Yeah, it was quite logical to men who had a pretty good hunch they would die invading the Japanese mainland.
Pretty darned logical to their families, and a war-weary nation, too.
There was an article in Military History Quarterly several years ago entitled “From Light to Heavy Duty,” which documents the progressive cycle of brutality in war. The American concept of strategic bombing was an example of this escalating brutality; an idea of just hitting military targets eventually evolved into destroying whole cities. And as Toland commented, Americans didn’t care. We just wanted to win, and didn’t want our own boys to die doing it. There is also a very good account of the progression of American strategic bombing doctrine in Richard Frank’s “Downfall, The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.”
This progressive brutality in wars, as applied to the “American way of war,” didn’t begin with World War 2. In the Civil War, both Sherman and Sheridan decided smokehouses and corncribs had become military targets worthy of destruction. The southern armies were denied movement through entire swaths of their countryside by the lack of provisions in the wake of the Union forces. That’s what war is, and what it always has been.
As for Toland’s account, I never considered his book as apologia for Tojo or Japanese militarism. He spared no criticism for the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the atrocities of their troops in the Solomons and New Guinea, or for the wanton destruction of Manila. He never made the argument, fashionable in some self-loathing American universities, that the Japanese were “defending their unique culture.” The Japanese people needed to look no farther than their own ruling clique to blame for their misery. Toland is pretty clear about that.
Tojo’s book is no different than Cornelius Ryan’s “The Last Battle,” part of which described the ordeal of the average German civilian in Berlin as the Soviets crushed the Nazi regime. There is a story to be told that doesn’t necessarily carry an endorsement.
Finally, a comment on how Americans have come to view their military and its role at the end of World War 2. I believe most Americans suffer from a “white hat” complex when it comes to our military and what it does. During World War 2, our forces were viewed as “liberators” in most of the places we went. The French greeted us with the “apple cider” in Normandy. The Filipinos greeted us with fruit. Even the Germans greeted us with relief when it turned out we “weren’t so bad after all.” We were certainly a better alternative than the Russians.
Much of this had to do with the fact that we weren’t the brutal oppressors that the Japanese and Germans had been. Much of it had to do with the fact that we brought so much “stuff” with us: chocolate, cigarettes and nylons being the most well-known. Look at the “cargo cults” that abounded in the Pacific Islands after the war. Build a plane out of sticks, and the C-47s will come back with a load of Pall Malls and Lucky Strikes.
So we got the idea that wherever we went, people would love us. It’s a hubris that goes all the way up to the highest levels of American government. It’s cost us thousands of American lives in Afghanistan and Iraq and trillions of dollars of national treasure. And it’s led to the introduction of cheap heroin into our country that has devastated communities everywhere.
Because we were the “good guys” in World War 2, we like to think of ourselves as the “good guys” everywhere, all the time. Not necessarily. And the real loss is that it makes us forget what war is really about. It’s about killing people and destroying their stuff. It’s about burning corncribs, smokehouses and entire cities full of civilians. It is, as Leo Durocher said, where “nice guys finish last.”