Posted on 07/28/2006 8:20:58 AM PDT by mjp
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.
How can death on such a scale be considered moral?
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 approach worked brilliantly. After the bombs, the Japanese chose wisely.
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.
There is no room on earth for this system, its ideas and its advocates.
It took a country that values this world to bomb this system into extinction.
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.
Thanks for your analysis.
You're engaging in hindsight and mind reading here. First, you're assuming that it's possible to take what was being said at face value. I think not, considering that you're talking about the country that created the Samurai...which was engaged in diplomacy up until Pearl Harbor. You're also operating with the benefit of hindsight and perfect knowledge, which did not exist in 1945. One of the most important factors for any type of decision is an awareness of the limits of your knowledge. In time of war, that's a major consideration; in hindsight it doesn't apply.
That's one of the limitations of hindsight not generally acknowledged by its practitioners.
You've missed the point; I have already stated, several times, that this is a "What If...?" Scenario. The point was that if there had been people with a little more intelligence and who were willing to entertain options instead of automaticaly rejecting those presented for political purposes, a different outcome was possible.
As for the "Samurai" junk, while the samurai tradition did (and still does) permeate Japanese society, the Japanese military was not adverse to retreat or surrender when it suited their needs. There were several incidents of the Japanese withdrawing troops from the battlefield (Burma, Guadalcanal, Coral Sea, mutliple times in China, Nomonhon and other Siberian clashes with the Russians, The Aleutian Islands, etc)when no further advantage could be gained from their sacrifice.
Had the Samurai tradition been as strong and as unbreakable as you assert, the Battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, Savo Island, Imphal, Leyte Gulf, Kommandorski Islands, and a host of others would have been different: the Japanese would have pressed advantages when they had them free of fear of failure or death (since, according to you, they would rather die anyway, either to atone for defeat or if it furthered victory), and the war would have been considerably shorter, since the entirety of the Japanese race would have gladly committed suicide rather than surrender.
I put it to you that since there are still 100 million or so Japanese around, that the Samurai-fight-to-the-death ethic was not as strong as you seem to think it was. It was certainly the driving force behind the ARMY (which later controlled the government) but was not the driving force in other areas of Japanese society (certainly not in the Japanese Navy or government ministries).
Also, towards the end of the war, Japanese troops began to surrender in increasing mumbers. Never as many as the Western nations would have liked, but the numbers steadly climbed as the war went on. Just because western armies surrender en-masse, doesn't mean oriental ones do, and then consider our (western) history of mass surrender as the "right and proper" kind, is ridiculous. In the instances of fanatical, last-ditch defenses to the last man, you have to take into consideration just where those battles took place; isolated island outposts where there was no chance of retreat to safety or reinforcement (Iwo Jima, Guam, Okinawa and such).
We should stop with this nonsense that the "Samurai tradition" created implaccable Japanese resistance to the death. While many aspects of Japanese society stress the collective over the individual, they also don't require suicidal stupidity. Do not mistake the Kamikaze and Bonzai charge as signs of a race bent on death; these were merely tactics, for which Japanese philosophy made exceptions.
You are making the mistake of attempting to view Japanese culture and philosophy through Western lenses. The same mistake the Allies made, incidentally.
Many folks have postulated that a direct attack on the Emperor would have left Japan in a frenzy and they really would have fought to the last man. The folks who say Mecca should be the first target following the next terrorist attack if there is another big attack might consider the results of that action (something by the way I don't consider a bad idea). Would a smoking Mecca break their resolve or fortify it? I don't know the answer, interesting question though.
So a continuing blockade leading to starvation for millions, plus the likely casualties on both sides from an invasion, is morally preferable to the use of the 2 atomic bombs?
The Japanese peace feelers were not taken seriously for good reason, not solely because of the declared Allied policy of unconditional surrender but for the underlying historical lessons that policy reflected: that anything less than a complete and catastrophic defeat for each of the Axis powers would just lead to a re-building phase and a renewal of war at a later date.
p.s. If we extrapolate from the death tolls on Okinawa (21,000 US and 120,000 Japanese dead), any invasion of the home islands would have been looking at 10x those casualties. The atomic bombings saved vast numbers of Japanese lives, although I'm sure that was not foremost in the minds of US policymakers at the time.
Perhaps I could put this better, but I don't know exactly how much clearer I could have been.
I don't mean to imply that firebombing or starvation is "more humane" than instant incineration. My beef, in this regard, is with those who believe that vaporization IS humane. Deadis dead, and it shouldn;t matter how quickly death came or by what method.
The point I've been trying to make all along is, that if the goal is "ending the war as quickly as possible" that possibilities to do just that existed prior to the decision to drop the bombs and weren't taken, and conversely, that options other than the bombs were available that did not necessitate a direct invasion of Japan and infliction of mass casualties on both sides.
The Tojo government fell one month before Roosevelt's death and directly afterwards, peace feelers working through various third parties were sent out by the Japanese; their arguments were discounted and ignored. That's the first possibility of ending the war without Atomic bombs: taking them up on their offer. Since Japan surrendered in anything BUT an unconditional fashion in the final analysis, I don't see why peace on the modest terms the Japanese presented in March, 1945 was any better than the peace achieved in August 1945.
In the meantime, many more Japanese, who died in conventional bombing raids would have been spared, as would the American servicemen who died at Okinawa and other actions directly afterwards (April 1,1945 onwards).
The background against which I base this idea is as follows:
- The Japanese were at the end of their rope, and the American's knew it (thanks to Magic). Japanese war production was nil, the population was starving, internal unrest was brewing, there was no fuel and the remaining weapons at Japan's disposal were completey inadequate to the task of defending the Home Islands.
- The Japanese desire to surrender was well known to Allied war leaders (also through Magic). Various diplomatic missions around the world were enlisted in the Japanese attempt to surrender prior to August, 1945. The Soviets, the Swedes and the Swiss all knew of Japanese surrender attempts and tried to mediate an end to the war (except the Soviets, of course).
- The Western Allies were out of infantry, and whatever could be scraped up would be hardly/barely sufficient to the tasks of invading Japan. Roosevelt, truman and Churchill knew this very well. The bomb, obviously, reduced the need for the "5 million men" MacArthur wanted, but wasn't going to get in any case. Why you would continue to throw soldiers, which you no longer have, at an enemy who wishes to surrender, is beyond me. Particularly when the American public, after the defeat of Hitler, pretty much felt the war to be over anyway. Demobilization of the American Armed forces after the Second World War was done with indecent haste. The public wanted the troops home NOW. The public would have accepted a Japanese surrender in Macrh 1945, regardless of terms, or whether or not MacArthur marched through the streets of Tokyo.
- The US Navy was taking a pounding at the hands of the Kamikaze, and Roosevelt/Truman were well aware that it would only be a matter of time before the strain, the losses and the logistical nightmare of keeping it in action would begin to tell. Lives would have been saved.
- The Soviets were about to invade Manchuria, Korea and Northern China (at America's behest). Since the West could effectively (and the Japanese definitely) do nothing to stop this, quickly negotiated peace made infinite sense if a secondary goal is to keep Stalin out of East Asia (the casis belli would be removed, i.e. the war would be over). Think of how many lives that would have saved.
All I'm saying is that there were options, they were known at the highest levels, and none of them was taken or explored. That is not "ending the war as quickly as possible" and "saving lives"; that is stupidity. And no, it is not "hindsight"; Truman perhaps had the best intelligence tool ever available to an American President in Magic, and it told him everything he needed to know about the true state of Japan and it's intention to surrender. What followed, the Atomic bombings, was murder, when you stop to consider how many times the Japanese tried to surrender and how hard-headed the Allies were about accepting the one Japanese condition; keeping the Emperor on the throne, which they wound up doing in any case, but only after unleashing hell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I'd hardly call any of that "arguing for the sake of arguing".
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.