I am certainly no expert on U.S. military history or WWII. I do have friends and relatives who are quite knowledgeable on the subject. At the risk of offending them, I'll post today these... shall we say "nonmainstream" viewpoints. They are extracted from a book published in 2001, and I have trimmed them further (emphasis in text is mine). Polite rebuttals are always welcome...
On August 9, 1945, [Truman] stated: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."Much more at the primary link.
This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the U.S. Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized.
On other occasions, Truman claimed that Hiroshima was bombed because it was an industrial center. But, as noted in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, "all major factories in Hiroshima were on the periphery of the city – and escaped serious damage." The target was the center of the city. That Truman realized the kind of victims the bombs consumed is evident from his comment to his cabinet on August 10, explaining his reluctance to drop a third bomb: "The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible," he said; he didn’t like the idea of killing "all those kids."
Moreover, the notion that Hiroshima was a major military or industrial center is implausible on the face of it. The city had remained untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the Japanese home islands, and never figured in Bomber Command’s list of the 33 primary targets.
Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost. The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll – nearly twice the total of U.S. dead in all theaters in the Second World War – is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly, the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score goes to President George H.W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the bomb "spared millions of American lives."
The bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur. The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s own chief of staff, was typical: “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
Image credit HERE. "The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives contains ten never-before-published photographs illustrating the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. These photographs, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, were found in 1945 among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima by U.S. serviceman Robert L. Capp, who was attached to the occupation forces. Unlike most photos of the Hiroshima bombing, these dramatically convey the human as well as material destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb. Mr. Capp donated them to the Hoover Archives in 1998 with the provision that they not be reproduced until 2008."
(Reposted from one year ago)
It has always been my belief that the dropping of the atomic bomb on those two cities was a war crime, one of the worst in history.
ReplyDeleteIf the point was to shock the Japanese into surrendering, why not explode the bomb off the coast, first, to display its awesome power. Then, publicly target an industrial complex, give a day's notice to evacuate, and then drop the bomb. Keep upping the ante until the point is made. The Americans had complete air superiority at the time, so this could have been easily done.
On the other hand, the devastating carpet bombing of Japanese cities before Hiroshima, by conventional air strikes, killed huge numbers of civilians as well, thought this is much less well known. Another dark mark on the Allied forces, equivalent to the bombing of Dresden in Germany.
I will read the full post at the link, but I do know these two facts from an article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: 1. During the war the US had purposely spared Hiroshima (& maybe Nagasaki?) from conventional bombing specifically to provide more accurate information on the destructive power of classified weapons then under development, so that the damage caused would be unambiguous, thus in one sense the US used the residents of Hiroshima as a practice target; 2. Truman's private diary mentions a central consideration in his decision to drop the bomb(s) was to warn the Russians, whose troops were then advancing through China and might soon have taken control of key port cities, that the US was in undisputed military control of the Pacific & east Asia, thus the bombs can be seen as intentional provocations which helped start the Cold War.
ReplyDeletePhillip -
ReplyDeleteI am, under no circumtances, any sort of specialist in history or warfare.
However, I cannot help but notice that you appear to question the U.S. stated motive of shocking the Japanese into surrender. You suggest that we should have exploded the first bomb off the coast, waited for a response, and continue to up the ante.
But didn't we do that? We didn't bomb both cities simultaneously. We bombed one. And we waited. Japan knew how to get ahold of the White House if they had wanted to surrender right then.
They did't.
And the idea that somehow, the Japanese would not have fought tooth and nail if we had attacked using conventional methods is, to be exact, ignoring the history of Japanese warfare.
You are aware of what the Japanese did to their own citizens (and to themselves) on Saipan during WWII, correct? What would they have done if we had reached the mainland?
Hindsight is always 20/20. I simply cannot put myself in the shoes of those who had to make such a terrible decision back then.
But I can tell you this: I have a wonderful family, all of whom are alive today, because my grandfather did NOT have to go fight the Japanese. He came home alive and well from Europe and was waiting, knowing he would be called back up to serve in the Pacific.
It didn't happen. He and who knows how many others got to live because of those two bombs.
And who knows how many Japanese soldiers and civilians got to live because the war was kept concentrated in certain areas of their nation - a total ground ar there would have been horrid.
The viewpoint on Hiroshima in this post is now the mainstream viewpoint. And it's wrong.
ReplyDeleteDeana:
ReplyDeleteYou might want to read this article, or research it yourself, Japan repeatedly approached the Allies for peace starting in January 1945, and in May their government fell in large part due to their failure to admit impending military defeat, the situation was ripe for a surrender but neither side's officials were much willing to bend on the terms, old-school Japanese in particular refused to allow the Emperor to be demeaned by placing him under the authority of foreigners. Destroying largely civilian targets accomplished the US goal of an unconditional surrender. You decide whether that was necessary or honorable.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
After the invasion of Okinawa, the US government ordered enough Purple Heart medals in anticipation of the invasion of Japan that the resultant oversupply lasted all through the Korean War, through Vietnam, and through the first Gulf War.
ReplyDeleteFor the first time in more than 50 years, they ordered new medals to be struck in 2000, but even then they still had more than 100,000 WWII era medals waiting in the supply chain – enough that even with all the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, there would be no danger of running out any time soon.
When the other option is that sort of inconceivable river of blood (just on the American side - one must assume much larger losses by the Japanese in that situation as the IJA was preparing old men and women to attack well armed invading American soldiers with bamboo hoes and other farm implements), consideration of the use of the Atomic bomb maybe didn't seem quite so monstrous.
Ai, ok. Controversy.
ReplyDeleteFrom my background reading over the course of my life the following issues need to be contended with:
1. The firebombing of Tokyo was more destructive and took more lives if we're looking at a single mission.
2. The psychological impact of the nuclear bombs did directly lead to the unconditional surrender (there had been overtures of surrender that would have left the militarists in charge, which although 'more humane' may have been in the long run a less acceptable solution and problematic for the Japanese. That being said, much of the civil bureaucracy returned to power prior to the Korean war when US administrative policies in Japan changed. (one source is Johnson's book on MITI).
3. The bombing was horrific, no ifs ands or butts. We can recognize that, but it was no more horrific than the Bataan death march, concentration camps, gulags, Polish ghettos, the war on the eastern front, mustard gas on the western front in WWI, Nanking, the Japanese war in China, forced sexual slavery or any of the million other horrific things in war. This is the problem I see again and again in Japan (I have been doing some uncredited work for NHK in relation to the usual abomb memorial week here in Japan that just hammers this home) and in general victim speak everywhere. The stories of the victims are unique, the horrors of war and terror are not.
@Mr. Graham
4. There were flyers dropped informing the Japanese that a number of cities were targeted for destruction, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was of course a part of the US psyops to bring the Japanese industry to a complete standstill. It did reduce casualties, but I don't know by how much.
5. As far as anecdotal evidence goes: The population of Japan still thought they were winning, because that was the line they were being fed. Teachers up until the day the Hiroshima bomb dropped were teaching that Japan was winning. I don't know what effect this would have had on casualties for any invasion of the Japanese mainland, but according to the TIME-LIFE books I devoured as an elementary school kid (Bush was not the first to estimate casualties at 1mill) the estimated casualties were in the 500k-1m range for a full invasion. And I really don't want to even think of the other issues of fighting throughout Japan trying to subdue a country. The civilian costs would have been on a entirely insane scale... just like it was in large parts of Germany.
6. Unconditional vs. Conditional surrender 20/20 hindsight: A conditional surrender would have left in charge a bunch of militarists who used the deification of the complicit Emperor to start a campaign of expansion that their own military often though was unsustainable and stupid. If we look at what is left of that side of Japanese politics, they are essentially hardcore neocons with an added dash of xenophobia... oh, that sounds just like the shit the US has/had in charge of various branches of its military-industrial complex. Unconditional surrender allowed the US to go in and dismantle a very problematic system of governance, how well this was done, and the long term effect are up for debate - but with 20/20 hindsight it looks like the right decision.
7. Abomb - morally repugnant which is no different from any war. Probably necessary. I'm not about to second guess the commander in charge, they have to live with what they did.
We had Japanese neighbors, and the wife lived in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. She was 16 years old. Her experiences still send chills down my spine.
ReplyDeleteI have always been taught (in the eighties) that the Cold War was already starting or at least anticipated at the time and that this was America's way of showing the Russians, who were advancing rapidly in Europe, what they were capable of.
ReplyDeleteWithout the US The Netherlands would have been in the Warsaw Pact. I'm curious to know if, now that the Cold War is over, history teachers in Western Europe would consider the dropping of the A-bombs a war crime.
You can read portions of Paul Fussell's (infantry Lieutenant in WWII and now emeritus professor of English from Penn) essay, "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb" here:
ReplyDeletehttp://wheatonhistory.wordpress.com/paul-fussell-%E2%80%9Cthank-god-for-the-atom-bomb%E2%80%9D/
He thinks it saved his life.
You can read portions of Paul Fussell's (infantry Lieutenant in WWII and now emeritus professor of English from Penn) essay, "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb" here:
ReplyDeletehttp://wheatonhistory.wordpress.com/paul-fussell-%E2%80%9Cthank-god-for-the-atom-bomb%E2%80%9D/
He thinks it saved his life.
Surprised to hear this view described as non-mainstream. Perhaps in the US where people like deana exist who think their family is worth 100,000s of innocent lives, but not in the rest of the world where we're not so overwhelmed with blind nationalist pride and a profound belief in the validity and selfishness of war.
ReplyDeleteTwo words: Pearl Harbor.
ReplyDeleteYes, I'm serious.
One theory is that there was a lot of pressure to get the Japanese to surrender ASAP because the Russians were moving forces from Siberia and US Command did not want a complicated 'joint' win like in Germany.
ReplyDeleteAt best you can say that War is Hell, and the Japanese had plenty of war crimes to their name, i.e. Nanking. But I wouldn't pretend it was the 'humane' option.