Kerry has plenty of experience betraying American soldiers during the Vietnam War. He added World War 2 to his repertoire with his visit to what is known as Hiroshima "Peace Park". Yes, he didn't apologize for the bombing of Hiroshima, but his visit and ambiguous comments play into existing historical revisionist narratives about what really happened.
The Japanese revisionist narrative is one in which the United States suddenly showed up and began bombing Japan. As a result of these "atrocities", everyone is expected to commit to "peace".
This is pernicious nonsense. Not only did Japan begin the war, but it was engaging in massive bombing of cities in China long before it. And Japanese soldiers did far worse things to Chinese girls than happened to Sadako in Hiroshima. Not to mention WMD experiments on captured US soldiers by Unit 731. This included vivisection without anesthesia on living people who had already been subjected to weapons experiments.
Since then, the US and Japan have gotten along fairly well. And if Japan wants to have its imaginary history in which US warplanes suddenly showed up in the sky and began dropping bombs for no reason while it was committed to principled pacifism and equality in Asia, it can have it. It makes its alliances with its neighbors more difficult, but that is its business.
But no American official should ever play into this revisionist history. Kerry became the first Secretary of State to visit the Hiroshima "peace park" dedicated to this revisionist history. That's a betrayal of American soldiers who suffered horrifying atrocities. Quite a few men would never have come home if Hiroshima had not been bombed.
Nazi sympathizers and then Communist sympathizers began pushing domestic revisionist histories here in which the United States was the aggressor. These range from "FDR Knew About Pearl Harbor", the 9/11 Trutherism of the period, to claims that the United States did not need to bomb Hiroshima for military reasons. Kerry's visit helps introduce doubt about the morality of our actions and feeds into these revisionist narratives.
The alternative to the bomb was an invasion that would have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. And some of those lives would have ended in an unimaginably horrific fashion.
Lt George Bush, then a 20-year-old pilot, was among nine airmen who escaped from their planes after being shot down during bombing raids on Chichi Jima, a tiny island 700 miles south of Tokyo, in September 1944 - and was the only one to evade capture by the Japanese.
The horrific fate of the other eight "flyboys" was established in subsequent war crimes trials on the island of Guam, but details were sealed in top secret files in Washington to spare their families distress.
Mr Bradley has established that they were tortured, beaten and then executed, either by beheading with swords or by multiple stab-wounds from bayonets and sharpened bamboo stakes. Four were then butchered by the island garrison's surgeons and their livers and meat from their thighs eaten by senior Japanese officers.
A radio operator, Marve Mershon, was marched to a freshly dug grave, blindfolded, and made to kneel for beheading by sword, testified a Japanese soldier, named as Iwakawa, at the war crimes trial. "When the flyer was struck, he did not cry out, but made a slight groan."
The next day a Japanese officer, Major Sueo Matoba, decided to include American flesh in a sake-fuelled feast he laid on for officers including the commander-in-chief on the island, Gen Yoshio Tachibana. Both men were later tried and executed for war crimes.
A Japanese medical orderly who helped the surgeon prepare the ingredients said: "Dr Teraki cut open the chest and took out the liver. I removed a piece of flesh from the flyer's thigh, weighing about six pounds and measuring four inches wide, about a foot long."
Another crewman, Floyd Hall, met a similar fate. Adml Kinizo Mori, the senior naval officer on Chichi Jima, told the court that Major Matoba brought "a delicacy" to a party at his quarters - a specially prepared dish of Floyd Hall's liver.
According to Adml Mori, Matoba told him: "I had it pierced with bamboo sticks and cooked with soy sauce and vegetables." They ate it in "very small pieces", believing it "good medicine for the stomach", the admiral recalled.
Oh yes, there was ritual cannibalism too. And plenty of it. This is the ugly truth behind the "cranes" and the Hiroshima memorial in which an innocent Japan was bombed for no reason at all.
Again, Japan is entitled to its imaginary history. But for American officials to pander to that revisionism is treason.
In his Winter Soldier Senate testimony, Kerry accused American soldiers of having "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun".
These accusations were lies, but Japanese forces actually did these things and far worse.