Posted on 03/12/2015 7:17:13 PM PDT by daniel1212
I'm going to comment on the ethics of nuking Japan. This is one of those perennial issues that America-bashers constantly raise. There are two extremes we need to avoid: "my country right or wrong," and "blame America first." For me the war has a personal dimension. My late father was a WWII vet who served in the Pacific theater. He was radio operator in the Air Force. His squadron conducted reconnaissance over Japan. He had some interesting stories to tell: i) He trained on B-17s in Alaska, then flew on B-29s in Florida. ii) Our pilots discovered the jet stream. They exploited the jet stream as a tailwind, making the planes fly twice as fast. The Japanese figured we must have some secret technology to make our planes so fast. iii) One time their plane crash landed on lift-off. The cause was sabotage. iv) One time he saw ball-lightning form on the outside of the plane. v) One time a window blew and the gunner was sucked out of the plane. vi) My father knew a day before that we were going to drop the A-bomb on Japan. Not because he was in the loop. He was a lowly staff sergeant. It was accidental. He and some buddies were joking with a high-ranking officer on base about dropping that new-fangled A-bomb on Japan. The officer's reaction was horrified–not because it was in bad taste, but because he was in the know. Because his facial reaction as a dead giveaway, he went ahead and told them that, as a matter of fact, they were planning to nuke Japan the very next day. Of course, my dad and his comrades were severely admonished to keep that to themselves. I'll begin by reviewing the standard argument for nuking Japan:
In World War II the Japanese military fought with a ferocity that made al-Qaeda look casual and uncommitted. In Okinawa, the Japanese hurled more than 1,000 kamikaze suicide bombers at the American fleet, and tens of thousands more kamikazes readied to defend the Japanese home islands. Japan still held huge swathes of Chinese territory, where unrelenting war and mass-scale atrocities had already cost more than 10 million Chinese lives.Just as disturbing, recent American experience in Saipan and Okinawa had illustrated the extent to which the Japanese civilian population would suffer in any further close combat. By some counts, up to one-third of the total civilian population of Okinawa died during the American invasion, many by suicide as parents killed children, then themselves, rather than fall into allied hands. At Saipan, Japanese civilians committed suicide by the hundreds — sometimes cutting their own children’s throats — persuaded by Japanese propaganda that Americans would commit unspeakable atrocities against civilians. Assuming similar behavior during an invasion, estimates of additional Japanese casualties ran into the millions — with American casualty estimates wildly varying but certainly no less than hundreds of thousands.Faced with the twin realities of inevitable Japanese defeat and staggering civilian and military casualties, the allies did the right thing: On July 26, they issued a surrender demand, the Potsdam Declaration. The Japanese rejected it, the atomic bombs followed roughly two weeks later, and the war ended.As the horror of World War II begins to fade into distant memory, it’s imperative that we not let the Left control the narrative. Already in pacifist Christian circles, I’ve seen historically illiterate professors and pundits condemn the Hiroshima bombing with greater ferocity than they condemn the rape of Nanking, much less Japan’s years-long reign of terror in China.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/355313/print
I'll also quote a few statements by Curtis Lamay which gives an idea of how military advisers at the time viewed the conflict:
We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?
From his autobiography, also requoted in Rhodes, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', p. 596
As far as casualties were concerned I think there were more casualties in the first attack on Tokyo with incendiaries than there were with the first use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The fact that it's done instantaneously, maybe that's more humane than incendiary attacks, if you can call any war act humane. I don't, particularly, so to me there wasn't much difference. A weapon is a weapon and it really doesn't make much difference how you kill a man. If you have to kill him, well, that's the evil to start with and how you do it becomes pretty secondary. I think your choice should be which weapon is the most efficient and most likely to get the whole mess over with as early as possible.
The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series , p. 574
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay
From early on he argued that, "if you are going to use military force, then you ought to use overwhelming military force. Use too much and deliberately use too much... You'll save lives, not only your own, but the enemy's too."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX61.html
The point isn't that we necessarily agree with him, but in assessing the morality of nuking Japan, as well as the morality of those responsible, we need to take their intentions into account–instead of simply imposing our own viewpoint onto the issue. i) There were some notable critics of the war. Eisenhower and MacArthur opposed dropping the bomb. However, Ike was a political rival who ran against the Truman administration, and MacArthur had an ax to grind with Truman. ii) The problem with alternate history is that, as a matter of fact, we never get a chance to find out how that would have played out. Since the counterfactual alternatives were never tried, we don't know how well or badly they would have fared in comparison with what we actually did. Even if successful, the alternatives would still prolong the war effort, leading to more American dead and wounded. Even in a best case scenario, how many US soldiers should we sacrifice to spare Japanese civilians? And, of course, you could have a worse-case scenario for American soldiers and Japanese civilians alike.
iii) I also expect that Hirohito had a very sheltered upbringing. That would leave him terribly out of touch with reality. It would take something spectacular to shock him into awareness. I'm reminded of The Last Emperor in the Forbidden City. True, that's China rather than Japan. But I presume that in both cases, the royal family had little exposure to the outside world, much less the modern Western world.
iv) One fresh perspective comes from John Wheeler, the renown physicist who worked on the Manhattan project:
When Wheeler learned the news, he was devastated. He blamed himself. “One cannot escape the conclusion that an atomic bomb program started a year earlier and concluded a year sooner would have spared 15 million lives, my brother Joe’s among them,” he wrote in his memoir. “I could—probably—have influenced the decision makers if I had tried.”
http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/haunted-by-his-brother-he-revolutionized-physics
What's striking about Wheeler's lament is that he essentially reframes the discussion. He thinks we should have dropped the bomb sooner! He laments the fact that we didn't develop it faster and deployed it sooner so that we could have ended the war earlier. The sooner WWII ended, the more lives that would save for all parties concerned.
Moreover, that seems to shift the hypothetical to possibly dropping the bomb on Germany. At least for starters.
Allied casualties were running 7,000 per week.
10 more weeks of fighting would have generated Allied casualties equal to those killed in the Hiroshima bomb. 20 weeks would have equaled the total of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And an invasion of Japan would have been the hardest fighting of the entire war. Casualty estimates were predicted st from 2-4 million Allied troops and 5-10 million Japanese.
Yes and then add all of the POWs and conquered peoples that were dying at the hands of the Japanese.
But with a country that has increasingly spurned God, and aborting 1 out of 3 infants, and is marrying men with men, and requiring promoting such for promotion in the Air Force, etc., then should this country not expect judgment in relation to the grace given it? Yet as always, "judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?" (1 Peter 4:17)
A surprise that should not have been.
My mother in law and her mother would have been killed for sure. She loves the US Marines for coming to their camp in Indonesia and liberating them. She is Indonesian/Dutch. They moved to Holland after the war and her father was one of the officers who help met out the punishment for the Japanese war criminals.
Interesting article. My late father also served as a staff sergeant in the South Pacific and was stationed on Tinian at the time the bombs were brought there before their final delivery to Hirohito. He said the bombs were under constant guard and it was clear they were possible game changers. He also said he likely would not have made it home had we not used them.
John Wheeler’s lament that the bombs weren’t developed and used sooner is right on the money and similar tactics would have saved many lives in the wars since WWII...and those yet to come.
FDR promoted several American military officers to the rank of 5 Star General and the equivalent Fleet Admiral rank with the order of their promotion determining who ranked highest. Some you will recognize but Leahy and King won’t be among them.
Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy 15 December 1944
General of the Army George Marshall 16 December 1944
Fleet Admiral Ernest King 17 December 1944
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur 18 December 1944
Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz 19 December 1944
General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower 20 December 1944
General of the Army Henry H. Arnold 21 December 1944
Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr. 11 December 1945
Japan and Germany lost any and all claims to the right to be free from force the minute they initiated force against other nations outside of rational self-defense. And by doing so, they put their own civilian populations in danger and are thus responsible for everything that happened to them.
It’s as simple as that.
Yet the Soviet Union and the resultant proxy battles are a reminder of the consequences of strengthening evil (leaders) to fight evil, and not dealing with the consequences when you could have. Patton wanted to arm the Germans to fight Russia, foreseeing the evil Not sure if that was feasible, but my unlearned though is that the US should have indeed seen humanitarian and some military help to Russia (which they seemed for forget), but not to the extent that they became an advancing army who even got to Berlin first. And obtained resources that became a problem for the US and the world.
“Interesting article. My late father also served as a staff sergeant in the South Pacific and was stationed on Tinian at the time the bombs were brought there”
Tinian was also the site of the world’s largest military hospital, being built in preparation for the invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Before we dropped the bomb we had total mastery of the sea around Japan, and the air above Japan. Before we invaded we would have bombed each and every city, industrial complexes, electrical grid, and everything it takes to be a functioning society. Millions would die from our bombing, even more millions would have died of disease and starvation.
We would have lost many good men in an invasion. Their brothers in arms would have done the same thing they did when they captured Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa etc. The bomb saved several hundred thousand American lives. The bomb saved millions of Japanese lives.
The part of revisionist history that really pisses me off is the mime where they say, “We should have demonstrated to the Japanese what the bomb would do before we dropped it on them.” We did demonstrate it a Hiroshima and they did not surrender. We demonstrated it again at Nagasaki and they did surrender. They realized that we had the means and will to erase the Japanese nation, culture and people from the face of the earth. We only had two bombs that were ready and we used them. There were many other bombs in the making. We would have been able to drop a new one every few weeks after a hiatus of a few months. We had the means to destroy them completely
Oddly enough the Emperor demanded of the Japanese War Lords, Tojo etc. that they surrender. He was nothing but a figure head with no power but the respect of the people. Prior to the dropping of the bomb, the war lords would have ignored him or worse. After the dropping of the bomb, it gave the a “face saving exit” to stop the war and they did.
My dad was in the Pacific in WWII. If it were not for the bomb, I might not even be here typing these words.
There’s some political intrigue not widely known which happened after Tojo resigned along with his cabinet. Tojo was out in the summer of 1944 (July) and after there was not a strong central figure (other than the emperor as a figure head).
This may have been a factor of many contributing to the delay of Japanese surrender.
True, and I believe God also allows atrocities partly in order to produce future abhorrence and avoidance of such. Few people want to be called a Hitler (though Stalin was worse in the long run).
” Patton wanted to arm the Germans to fight Russia, foreseeing the evil Not sure if that was feasible,”
I believe you’re thinking of Patton saying that he could have defeated Stalin with his own troops. And that was hyperbole of the highest order. Patton knew something about logistics and supply lines and just from that perspective there wasn’t the slightest chance that this would work. Not to mention that American soldiers were extremely eager to get home ASAP. They had no illusions about the romance of war by that point, they were just glad to be alive.
Illuminating. But in the liberal Howard Zinn world the Japanese were peace loving pacifists who were finally provoked into attacking the big bully America because it selfishly would not share the world with such peace loving pacifists. Things like the rape of Nanking are just some much misunderstanding of culture, or excusable. Blame equivalent of George Bush.
Note however that i must respect the Japanese as industrious, etc. .
A good point.
US five-star admirals:
Not that i glory in bloodshed, as i do not, but what if Patton had his way against Russia?
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