Today is the anniversary of Hiroshima.
A conversation I had with Thayrone X today on his way too cool for school radio show, On The Edge:
First, let's bring up Ed. Apparently, Ed had dinner with a Nazi. Ed, welcome to On The Edge. You had dinner with a Nazi.
Ed
Yeah, so anyways, coincidentally, for the last couple of nights, my wife and I have been watching a movie. We finished it up. Real good movie. World War II submarine movie called The Enemy Below with Robert Mitchum and Kurt Jurgens. And it's about... Robert Mitchum hunting a Nazi, or I should say a German submarine commander, and then the battle back and forth between. Real good movie. But I totally forgot about something while watching it. I once had dinner with a Nazi U-boat commander. And of all things, the discussion during dinner was the anniversary of Hiroshima, which is today.
Thayrone
Can you tell us, can you go back in the story to where and how you met this guy? What made you sure he was a Nazi U-boat commander?
Ed
I was working with him. And he... You know, we didn't talk about his being a Nazi, but he was a German U-boat commander during World War II, and he was assigned to Japan, actually Tokyo, to teach the Japanese German submarine tactics.
Thayrone
Was this here in America you were working with them?
Ed
No, I happened to be in Italy working there.
Thayrone
Okay.
Ed
Okay and so I was working with an Italian-American and I was on a team that was working there and this guy was part of the business we were in and so we had dinner with him and actually I was told he wasn't a great guy don't trust him blah blah blah but you know we're sitting there having dinner with him and the subject of Hiroshima came up because it was the anniversary Hiroshima. So we're talking about Hiroshima and when this guy had been in Japan he married a Japanese woman and during the conversation they both said the United States did the right thing when they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did the exact right thing and this Japanese woman said the same thing besides the German U-boat commander so I just thought I was interested to share with you since you said you would have liked having dinner with a Nazi and actually I did.
Thayrone
Well did he expound at all on what it was like being a Nazi back in the day back then?
Ed
You know what? I was very young, obviously very young, and I didn't think about it and I to some degree I think it might have not been the thing to bring up at dinner, We were talking more about the submarine experiences and then the conversation turned to Hiroshima and then some other stuff.
Thayrone
I would have had to have probed. I'm really always curious as to how somebody reconciles wanting to waste an entire race of people or section of humanity and say we're going to kill all these people and then life will be good. How do you get your head wrapped around that?
Ed
Well, you know, for instance, if you watch this movie, The Enemy Below, you see the character that Kurt Jurgens plays, the U-boat commander, and there is a die-hard Nazi that works for him on the boat. And the regular Navy guys, they just have no use for him. They kind of scorn him. And to my understanding, that was true of a lot of the German Navy. They were in there in the Navy when the war started. They were, you know, the Reichsmarine, and they just served because they were Germans and they were fighting for Germany, not for the Nazis. Not, you know, the good Nazi thing, whatever. I doubt that. But I do believe that there were German veterans who were just fighting for their country, not for a political regime.
Thayrone
Civilians as well didn't go along with it, but kept their mouths shut and didn't say anything. They didn't want to wind up in the camp.
Ed
Well, you got to remember that von Trapp of The Sound of Music, he refused to serve in the German Navy. Period. I mean, he was Austrian, but he was called in the German Navy, and he said, No, not gonna happen, and they ran off to the States.
Thayrone
I was at a thing out in Chelsea way back when I've talked about this before. It was not really a dinner, but the guy would throw what's called a salon, where he'd get everybody together at his house. He'd sit there with a white dinner coat on, he had a bell, he'd go around the table with subject matter. It was very interesting. He did it once a year. And I got invited because I'm Theron X, so they love me coming there. But at the end of the table, there was an old woman, I mean really old. She didn't say a word. And all of a sudden she chimed in, she was the mother of the couple sitting next to her, and she was full on German with a thick accent. She talked about how she was in the Sudetenland when she was taken from her parents by the Nazi party and put it to a Nazi school. And she started talking about what that was like. And she said, we have no idea here how close we are to the socialism that her parents witnessed back in the day. And I had a Romanian woman tell me that in Costco, of all places, about we have no idea how close we are to that. I mean, all the little things chime in that happened back then, too, before it caught fire and took over the entire country.
Ed
I've heard, yes, you're absolutely right. I've, there's a woman, Xi Van Ping or something like that. I can't remember her name exactly but I'm trying to get her on my show, frankly, but I've heard her speak and she talks about having been raised under Mao and says, this is, this is what we're looking at here now.
Thayrone
Right.
Ed
Of course, you see Vietnamese expatriates, people who fled, you know, the communists in Vietnam for freedom here and then all of a sudden, they're seeing, they're.
Thayrone
Yeah, and I've had that experience several times. I spoke once out to a bunch of women in Bloomfield Hills, Bloomfield Hills Women's Club or something like that, and a woman there, Polish, same thing, was freaked out at how Americans are so casually accepting communism a little at a time.
Ed
Well, the educational system's working. Hey, look, I'll talk to you later. I hear the music.
Thayrone
And have a great day. All right, thanks, Ed. Thanks a lot. Mr. Your American Heritage right there. A great show that you hear on WAAM Radio. Yeah, and they take it for granted. The kids today have been so dumbed down, so completely groomed by kids today. I mean, all the way up, I'd say, through the age 40. You can't let it happen. You got to rebel against it every chance you get. You got to take it down. You're on the edge.
