I do think that the leafletting of the city is a morally relevant point, as it showed an acknowledged duty to discriminate between noncombatants and military. The U.S. would obviously not have been morally obliged to drop leaflets on the gigantic concentration of Japanese troops in southern Kyushu to invite them to escape annihilation, because nobody can dispute that those troops would have been a legitimate target for an atomic bomb. So this leads to the question: why did they drop these bombs on the city, and not on the troops?
Truman wrote, in his papers published after the war, that he intended the Japanese government to get the message that we could and would kill massive numbers of the military and civilian population, indiscriminately, unless they made unconditional surrender. Dozens of FReepers have already weighed in to say that the targetting of noncombatants per se is not, in their view, morally prohibited. This shows, if nothing else, a rather extensive decay of moral conscience, comparable to the acceptance of mass abortion.
In other words: the usual.
It is that intention to use an explicitly indiscriminate weapons against a city construed as, itself, the target, which is morally prohibited, since it uses the killing of noncombatants as a means to an end.
This difficulty comes up over and over in warfare, especially where the enemy themselves do not make distinctions between combatant and non-combatant, and where they use civilian structures for military uses: as the jihadis in Afghanistan, for instance, might use a hospital as an artillery emplacement, a mosque as an arm cache and bunker, a pregnant woman as a suicide bomber.
So the question comes up: can you target that hospital, that mosque, that pregnant woman? And the answer is “Yes,” if it is solidly probable that they have in fact been “weaponized” and are not any longer in fact noncombatant.
The question also comes up: can you target a whole city for annihilation, if it has in it military assets? And the answer is “No.” Why? Because a city --- unless it has been evacuated and its population replaced by military --- is always primarily a habitat for people who are, even under a fanatical, totalitarian system, blamelessly carrying out the acts of living. The sweeper sweeps. The mother mothers. The just man, as Hopkins says, justices.
This is not true for every sector of the city. The port facility, the rail hub, the weapons factories, etc. etc. --- they are all legitimate targets, and if a preschool and an opera company are unfortunately next door and get destroyed with them, that’s what we call collateral deaths: very sad but strictly unavoidable, and not murder.
But the city as a whole cannot equal the target. This the Catholic Church teaches as an authoritative truth. The Catechism --- which is not irrelevant --- can be consulted here (Link)
What Thucydides might have said is, of course, interesting. But Thucydides did not die for my sins, and when I die he cannot save me.
My husband and I are going out of town Thurs-Sun and I am getting ready right now, which means I'm not going to be able to return to this discussion until early next week, which is most unfortunate. But I do hope the discussion will go on.
Anyway, thank you for thinking about this.
I have a sick baby, in addition to the usual turmoil, so I’m just wandering by occasionally, in a fog, presently, that suggests I’m coming down with whatever Frank’s got. Oh, joy. At least I’ll lose weight if I start throwing up.
The question I’m addressing, rather haphazardly, is whether there are “noncombatants” in a distinguishable sense in a total war. However, I have no stake in being right nor in persuading anyone else. The events of sixy years ago will not unhappen, nor will any of the other events we wish that they would. As it were.
Best wishes for your trip, Mrs. Don-o!
The Allies at the time did not know for certain that the troop concentrations would remain in place while we sent the bomber toward it. This was before spy satellites, and there was a significant time delay in intel.
Also, according the the accepted military theories of the time (accepted by all sides), cities were “valid targets” for strategic bombing. Hiroshima did have military value, and those same civilians were involved in supporting military. The idea was to cut off supplies to the fighting troops. Now, the Air Power studies after the war showed that the bombing Germany (often called terror bombing) did not have near the effect that we had hoped for. So much that US military doctrine change in target selection. But in 1945, they did not know that yet, and LeMay was not one to ask questions to. The view is the same as why Sherman's march worked. Cut out the supplies, and the army withers on the vine.
Also remember what the troops, and officers, had seen of the Japanese military at this point. Remember what had happened in the island campaigns. Invading Japan would have meant the end of Japan as a culture. They would have fought using suicidal attacks with pregnant women and children. The same that you said would have been spared if we didn't drop the bomb. These men had seen just a taste of what would have been in store for them if Operation Downfall was launched. The loss of millions of Japanese civilians from direct action and starvation would have destroyed the culture. Even after the bombs, the Warlords wanted to fight on. It took the conventional bombing raid of Tokyo to stop the coup (by chance).
And finally (for now), we need to really think about what the term “war crime” actually means. Akin is right in a sense, for some of the things we as a nation have condemned in others we have done our selves.
There are many facets to this issue. I chose one sort of at random. There are other places to defend the actions of the United States.
But continuing on along the path I've already chosen:
“Truman wrote, in his papers published after the war, that he intended the Japanese government to get the message that we could and would kill massive numbers of the military and civilian population,...”
First, I will note that Mr. Truman was not a Catholic, and likely was not adept at expressing himself in categories of Catholic moral theology. Thus, all I can do is look at what he instructed the military of the United States to do.
I would not count as a war crime trying to “get the message that we could and would kill massive number of the military and civilian population,...”
What I would count as a war crime is the direct, intentional, actual extermination of innocent civilians.
And the leafleting of the cities thus bombed is counterfactual to that direct intent.
In other words, Mr. Truman may have wished to scare the Japanese into believing we'd kill all the Japanese (and maybe he might have actually gone ahead and done it - but things didn't get that far and thus, he didn't have a chance to commit that sin), but still may not have intended as the primary effect to actually primarily, directly, intentionally kill civilians. And this is supported by what we actually did, not what anyone wrote or said after the fact. We actually told civilians to leave these cities.
“It is that intention to use an explicitly indiscriminate weapons against a city construed as, itself, the target, which is morally prohibited, since it uses the killing of noncombatants as a means to an end.”
There are two problems with this assertion. The first is the hidden premise - that using indiscriminate weapons against a city uses the killing of noncombatants as a means to an end.
If the city, itself, is a legitimate military target, then, if one warns the civilians to get the heck out of the city, one may legitimately destroy the city, by definition.
The question then, really, is whether a city, as a whole, may be a legitimate military target. One may not answer in the negative by saying, but a city is a place where people live, in that's sort of a begging of the question in a case where one can make out the argument that the city is, itself, a military target, and one has taken some care to encourge the evacuation of the city.
I believe that in the case of Japan in WWII, the Japanese government and people had made it clear that they would use every last resource available to them to resist in war, without discrimination between civilian and military persons or resources. By the time that we dropped the bombs, we'd wreaked unbelievable death and destruction on all manner of Japanese cities, towns, villages, etc., and yet they answered us that they would fight until a hundred million had died.
In face of such resistance on the part of the entire people, their enemy at least retains the right to destroy all resources (as, by definition, the nation has made ALL resources into military resources), as long as the enemy makes some effort to spare non-combatants, which is what the actual historical record shows actually happened.
And the reaction after both bombs were dropped is entirely relevant, that there were strong elements within the Japanese government and society that wanted to fight the war even after both bombs were dropped. That's relevant because it validates the intention of the Japanese to use every last resource and every last life to fight the war against us. And thus, it validates our judgment that all Japanese resources were liable to destruction, as long as we made the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and made the effort not to indiscriminately kill non-combatants, because the Japanese had directly, intentionally, actually made all their resources available for military use to wage war against us.
It was the Japanese nation that was guilty of having eliminated the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. It was our sad fate to have to make the best of that elimination of distinction, and try to continue to act morally, yet also effectively, in the face of their rank civilizational failure and descent into absolute barbarism.
"...and if a preschool and an opera company are unfortunately next door and get destroyed with them..."
The difficulty is when the enemy has made clear that even the preschool and the opera will be used as military assets.
If we were to wage war and our enemy regularly shelled our ambulances and other medical services, we would count that as an atrocity. But if we were to announce that we would make dual use of these assets, both to provide medical services and to wage further war against the enemy, I'd hardly count the enemy guilty of a war crime for then shelling our medical resources.
I will not make the argument that there was no practical difference between civilian and military personnel in wartime Japan. There is a case to be made for it, but the conclusion of it is so morally repugnant to me that I am unable to type the case that could be made. Frankly, it reeks of Islamic thinking to me.
One may quibble about the dotting of the moral i's and the crossing of the theological t's when one's enemy erases all distinctions between their military resources and personnel and their civilian resources and personnel. However, in the main, even though Mr. Truman didn't strike me as being especially schooled in Catholic moral theology, I think he made a darned good attempt to follow that law which is written on the human heart, the moral law, the natural law, in his attempt to discriminate between the destruction of physical assets that had been formally declared available for military use and the indiscriminate killing of non-combatants.
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