overruled by the emperor, an unheard-of intervention by an otherwise constitutional monarch akin to Britain’s.
In the early 1990s, this issue came up in Washington, where I then worked, when the Smithsonian proposed a Hiroshima exhibit that suggested the United States was to blame for the atomic bomb. The Smithsonian ultimately dropped the proposal.
Brigadier General Reid K Beveridge (ret.)
Milton, Delaware
It dawned on me
I read the October/November 2020 issue of MHM with much interest, particularly Taylor Downing’s review of 1979’s Zulu Dawn, as it compared two of my favourite movies.
Both it and 1964’s Zulu have their strengths and weaknesses. For example, Downing liked the dusty look of the uniforms in Zulu Dawn over the nattier impression in Zulu. But that should not be taken as a mark against the older movie when one considers that the soldiers in Zulu Dawn were on active campaign, while the men at Rorke’s Drift were garrison troops.
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