I’ve just finished reading William Manchester’s absorbing memoir about the Pacific War. ‘Goodbye Darkness’ is a reminder of just how brutal that campaign was, particularly the battle for Okinawa in 1945, where Americans and Japanese fought in hand-to-hand combat in conditions that Manchester likened to Passchendaele. There was one key difference though: in the East China Sea, Americans were up against an enemy only too willing to die for their cause. Few Japanese surrendered; most fought to the end and some died as suicide bombers, ambushing Marines with explosives strapped to their bodies.
Manchester, who became a renowned writer and historian after the war, still harboured a grudge against the Japanese when he wrote his cathartic memoir in 1980. How could an enemy be so fanatical and pitiless, he wondered, concluding that but for the decision to drop two Atomic bombs upwards of one million Americans would probably have died in the conquest of Japan.
That opinion was unfashionable when Manchester published his book; one reviewer, who hadn’t fought in the Pacific campaign, wrote that “one recoils when he writes, early on, ‘thank God for the atomic bomb’.”
Just as Manchester was out of touch with the views of right-minded politicians in 1980, so is Nigel Farage today when he argues – as he did last night on ITV’s political debate – that Islamist terrorists convicted of plotting mass murder should never be freed.
Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t hold to that view and nor did the Labour leader apparently approve of how the Americans recently dealt with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Isis.
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