To begin with, it is never correct for a Christian to let the ends justify the means, when the means are themselves morally objectionable. Killing innocent civilians as a directly intended result of an action in wartime is always morally wrong. It is murder. Just as the actions that took place at the WTC on 9-11 were acts of mass-murder of innocents, just as the German bombing of Poland and Russia and the London Blitz were acts of mass-murder, just as our own Allied bombings of virtually every major German and Japanese city were later on. All of these were "terror bombings" of civilian populations. All of the various armed forces engaging in them admitted as much, including Allied commanders. "Bomber" Harris of the RAF made no secret that he thought these were terror bombings, and he was far from alone.
Indeed, we put Germans and Japanese on trial after the war for bombing, shooting, gassing civilian populations everywhere they could outside of their own turf. We hanged such people. And rightly so. I do not deny the fact that Germans and Japanese started these deliberate attacks on civilian population centers. But, from a Christian POV, how does that justify our doing the exact same thing - with regard to bombing and shooting civilians anyway - on a hugely increased scale later on? We lost any and all moral superiority by the end of the war when it comes to the topic of bombing and other destruction of population centers. The only real moral high-ground we might have retained is that, especially in Germany, we did not engage in premeditated genocide like they did.
As for the A-bombs themselves, they are just an order of magnitude worse than what we were doing anyway, long since, with carpet-bombing runs of thousands of B-17s and B-29s at a time. But to drop them as we did, under the background circumstances, was absolutely reprehensible. Many people claim that there would have been 500,000 to a million American casualties. This is nothing more than contemporary propaganda. There are other documents at play showing that the US would be facing something closer to 50,000 casualties, at a maximum. And that is assuming the worst politically: that the Japanese would really have the will to fight on. But they were done!
They had nothing left to fight with in any conventional military sense. They had virtually no navy at all by this point. Leyte Gulf pretty much finished that. They had no Air Force either, outside of the Kamikazis. They could have been blockaded until the population forced the government to surrender. But even that was not necessary.
For months, the Japanese government had been trying to make surrender overtures to the Allied forces, and they were stonewalled. Unconditional surrender had already been declared as a goal, and there would be no conditions entertained. Not that the Japanese had very many. Mostly, they just wanted to keep the emperor on his throne. We said no, that we would guarantee nothing like that, and might put him on trial along with the generals. Ironically, of course, he wound-up staying anyway, due mostly to General McArthur employing some basic understanding of human nature, and seeing the utility of keeping Hirohito alive to smooth the occupation of Japan.
The Japanese were willing to surrender, with minimal terms. We stalled them all through June and July 1945, because, well, by God, we were building the damned bombs, and we were going to use them! We missed an opportunity in Germany, since the war was over there. Besides, it would be a lot easier to drop those bombs on Japan anyway, since there were racial considerations that would be less "objectionable" doing it to them. Once the Trinity test (ironically named!) took place successfully near Alamagordo, NM in late July 1945, nothing the Japanese might do to surrender would be honored. We had to end the war with those bomb drops.
And we sure did! This great Christian Nation, armed with the "rightness of our cause," dropped not one but two bombs, both of them on militarily meaningless targets, with the full understanding that the overwhelming majority of the people to be killed were women, children and men too old to be in the army, or already wounded in previous military action. Nagasaki, ironically, was the city in Japan with by far the highest concentration of Christians, and Hiroshima had a relatively large contingent as well. Not that that should matter, since the real issue is deaths of innocent civilians, period, but it is interesting that that is how things turned out.
Now, if you've read this far, you're probably grinding your teeth at me! Look, I am no pacifist. I believe countries have a right to defend themselves from unjust attack. Our country was certainly attacked first, and without warning. But consider again the fact that Japan was trying to surrender. It was all but over, if we wanted to take negotiations seriously. The firebombings of many Japanese cities, as well as the two atomic bombs, of course, were totally unnecessary - by any standard, not just a Christian one - anytime after June 1945 (a case could be made for April).
And here's the proof: virtually every American commander, either contemporaneously or just a few years later, admitted as much! The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were militarily not justified. Here are some quotes from this ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html ) website (there are plenty others like it, for those who want to research the matter, but this one is concise and has some good quotes from our own commanders):
American leaders who were in a position to know the facts did not believe, either at the time or later, that the atomic bombings were needed to end the war.
When he was informed in mid-July 1945 by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the decision to use the atomic bomb, General Dwight Eisenhower was deeply troubled. He disclosed his strong reservations about using the new weapon in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313):
During his [Stimson's] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face."
"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing ... I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon," Eisenhower said in 1963.
Shortly after "V-J Day," the end of the Pacific war, Brig. General Bonnie Fellers summed up in a memo for General MacArthur: "Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan's unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either these events took place."
Similarly, Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, later commented:
It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan ... The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
If the United States had been willing to wait, said Admiral Ernest King, US Chief of Naval Operations, "the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials."
Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born scientist who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb, argued against its use. "Japan was essentially defeated," he said, and "it would be wrong to attack its cities with atomic bombs as if atomic bombs were simply another military weapon." In a 1960 magazine article, Szilard wrote: "If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them."
End of quoted passage. I don't think there is any doubt that the A-bombs on Japan were military overkill and as much an "object lesson" warning to the Soviet Union as anything else. It is impossible to justify them from a Christian POV under any circumstances, but, as it is, there were no circumstances that could even sort of legitimize these actions. Had the Germans of Japanese done the same thing to us, and we prevailed to win the war anyway, there is no doubt whatsoever that the use of atomic weapons would have been defined as a war crime, and the advocates and implementors of such atrocities would have been executed for those kinds of bombings alone, never mind whatever else they may have done.
World War Two has been over for nearly 65 years. We need to begin to cut through all of the propaganda and misdirection of the public that took place then, and view things with the objective lens of history-from-a- distance. Simply swallowing justifications based on highly inflated casualty figures just won't do anymore. All of us conservatives have no qualms admitting that our own government today is not exactly attuned to telling us the straight dope when it is not in their interest, no? Things were no different then. We dropped the bombs on Japan because we were bound and determined to do so. Ninety percent or more of the casualties were women, children and old men. Christians! How do you really think Jesus would view this sort of civilian massacre, especially when the country on the receiving end was trying to surrender for some time back? What would be your sense of vengeance, and upon what moral justification would your rage be based, if we were on the receiving end of such an attack ourselves? Fight back? Sure. Attempting to destroy the military that attacked you unjustly is legitimate. But deliberately killing millions of the enemy's civilian population simply as an act of retribution? A tit-for-tat sort of thing? I'd rather not explain myself for that with God, thanks!
This country went to war in 1941 against two war-mongering counties, one of which had directly attacked us. We were in our rights to "respond." But, by the end of the war, we were doing just as many - and more! - war crimes as they ever did. We just happened to win, so you never saw any of our guys in the docket at war crimes tribunals. The whole world should have been ashamed by 1945. The doe-eyed innocence we allegedly had as a country into the early sixties was, in reality, long-gone. We fooled ourselves for years. I personally fooled myself about this for years. Maybe it's time to wake up.
Well said, thank you.
>>But, by the end of the war, we were doing just as many - and more! - war crimes as they ever did. We just happened to win, so you never saw any of our guys in the docket at war crimes tribunals.
Exactly..
Killing innocent civilians in war is murder. It is a war crime. It is a means to an end that cannot be justified. Whether innocent civilians are killed by bullets, firebombs, conventional bombs, atomic weapons, or simply starved to death is irrelevant.
In our age, unfortunately, the structures of our various global civilizations are so complex and entwined that war cannot be fought without killing innocent civilians. It is therefore impossible to wage a just war in the modern age. It would therefore seem that the only moral way to respond to an attack in the modern age would be to surrender immediately, and accept slavery or extermination at the hands of the aggressor.
However, any such surrender is itself a moral failure. Allowing one’s children to be enslaved or exterminated when one has the means to resist is likewise to commit murder.
Therefore, when an aggressor nation attacks, there is no moral solution. All options are immoral. To resist an aggressor leads to murder. To acquiesce to an aggressor likewise amounts to murder.
God provides a moral solution to the problem of war in the modern age. His solution is to not make war. We are to love our enemies, which means never committing any act of aggression against them. If this law were followed by all nations, war would not exist.
But since the aggression of nation against nation does exist, we are left with no moral option when attacked. To resist aggression means to become murderers of innocent civilians. To surrender in the face of aggression also means to become murderers of innocent civilians. War therefore makes murderers of both sides. This is the great tragedy of war.
Therefore, since we will end up committing murder whether we resist aggression or acquiesce to it, the only choice remaining to us is to minimize the number of murders we commit in the cause of national defense. Since we must murder innocent civilians in order to survive, the best course of action is to keep the number of murders we commit to the minimum possible. This is done by fighting the war as brutally as possible, in order that war be ended as quickly as possible, and the amount of blood on our hands be kept as small as possible.
And afterwards, when the war is over and the aggressor has been vanquished, it remains to us to fall on our faces before the Just Judge and beg His mercy, receiving in humility His just recompense for the innocent blood that we have shed. We can only trust that God will forgive us of murder; we can only pay the temporal penalty for shedding innocent blood.
***
When an embryonic human being becomes implanted into the Fallopian tube of his or her mother, no chance of a live birth exists. The baby is certain to die if left to develop. The mother will also certainly die if the pregnancy continues. The parents or other responsible parties in such cases are therefore left with two options: murder the embryonic human being by removing it from the mother’s body, or murder both baby and mother by allowing the pregnancy to continue. Since murder is committed in both cases, no moral option exists. In such cases — as in war — all we can do is murder as few people as possible in order to save what life we can, and to accept the punishment for our actions without self-pity and without complaint.
I've had my uncertainties about this for years. Prior to that, I had accepted history as it was presented to me. Thank you for a very thought-provoking post.
No they were not. Even the Japanese will tell you that.
I’m not ashamed.
Stop using christianity since you hate our troops and wish them all death. Nothing worse than an atheist using christianity.
Since you hate our troops do you do a dance we all recognize when you hear more died or make one up?
Atheist using christianity.