The Moral Lesson of Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945 the American Air Force incinerated Hiroshima, Japan with an atomic bomb. On August 9 Nagasaki was obliterated. The fireballs killed some 175,000 people. They followed months of horror, when American airplanes firebombed civilians and reduced cities to rubble. Facing extermination, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. The invasion of Japan was cancelled, and countless American lives were saved. The Japanese accepted military occupation, embraced a constitutional government, and renounced war permanently. The effects were so beneficent, so wide-ranging and so long-term, that the bombings must be ranked among the most moral acts ever committed.

The bombings have been called many things-but moral? The purpose of morality, wrote Ayn Rand, is not to suffer and die, but to prosper and live.

The answer begins with Japanese culture. World War II in the Pacific was launched by a nation that esteemed everything hostile to human life.

Japan's religious-political philosophy held the emperor as a god, subordinated the individual to the state, elevated ritual over rational thought, and adopted suicide as a path to honor. This was truly a Morality of Death. It had gripped Japanese society for three generations. Japan's war with Russia had ended in 1905 with a negotiated treaty, which left Japan's militaristic culture intact. The motivations for war were emboldened, and the next generation broke the treaty by attacking Manchuria in 1931 (which was not caused by the oil embargo of 1941).

It was after Japan attacked America that America waged war against Japan-a proper moral response to the violence Japan had initiated. Despite three and a half years of slaughter, surrender was not at hand in mid-1945. Over six million Japanese were still in Asia. Some 12,000 Americans had died on Okinawa alone. Many Japanese leaders hoped to kill enough Americans during an invasion to convince them that the cost was too high. A relentless "Die for the Emperor" propaganda campaign had motivated many Japanese civilians to fight to the death. Volunteers lined up for kamikaze "Divine Wind" suicide missions. Hope of victory kept the Japanese cause alive, until hopeless prostration before American air attacks made the abject renunciation of all war the only alternative to suicide. The Japanese had to choose between the morality of death, and the morality of life.

The bombings marked America's total victory over a militaristic culture that had murdered millions. To return an entire nation to morality, the Japanese had to be shown the literal meaning of the war they had waged against others. The abstraction "war," the propaganda of their leaders, their twisted samurai "honor," their desire to die for the emperor-all of it had to be given concrete form, and thrown in their faces. This is what firebombing Japanese cities accomplished. It showed the Japanese that "this"-point to burning buildings, screaming children scarred unmercifully, piles of corpses, the promise of starvation-"this is what you have done to others. Now it has come for you. Give it up, or die." This was the only way to show them the true nature of their philosophy, and to beat the truth of the defeat into them.

Yes, Japan was beaten in July of 1945-but had not surrendered. A defeat is a fact; an aggressor's ability to fight effectively is destroyed.

Surrender is a decision, by the political leadership and the dominant voices in the culture, to recognize the fact of defeat. Surrender is an admission of impotence, the collapse of all hope for victory, and the permanent renunciation of aggression. Such recognition of reality is the first step towards a return to morality. Under the shock of defeat, a stunned silence results. Military officers no longer plan for victory; women no longer bear children for the Reich; young boys no longer play samurai and dream of dying for the emperor-children no longer memorize sword verses from the Koran and pledge themselves to jihad.

To achieve this, the victor must be intransigent. He does not accept terms; he demands prostrate surrender, or death, for everyone if necessary.

Had the United States negotiated in 1945, Japanese troops would have returned to a homeland free of foreign control, met by civilians who had not confronted defeat, under the same leaders who had taken them to war. A negotiated peace would have failed to discredit the ideology of war, and would have left the motivations for the next war intact. We might have fought the Japanese Empire again, twenty years later. Fortunately, the Americans were in no mind to compromise.

President Truman demonstrated his willingness to bomb the Japanese out of existence if they did not surrender. The Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945 is stark: "The result of the futile and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world stands forth in awful clarity as an example to the people of Japan . . . Following are our terms.

We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay . . . We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces . . . The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."

The method was brutally violent, as it had to be-because the war unleashed by Japan was brutally violent, and only a brutal action could demonstrate its nature. To have shielded Japanese citizens from the meaning of their own actions-the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March-would have been a massive act of dishonesty. It would have left the Japanese unable to reject military aggression the next time it was offered as an elixir of glory.

After the war, many returning Japanese troops were welcomed by their countrymen not as heroes, but with derision. The imperial cause was recognized as bankrupt, and the actions of its soldiers worthy of contempt.

Forced to confront the reality of what they had done, a sense of morality had returned to Japan.

There can be no higher moral action by a nation than to destroy an aggressive dictatorship, to permanently discredit the enemy's ideology, to stand guard while a replacement is crafted, and then to greet new friends on proper terms. Let those who today march for peace in Germany and Japan admit that their grandparents once marched as passionately for war, and that only total defeat could force them to re-think their place in the world and offer their children something better. Let them thank heaven-the United States-for the bomb.

Some did just that. Hisatsune Sakomizu, chief cabinet secretary of Japan, said after the war: "The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by Heaven for Japan to end the war." He wanted to look like a peaceful man-which became a sensible position only after the Americans had won.

Okura Kimmochi, president of the Technological Research Mobilization Office, wrote before the surrender: "I think it is better for our country to suffer a total defeat than to win total victory . . . in the case of Japan's total defeat, the armed forces would be abolished, but the Japanese people will rise to the occasion during the next several decades to reform themselves into a truly splendid people . . . the great humiliation [the bomb] is nothing but an admonition administered by Heaven to our country." But let him thank the American people-not heaven-for it was they who made the choice between the morality of life and the morality of death inescapable.

Americans should be immensely proud of the bomb. It ended a war that had enslaved a continent to a religious-military ideology of slavery and death.

For the Americans to do so while refusing to sacrifice their own troops to save the lives of enemy civilians was a sublimely moral action. This destroyed the foundations of the war, and allowed the Japanese to rebuild their culture along with their cities, as prosperous inhabitants of the earth. Were it true that total victory today creates new attackers tomorrow, we would now be fighting Japanese suicide bombers, while North Korea-where the American army did not impose its will-would be peaceful and prosperous. The facts are otherwise. The need for total victory over the morality of death has never been clearer.

Redgolum, yours is an interesting post --- one I'll have to look over again when I get time later today.

The problem with looking at alternatives to something that has already happened is twofold: for one thing, we can never actually know how the alternatives would have turned out; and secondly, you often don't grasp the consequences of what actually DID happen.

For instance, consider this: WWII marked a moral turning point in that not just the "bad guys," but even the "good guys" carried out massive and strategically deliberately attacks against civilian populations.

In the aftermath, during the U.S. Occupation of Japan under General Douglas MacArthur, Japan passed a law entitled “the Eugenic Protection Act of 1948,” encouraging voluntary sterilization as a public health measure. (In addition, reportedly some 275,000 Japanese were involuntarily sterilized.) Also in the wake of Hiroshima/Nagasaki Japanese law was changed to permit abortion for most genetic or chromosomal disorders or congenital malformations.

Every such law is not only policy, but precedent. Heretofore in most nations considered criminal and in many, unthinkable, abortion became newly associated not with crime but with public health. So the surgical killing and trashing of unborn babies picked up a certain undeserved respectability, and began its long march toward universal acceptance.

Or maybe not such a long march. By 1962, the American Law Institute published its "Model Penal Code" de-criminalizing abortion for certain hard cases. Within 20 years of the Japanese abortion law, abortion law was liberalized in Colorado and California. (Some so-called "ethicists" had picked up on the WWII-vintage idea that you can intentionally exterminate the innocent if you have a really good reason!) In 1970, New York (followed by Alaska, Hawaii and Washington) introduced the first laws to allow abortion "on demand."

Then came Roe vs Wade. Then over a period of 30 years, 1/4 to 1/3 of all babies conceived in the United States of America were killed. That comes to approximately 50,000,000 dead.

Is this one of the long-term consequences of Hiroshima/Nagasaki? I think the argument could be made. Once you accept in principle that the prohibition against the intentional shedding of innocent blood can be set aside in favor of our own better judgment, the consequences can play out across a range of situations. And if the killing of 1/3 of the children in America is not a consequence of the "new morality" of targeting the innocent as in Hiroshima/Nagasaki, it may be its punishment.

You bring up some good points, but on the abortion side you forgot one fact. The eugenic laws were already in place in the US well prior to the outbreak of WWII. Forced sterilization and even some abortion was being done at state ran hospitals as a method to "strengthen the strain" as it were.

The book "War Against the Weak" by Edmond Black documents it very well. The abortion laws might have come partially as a result of the atomic bombs in Japan, but well before the bomb dropped the trend in law was for open abortion and contraception. If the Japanese laws had any effect, it was to speed things along somewhat. That and also remember there was a culture tradition of killing unwanted newborns in Japan well before war. It was viewed not only as acceptable, but required for the nation. So the infanticide became prenatal instead of the post natal.

The other issue was the targeting of civilians by both sides. At the Nuremberg trials, Goering had an interesting defense. He said if he was going to die because of the blitz, he wanted Bomber Haris and Curtis LeMay on the stand facing similar charges. In air bombing runs, the Allies killed far more than the Axis. That is mainly because the Axis powers never had the strategic bomber force like the US and UK did.

After the war, it was discovered that the terror bombings didn't accomplish much. They killed alot of civilians, destroyed some infrastructure, but didn't slow the production of armaments down very much (which was the stated goal) or reduce moral. In fact, it was found that after things like Dresden, more people in Nazi Germany and other places went against the Allies.

That is why city bombing is no longer considered a tactic today.

It's Nagasaki which was the "Catholic pearl of Japan."

You're right about the eugenics/euthanasia crew in the USA preceding WWII by many decades. Sanger and her movement supplied important legal precedents as well as the philosophical basis for the Nazi program.

I'm looking at the cumulative effect of the anti-ethic that it's OK to deliberately kill innocent people if you have a really good reason. That's why it always disturbs me when certain FReepers refer to -- well, some of them start with William Tecumseh Sherman --- and then justify the targeting of the civilian population of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hirosima, Nagasaki as an ongoing American tradition of indiscriminate slaughter "when needed."

If we accept that, it's hard to see how we differ from the jihadis, who (also) reject the fundamental moral law that innocent human life is to be immune from direct attack. Certainly there is no fear of God before our eyes.

It's only recently that I saw that the massive slaughter of our own, via abortion, may be the judgment and punishment we have brought upon ourselves.

Certainly. While the instrument of surrender does make the Japanese civilian government subordinate to MacArthur's Occupation forces, it did not require the surrender of civil authority to Allied command, as was the case in Germany.

The reason for this was because unlike Nazi Germany, the Japanese government not only fufilled constitutional, civil needs, but reflected cultural norms as well. The Japanese public could accept the surrender of it's armies to enemies that had clearly demonstrated their superiority in the field (this is a near-universal oriental concept, see Sun Tzu, Confucious, et. al.). However, civil authority in Japan devolves from divine providence (i.e. the Emperor) and therefore, turning over civil authority to the Allies is, in a sense, religiously intolerable.

What occurred during the American Occupation of Japan is that MacArthur, fully aware of these distinctions and cultural bugaboos, left the visible signs of Japanese self-rule in place, and worked behind the scenes through the Emperor to affect whatever changes he deemed necessary (New constitution, reorganization of the civil service, universal sufferage, etc). MacArthur could dictate to the Emperor and the Emperor to the government and people. To do it any other way would have incited the Japanese to continue the war.

That is the distinction; Germany could function without the Nazis, Japan could not without the Emperor and the organs of government that were touched by his divine mantle. There was no strict program of "De-Nazification" in Japan (with regards to the militarists who dragged the country into war), because to do so would have resulted in civil unrest on a huge scale (and would probably have driven Japan in to the Communist sphere). For the sake of peace, the Allies were willing to make these concessions to the Japanese people.

I know of three attempts made by the Japanese from May to July of 1945 to negotiate a surrender;

1. Japanese envoys in Moscow made no fewer than three attempts to negotiate through the Soviet Union (Japan and Russia had signed a Non-Aggression Pact in 1940, and this was still in force at the time). The Russians stonewalled these negotiations by purposely failing to notify the Western Allies of them, primarily because American pressure on the Soviet Union had been to enter the war in the Pacific at the earliest, possible date. Roosevelt (before he died) had promised the Russians a slew of incentives to do so (mostly reversing the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, and promising American acquiescence in Russian interests in Mongolia, Manchuria and Northern China. Roosevelt was famous for taking credit for the Atlantic Charter and then forgetting about it's provisions when it was convenient -- see Baltic states, Poland, etc).
The Russians would do nothing to jeopardize this arrangement --- like inform their allies the enemy wished to surrender before they could get into the war and strengthen their claims with military force.

2. Additional attempts were made through the Swedes in Stockholm. Allied officials did actually listen to some of the proposals, but rejected them because Japan offered to surrender to the Western Allies, but not the Soviets, with whom they were not officially at war (Russo-Japanese Non-Aggression Pact rears it's ugly had again), and the guarentee of the sanctity of the Emperor. Allied diplomats, wedded to the ideas of Unconditional Surrender and no seperate peace treaties between beligerents (i.e. not entering into any agreement which was not binding upon ALL the Allies simultaneously) rejected these terms.

3. The third attempt that I'm aware of took place in Bern, Switzerland, where Japanese diplomats contacted Allen Dulles (then Head of the OSS, forerunner of the CIA), and offered the same terms as in example 2. Dulles did not presume to speak for the American government, and demurred, but did forward the information to Washington, where it was rejected because it did not fit the "Unconditional Surrender/No Sperate Peace" mold.

Prior to the actual dropping of the Atomic bombs, American scientists sent a report detailing the effects (but not the secrets behind) the bomb to their Japanese counterparts as a warning of what was in store. Additionally, the American government made repeated broadcasts between 25 July, 1945 and 3 Aug, 1945 (the day Hiroshima was bombed) all but begging the Japanese to surrender.

The respnse they got to these broadcasts is astonishing; the Japanese did in fact agree to negotiate, whatever by wireless broadcast on 2 Aug, 1945 delivered by Foreign Minister Shigematsu. However, due to a mistranslation (Japanese is not an easy language to learn and it is not as precise or literal as most Western languages) the response was misconstrued as "stuff your offer" when in realty it was closer to "we will consider your proposal".

The desire for an end to the war in Japan was quite manifest to anyone willing to pay attention to it in early 1945; the Tojo government fell in March (have to check again) 1945. Japanese diplomats all over the planet were making overtures to the allies through neutral embassies. Food shortages were causing civil unrest throught Manchuria, Mongolia and Korea. Fuel of any kind was all but unobtainable. While there were still diehards within the military, the civilian segments of the Japanese government were increasingly being run by men who worked for, and died for, peace. Only the peculiarity of some Japanese customs and Allied thick-headedness prevented the war from ending sooner than it did.

The funny thing (or is it?) is that American intelligence was aware of most of these facts; they are all over the "Magic" intercepts (Magic was the consolidation and interpretation, with strategic recommendations, of all Allied intelligence gained through espionage, codebreaking, or other means, which was presented to Allied policy makers on a daily basis). The Western Allies were well aware of what was happening in Japan, they were singularly unaware of how to use it to their advantage.

Dan, didn't you know that internal unrest in Germany forced the Kaiser to seek terms? Or haven't you ever heard of the food riots that took place in Germany from 1916 until the end? How about the mutinies of the Kreigsmarine in Kiel and Hamburg in 1918, or haven't you ever heard of that? The continued British blockade and the addition of a million American troops on the Western Front merely put a punctuation mark on a war that was already being lost behind the lines.

As for your contention that the Second World War was a direct result of not beating the snot out of the Germans the first time around, nothing could be further from the truth. The Treaty of Versailles was incredibly harsh in this regard and the world-wide economic Depression only made the situation worse. Germany ws brought as low as it is possible to bring a western, indutrialized society without returning it wholly to nature.

More than anything, the cause of the Second World War WAS NOT that Germany went undefeated in the field; it was a cultural phenomenon. The generation that fought for the Kaiser in 1914-18 was only the second or third raised in a unified German state (something that had not existed 100 years prior), and who had taken Bismark, Clauswitz, Otto the Great and their warrior past in with their Mother's milk.

And when they went to the front, they defeated the vaunted Russian army (helping to cause revolution in Russia, no less), fought the mighty French to the brink of collapse, and at sea fought Britain's Royal Navy to a stalemate, and at the end of the war were still in occupation of a not- insignifigant portion of France.

As those men saw it, they had won. What they could not fathom was how it was possible that their government surrendered with an arguable military victory in their hands. They left 3 million men on the battlefield while compiling those accomplishments, and the means by which they surrendered left a very bad taste in their mouths. The harshness of Versailles and it's ruthless enforcement only made matters worse. In effect, the Armistice and Versailles were Germany's Hiroshima and Nagasaki; they ruined the country economically, politically and socially.

THAT is the cultural enviornment that produced Hitler and the Nazis. That is the soil in which the seed of a Second World War grew. Such a thing would not have been prevented by razing Germany to the ground because it could not prevent the MINDSET that motivated the Nazis. The First World War is a prime example of how, sometimes, it is necessary to let an all-but-defeated enemy get off the mat. Finishing that war on the terms you suggest only guarenteed a second round.

Japan, of course, is a totally different horse altogether. Th Japanese reasons for going to war cannot be fully explored here (I'm sure you wouldn't want to read it anyway) and the Japanese culture (based on Confucian principles of the Harmonious Society) more or less demand that once a decision is made (for either war or peace) it will be followed through with the utmost expedience and efficiency and with very little opposition from internal social and governmental sources.

In that regard, if any of the surrender negotiations that took place prior to Hiroshima had been seriously explored, a settlement in which atomic bombs were unnecessary can be reasonably assumed to have been possible. Despite the Japanese pleas for more favorable surrender terms, there were plans on the board for a continued blackade (and continued starvation) of Japan, which were expected to last until mid 1946. The question regarding it's implementation, however, was just how long the US Navy could hold out against he Kamikaze (the USN had lost or had damaged 300 ships and suffered over 15,000 casualties from Kamikazes at Okinawa alone).

As for the "1,000,000 American casualties" estimate-- it was just that: an estimate. It is not a fact and bandying it about proves nothing because the event never occurred. You cannot say "the atom bombs saved a million Americans" in that way, because it's theorhetical. That is a terribly bad (and a very old, misunderstood and completely overused) argument. We'll never know if it was accurate (and that's a good thing) and there is no similar, real-life event to use as a comparison. The fact is that all the plans for the invasion and occupation of Japan were all very "last minute" and had gaping holes in them. There seems to have been hardly any realistic planning done because it had been assumed previously that Japan could not be defeated by 1945 and possibly not until 1946.

I would tend to take the "1,000,000 casualty" figures with a VERY large grain of salt. The same could be said about the "we saved x number of Japanese"; there is no way to verify whatever figure you throw out there.

Of course, since you can't play "What if.." with casualty figures, I can't play the same game with a negotiated surrender scenario; neither event occurred, and we're arguing 60+ years later, often with a whole lot more information than was available to any decision maker in 1945.

"It sounds as if Germany wasn't really defeated in WWI, and what the allies won could hardly be called a "victory.""

Depends on your point of view, I would guess. If I was a German veteran of the First World War, and I had spilled my blood on the fields of Flanders only to find that elements and events within my country were conspiring to bring about it's downfall, I would feel betrayed too.

When i say "elements and events" I do not mean to lend creedence to the later Nazi claim that Jews, Serbs, Communists, homosexuals, etc. were in direct conspiracy. These identification of these "elements" of German society were merely easy targets and psychological constructs. They are the scapegoats. What had happened in Germany between 1916-18 is simply that a series of calamities for which the German people were unprepared all occurred within a short period of time; the losses at the front, the continued pressure of the blockade, the increasing removal of raw materials from the civilian sector to the military, the stalemates at the various fronts. The typical German-in-the-street back in Bonn, Leipzig or Dusseldorf took all of this in and wondered just why it was continuing.

The only reasonable solutions were either revolution or capitulation. The Germans settled for capitulation. The arrogant French, however, overstepped thier bounds and acted as if they HAD won the war (nothing could be further from the truth), and a weakened Germany was unable to resist the terms of Versailles. Not when it's armies were shattered, it's navy rusting at anchor and with internal revolt just below the surface within each.

The Allies simply WORE Germany (particularly it's civillian population) out; they did not defeat it's armies in any realistic sense. German forces in the field were probably more than capable of drawing the war out infedinitely, but were conversely also unable to resume the offensive. By 1918 there was no longer any reason to do so.

Given that backdrop, it's not surprising that Germany surrendered.

Really? Am I dreaming?

Let me put it to you this way;

1. By 1945, the Unbited States was simply out of soldiers. Between 1941-45, 16 million Americans were serving or had served in uniform. Shortages of manpower had become acute in the European theatre as early as November 1944 (Battles of the Hurtgen Forest) and made themselves manifest during the Battle of the Bulge. The fact was, the American army whihc invaded France in 1944 was an unbalanced force: it was top heavy with armored and specialty units and lacking infantry. American infantry in Europe took a terrific beating at the hands of the Germans. The infantry replacement problem had become so severe that those previously disqualified for military service were now entering the ranks (one of them, Eddie Slovik, was executed on Eisenhower's orders "pour encouragement de otres").

Allied commanders, especially General Patton, were so hard up for infantry that they began systematiccaly denuding anti-aricraft units and other rear-area establishments for troops. This was a common occurrance. There simply was no infantry (and certainly no QUALITY infantry) replacements left to draw upon. Infantrymen, incidentally, win wars; not strategic bombers, not tanks, not aircraft carriers. You need boots on the spot to decide the issue.

The invasion and occupation of Japan ( by MacArthur's estimate) was expected to require 5 million Americans; that's front-line infantry, for the most part. There weren't five million infantrymen to be found anywhere, except in the Soviet Union.

2. Japn's economy was thoroughly ruined and could not continue to produce the weapons necessary to support resistance for any extended period of time. By 1945, 88% of the Japanese merchant navy was on the bottom, the rest was either dodging Allied submarines or swinging uselessly on their hooks in foreign ports, unable to make the transit. There was no flow of raw materials or fuel to continue the fight. While Japanese industry would ocntinue to make extrordinary use of what was available, it was simply never going to be enough to defend against a determined Allied assault, no matter how stubbornly or bloodily the Japanese resisted.

Food riots were common in the hinterlands of the Japanese Empire (particularly in Manchuria, Mongolia and Korea). In most rural regions of Japan, the populace was openly hostile to men wearing their country's uniform. The military government which had dragged the country into war by a series of fait accomplis had, for the most part, begun to sag with the fall of Saipan (Summer 1944) and finally fell a few months later, to be replaced by an organization known as the Jushin (have to check the spelling), a collection of elder statesmen, many of whom had spent the 30's and early 40's working to prevent war.

The stage was set for capitulation, the only questions were how to bring it about, and would the men who set it in motion survive the process (Japanese politics of the time was infamous for political assassinations and resort to private violence).

All of this was certainly known to Allied leaders and commanders. What is absolutely incredible (to me) is that given this information, the knowledge of a lack of Allied capability to sustain the assault, and the a knowledge of the Japanese inability to continue resistance for any reasonable length of time, how supposedly brilliant men could find no other way out. It is as if the long practice of direct frontal assault that had been practiced from 1942 onwards simply became a habit that could not be broken.

What was required was a meeting of the minds, which never occurred because most of the minds were already made up, in many cases. In the end, this singular lack of originality, intelligent thinking, foresight and compassion, meant that only option left was direct, overwhelming force, and damn the consequences. That was particularly uncreative and manifested itself in pure, unadulterated murder. The biggest shame of it all is that there were people with the requisite intelligence, compassion and foresight (on both sides) and they went completely unheeded.

We could complicate the picture more by talking about Truman and his hatred of everything Russian, the uselessness of the Chinese as reliable allies, the political pressures on al the Alied governments to end hostilities quickly and bring everyone home (especially in America and Britain), but it only dtracts form the main point; the Japanese had sent out feelers and througha series of stupid rejections, misunderstandings and adherance to a political program (no Seperate Peace, Unconditional Surrender)that was increasingly becoming an obstacle rather than a help, those who had the opportuity to find peace failed utterly.

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