August 6, 1945 -- a date that will live in infamy?

December 7 looms – a date that will live in infamy.
For some, maybe.

For others, the date that will live in infamy is August 6, 1945. On this date, a U.S. B-29 bomber demolished Hiroshima with the first atomic bomb used as a military weapon.

Three days later, a second atomic bomb would level Nagasaki.

Many Japanese are predictably critical of these attacks, although it was they who drew first blood in a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. Four years later, the atomic bomb would place an unforgettable explanation point to our retaliation.

But revisionist history in Japan justifies the ugly provocation at Pearl Harbor. So do those Americans who as a habit are bitterly critical of the U.S. armed forces at every opportunity.

The saga of victimhood renews itself every year. Already the airwaves are full of documentaries showing two Japanese cities flattened in a heartbeat. Smoking ruins. Utter desolation. Melted steel. People in agony with their skin burned off. Citizens saturated with radioactivity who would die by the thousands.

Do you sort of choke up when you see that? Actually, if the Japanese had been better scientists, today they might be feeling sorry for America, though I doubt it.

But they weren’t better scientists. Like any marauding society, they built every conceivable weapon of destruction they could muster, and used it mercilessly. They were known for their savagery.

But it wasn’t enough. The race for the technology that would end World War II in the Pacific went to the U.S.

Had it not been for that American superiority, which I know was a gift from God, mushroom clouds might eventually have blossomed over Honolulu, close to where it all started, and perhaps as well over Los Angeles and other U.S. population centers on the Pacific Coast.

As the American juggernaut rolled through the scattered Pacific atolls in costly assaults against entrenched Japanese land forces, Emperor Hirohito had the homefolks built up into a froth, ready to die fighting with guns, pitchforks, clubs, or whatever was at hand to repel the expected U.S. invaders.

Vicious propaganda had convinced average citizens that the invading Americans were insatiable monsters who would kill, maim, rape, torture and even cannibalize every Japanese who fell into the enemy’s clutches.

Mass suicides were anticipated, and a hellish incident on Okinawa fueled that belief. As American forces mopped up resistance on Okinawa to claim its vital airfield, terrified civilians raced to leap off island cliffs to escape the inhumane treatment they expected at the hands of the invading GIs.

It was a horrifying, senseless spectacle that the Americans sought in vain to prevent, although they did save many Okinawans from a tragic death at the foot of the cliffs, persuading them to surrender.

Several things had become clear to the Americans.

The Japanese on the mainland would fight and die to a man, many in banzai charges, and civilian suicides would extinguish many more lives.

And as many as a million American military combatants might be sacrificed in bloody amphibious assaults and vicious infighting.

But another option had appeared. A monster weapon – the atomic bomb – had emerged from U.S. tests ready for deployment.

President Harry S. Truman, was a feisty, pragmatic man whose slogan was “The buck stops here.” He meant it. It was on his watch that history and fate brought together this fearsome weapon and the Japanese war machine which, though it teetered, would not fall.

Give-‘em-hell Harry decided to give ‘em hell. Realizing that deploying the atomic bomb against Imperial Japan could spare the lives of American troops and win the war, he did the right thing. Without looking back, he dispatched two B-29 bombers to Japan, each with an atomic payload.

The mushroom clouds that rose over Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, signaled that the “sleeping tiger” awakened by the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor had answered the indignity with a sudden, shocking response.

It was payback with stunning finality. But to this day, many Japanese – and some misguided Americans as well – still harbor a convenient disconnect between what started the war, and what ended it.

Between the years of 1968 and 1980, I traveled to Japan a dozen times or more, providing radio and television coverage to N.C. trade missions. I studied the Japanese language at N.C. State University, and, in Japan, avoided the cultural “cocoons” in which many Western visitors isolate themselves while there.

I learned many things about the Japanese during those visits, and made some Japanese friends whom I appreciated and admired.

While most of my time was spent in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, I was asked many times if I wanted to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I never cared to. I could not bear to join the ranks of simpering Western apologists who flaunted their guilt over the suffering and death caused by The Bomb. I did not – and do not – share that grief.

The Bomb saved American lives and – curious though it may seem – countless Japanese lives as well.

I don’t subscribe to the radical revisionist history taught not only in Japan, but slavishly devoured by many Westerners as well, alleging that America was the villain in that war, and Japan the victim.

That is a cruel, barbaric lie. That war was brought to us. We learned many cruel lessons from it, including the wisdom of peace through strength, which Ronald Reagan would later champion as a deterrent to enemies of America.

Anyway, for me there are now two dates that will live in infamy – Dec. 7, 1941. And January 20, 2009.