Someone has to post it...
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 only thing that I do not understand is, why Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Why not Tokyo, centered on the “false emperor’s” palace?”
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also industrialized cities, supporting the war machine of Japan
Japan should be thankful we only used two bombs and gave them time between to surrender. We could have just as easily waited a few months then loaded 100+ bombs and absolutely destroyed Japan.
“the “god” emperor needed to be humiliated and humanized, not martyred”
Did you read the rest of my post? If that had been carried out then ‘martyrdom’ would not be an issue.
Who would be inclined to mess with the USA if the rest of my post had been carried out?
It is exactly like Patton said, paraphrased!: “The problem is that the politicians never let us finish the wars.”
Even Genghis Khan, who I admire, made only one mistake: He let the women and children live so that they could breed more evil.
Let me see, America dropped the bomb on Tokyo on Dec 7 1941 and started the war with Japan, right. I find it appalling that it is the US that is second guessed and not the instigators of the second world war. It was Japan that started the steps toward the bombing of their cities not he US. If they suffered then they need to look at their own history and this country needs to quit wringing its hands over something that they had no control over.
Ask the Chinese how they were treated by the Japanese. Ask the Korean women how they were treated by the Japanese. I don’t think we have anything to apologize for and should not be doing so.
Please see my post # 23.
In the run-up to the planned invasion of Japan, physicist William Shockley was asked to prepare a casualty estimate for Secretary of War Henry Stimson. He calculated the twin invasions of the main Japanese islands, scheduled for the Fall of 1945 and the Spring of 1946, would result in as many as 1.7 million casualties, with 400-800,000 KIA—roughly the same number killed (on the low end) in all battles/all theaters up to that point. More conservative estimates from Admiral William Leahy put our expected combat deaths between 250-300,000. The number of Japanese dead would be in the millions.
Here’s another way of looking at the cost of invading Japan. Most of the Purple Hearts awarded to our dead and wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq came from stocks produced ahead of the planned amphibious landings in Japan. As of 2010, there were still more than 100,000 of those WWII medal kits still in defense supply warehouses.
A lot of us wouldn’t be here today if the U.S. hadn’t dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father was part of the 1st Army that fought its way across Europe after D-Day. Plans called for the 1st to lead the invasion of Honshu in the spring of 1946, with the objective of taking Tokyo. It would have been a bloody, protracted campaign, and a lot of ETO vets did not expect to make it through a second campaign against Japan.
That's a deliberate, straight-out repudiation of God. The notion that good ends justify evil means is a moral theory condemned ever since St. Paul wrote Romans 3:7-8:
"But if through my falsehood God's truthfulness abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just."
Some people say it depends on whether they thought the Japanese were on the verge of surrendering before August 6, 1945 --- or not. I would not be the one to make the call on that, because I haven't got the military experience and expertise.
But some people DO have that kind of expertise. Historians record that most of America's WWII military leadership thought Japan was already n the verge of collapse before the atom bombs were used:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3321050/posts
"Six of the seven five-star generals and admirals of that time believed that there was no reason to use them, that the Japanese were already defeated, knew it, and were likely to surrender before any American invasion could be launched. Several, like Admiral William Leahy and General Dwight Eisenhower, also had moral objections to the weapon. Leahy considered the atomic bombing of Japan “barbarous” and a violation of 'every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all of the known laws of war.'"
I don't think these American military leaders were pinkos, pacifists or fools.
But the real problem isn't not that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings were strategically unnecessary. The real problem is that, in terms of an ethic of killing, there is a difference between targeting soldiers/combatants/military assets, and civilians/noncombatants/civilian values.
Most people in the world today at least profess to recognize this distinction (except for ISIS and their ilk).
It's hard to put it any clearer than this:
"Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and humankind itself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation." (Gaudium et Spes, para. 80, 1962)
Utterly crushing the Japanese military/political machine would have been justice. Incinerating civilians with a deliberately indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction, was murder. That should be clear when you consider that General Douglas MacArthur and his staff wrongly succeeded in exonerating Emperor Hirohito and all members of the imperial family from criminal prosecutions.
Thus in the end, 250,000 civilians were killed, and the Emperor Hirohito was not.
Hiroshima: Thoughts on an awful anniversary [Do the Ends Justify the Means?]
In that case, absolutely.
Sadly a lesson that America became so afraid of as to not have learned from it. Thus the Vietnam War and others.
The lesson being if you lack the spine, the willingness, the courage to win a war, then stay the hell out of it or surrender from the start............
“Do the ends justify the means?” is a loaded question vis-a-vis the bombing of Hiroshima, implying that atoms were unjustified merely by virtue of their being atoms. The ends, less death, are justified - whether by bullets or atoms makes no difference in the justification, less death is justified. If less death would be obtained by bullets that would have been the choice. It was determined that less death would result from atoms.
The question is an attempt to vilify atoms.
Do not mistake this for minimizing the enormity of this single act.
“Hiroshima: Thoughts on an awful anniversary [Do the Ends Justify the Means?]”
The question is meaningless — the ends ALWAYS justify the means for Democrats.
I don’t disagree with the decision, though. Broken clock and all....
“Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was “wrong” seem to be implying “that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs.” People holding such views, he notes, “do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots.” “
-Paul Fussell
Tokyo had been firebombed earlier by Gen. Curtis Lemay, which resulted in 90,000 deaths.
The term “kokutai” is quite the euphemism.
Take note that Shinzo Abe is a member of a revanchist Shinto group whose aim is to re-establish state Shinto.
thank you for a more complete answer
The Japanese 'Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps', which included civilian men aged 15 to 60 and women 17 to 40 for a total of 28 million people,who would attack the Allies with sword, spears, hoes and shovels.
How would history judge us when we slaughtered millions of women and children?
The “means” were well justified in the planning and execution.
Dropping the bomb saved a million lives that would have been lost in a continuing conventional battle.
There is nothing “more humane” about killing with bullets and bombs, over an expanded period of time.
When your own top military officer, who has lived and studied among your proposed enemy (Yammamoto) says you can't win the war ... maybe listening to him would be a good idea.
“the{ir} “god” emperor needed to be humiliated and humanized, not martyred”
As does ours.
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