Wartime lessons help us all.

In a ''LETTER TO THE EDITOR'' in the TAIPEI TIMES on November 3, 2012, Dave Hall in Taipei wrote, re the Taipei Times news article about ''THE PEACEFUL GUNFIRE'' memoirs:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2012/11/03/2003546750

Dear Editor,
Wartime lessons help us all.

Thank you for the news article by freelance reporter Dan Bloom titled “Memoirs recall Japan’s wartime
rule over Taiwan in the 1940s” (Nov. 1, 2012, page 12), and thanks to Mr. Tony
Kuo (郭天祿), who translated into English his father’s memoirs of life
under Japanese rule and as a soldier for the Japanese.

This type of research needs to be carried out to enlighten us to a
fascinating and under-studied period of World War II and the years
prior to the war.

Tens of thousands of Taiwanese served in the Imperial Japanese Army.
As in Tony Kuo’s father’s diary, their story needs to be told.

I have always been interested in the US bombing of Taiwan. At the
National 228 Memorial Museum in 228 Park there is an exhibit on the
bombing of Taipei by the US. The Presidential Office and Longshan
Temple were just two of the many buildings bombed in those air raids
in an effort to defeat the Japanese occupiers of Taiwan.

I recall religious Taiwanese friends’ stories that some of the bombs
dropping from the air were caught by “guardian angels” of the people
below. If only those stories were true: So many suffered during the
war, on all sides of the conflict.

Let us tell the stories of those who lived through those times in the
hope that such violence will never happen again.

Academic research, oral histories and newspaper articles such as this
can only enlighten us to those terrible times.

Sincerely,
-- Dave Hall
Taipei