Thank God for the atomic bombs!

Eighty years ago this week, the Boeing B-29 Enola Gay carried Little Boy to Hiroshima, and Bocks Car followed up by dropping Fat Man on Nagasaki, effectively obliterating both cities and ending the war that Japan had launched by invading China years earlier. To the fury and fitful rebellion of his armed forces, the emperor Hirohito surrendered on August 15 in his first radio address to the Japanese people, though he didn't use the S-word. Instead, he explained that the "the war situation has not necessarily turned in Japan’s favor.... Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives." I am one of a declining age group that remembers those events of August 1945, and who was old enough to skip with joy that the War was over and I wouldn't have to fight in it. Thank God for those atomic bombs!

Paul Fussell was not so blessed. He went to war as a 20-year-old second lieutenant -- a platoon leader, probably the most dangerous job in the infantry -- in France in 1944, where he was wounded in action. He earned a Bronze Star for valor and a Purple Heart for his wound, recovering in time to be assigned to the 45th Infantry Division for Operation Coronet, the invasion of the Japanese main island of Honshu in March 1946. (Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu island, was scheduled for November 1945 and would have involved American and British Commonwealth troops already in the Pacific theater.)

Lieutenant Fussell was spared by the bombs of August, and he lived to become a noted author and professor. By the 1980s, most scholars and authors and Good People had already turned against the nukes, and he wrote "Thank God for the atom bomb!" for the New Republic, a left-wing magazine but one still willing to publish contrary opinions. (Including mine, in the 1970s.) The essay became the title piece in the similarly named book, now out of print but fairly cheap on AbeBooks online. Or you can download the 14-page text file from Scribd.com for the price of a one-month subscription.

Ceasing fire?

I've been invested in Israeli victories since 1967 (Moshe Dayan with his eye patch!) and with a Ukrainian victory since 2022 (Zelensky saying that he needed "ammo, not a ride" out of Kyiv!). But Cambodia? Thailand? Well, it's nice that they've ceased firing, but what were they firing about in the first place?

I changed planes in Bangkok one time, and had to make a flying wedge with a German doctor and an English nurse to get on the plane to Rangoon. I enjoyed the airport, which had cows grazing between the runways, but not so much that I would take sides in a Thai-Cambodian war. They both seem like nice countries. Why would they go to war? It's as bewildering as Luxembourg invading Belgium!

Trump takes notice

It's been a long time coming, but Mr Trump has finally noticed that Russia is a somewhat shifty colllaborator. "We thought we had that settled numerous times, and then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city like Kyiv and kills a lot of people in a nursing home or whatever," he said yesterday while on the golf links in Scotland. So he's canceling his 90-day window for Putin to stop shooting. The limit now is 10-12 days, or about August 8. That's progress, provided Mr Trump doesn't forget the ultimatum after he packs up his clubs.

Happily, NATO (except for its perennial deadbeat, Spain) seems to be stepping into the breach, as Germany pledges to deliver 55 of its own IRS-T air-defense launchers to Ukraine. Originally intended as a replacement for the American Sidewinder air-to-air missile, it has now been adapted to the surface-to-air mission, as a shorter-range version of the US Patriot system that we can't seem to manufacture in sufficient quantities.

Will Vladimir be fired?

For 14 years, Donald Trump starred in a "reality" TV show in which, each week, a poor-performing apprentice lost out in a competition for a $250,000 job to promote a Trump property. The host became famous for his tag line: "You're fired!" The joke ended when we hired him as our 45th president in November 2016. I wasn't the only one to suspect that he didn't actually want the job, that his campaign was just another Trump promotion. But he won, and he won again last November, only the second US president to be elected to two non-consecutive terms. Whether he will try for a third is anyone's guess.

Like a fool, I thought Trump would do better by Ukraine than Joe Biden, whose two years of dithering sent just enough help to prevent an outright defeat but never enough to risk Russia's humiliation. Then came that appalling brawl in the Oval Office on February 28, when our president and (worse!) vice-president scolded Zelensky like a fifth-grader who'd dared talk back to Teacher. This was followed by months of pleading with Putin ("Please, Vladimir!") and preemptively ceding fresh regions of Ukraine to Russian occupation.

But now it seems that Putin has overplayed his hand. "We are going to send some weapons," Trump said. "I'm very disappointed with the conversation I had today with President Putin.... We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin.... He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless."

Please, Donald! Fire the bastard!

Red Wedding and Operation Narnia

The Wall Street Journal this morning front-pages the incredible story of Israel's decades-long plans to stop Iran from developing nuclear missiles. Included were assassinations, training flights to Greece, a wink from the US president, drones and munitions smuggled into Iran, and even an actual wedding, that of Netanyahu's son. As a classical military operation, it even overshadows Ukraine's audacious Operation Spiderweb earlier this month. May Israel long be free, from the river to the sea!

You think?

"I consider [Putin] a person who is misguided," Trump said of the Russian dictator yesterday at the NATO meeting in the Netherlands.

Well, that's a start. As is NATO's decision to raise its defense spending to 3.5 percent of gross national product, plus 1.5 percent devoted to defense-related spending, significantly including aid to Ukraine. This is a level that no NATO member presently reaches, though Estonia is heading in that direction. And the US does spend 3.5 percent on its military, while sending nothing to Ukraine except insults from our president and vice president and the occasional sneer from our secretary of state. The great laggards of course are Spain and Canada, plus Slovenia, which is hardly a country at all.

Trump of course is notoriously fickle. Perhaps this latest flutter of common sense is only a refleciton of the fact that he hasn't talked to Putin lately and did spend nearly an hour chatting with Zelensky. He even hinted that the US might "find" some Patriot missiles to foil Russian attacks on Ukraine, which yesterday killed 23 civilians and wounded more than 300.

Well done, Mr President!

Sending our B-2 bombers laden with 30,000-pound bunker busters to destroy Iran's Fordow nuclear plant was a brave and necessary act. Good for Trump! What with his cringe-worthy romancing of Vladimir Putin and his (and JD Vance's) scolding of the Ukrainian president, I was beginning to fear that we'd traded Biden's dithering support of the embattled country for outright hostility to it. But apparently Benjamin Netanyahu has put some spine into Trump's back.

Let's hope that the bunker-busters are as powerful as advertised and that, even if they didn't actually penetrate the 300 feet of rock above the once-secret plant, they created an earthquake that shook the whole thing to rubble. Supposedly the US had twenty of the Massive Ordnance Penetrators -- MOPs! -- of which fourteen were used in the raid, a dozen on Fordow and two on the Natanz plant that Israel has alread pummeled. So there are still some MOPs available for a second strike on Fordow if one is needed.

Good. Let's hope the raid turns out well enough that Trump gets up the courage to shake a stick at his buddy in the Kremlin.

Happy birthday, US Army!

On Saturday, the US Army will celebrate its 250th anniversary. It is a year older than the country it defends. In all honesty, I didn't enjoy my two years and a day of active duty in what was formally known as the Army of the United States -- the draftee army, as opposed to the Regular Army. But shockingly -- to me, anyhow -- it was one of the most important things I ever did, because most of my writing life has been about the military, or anyhow about war.

I entered as a Private E-1 on January 6, 1956, and exited as a Specialist E-4 on January 6, 1958. (1956 was a Leap Year, so my two-year hitch lasted 731 days. I spent about two months in Infantry Basic at Fort Dix, NJ, followed by seven months at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, NC, followed by fifteen months at Headquarters, US Army Communications Zone, in Orleans, France.

Orleans was good duty. The US was in recession in 1958, and I was enthralled by Europe, so I took my discharge at Orleans and went to work a couple days later at the Overseas Weekly in Frankfurt, Germany, a newspaper selling to American GIs in Germany, France, and Italy. So in many ways that was a continuation of my Army career. I came home that October, and never held another full-time job.

I was with the US military in Vietnam for a few months in 1964, at which time I predicted we'd still be there in ten years, which was more or less correct. (We pulled out US ground forces in 1973 and Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975.) By the time we invaded Iraq, I was feeling rather out of the loop, so I signed up for a master's "programme" in War in the Modern World at King's College London. One of our assignments was to start a blog -- this blog. I'm still at it. Never really a soldier but still fascinated by soldiering.