Posted on 05/04/2018 9:37:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In the decades immediately following World War II, American public opinion generally supported President Truman's historic decision to unleash nuclear weapons on Japan. Everyone accepted that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an unfortunate necessity brought on by the unwillingness of Japan to surrender. Those two bombs, which killed over 140,000 civilians, were viewed as a way to avoid the obscene costs in men and materiel associated with invading the Japanese homeland.
Nowadays, many question whether those bombs were necessary. Given that they killed almost exclusively civilians and that the second of the two was dropped only two days after the first, many people have concluded that the attack was immoral. Today, the typical American is likely to react to the words "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki" with a vague sense that our country did something wrong.
But the nuking of Japan was a moral act: war is hell for those who do the actual fighting, so those two bombs put an end to their suffering. This was true for the soldiers on both sides (even a Japanese soldier must have felt relieved to know he was going to survive unscathed). A purely theoretical model for explaining why dropping nukes was bad appeals only to those who have no skin in the game.
The Japanese war had already killed millions, most of whom were civilians. The two nukes killed 140,000. Do the math. It is a distasteful application of arithmetic, but it is an application that soldiers have to do all the time in their struggle to win a war.
For those who favor elegant ideas over ugly realism, I strongly recommend as a corrective the work of an ordinary Marine who, in 1981, published a book narrating his experience as a hand-to-hand combat soldier in the Pacific theater
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Those two bombs saved the lives of Tens. Of. Millions. of Japanese.
A rather extended description of what an invasion of Japan would have entailed here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20091101051918/http://www.webwizpro.com/1945InvasionofJapan.html
By August of 1945 Tokyo had already been burned to the ground; there was no point in nuking it.
Yes...one of my favorites as well. Lot of respect for VDH...
It must have been hard for these guys who were in WWII to have to debate teenagers about the propriety of using the weapons...
I’m sure there was teeth grinding and eye-rolling.
As Fussell recounted for the New Republic and in a book length memoir, when the A bomb was dropped, he and his unit were en route to Japan to take part in the massive invasions that would win the war. When Fussell and other tough combat veterans heard the news of the A bomb, many broke into tears and made prayers of thanksgiving.
Unexpectedly, instead of dying or suffering grievous and disabling wounds in combat on Japanese soil, due to the A bomb, they would live and return home to ordinary civilian lives. And, as Fussell recounts, after a war marked by unusually savage fighting, the A bomb meant that Japan could surrender and be spared the brutal consequences of an invasion that even Japanese civilians were expected to take up arms against.
I have no doubt that Fussell was truthful in his account of the reactions of GIs readying to invade Japan. An appellate judge whom I once worked for was a WW II veteran and had a similar view of the A bomb. He and his unit had been specially trained as invasion leaders, and he was slated to go ashore in the first wave of the invasion of the main Japanese home island. He did not expect to live though the first hour of the assault and regarded the A bombing of Japan as the deliverance of him and his fellow soldiers.
I have heard the “blockade” reasoning before and who knows if that was workable while leading to a humanitarian crisis and most POW’s killed. Most soldiers were to be reassigned from the European theatre and off to the Pacific to meet those already at the last remaining islands outside of the Mainland for the invasion that would dwarf D-Day. It is safe to say the invasion would be epic in loss of life militarily and civilian. Every soldier that I have read about thought they would most likely not survive the operation and thanked God for the Bomb and end of the war with Japan.
for later
“Those who contend that Japan would have surrendered without the bombs must explain why they hadn’t
...”
And those who ask for the explanation should listen to people like General Douglas MacArthur when they answer precisely that question:
MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur’s reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: “...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face ‘prompt and utter destruction.’ MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General’s advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary.”
William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512.
Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, “MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed.” He continues, “When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”
Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
While American leadership was working on their estimated cost for mainland Japan (approaching 1 million), the Japanese leadership were working up their own cost. The number most referenced by the Japanese......20 million.
To think any other option would have been less costly, is folly.
It’s OK to deplore it (and Tokyo, and Hamburg, and Dresden) while accepting the judgement of leaders of the time.
FWIW I’m probably here because we dropped the bomb. My mother was a Captain in the Army Nurse Corp, and Chief of Nursing at West Point.
She and her nurses were on a train to New Orleans for transport to the Pacific Theater for the invasion when the first bomb was dropped. And with Japanese’s propensity for kamikazing hospital ships, there’s a good chance she would not have survived.
On the other hand, my father, who was a police officer in civilian life, spent the war in the Navy Shore Patrol guarding the Navy Pier in Chicago.
He always said that he did his job, since no Japs got past Chicago.
Do you really expect us to believe that after island after island of to-the-last-man resistance the Japanese would just roll over and surrender the home islands?
140,000 is less than the number killed in the napalm fire bombing of Tokyo-Yokohama a few months before the atomic bombs were used.
“To exempt civilians from involvement in an existential war is to contend that the life of a child or a woman or frail elder is more vital to the survival of a nation than the life of a young soldier on the field of battle. This is unreasonable.”
Possibly the most glaringly amoral sentence I’ve ever seen in an article posted on Free Republic.
There were still dozens of caves when I was there in the 1950s as an Army Brat.
A few Japanese families lived in the caves in Yokohama not far from our house.
A couple of caves had openings in the Army’s Area 2 Dependent’s Housing Area in Honmoku and an American kid got hurt in one of them and had to be rescued.
The MPs ordered that all the caves be filled with cement to put a stop to potential accidents in ‘59 or ‘60.
“Do you really expect us to believe that after island after island of to-the-last-man resistance the Japanese would just roll over and surrender the home islands?”
I’m not claiming that they would have. And I’m not claiming that they would not have.
I am just posting evidence that General Douglas MacArthur said yes, they would have surrendered two weeks earlier had the civilian Democrats running the war effort not (in MacArthur’s view quite unwisely) demanded the removal of the emperor. Whether you take MacArthur’s view as persuasive or whether you think the Democrats in Washington understood the Japanese military establishment better than he did is up to you.
Note, in addition, that the conversations reported on took place well into the occupation, which MacArthur was running. So we might have expected that if MacArthur had subsequently turned up evidence to suggest that the Japanese would not have surrendered even if we had agreed to keep the emperor, he might have tempered the boldness of his claim.
Note also that the Democrats running the war effort didn’t even consult General Douglas MacArthur on the decision to use the atomic bombs, which is really quite remarkable, even if he was inclined to be supportive.
Thanks for posting that.
Many if not most Japanese don’t consider Okinawa people as real Japanese.
On a clear night in March 1945, more than 300 U.S. B-29 bombers launched one of the most devastating air raids in history. By dawn, more than 100,000 people were dead, a million were homeless, and 40 square kilometers of Tokyo were burned to the ground. More people were killed in the Tokyo firebombing of March 9-10 than in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.
http://nation.time.com/2012/03/27/a-forgotten-horror-the-great-tokyo-air-raid/
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