Posted on 03/12/2015 7:17:13 PM PDT by daniel1212
I'm going to comment on the ethics of nuking Japan. This is one of those perennial issues that America-bashers constantly raise. There are two extremes we need to avoid: "my country right or wrong," and "blame America first." For me the war has a personal dimension. My late father was a WWII vet who served in the Pacific theater. He was radio operator in the Air Force. His squadron conducted reconnaissance over Japan. He had some interesting stories to tell: i) He trained on B-17s in Alaska, then flew on B-29s in Florida. ii) Our pilots discovered the jet stream. They exploited the jet stream as a tailwind, making the planes fly twice as fast. The Japanese figured we must have some secret technology to make our planes so fast. iii) One time their plane crash landed on lift-off. The cause was sabotage. iv) One time he saw ball-lightning form on the outside of the plane. v) One time a window blew and the gunner was sucked out of the plane. vi) My father knew a day before that we were going to drop the A-bomb on Japan. Not because he was in the loop. He was a lowly staff sergeant. It was accidental. He and some buddies were joking with a high-ranking officer on base about dropping that new-fangled A-bomb on Japan. The officer's reaction was horrified–not because it was in bad taste, but because he was in the know. Because his facial reaction as a dead giveaway, he went ahead and told them that, as a matter of fact, they were planning to nuke Japan the very next day. Of course, my dad and his comrades were severely admonished to keep that to themselves. I'll begin by reviewing the standard argument for nuking Japan:
In World War II the Japanese military fought with a ferocity that made al-Qaeda look casual and uncommitted. In Okinawa, the Japanese hurled more than 1,000 kamikaze suicide bombers at the American fleet, and tens of thousands more kamikazes readied to defend the Japanese home islands. Japan still held huge swathes of Chinese territory, where unrelenting war and mass-scale atrocities had already cost more than 10 million Chinese lives.Just as disturbing, recent American experience in Saipan and Okinawa had illustrated the extent to which the Japanese civilian population would suffer in any further close combat. By some counts, up to one-third of the total civilian population of Okinawa died during the American invasion, many by suicide as parents killed children, then themselves, rather than fall into allied hands. At Saipan, Japanese civilians committed suicide by the hundreds — sometimes cutting their own children’s throats — persuaded by Japanese propaganda that Americans would commit unspeakable atrocities against civilians. Assuming similar behavior during an invasion, estimates of additional Japanese casualties ran into the millions — with American casualty estimates wildly varying but certainly no less than hundreds of thousands.Faced with the twin realities of inevitable Japanese defeat and staggering civilian and military casualties, the allies did the right thing: On July 26, they issued a surrender demand, the Potsdam Declaration. The Japanese rejected it, the atomic bombs followed roughly two weeks later, and the war ended.As the horror of World War II begins to fade into distant memory, it’s imperative that we not let the Left control the narrative. Already in pacifist Christian circles, I’ve seen historically illiterate professors and pundits condemn the Hiroshima bombing with greater ferocity than they condemn the rape of Nanking, much less Japan’s years-long reign of terror in China.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/355313/print
I'll also quote a few statements by Curtis Lamay which gives an idea of how military advisers at the time viewed the conflict:
We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?
From his autobiography, also requoted in Rhodes, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', p. 596
As far as casualties were concerned I think there were more casualties in the first attack on Tokyo with incendiaries than there were with the first use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The fact that it's done instantaneously, maybe that's more humane than incendiary attacks, if you can call any war act humane. I don't, particularly, so to me there wasn't much difference. A weapon is a weapon and it really doesn't make much difference how you kill a man. If you have to kill him, well, that's the evil to start with and how you do it becomes pretty secondary. I think your choice should be which weapon is the most efficient and most likely to get the whole mess over with as early as possible.
The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series , p. 574
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay
From early on he argued that, "if you are going to use military force, then you ought to use overwhelming military force. Use too much and deliberately use too much... You'll save lives, not only your own, but the enemy's too."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX61.html
The point isn't that we necessarily agree with him, but in assessing the morality of nuking Japan, as well as the morality of those responsible, we need to take their intentions into account–instead of simply imposing our own viewpoint onto the issue. i) There were some notable critics of the war. Eisenhower and MacArthur opposed dropping the bomb. However, Ike was a political rival who ran against the Truman administration, and MacArthur had an ax to grind with Truman. ii) The problem with alternate history is that, as a matter of fact, we never get a chance to find out how that would have played out. Since the counterfactual alternatives were never tried, we don't know how well or badly they would have fared in comparison with what we actually did. Even if successful, the alternatives would still prolong the war effort, leading to more American dead and wounded. Even in a best case scenario, how many US soldiers should we sacrifice to spare Japanese civilians? And, of course, you could have a worse-case scenario for American soldiers and Japanese civilians alike.
iii) I also expect that Hirohito had a very sheltered upbringing. That would leave him terribly out of touch with reality. It would take something spectacular to shock him into awareness. I'm reminded of The Last Emperor in the Forbidden City. True, that's China rather than Japan. But I presume that in both cases, the royal family had little exposure to the outside world, much less the modern Western world.
iv) One fresh perspective comes from John Wheeler, the renown physicist who worked on the Manhattan project:
When Wheeler learned the news, he was devastated. He blamed himself. “One cannot escape the conclusion that an atomic bomb program started a year earlier and concluded a year sooner would have spared 15 million lives, my brother Joe’s among them,” he wrote in his memoir. “I could—probably—have influenced the decision makers if I had tried.”
http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/haunted-by-his-brother-he-revolutionized-physics
What's striking about Wheeler's lament is that he essentially reframes the discussion. He thinks we should have dropped the bomb sooner! He laments the fact that we didn't develop it faster and deployed it sooner so that we could have ended the war earlier. The sooner WWII ended, the more lives that would save for all parties concerned.
Moreover, that seems to shift the hypothetical to possibly dropping the bomb on Germany. At least for starters.
Thanks, and you are absolutely 100% correct in your assessment.
“FDR should have only helped the Soviets enough to keep Germany from advancing, the people from starving.”
The Russians were fighting over 100 German divisions before we even entered the war. And this was some of the best of the German army.
The only reason we were finally able to land on the Normandy coast three years later is because Hitler wrecked his armies on the Eastern Front. Many Americans have little idea of how big those battles were.
If Hitler had defeated Stalin then Germany would have been immensely stronger when we tried to gain a beachhead on the Continent. It was in our interest to make sure that Russia was able to keep fighting. There was no way to know what “just enough” support would have been.
Patton wasn’t the only American who knew that the USSR was trouble. But the reality is that there was little we could do about it. For one thing on VE Day we still needed Russia if the atomic bombs didn’t work and we had to invade Japan.
And moreover everyone could read the same map that Patton was pretending didn’t matter. Russia has internal lines of communication leading right to Central Europe. We are on the other side of an ocean. Wars are won with logisitics. And all of this ignores the fact that you would have had a mutiny by the American people who were tired of war and their sons coming home in boxes.
Amen!
Number one— if someone is going to write about the Army Air Force... they SHOULD know how to spell General LeMay’s name.
Curtis LeMay, a great American who understood airpower fully and its use in the defense of our homeland, from a greate distance.
Okay— the dude gets the name right later in the “article”.
Leahy supported a “demonstration” bomb drop for the Japs... he was voted down. He knew quite a bit about what the bomb would or could do. With the exception of radiation— which was not understood well at all.
But Venus is only being considered for the most vocal Global Warming deniers. They figure a surface hot enough to melt lead would be convincing.
You and your dad would surely enjoy “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors”, The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour. Hornfischer is the author. Excellent book.
My father will be 95 this June. He was motor officer for an artillery battery in the 7th Army. North Africa, Sicily, Corsica, France, Germany.
It has been rather famously researched and reported— Hirohito knew and approved of everything Tojo and his cabal was doing including the horrific “science” camps of Chinese people... that they called “logs”.
Hirohito was a war criminal. The only reason he was let alive was the potential for the US to have to have held the country for decades.
“We did not know about the camps”..... oh, yeah? A map of the camps would put the lie to that, that and the smell that had to be known for it’s source.
It was culture wide— the easy acceptance of “sub-human” status of Gypsies, Poles, Hungarians, Russians, and Jews of any country of origin, and the justification for “removal”.
If they could, they would put us in a Cage and apply some Global Warming, just like ISIS does.
Liberals would treat Conservatives the same way FDR treated Japanese Americans in WWII if they could get way with it.
Off to the Camps for some Reeducation.
“A surprise that should not have been.”
It really wasn’t totally a surprise. The attack might have been, but not the fact that war was coming. A couple of years before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. really started building up facilities at Pearl Harbor. That caused a work boom for construction labor. My father-in-law moved from Kauai to Honolulu to work as a worker on construction projects; they built things like new aircraft hangars, etc. So everybody in Hawaii knew that that the U.S. was preparing for a potential war and at some point things could get bad, but I don’t think anyone in Hawaii thought Japan would have the gall to actually sneak attack a major U.S. naval facility the way it did. I think most folks assumed that the Japanese attack on America would have come somewhere in Asia like the Philippines.
“What i meant was that just as FDR ordered the interment of Jap-Americans due to the threat they potential posed”
Well that’s not exactly the whole story. The West Coast internment was done so that a hundred or so Japanese-American spies and saboteurs could be rounded up without tipping off the fact that we knew who they were. Our knowledge of them was hidden by the larger internment.
If we had arrested only the 100 then Japan would have wondered how we knew about them. And they eventually would have realized that we had broken the Japanese Naval Code. The MAGIC intercepts. This was a prize equal in value to the atomic bomb and wasn’t going to be put at risk.
Leahy and King were number one and number two in the US Navy command. King answered to Leahy. That’s in the Navy.
In the military, all branches— Leahy was the senior rank over all the others on your list.
From 1942 until his retirement in 1949, Leahy was the highest-ranking member of the U.S. military, reporting only to the President. He was the first, de-facto chairman of the joint chiefs of staff (before there was one) and personal pal of FDR. As such, even George Marshall had to go through him to FDR. He didn’t do to well as Ambassador to France in containing the Vichy govt from their love affair with the nazis.
If I am not mistaken, the U.S. casualties at Okinawa were second only to Gettysburg.
Not to get off point here, but I was just making a comment that Democrats have done things that they would eviscerate a Republican for doing.
Then again, a typical Liberal thinks that Jim Crow Laws, the KKK and opposition to the Civil Rights Act were Republican ideas.
The same prior conditions are being set. Amazingly, the sheep, bah and graze.
I have always believed, though I have nothing to back it up, but my feeling is that Hitler kind of semi wanted the Brits and US on his side, to beat the Soviets. I have no clue if that is right, I just feel that way.
In 1941 we didn’t have an aerial torpedo that could arm in shallow water and assumed that the Japanese didn’t either. Pearl Harbor is shallow water.
The Japanese employed radio silence well and we didn’t know that their fleet was headed our way. The “sneak attack” was just that.
In the years before WWII some American Naval cadet had written a paper describing how to go about an attack like Pearl Harbor. The Japanese made a practice of reading the papers of our bright students.
“Were you ever stationed in FRG? You are wrong about Germans coming to understand their War Crimes. You are absolutely wrong. You, could not be more wrong, ever.”
I served in the GDR and I believe that some Germans of the war generation did not understand, but they accepted. Younger generations have fully embraced their history.
Not all Germans of the war generation approved, but were unable to resist. Don’t overlook Claus von Stauffenberg, for example.
The US has not decisively won a major war since WWI, because we have sought to avoid the killing necessary to do so. Bombing civilians in Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin and other major German cities, helped us win.
Likewise bombing Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped win as well.
My father was a young Marine, who enlisted at age 17, and after 45 days on Okinawa, was seriously injured, evacuated to Honolulu, recovered and was ready for full duty when the two bombs ended the war.
Was plans and casualty estimates for invasion of the Japanese mainland predicted far more casualties, than the two bombs.
Hence Pres. Truman was a great humanitarian, and wartime leader.
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