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.”
Please see my post # 23.
what about the war with Japan was not finished by Truman’s action?
The US strategy was not to engage in a total war and not to seek the total destruction of Japan, but to use precision application of force to make the Japanese military regime surrender, and then use McArthur and western advisors to finally open Japan to the west and reconstitute Japan’s government and economy.
This was an effective end to the war. Since 1946 the US-Japanese alliance has served both of our nations to contain China and Russia and preserve western (and Japanese) interests in the western Pacific
The Purple Hearts awarded today were made for the estimated casualties from the invasion of Honshu. We will probably never run out.
“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.”
Isn’t it interesting how much trouble we took to take him out?
(See my perpetual tagline)
Please compare and contrast the atomic bombing of two cities, and the incendiary bombing of over two dozen cities. Do you see any moral distinction between, let us say, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the incendiary bombing of Tokyo?
Actually I believe there were 2 bombs, a list of 6 industrial targets, and Hiroshima had the best weather for a mission on August 6
So does that justify dropping the a-bomb on civilians? Unfortunately, yes. When the Allies found themselves in a war against two foes who had murdered millions of innocents and would gladly murder many millions more, their hearts became hardened. I would think that would be the natural result of any people engaged in a war with ruthless enemies. Kill or be killed.
How could the leaders of America justify one hundred thousand more dead servicemen because they invaded Japan (and killed many more enemy civilians than died from the atomic blasts) instead of dropping the bombs?
Again, the Allies found themselves in war against foes who wanted to annihilate them. Their response had to be as equally or more ruthless.
“Since 1946 the US-Japanese alliance has served both of our nations to contain China and Russia and preserve western (and Japanese) interests in the western Pacific”
While I agree that what you say is true, had the second part of my ‘plan’ had been carried out then we would not have had to worry about Russia nor China.
“This was an effective end to the war.”
Except perhaps for the weak prosecution of their war criminals afterwards.
The U.S. killed more civilians in the firebombing of Tokyo than in the attacks on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But nobody condemns them for that.
“The Purple Hearts awarded today were made for the estimated casualties from the invasion of Honshu. We will probably never run out.”
OK, thanks, but perhaps you responded to the wrong post?
Just read Richard Frank’s book “Downfall”, it covers the last several months of the Pacific War and goes into detail everything. We had to drop the Bomb.
One wasn’t enough. It took two.
Compare the death toll and damage from conventional and fire bombs dropped on Germany to that of the final 2 atomic bombs dropped on Japan
From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
The US Strategic Bombing Survey later estimated that nearly 88,000 people died in this one raid, 41,000 were injured, and over a million residents lost their homes. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated a higher toll: 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded.
And this from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
In August 1945, during the final stage of the Second World War, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombings, which killed at least 129,000 people, remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history.
....”I don’t think we have anything to apologize for and should not be doing so”....
Exactly!.....Japan started it with the bombing of Pearl Harbour, killed two thousand five hundred Americans injured another one thousand so lets not forget that....
.....Did Japan care when they were killing hundreds of people in the war?.... Have they said sorry? ...
We were right right to drop the bomb, it stopped the war all over Asia....Had to be done it was the only way to stop them.... Even ‘after the first bomb’ was dropped they didn’t give up.
Yes, that’s correct.
...”The notion that good ends justify evil means is a moral theory condemned”...
Ummm...
God command the extermination/genocide of the Canaanites, women and children included...... God did not order the extermination of these people to be cruel, but rather to prevent even greater evil from occurring in the future.
In 1 Samuel 15:2-3, God commanded Saul and the Israelites,.....
“This is what the LORD Almighty says:..... ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
God knew what the results would be if Israel did not completely eradicate the Amalekites. If Israel did not carry out God’s orders, the Amalekites would come back to “haunt” the Israelites again and again.
God ordered similar things when the Israelites were invading the promised land.... (Deuteronomy 2:34; 3:6; 20:16-18)
....to the Canaanites, God commanded,...... “However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites — as the LORD your God has commanded you...... Otherwise,..... they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God” .....(Deuteronomy 20:16-18).
The atomic weapons used on Japan were fission bombs. Yields of about 15 and 20 thousand tons (20KT) of explosive apiece.
A Hydrogen bomb, or fusion weapon, such as the weapon tested on Bikini Atoll had a yield of 15 million tons (15MT) of explosives. That is an explosive power a thousand times greater than the atom bombs used on Japan. The Bikini Atoll test vaporized only a small part of the island and created a modest size crater. You can't flatten whole islands with atomic weapons.
Even after the second mushroom cloud, there was still a faction in the Japanese military that refused to say “Uncle”.
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