Yankee Way of War

About this time every year, cruise ship historians like to trot out articles justifying the mass slaughter of innocents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. America had no choice but to drop the atom bombs, the basic argument goes.

Mainstream media coverage in Japan tends to leave the subject, “America,” out altogether. It was war in the abstract that is to blame, many media outlets here tell us. It’s as though the bombs fell out of the sky by themselves. Maybe God or nature or the universe is the culprit.

A closer examination of facts reveals a truth that won’t surprise Abbeville readers. It wasn’t “America” that dropped the bombs. It wasn’t nature, the cosmos, or the Almighty, either. It was, almost to a man, Yankees.

Manhattan Project director Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, Jr., was a New Yorker. Groves’ boss, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was from Hyde Park. Groves’ Manhattan Project assistant, Maj. Gen. Thomas Francis Farrell, was a third New York native. Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the top scientist at Los Alamos laboratories in charge of designing and building the atomic weapons, was a fourth New Yorker. Richard Feynman, a junior physicist at Los Alamos, was a fifth.

Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., the pilot of the Enola Gay that flew the atomic bomb to Hiroshima, was from Illinois. Tibbets’ co-pilot was a Brooklyn native named Robert Alvin Lewis. Enola Gay weaponeer and Project Alberta leader William Sterling “Deak” Parsons, was from Chicago. Navy captain Charles Butler McVay, III, who skippered the ill-fated Indianapolis (and its murderous cargo) across the Pacific to Tinian Island, whence the Enola Gay departed, was from Pennsylvania.

The Enola Gay bombardier was Thomas Wilson Ferebee, of North Carolina. Yankees like to dupe Southerners into doing their dirtiest work for them.

The Enola Gay killed women, children, the disabled, American POWs, and the elderly in Hiroshima, but it was not the end of the Yankees’ orgy of murder. Three days later, Bockscar dropped another atomic weapon, this time on Nagasaki, a largely Catholic city in southern Japan. (Yankee “religious tolerance” has not changed much since the days of John Winthrop.)

Weaponeer aboard the Bockscar was Frederick Lincoln “Dick” Ashworth, from Massachusetts. (Probably the codename “Manhattan Project” would have been better as the “Lincoln Project.”) The Bockscar pilot was Charles W. Sweeney, also of Massachusetts. The man who released the bomb was Kermit King Beahan, of Joplin, Missouri. Like Ferebee, Beahan was a Yankee stooge. But there is some poetic justice to the sordid circumstances. Beahan’s wife, Teresa Lavery, was the ex-wife of Shelby Foote, an artilleryman. To my knowledge, Foote, who would go on to become a great historian of the War of Northern Aggression, never bombarded hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Maybe Lavery wanted a man who would, and did.

Before the atomic bombings, Operation Meetinghouse, the indiscriminate firebombing of more than five dozen Japanese cities, was planned by one Curtis Emerson LeMay, who, like William Tecumseh Sherman, George Custer, and Ulysses Grant, was a native of Ohio. (To be fair, the man who oversaw the execution of Operation Meetinghouse was Gen. Thomas Sarsfield Power, from New York).

After the atomic bombings, Yankees continued to run wild. During the Korean War, Gen. Earle Everard “Pat” Partridge (Massachusetts), Gen. Emmett O’Donnell, Jr. (New York), Lt. Gen. George Edward Stratemeyer (Ohio), and others dreamed of incinerating entire Korean cities, which largely came to pass. (Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a Southerner, got them to tone things down a bit.) The intentional targeting of civilians in Vietnam was developed and planned by such illustrious Northerners as National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and his brother, Assistant Secretary of State William Putnam Bundy, both from Massachusetts, and Secretary of Defense and California Yankee Robert Strange McNamara. LeMay loved it, but thought it didn’t quite go far enough.

William Childs Westmoreland was another architect of the air campaign against Vietnamese villagers. General Westmoreland was a son of South Carolina. So was the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who wanted very much to do to the Iranians and Palestinians what the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had suffered. A little over a century out from Appomattox and we find some Southerners–South Carolinians no less–killing for Yankee overlords, and then cheerleading for yet more killing. So it went with Gen. Tommy Ray Franks, who led the Yankee attack against Iraq in 2003. Franks was born in Oklahoma and graduated from Robert E. Lee High School in Midland, Texas, but seemed unconcerned about marauding, Yankee style, through someone else’s country on false pretenses. True to form, Franks had no clear answer when asked about the fact that his alma mater had been renamed. Not every Yankee is from Boston or the Bronx.

In the most recent iteration of the Yankee way of war, a Manhattan billionaire salivated over the ethnic cleansing of Persia while his military dropped missiles into a girls’ school. Who were the valiant commanders who ordered the missiles to be launched? USS Spruance Commander Leigh R. Tate (California) and Executive Officer Jeffrey E. York (California). Gen. Sherman would have been very proud.

This August, and throughout the year, is a good time to remember that we Southerners are not like our conquerors and occupiers. We have many faults, but genocidal mania is not one of them. We debase ourselves by acting dishonorably in the Yankee military. Given the piratical nature of that military, we debase ourselves by signing up for it in the first place. We disgrace our ancestors by killing women and children to appease the insatiable Yankee thirst for innocent blood.

The Southern way of war does not involve mass murder of defenseless civilians. The Yankee way of war is virtually nothing but.

The views expressed at AbbevillInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

Jason Morgan

Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Chiba, Japan.

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