Posted on 08/06/2015 8:52:11 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
I mean “awful” in the old sense of “full of awe.”
It is not often that I agree with the politics espoused by The Guardian, England’s most left-wing serious newspaper (or perhaps I mean its most serious left-wing paper). But several years ago on this date — August 6 —The Guardian published a sober and clear-sighted article about the terrifying event whose anniversary today commemorates: I mean, of course, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The article by the journalist Oliver Kamm won my wholehearted endorsement and I wrote about it at the time.
The idea that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima — and, since the Japanese failed to surrender, of Nagasaki on August 9 — was a “war crime” has slowly acquired currency not only among the anti-American intelligentsia but also among other sentimentalists of limited worldly experience. In fact, as Mr. Kamm points out [1], the two bombings, terrible though they were, “should be remembered for the suffering which was brought to an end.” For here is the . . . I was going to say “inarguable,” but that is clearly not right, since there have been plenty of arguments against it: no, a better word is “irrefutable.” The irrefutable fact about the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945 is that they ended World War II. They saved hundreds of thousands of American lives — including, possibly, that of my father, who was a Marine stationed somewhere out East — and, nota bene, millions, yes millions, of Japanese lives.
Were those bombings terrible? You betcha. I, like most people reading this, have read John Hersey’s manipulative book on the subject and have seen plenty of pictures of the devastation those two explosions caused. But again, if they caused suffering, they saved the much greater suffering that would have ensued had the United States invaded Japan. This was understood at the time. But in recent years a revisionist view has grown up, especially on the Left, which faults President Truman for his decision to drop the bombs. “This alternative history,” Mr. Kamm argues, “is devoid of merit.”
New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb. This conclusion may surprise Guardian readers. The so-called revisionist interpretation of the bomb made headway from the 1960s to the 1990s. It argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.
Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb. The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan’s military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.
Mr. Kamm’s article elicited the usual howls of rage and vituperation. But he was right:
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire – and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.
What is the essence, the core, of conservative wisdom? One part is that when it comes to the real world, the choices we face are often not between good and bad but between bad and worse. This is particularly true in times of war. A difficult lesson. But crucial for those who wish to do good as well as emit good-sounding slogans.
This was a point made by the late literary critic Paul Fussell, whose classic essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb [2]” really says all that needs to be said about the subject of whether using those fearsome engines of war was justified. “The future scholar-critic who writes The History of Canting the Twentieth Century,” Fussell wrote, “will find much to study and interpret the utterances of those who dilate on the special wickedness of the A-bomb-droppers.”
He will realize that such utterance can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he was not socially so unfortunate as to find himself down there with the ground forces, where he might have had to compromise the purity and clarity of his moral system by the experience of weighing his own life against someone else’s. Down there, which is where the other people were, is the place where coarse self-interest is the rule. When the young soldier with the wild eyes comes at you, firing, do you shoot him in the foot, hoping he’ll be hurt badly enough to drop or misaim the gun with which he’s going to kill you, or do you shoot. him in the chest (or, if you’re a prime shot, in the head) and make certain that you and not he will be the survivor of that mortal moment?
Fussell, who was himself in the Army, had seen action in Europe and in the summer of 1945 was part of a contingent being readied for the invasion of the Japanese homeland. He was particularly acerbic about arm-chair moralists like the philosopher J. Glenn Gray [3], who published fine-sounding reflections about the inhumanity of war but who spent the war as an interrogator at division headquarters miles from the front. “It would,” Fussell wrote, “be not just stupid but would betray a lamentable want of human experience to expect soldiers to be very sensitive humanitarians.”
The Glenn Grays of this world need to have their attention directed to the testimony of those who know, like, say, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, who said, “Moderation in war is imbecility,” or Sir Arthur Harris, director of the admittedly wicked aerial-bombing campaign designed, as Churchill put it, to “de-house” the German civilian population), who observed that “War is immoral,” or our own General W. T. Sherman: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Lord Louis Mountbatten, trying to say something sensible about the dropping of the A-bomb, came up only with “War is crazy.” Or rather, it requires choices among craziness’s. “It would seem even more crazy,” he went on, “if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. ” One of the unpleasant facts for anyone in the ground armies during the war was that you had to become pro tem a subordinate of the very uncivilian George S. Patton and respond somehow to his unremitting insistence that you embrace his view of things. But in one of his effusions he was right, and his observation tends to suggest the experiential dubiousness of the concept of “just wars. ” “War is not a contest with gloves,” he perceived. “It is resorted to only when laws, which are rules, have failed. ” Soldiers being like that, only the barest decencies should be expected of them. They did not start the war, except in the terrible sense hinted at in Frederic Manning’s observation based on his front-line experience in the Great War: “War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.” Knowing that unflattering truth by experience, soldiers have every motive for wanting a war stopped, by any means.
There are some, like the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, who argue that America’s insistence on unconditional surrender was “the root of all evil.” In fact, it was our failure to insist on this in 1918 that was the root not perhaps of all evil but of that particularly toxic node that paved the way for World War II and the untold suffering it caused. Do the ends really justify the means? Alas, like so much about the real world, the melancholy — but also the moral — answer is, “Often, yes.”
The objective of warfare is to accomplish some goal (like winning the war) and then move into the future as peacefully as possible. Killing their emperor would have galvanized Japanese hatred of us for centuries.
You'd be surprised what sort of issues are the direct concern of the general staff. They learn to consider those sort of things in the War College. We learned to think that way once we were allowed to send officers the British Admiralty School.
There were three. One was detonated on the top of the test tower.
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There had to be a second bombing before they gave up, so the first Atomic bomb didn’t do the job either.
Roosevelt maneuvered us into that war. The decision to drop the bomb was brilliant politically but unnecessary militarily.
The Japs are damn lucky that we dropped the bombs before the Russians came in with any strength...just imagine if Tokyo got the “Berlin” treatment..yes, damn lucky.
1. In the OT, God says over 15 times that He "hates" the shedding of innocent blood. He calls it an abomination. Do you deny that?
2. Even if it is argued that God is the Master of life and death, and has the authority to order people to commit the abomination of murder in specific instances (as in the case of ordering Abraham to kill Isaac, or the genocide of the Amalekites or the Midianites)this was an exception, not a principle.
God commanded these killings, not as a general law (as if to say, "In war, you must always kill all the women and children" or even a general tolerance ("In war, you 'may' intentionally or indiscrimiantely kill the women and children" but as a specific command n a specific instance. They were never extended in the sense of a general rule.
Even more to the point, God did not order Harry S. Truman to kill all the people in Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
3. With the coming of Christ, God has established a new covenant with mankind (Jeremiah 31:31-34, Luke 22:20, 1 Corinthians 11:25, Hebrews 8:8-13, 9:11-15). Jesus and His apostles gave us a radically new understanding of the true intent of the Old Testament Law; they brought a new era of the rule of love for all people and spiritual truth instead of rule by law (Luke 10:25-28, John 13:34-35, Ephesians 2:14-18).
There is not one syllable in the example or the precepts of Jesus Christ that would justify the intentional targeting of noncombatants or the slaughter of blameless people. If there were, there could be no commandment against murder (one of the Big Ten) because murder is, by definition, an unjust killing, a killing of a person who has not merited a capital sentence.
One possible moral distinction: even in WWII, when the precision targeting technology just wasn't there, in some cases, ordinary incendiary bombs could be reasonably directed toward enemy troops or assets. You can see this in the early period of the War in Europe, when the US Army Air Corps did daytime bombings focusing on Nazi military assets. This was in contrast to the RAF, which did nighttime carpet bombings of whole cities, city block by city block.
Even if they predictably caused a whole lot of collateral civilian damage, the USAAC was justified in using incendiary bombs targeted "as exactly as they could" ---these bombings, though devstating, were not targeting the civilian per se.
I don't know whether the bombings of e.g. Tokyo were intended to slaughter and incinerate civilians, or if they were focused on military assets but (collaterally) resulted in horrific city-consuming firestorms. If they were solely intended to destroy military assets, they were justified. If they were not --- if they were intentionally focused on civilians, or deliberately indiscriminate --- they were the moral equivalent of Auschwitz, the London Blitz, or Planned Parenthood.
EVERY year, in early August, we get the same silliness.
"Why not say--as some slanderously claim that we say--"Let us do evil that good may result"? Their condemnation is just!"
I’m not missing any points.....we’re not arguing law here. God ordered the killing of children, woman and men to clear the “evil” that was and would be. (It pays to understand fully what evil is.)
Jesus warned.... “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad” (Matt. 12:30)..... In the fight ‘against evil’ there is no middle ground, no gray area, no neutrality.
The prophet Obadiah severely condemned the Edomites for doing nothing when evil was befalling their brethren, the Jews..... When Jerusalem was invaded by her enemies, the Edomites “stood on the other side” doing nothing but watching the slaughter as spectators.... God said by their failure to act and to help their brethren “even thou wast as one of them” (Obad. 11).
The same could be said of ISIS today....their woman and children are brainwashed fully and I would be comforted if their children were in the arms of Jesus in heaven rather than be raised to love hate and death as they are... and kill as they surely would.
That’s not what this is about.
It no longer matters, but the Japanese were training mothers and housewives the proper way to attack machine gun nests using broomsticks. The atom bomb saved a couple million Japanese lives atop all those U.S. Lives which is what mattered in those days.
Hiroshima was just the cherry on top. The fire bombings by the B-29’s was the real barbeque. It was pretty amazing the Japs did not give up after the amount of napalm dropped on their cities.
Wow! Even the idiots over at the DUmp agree that the a-bomb saved countless lives! I’ll be d(a&*med!
Exodus 15:3 says.... “The Lord is a man of war, the Lord is His name.”......
Deuteronomy 20 is basically God’s war policy.
.... He instructs ‘first’ to speak peace to every city.... BUT if it refuses to make peace and fights and attacks THEN we are to besiege it and smote it.
In this first account of war, there were four kings against 5 kings. The winners took all of the wealth of Sodom and Gomorrah, where Abram’s nephew Lot lived. They also took Lot and all of his belongings as a prisoner of war. BAD IDEA.
As a result, Abram heard about it.... Did he shrink back and try to say “Pretty please give my nephew back?.. That wasn’t very nice that you slaughtered so many people and took their stuff... Can we talk about it? ... Nope. He didn’t say any of that. Here’s what he did....
Lot took 318 of his best men, divided his forces at night and went in. He attacked them, routed them and even continued to chase them, taking them down... Then, he brought back all of the goods that were taken. He also rescued his nephew Lot, took back all of his belongings and the people.....That means he overwhelmingly defeated them. To top it off, he got BLESSED for it!
Abram was attacked, and he defended himself. He went after the attackers, pursued them, took them down, and restored justice to the area.
Psalm 18:34:..... David said....” God teaches my hands to war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.”..... In verse 37 he goes on to say, ....”I pursued my enemies and overtook them neither did I turn again till they were consumed. I smote them so that they were not able to rise, they fell wounded under my feet.”
Numbers 10:9 ....justifies going to war against enemies that try to oppress you.
In 1 Samuel 17.... Israel is ‘being terrorized’ by the Philistines.... A young 17 year old boy named David took courage and killed their fiercest soldier, Goliath, with one blow to the head.... Then the Israelite army pursued and destroyed the Philistine terrorists killing them all and leaving their dead on the road…....To top it off, David cut off Goliath’s head and brought it back to Jerusalem as a trophy..... Then, David got blessed by God for his courage to fight against the enemy!
What goes unsaid in these discussions is the politically IMPOSSIBLE position that deciding NOT to use the atomic bomb would have put President Truman in at the time.
Just how do his critics think the American public of the day would have reacted when they found out that the President had deliberately decided NOT to use the fantastically expensive and possibly war winning atomic bomb out of some elevated sense of humanity?
Just how do his critics think the American public of the day would have reacted when they found out that the President had deliberately chosen to have the American people endure the million or more US killed/wounded/missing needed to reduce the Japanese home islands through conventional land warfare?
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