I try to retain respect for other commentators, even when they write things I completely reject. But I do expect people who take a hand in guiding popular opinion to ask the right questions and demand that they be fully and honestly answered. Intelligent people must not allow themselves to be spoon-fed an erroneous or incomplete version of events. That way leads madness and worse than madness.
Just a few minutes ago I encountered this, at Ace’s place:
I watched “Oppenheimer” last night, and the ridiculousness of its presentation of communism was embarrassing. The fixation on the ultimate evil of atomic weapons and the arms race and the cold war was equally ridiculous, and carefully linked to the non-communists! I have written in the past that the atomic weapons used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 was the greatest humanitarian act in history. Their use saved possibly 1,000,000 Allied military lives and probably millions of Japanese, yet their use was presented as at best a murky ethical issue, and at worst the beginning of the end of humanity.
The ethical scenario commentator CBD presents in the above is seriously incomplete. A critical consideration is missing from President Truman’s decision to A-bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you, Gentle Reader, know the history of World War II, especially the Pacific War, give it a few moments of hard thought before continuing on. You’ll feel better for finding it yourself than for reading it here.
I’ll wait here.
Okay, that should be long enough. Let’s proceed.
The decision to A-bomb those two Japanese cities has been presented to the world as a calculation: so many Japanese casualties versus so many American casualties. And if we omit the considerations surrounding that decision, the calculation seems to stand alone, untethered to any larger question. But there is a larger question. It arises from the politics of the War.
The choice as CBD presents it, and which colors the debate about the ethics involved, is either-or. Either we drop the Bomb or we mount the largest ground invasion in the history of warfare. But why was it necessary to adopt one or the other course? What prior condition precluded other possible actions – or inactions?
The answer is both simple and terrible: The Roosevelt / Truman insistence upon a Japanese unconditional surrender.
As of August 1, 1945, Japan’s warmaking capacity was essentially zero. Its ground and naval forces had been reduced to stubs. Its air power could not even prevent the saturation bombing of Tokyo. Yes, the Tojo regime strained to mobilize the entire nation of Japan to resist a ground onslaught. And indeed, had an American ground campaign been mounted, it’s highly likely that the casualties would have greatly outnumbered that from the A-bombings.
That presses a question upon us: why was obtaining an unconditional surrender so important?
I don’t have the answer. Perhaps there were considerations of which no one who wasn’t involved in the decision will ever know. But it’s tragic that the possibility that a conditional surrender would have been acceptable is never addressed. In point of fact, the Japanese did insist on one condition: that the Emperor not be touched and the sovereignty of the Imperial succession be left as it is. Washington agreed to that condition, though it’s seldom spoken of today.
Japan had offered to surrender on somewhat more generous terms before the bombing of Nagasaki. Ironically, the principal barrier to that surrender was the territorial desire of the Soviet Union:
It was not known at the time that the enemy [Japan] was trying to surrender. A new government, under premier Suzuki, had approached Soviet Russia as early as May with a request that Russia mediate the conflict. However, the Japanese insisted upon surrendering upon terms, and the Russians had their own designs for eastern Asia, which did not include a premature end to the war before the Russians got what they wanted, so the hesitant attempts came to nothing. On August 8, the Russians declared war on Japan, and Red Army troops poured over the Manchurian border and began a rapid occupation of territory. The next day the Americans dropped a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki….
That was enough. The Japanese government, at the urging of the Emperor – the army was determined to fight on—offered on the 10th to surrender, its only condition that the person of the Emperor and the Imperial throne remain inviolate: the Allies responded positively, and on August 14 the Japanese accepted the terms and surrendered.[James L. Stokesbury, A Short History of World War II.]
Those details are seldom mentioned when the A-bombings are discussed in an ethical context. They should be.
We of Liberty’s Torch hope you’re enjoying the Christmas season.
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Firebombing German cities full of civilians worked so well, thought our leaders, let’s try a couple of Japanese cities.
The Soviets planned to occupy Hokkaido in September, 1945. The ambassador visited MacArthur in his headquarters in Tokyo and announced that soldiers would be landing on Hokkaido the next day. MacArthur told the ambassador that if a single Soviet soldier set foot on Hokkaido, the entire Soviet diplomatic delegation in Tokyo would be placed under arrest.
Thus, Hokkaido did not quite become the Japanese version of East Germany.
I told this story to a family in Sapporo in 1995. The university-age daughters did not believe it. They’d never heard of it from their teachers, most of whom, of course, were in the socialist party-affiliated teachers’ union. Their father backed me up.
Many histories state that the U.S. and her allies achieved “unconditional surrender” against the Empire of Japan, but this is false. It is more-accurate to state that we proclaimed to the world Japan’s unconditional surrender while in fact allowing conditions away from the pomp and circumstance of the surrender ceremonies aboard the battleship U.S.S. Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.
Japan’s militaristic leaders, even at the eleventh hour, remained deeply divided – to the point of several thwarted assassination attempts against the emperor – and it was only the public declaration of defeat and surrender by Hirohito which persuaded the Japanese nation to lay down its arms.
MacArthur and his staff cannily permitted Hirohito to remain on his thrown as the symbol of Japan, but removed from him any of his power to run day-to-day life in the nation. That was a violation of the conditions of unconditional surrender; another was allowing him to escape criminal charges of any kind pertaining to the wartime atrocities committed by General Tojo and other top military and political officers.
As titular head of the Japanese nation, these acts were almost certainly known to his highness – yet he escaped accountability for them. Why? The reasons are several, but most importantly, the U.S. wanted to win the support of Japan in the unfolding Cold War against the Communist Bloc, and measures of this kind were seen as one means of doing that.
Some have termed the decision by Harry Truman between the use of atomic weapons or the invasion of Japan as a false dichotomy; that there were other options available.This interpretation of history attributes a greater freedom of action to Truman than he in fact possessed.
The commander-in-chief could have ordered a continuation of the near-total naval blockade then in effect against the Japanese home islands. It was working; the Japanese people were pushed to the brink of starvation in some instances. But sooner or later, Truman would have to have ordered Operation Downfall executed, the invasion of the home islands, or else watch the Soviets occupy post-war Japan, which was an outcome not acceptable to anyone not named Josef Stalin.
It is germane to note that Japan still retained a degree of military striking power on mainland Asia. The Kwantung Army in Manchuria, for example, was a force in being, as were forces further south in Korea, Indo-China (Vietnam), and Thailand, as well as in Indonesia. These forces were surrounded and cutoff due to Allied control of the sea and the air, but they did exist.
Truman really had little choice but to green-light the use of the atomic bomb. At the time the Manhattan Project was the most-resource intensive and expensive military weapons project ever undertaken. Had he declined to use such a paradigm-changing weapon despite its availability, he probably would not have survived politically, and might have faced criminal sanction. It was a very different America in those days.
As horrific as the two atomic devices were, the previous fire-bombing of Tokyo by USAAF General Curtis LeMay proved to be more-damaging to infrastructure and cost more human lives than either of the atomic bombs.
Much ink has been spilled since WW2 portraying LeMay as a blood-thirsty maniac with a lust for taking lives. This portrayal of him is almost the polar opposite of his real personality, which was clear-eyed, intelligent, moral and pragmatic. LeMay knew, as most professional warriors do, that in total warfare, to be anything less than ruthless in seeking victory is ultimately not only self-defeating but cruel to one’s self and one’s adversary.
LeMay knew that the quickest way to end the killing was to totally break Japan’s will to resist, and the quickest way of doing that was to kill or destroy every target in the sights of his command’s B-29 bombers. In the short term, cruel and inhuman, but in the long term, better for them, better for us, and since the war ends sooner – better for humanity.
The wonderful thing about hindsight is its preternatural clarity. Things are less so when contemporaneously viewing conditions and circumstances on the ground. Thus, our constant reviewing and revising of history. At least it gives historians a source of income. By the same token, there is also the nearly unlimited amount of predictions made, most of which turn out to be erroneous. Human beings have a difficult enough time merely understanding what’s happening in the present. For example, I’m so old that I remember Fukuyama’s prediction of the end of history. As far as I can tell, it’s still being made.
Author
Yes, the history factory is still working three shifts. Did Fukuyama ever return to his thesis to defend it in the light of subsequent events?
Honestly, it often helps to contemplate ancient wisdom to recognize our inclination to wish we could have done better. We are incapable of perfection even where we can conceive of it. There are some things, such as dealing with people, where it is simply impossible to even come close to excellence. That historical incidence was clearly one of those.
There is no doubt that the two nukes shortened the war in the pacific just as their is no doubt bombing German cities where war materials were manufactured shortened the war in Europe.
Now jump to today where Singapore has no drug problem but America has well over 100,000 deaths from illegal drugs every year. Why? Because if you bring drugs into Singapore to sell them they will kill you. Sounds pretty harsh if you are a bleeding heart liberal who prefers people to die on the streets from overdoses. But just imagine if we passed a law with immediate death penalty shown on TV at 6PM for selling drugs in America. We might just save 100,000 lives a year!!! But the Liberal says no. Can’t kill the guilty but could care less how many innocent die.
Author
That’s a separate subject — and comparing the U.S. to an island nation — a small island nation that has a homogeneous population — isn’t quite cricket. We’ll discuss it another time.
There must be a death cult religious test of some kind that elevates liberal thought because it leads to what you and every other sensible person who thinks about what they observe. Us sensible ones are too willing to stay silent or else we’d more often point out how deadly soft laws end up being.