Only humans, many angry Americans argued, understood or could express feelings of gratitude. Many did so, I suggest, to assist wartime mobilization, to lionize America’s righteous global stature, and to forge and reinforce constructions of their enemy’s sub-human character. This article explores why, amidst the great whirlwind of wartime inhumanity, Americans harkened back to their 1923 humanitarian engagement with Japan following the Great Kantō Earthquake. Numerous commentators, citizens, and opinion-makers looked beyond wartime atrocities and regularly vilified Japanese for the crime of “ingratitude.” Japan, they argued, had not merely attacked the country that had opened it to the outside world a century earlier, but had also declared war on the people who had saved its citizens in 1923. Most Canadians are broadly familiar with Canada’s great contribution to the war in Europe from Dieppe, Southern Italy and Normandy to the Falaise Gap and the liberation of Belgium and Holland.Between 19, Americans expressed outrage over Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequent military aggression. It is therefore perhaps a good time to revisit Canada’s part 75 years ago in the war against Japan. With tensions on the boil again in the Indo-Pacific, the potential for Canadians becoming somehow drawn into a conflict between the West and China is rising. Infamously, Cosgrove put his signature on the wrong line, obliging all the allied officers who went after him to sign one line below where they were supposed to have.Ĭanadian troops were also to have been part of the invasion of Japan that was aborted after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Lawrence Cosgrove who had been Canada’s military attaché for the South West Pacific. Signing the instrument of surrender for Ottawa was Col. in the Pacific and Indian oceans were represented in Tokyo Bay by a general or an admiral, except for Canada. However, unbeknownst to many Canadians, their troops played a role in the war in the Pacific for nearly four years and were to have made a significant contribution to the invasion of Japan.Īll the countries which were allied with the U.S. It was an almost entirely American show that day on the Missouri as it was for most of the battles in the Pacific.
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Pacific fleet crowded into the bay and hundreds of US Navy and US Army Air Force bombers and fighters flew overhead, having launched hours earlier from islands until previously held by Japan and from 38 nearby aircraft carriers. military might that was personally choreographed by Gen.
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In stark contrast to the austere, late-night ceremony several months earlier in France that ended the war against Nazi Germany in western Europe, the capitulation of Imperial Japan was a triumphant public demonstration of U.S. 2 that the Second World War officially ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender aboard the 45,000-tonne battleship, the USS Missouri, in Tokyo Bay. Send this page to someone via email email.