Posted on 08/06/2013 7:48:46 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Should add, national suicide as a means of inflicting unacceptable casualties on the allies to reach a negotiated settlemet ...
The Japanese had posted a large number of divisions in the South of Honshu to repel an invasion. Either 10 or 18 divisions, don’t remember how many but it would have been fatal to many in the amphibious landing.
The numbers handed to Harry Truman were probably low particularly on the Japanese side as the civilians were being trained to fight in the mountains and cities. Considering the likelihood of disease and starvation of the Japanese population the real number could have been much higher, perhaps 15 million.
It would not have been another Afghanistan but would have been another 4 years of total war with extremely high casualties. Harry’s decision was a good one and it saved many American and Japanese lives.
The Leftists are just upset because their pals the Soviets weren’t able to get their hands on Japan.
Just War, first articulated by St Thomas Aquinas, made clear you go to war when your cause is ‘just’ and you conduct war in such a manner as to minimize suffering of the innocent.
“•The war must be fought proportionally.
This means do not use more force than necessary or kill more civilians than necessary.”
http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A644672
http://www.h2g2.com/approved_entry/A644672
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1996394/posts
You're right. The firebombings killed far more people and caused much more destruction than did the nukes.
It seems to me that the Allied bombing of cities in WWII, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not justifiable under the Just War rubric. I don't understand why the nuclear weapons weren't used against military targets.
Very possible. They would never have submitted to McArthur’s occupation without the bomb, which turned out to conducted in a very humane and conciliatory way. Communism needs the perception of injustice and suppression to take root. The bomb and McArthur took that away from the lousy POS Commies.
It has taken them many, many years to dumb down a big segment of the masses in the US and create a gigantic chip on the shoulder of the underclass. The same bunch of cutthroats who are wrecking the lives of this class of people are the same ones who are convincing them that they are their savior. The sheer stupidity of what is happening in this country to that effect is mind-boggling and sickening.
Moreover, Truman was a man who had seen the horrors of battle, up close and in person. He was a Captain of arty in WWI.
For Truman, the decision was simple:
Consideration 1: Which path led to the fewest American lives being lost?
Consideration 2: Which path led to the fastest end of the war?
I believe that if we had a POTUS who had a fancy-pants Ivy League education, they would have turned this into a naval-gazing moment, complete with a pre-fabricated sob story to tell the press. Fortunately for the US, we had a guy who had been an infantry soldier, a dirt farmer, had spent long hours in the Missouri sun looking at the rear end of a mule while he was pushing a plow through the dirt, then had been a haberdasher and a failed businessman before getting into politics. Truman might have been a Democrat, but he was arguably the last of the common men of that party to become POTUS.
There’s a great podcast called “Hardcore History” that covered this by going step-by-step through the progression of aerial bombing, starting with WW1, going through the interwar theorizing and then WW2. By the time you’re at Dresden and Tokyo, the atomic bomb is a very, very small step.
“It seems to me that the Allied bombing of cities in WWII, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not justifiable under the Just War rubric.”
Read “The Rape of Nanking” and get back to us on that justifiable war thingie. The Japanese occupation of China was absolutely brutal and done without any regard to “proportionality”.
The Tokyo newspaper ran a series of stories on two officers in Nanking who had a beheading contest. They got bored with it after each dispatched 140 Chinese and called it a draw.
You are right on. Some of the wisest men I have ever known were simple dirt farmers . . . not highly educated or learned, but still very wise . . . . It is very surprising how much of an education you can get staring at a mules rear-end all day. We have way too many educated idiots running around this country.
I propose that an Ivy League degree should now disqualify you from elected office and government service.
My take is firebombing cities was unjust because the aim was to attack the innocent, the civilian, with no real proportional military gain.
Make no mistake, many innocent die or suffer in a just war, but as weapons become more accurate the risk of innocents suffering is reduced.
What may have been (by todays standards) an unjust use of force was not the case years ago.
For example, in WWII, to achieve a 90% Pk of a munitions factory in the middle of a city required roughly 9,000 bombs dropped from B-17s. Bombing was that inaccurate but the best we had at the time and the aim of the attack was the factory but innocents suffered. The attack was “just” as long as the military gain was worth the proportional cost to the innocent.
Today, we can achieve that same result by using one JDAM. . .with a huge reduction in the suffering of innocents (collateral damage).
Regardless, all military action is based on “proportionality,” i.e., is the military gain worth the innocent suffering?
The use of Nukes in WWII was defended, and rightly so IMHO, from a Just War perspective because the balance between how many “innocents” were to die if an invasion took place versus how many innocents would not die/suffer if a nuke was used.
(I say “innocents” because they were fanatical and in response to an invasion would take up arms to resist and thereby suffer and die in untold numbers).
Just my opinion. . .
Good point. I was there this spring and wouldn’t have missed it. Those who try to rewrite history occasionally get what they deserve, and it seems Colonel Willey is happy to be that instrument. Good for him, and thanks for your post.
Had the bombs not been deployed, the Soviets would have likely conquered Korea, Hokkaido, and the northern part of Honshu before we would have been able to launch Operation Torch.
That would have made the Cold War much more dangerous.
Hiroshima was a major port and also headquarters of the Japanese Second Army, which was responsible for the defense of southern Japan. Like Dresden, it was also a transport hub and center for troop concentration. Unfortunately for the citizens, it was also relatively undamaged and thus was selected both as a military target and as a site where the effects of the bomb could be measured.
Nagasaki was a major industrial center and produced ordnance, ships, military equipment and other war materiel. The target area at Nagasaki was in its industrial center. In fact, the bomb itself exploded between the two principal targets in the city, the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works, which produced torpedoes.
It is a liberal canard to state that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were purely civilian targets. As in the case of Dresden, that is not true.
The best book on this subject is Richard Frank’s “Downfall, The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.” Frank, a noted historian of the Pacific War, specifically wrote this book to refute the distorted historical record in Gar Alperovitz’ “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.” Alperovitz wrongly states liberal/communist dogma that:
1. The Japanese were ready to surrender;
2. The bombs were dropped because of racist motivation;
3. The bombs were dropped as a means of intimidating the USSR;
Frank goes through all of the Japanese diplomatic cables between Tokyo and their embassy in Moscow, where the Japanese were supposedly making their “peace feelers.” These cables, which we were intercepting and decoding, clearly show that the Japanese did NOT have any concrete proposals to end the war other than “we keep all that we currently occupy and you just go away.” Also, the proposals were being floated by some mid-level diplomats in Tokyo who did NOT speak for the Imperial Government. All historical evidence points to the fact that the Japanese leadership still wanted to continue the war, and more importantly, we knew it.
Second, Frank points out that the bomb was originally intended for use on Germany. So much for racial motivation.
Third, although there was some discussion between Truman and Byrnes about the effect of the use of the bomb on the USSR, all discussion among the military chiefs with Truman focused on how to end the war with Japan, and the mass of historical material pretty much proves that was Truman’s prime motivation. Reading Alexander Werth’s “Russia at War” shows where this theory came from; it came from the Russians themselves, who were, in fact, intimidated by the atomic bomb. Not the first time liberal dogma is the parroting of talking points from the communist left.
Finally, Frank shows the justification for the use of the bomb on, oddly, humanitarian reasons. The bomb convinced the Japanese leadership to end the war. Militant army leaders like Field Marshal Hata, who would have led the defense of Kyushu, changed his mind about resistance. But ONLY after the second bomb was dropped. The two bombs were necessary to prove that the bomb was not just a one-off deal.
But the bombs saved lives. Japanese lives. Literally millions of them. Not from combat, but from starvation and disease. Frank details how the submarine, naval and aerial campaign had done or within the next 60 days was going to do three things to Japan:
1. All imports of fuel, food and coal were going to be cut off;
2. All urban industrial centers had been destroyed, and;
3. All internal transportation links by rail and intercoastal shipping had been or were going to be severed.
In other words, the entire Japanese economy was about to completely collapse. What this meant was that a civilian population that was already reduced to less than subsistence rations in the summer, was about to be reduced to virtually no food at all in winter. And there would also be no fuel for heat, either.
Imagine the German siege of Leningrad, but on a national scale. The sick, young, and elderly would be the first to die. Over the winter, before an invasion of Honshu, out of a population of 80 million, as many as 20 million deaths could have occurred.
Yes, the bombs were brutal. Many people died horribly. Less than 250,000. But the use of those bombs saved 20 million lives. Liberals are not comfortable with that fact, but that fact remains.
Most of the debate on use of atomic bombs on Japan misses this point. The focus of the debate is always on the bomb, not on the target. In my book A Fighting Chance: The Moral Use of Nuclear Weapons, I apply Just War Doctrine to the use of nuclear weapons. My conclusion: the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were immoral, not because atomic bombs were used, but because they were targeted at cities full of noncombatants.
I once read a memoir by a Japanese submarine officer who had been stationed at a sub base near Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped on that city. He described the bombing from the standpoint of a nearby observer. Rather than attacking the city, the sub base should have been attacked. Yes, there still would have been some damage to the city, but the attack would have satisfied the Just War criterion of Discrimination, that is, attacks should be on the enemy's military forces, not on noncombatants. Whether it would have satisfied the other Just War criterion of Proportion is impossible to determine now, but my guess is, it would have. That is, the damage done to noncombatants (collateral damage, in the current vernacular) must not exceed the good done by the attack on a legitimate target.
Those who point to lives saved by the bombings are, whether they realize it or not, appealing to the Proportion criterion. Yes, the atomic bombs cost many lives, but they saved many more. However, Proportion is trumped by Discrimination. First of all, the attack must be against a legitimate target. Only after Discrimination is satisfied can one even ask about Proportion.
FWIW, I teach Just War Doctrine at Yorktown University.
Also FWIW, my father was stationed at an amphibious training base in California in 1945, and would have been manning a landing craft during the invasion. Yes, I'm glad the war was brought to an end without an invasion. However, I wish the bombs had been used in accordance with Just War Doctrine.
As far as Japanese and German civilians dying, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany invaded Poland, over one million Japanese and German civilians were condemned to die by their own governments. Unless of course, the U.S. and the Allies had decided to submit to the Axis and surrender. As soon as the Allies decided to fight back, those Axis civilians were doomed to die in large numbers, atom bomb or no atom bomb.
As far as Japanese and German civilians dying, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany invaded Poland, over one million Japanese and German civilians were condemned to die by their own governments. Unless of course, the U.S. and the Allies had decided to submit to the Axis and surrender. As soon as the Allies decided to fight back, those Axis civilians were doomed to die in large numbers, atom bomb or no atom bomb.
I remember attending some sort of August 6 observance in my hometown of La Crosse, Wisc. more than twenty years ago just to see what those things looked like. I heard speaker after speaker condemn the U.S. for dropping the bomb. They had one Japanese woman who said she'd never forgive the U.S. for dropping the bomb. As I was watching the ceremony, I wanted to shout out and ask the attendees if they were going to the observance mourning the millions of Chinese civilians slaughtered by the Japanese army. Of course, there was no observance for those people.
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