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.”
RE: What goes unsaid in these discussions is the politically IMPOSSIBLE position that deciding NOT to use the atomic bomb would have put President Truman in at the time.
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Who woulda thought that a one time small town Haberdasher could have stopped a war that killed millions with one fateful decision?
Actually, despite the supposed Japanese peace overtures via the Soviets and the likely effects of the sea blockade of Japan, he really didn’t know what would ultimately be required to compel the Japanese to lay down their arms, to surrender unconditionally. When he made the decision to drop the bomb, Operation DOWNFALL was still on.
Truman, I would argue, was duty bound to try the bombs whether or not they worked (that is, made the Japanese surrender) so that he could honestly tell the American public he had tried everything in his power to get the Japanese to surrender before ordering the Operation OLYMPIC landings (Phase 1 of DOWNFALL) scheduled for November 1945.
“The objective of warfare is to accomplish some goal (like winning the war) and then move into the future as peacefully as possible.”
I still like General Patton’s thoughts on the matter. The politicians always get in the way of total victory.
I also dislike Genghis Khan’s idea to let the women and children live so that they could breed more evil.
“You’d be surprised what sort of issues are the direct concern of the general staff. They learn to consider those sort of things in the War College. We learned to think that way once we were allowed to send officers the British Admiralty School.”
And that ‘solution’ has not worked throughout history.
Probably, but it would have been difficult for the USSR to get there in force. No big navy and their other route required crossing all of Siberia.
I am advocating warfare. Not murder.
The atom bombs NIP the JAPS in the nick of time.
That is simply not true. Britain trades with the US. The US trades with Japan. We even have a budding relationship with the Vietnamese, while the Chinese do not. The Japanese are despised by the Chinese to this day. Those who treat the defeated with dignity and respect and help them recover can meet later in friendship and trade.
The only time this hasn't worked is in the Middle East. Of course, they still remember the Crusades.
So, who on earth won the war?
Same here. My Dad's division was part of the 3rd and later the 7th armies, making the long slog across Europe from D-Day to the Ruhr Valley. He never talked much about his experiences, but did say the second-happiest day of his life was hearing the news that the bombs had fallen and the war was likely over, which would spare him and his friends another amphibious assault on enemy-held ground. So he was able to come home and marry the girl he left behind, which was the happiest day of his life.
I find it ironic that you should mention Britain. Other than 9/11 and other attempts since 9/11, Britain and Japan are the only two countries on the planet which have attacked the USA and Britain did it twice. Why are they our supposed ‘friends’?
Don’t say Mexico because Texas was not a state when Mexico attacked a then possession of Mexico.
Both Britain and Japan are countries which should be our bitter, untrustworthy enemies.
Yes, Chinese hate Japanese because they remember the Nanjing massacre and I do not blame the Chinese. The Japanese showed their brutality not only to Nanjing residents but to our troops, too, a la “The Bataan Death March”.
However, we do all have our opinions. ;-)
“No. If the intent was the indiscriminate killing of the innocent, then the means is just a technical detail. It doesn’t matter whether you kill them with incendiaries or nukes, with a bomb, abortion or a baseball bat.”
The “intent” was to strike military targets in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as destroying the Japanese will to resist. The civilian deaths were “collateral damage”. In terms of intent, the firebombings of Tokyo, Dresden and other cities were less defensible. Note that even today, there is unavoidable collateral damage in military conflict. Are our soldiers “murderers”? I think not.
(As an aside, war in biblical times was typically in many ways much more barbaric than today.)
Personally, I think the decision to drop the bombs was a good one, for reasons given many other places in this thread.
You might also want to reflect on the fact that nuclear weapons, bolstered by the effects of their actual usage, have probably saved countless millions of lives since WWII by preventing another world war.
That policy provided some guidance to the United States, resulting in keeping their emperor out of a nuclear blast.
I was answering the question "Why didn't we nuke Tokyo?", not designating our closest friends.
Thank you.
“resulting in keeping their emperor out of a nuclear blast.”
You missed my point. ;-) The emperor is the one who could have stopped/prevented the whole Pearl Harbor attack/war with the USA. That is exactly why he should have been nuked. However, because he was not nuked then he should have been hung with the rest of the war criminals and Japan should have become, as I said before, either a vast wasteland or a shallow sea. ;-)
Instead, they let him live, keep his post and prosper and later for Japan to prosper while competing with the USA on the economic/financial world level. How has Toyota/Honda, et al, helped USA automobile manufacturing?
How have Japan’s electronics and computer companies helped the USA economy?
How many USA jobs have been lost because we ‘helped’ Japan after WWII?
Politicians have always prevented total victory in all wars. Simply because Britain did it does not mean that the USA should do it. I repeat, Britain should be considered to be our enemy.
In fact, the best approach and should be the policy of the USA gov’t that we simply have no ‘friends’ in the world and treat every other country on the planet as enemies.
I never said that I agreed with the way they settled all of that. I just stated the reasons they did it they way they did.
Because, strangely enough, he was the least objectionable of all the Japanese leaders around. And it would have resulted in us being forced to bomb Japan to rubble. When the emperor died in 1989 there were a number of suicides by people who thought it was an honor to die with their emperor.
And.....why are there still Japanese who lived on the islands still alive? Why are the Japanese islands still there? Why were the Japanese islands not atom-bombed off of the planet so that they would be at worst a vast wasteland/pile-of-rubble or at best a shallow sea?
Because you do what you have to do in war and then you stop.
“Because you do what you have to do in war and then you stop.”
Please do not include me in those ‘yous’. That is not the way I would do it. I would win the war and obliterate the offensive ones off of the planet so that there would be no possible recurrence. ;-)
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