Dropping the bomb

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.

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.

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."

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.”

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.

The only reason we were finally able to land on the Normandy coast three years later is because Hitler wrecked his armies on the Eastern Front. Many Americans have little idea of how big those battles were. If Hitler had defeated Stalin then Germany would have been immensely stronger when we tried to gain a beachhead on the Continent. It was in our interest to make sure that Russia was able to keep fighting. There was no way to know what “just enough” support would have been.

It was strategic, and also,

The Soviet advance and ultimate capture of the German capital was virtually unopposed by their allies. In an effort to avoid a diplomatic issue, United States Army General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower had ordered his forces into the south of Germany to cut off and wipe out other pieces of the Wehrmacht and to avoid the possibility that the Nazi government would attempt to hold out in a National Redoubt in the Alps. However, the failure of Operation Market Garden in late 1944 may have played a key role in this decision. .

The western Allies' decision to leave eastern Germany and the city of Berlin to the Red Army - honoring the agreement they made with the Soviet Union at Yalta - eventually had serious repercussions as the Cold War emerged and expanded in the post-war era - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_Berlin

Yet Western aid was substantial,

Soviet Weapons Losses in 1941 (The First Six Months Of The War)

72% of all Tanks.
34% of all Combat Aircraft.
56% of all Small-arms and Machine guns.
69% of all Anti-Tank guns.
59% of all Field guns and Mortars.

Take it from Zhukov:
"It is now said that the Allies never helped us . . . However, one cannot deny that the Americans gave us so much material, without which we could not have formed our reserves and could not have continued the war . . . we had no explosives and powder. There was none to equip rifle bullets. The Americans actually came to our assistance with powder and explosives. And how much sheet steel did they give us. We really could not have quickly put right our production of tanks if the Americans had not helped with steel. And today it seems as though we had all this ourselves in abundance." - http://www.historynet.com/russias-life-saver-lend-lease-aid-to-the-ussr-in-world-war-ii-book-review.htm

Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.[29][30]

The United States gave to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941 to May 31, 1945 the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil), 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,900 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company's River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.[31] British deliveries to the USSR

In accordance with the Anglo-Soviet Military Supplies Agreement of 27 June 1942, military aid sent from Britain to the Soviet Union during the war was entirely free of charge.[32][33] In June 1941 within weeks of the German invasion of the USSR the first British aid convoy set off along the dangerous Arctic sea routes to Murmansk arriving in September. It was carrying 40 Hawker Hurricanes along with 550 mechanics and pilots of No. 151 Wing to provide immediate air defence of the port and train Soviet pilots. After escorting Soviet bombers and scoring 14 kills for one loss, and completing the training of pilots and mechanics, No 151 Wing left in November their mission complete.[34] The convoy was the first of many convoys to Murmansk and Archangelsk in what became known as the Arctic convoys, the returning ships carried the gold that the USSR was using to pay the US.

Between June 1941 and May 1945 3,000+ Hurricanes were delivered to the USSR along with 4,000+ other aircraft, 5,218 tanks, 5,000+ anti-tank guns, 4,020 ambulances and trucks, 323 machinery trucks, 2,560 bren carriers, 1,721 motorcycles, £1.15bn worth of aircraft engines and 15 million pairs of boots in total 4 million tonnes of war materials including food and medical supplies were delivered. The munitions totaled £308m (not including naval munitions supplied), the food and raw materials totaled £120m in 1946 index. Naval assets supplied included a battleship, 9 destroyers, 4 submarines, 5 mine sweepers, 9 trawler minesweepers, over 600 radar and sonar sets, 41 anti submarine batteries, several hundred naval guns and rocket batteries.

Significant numbers of British Churchill and Matilda tanks along with US M3 Lee were shipped to the USSR after becoming obsolete on the African Front. The Churchills, supplied by the arctic convoys, saw action in the siege of St Petersburg and the battle of Kursk.[35][36] while tanks shipped by the Persian route supplied the Caucasian Front. With the USSR giving priority to the defence of Moscow for domestically produced tanks this resulted in 40% of tanks in service on the Caucasian Front being Lend-Lease models.[37]

True. Like 9111. But that new fanged thing called radar might have been of some help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-270_radar#Use_of_SCR-270_radar_at_Pearl_Harbor

Unit s/n 012 was at Opana Point, Hawaii on the morning of the seventh of December 1941 manned by two privates, George Elliot and Joseph Lockard. That morning the set was supposed to be shut down, but the soldiers decided to get in additional training time in since the truck scheduled to take them to breakfast was late. At 7:02 they detected the Japanese aircraft approaching Oahu at a distance of 130 miles (210 km) and Lockard telephoned the information center at Fort Shafter and reported “Large number of planes coming in from the north, three points east”. The operator taking his report passed on the information repeating that the operator emphasized he had never seen anything like it, and it was “an awful big flight.”

The report was passed on to an inexperienced and incompletely trained officer, Kermit Tyler, who had arrived only a week earlier. He thought they had detected a flight of B-17s arriving that morning from the US. There were only six B-17s in the group, so this did not account for the large size of the plot. The officer had little grasp of the technology, the radar operators were unaware of the B-17 flight (nor its size), and the B-17’s had no IFF (Identification friend or foe) system, nor any alternative procedure for identifying distant friendlies as the British had developed during the Battle of Britain. The raid on Pearl Harbor started 55 minutes later, and signaled the United States’ formal entry into World War II a day later.

The radar operators also failed to communicate the northerly bearing of the inbound flight. The US fleet instead was fruitlessly searching to the southwest of Hawaii, believing the attack to have been launched from that direction. In retrospect this may have been fortuitous, since they would have met the same fate as the ships in Pearl Harbor had they attempted to engage the vastly superior Japanese carrier fleet, with enormous casualties.

After the Japanese attack, the RAF agreed to send Watson-Watt to the United States to advise the military on air defense technology. In particular Watson-Watt directed attention to the general lack of understanding at all levels of command of the capabilities of radar- with it often being regarded as a freak gadget “producing snap observations on targets which may or may not be aircraft.” General Gordon P. Saville, director of Air Defense at the Army Air Force headquarters referred to the Watson-Watt report as “a damning indictment of our whole warning service”.

That’s a line of argument that has its roots in the 1960s Left. I wish conservatives would cease using it but Hannity and Limbaugh keep making it popular. It will backfire on those who use it.

The Republican party has plenty in its own past that makes a mockery of the Bill of Rights. I doubt that 5% of this site has much of an idea of what Reconstruction entailed. The Civil Rights Acts were passed by FDR protege Lyndon Johnson with the assistance of the progressive northeastern GOP establishment and those acts were opposed by Barry Goldwater and other conservatives.

Conservatives of that time understood that giving the national government the power inherent in those bills would permit politicians to dictate what is acceptable opinion and criminalize what authorities dislike. You have to look no further than what is happening to those frat boys in Oklahoma. In another time they would have been regarded as boorish or rude at worst. Now they are nationally reviled thought criminals worthy of having their lives ruined. That is a predictable result of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Celebrate it if you want, I won’t.

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