I believe that the Japanese forfeited the distinctions which underlay just war theory niceties such as noncombatants, civilians, innocents, or whatever other word you might choose, because of the political ideals of the regime and the kind of war they fought. God may have viewed some of them as innocents; the President of the United States does not have such a luxury. Further, the Japanese leadership was warned, albeit obliquely, of what may lay in store for them if they continued the conflict, but it was a warning that was ignored. Finally, Truman's sworn obligations were to the lives of his countrymen, not to theories of jus bello.
Anscombe always claimed that she was not a pacifist, but her actions show differently. She loudly and openly opposed confronting Hitler, because it didn't quite fit in with her theory of how a war should be conducted. She had a remarkably subtle mind, but she was a very stupid woman. Fortunately, the war was conducted by Churchill, and not an Oxford professor of philosophy.
I think that's about all I have to say on the subject. You may have the last word.
You stray into a category error, I think, when you speak of the Japanese as having forfeited the relevant moral distinctions. We are speaking of human dignity, which the Christian West in general, and the U.S. political philosophy in particular (as exemplified by our founding documents) recognizes as being innate and God-given, not something conferred by a Theory, a Constitution or a Contract, and sot something that can be revoked by a President or a God-Emperor.
That God-Emperor, by the way, Hirohito, was a man who had some real power and responsibility for the blood-hurricane that was WWII. Some US strategists --- rightly, I think ---advocated using big, conventional blockbuster bombs to kill him. We knew where he was and we knew how to do it. Yet even in the firebombings of Tokyo, as much care as possible was taken to avoid bombing the Emperor's palace, even though Japanese air defence had been pulled back from the cities, and was being reserved for the defense of Kyushu.
Why did we prefer to leave untouched a homicidal Emperor who was just as guilty as Tojo and the top military staff, and yet annihilate a hundred thousand of his battered civilian subjects whose power and culpability were far less, in some cases vanishingly so?
Alongside the crime of indiscriminate lethal force against civilians, is the crime of insufficient force, of culpable omission: the crime of non-use of overwhelming power to decapitate the Japanese military, political and ideological leadership, starting with the God-Emperor. He needed a well-directed blockbuster or a public hanging.
If you have any documentation of Anscombe being “opposed to confronting Hitler,” I would like to see it. She was a 20-year-old undergraduate in 1939, and wrote nothing that I know of during WWII except her brief essay "The Justice of the Present War Examined", a statement against the policy of carpet-bombing. She withdrew it quickly from circulation when the Catholic Bishop of Birmingham warned her that it would be misinterpreted as a statement against the war per se.
Everything Anscombe wrote on the subject through the 1950’s --- that I have seen --- either defends or assumes the position that the war against Hitler was just, while consistently maintaining that direct massacres of civilians are not legitimate acts of war.
She argued against pacifism in the 1960’s, when Bertrand Russell and his posse were putting together the CND --- a movement she conspicuously refused to support because of its leftist and pacifist elements. (But if you have other information, I need to see it.) Stupid she was not.
Thanks, mojito, for the thoughts you’ve put in writing here. Neither your remarks nor mine exhaust this subject, but maybe between us we’ve pushed things a little further toward clarity.