The Patton Adage....
Posted on 08/08/2023 9:07:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The film Oppenheimer has made a lot of noise in the run-up to the anniversaries this month of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and not just from Christopher Nolan’s bombastic soundtrack. As happens every year, these anniversaries prompt debate over the the decision to use atomic weapons, and whether they were necessary to end the war with Imperial Japan.
The film itself seems timed to influence those debates. As Axios reported over the weekend, it has at least stirred controversy in Japan, although perhaps not exactly as its producers intended:
“Oppenheimer” has generated backlash in Japan, for what critics argue is its failure to fully grapple with the destructive reality of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its celebration of the “father of the atomic bomb.”
Why it matters: While the film does chronicle J. Robert Oppenheimer’s guilt over the deployment of the weapon he helped create, it doesn’t truly show “what happened under the mushroom cloud,” Keiko Tsuyama, a former staff writer for Kyoto News who covered the aftermath of the bombing in Nagasaki, tells Axios.
It has also been deeply uncomfortable for some Japanese people and Japanese Americans to see the development of weapons that killed upwards of 200,000 people in 1945 become part of a pop culture phenomenon.
Part of this aims at Warner’s efforts to promote the tongue-in-cheek “Barbenheimer” social-media memes, which the living survivors understandably find offensively trivializing. Some of this, however, comes from efforts in Japan and the US to strip the decision to use the bombs from the context of the war, especially in the way Imperial Japan itself conducted its genocidal campaigns and their refusal to deal with the consequences and realities of their own choices.
The film contributes to this revisionist impluse, either intentionally or accidentally. In a scene between J. Robert Oppenheimer and Harry Truman after the war, Oppenheimer laments that “I feel I have blood on my hands,” an anecdote taken directly from the biography American Prometheus on which the film is based. Truman calls Oppenheimer a “crybaby” behind his back after trying to ease his conscience by reminding Oppenheimer that the decision to use the bombs was Truman’s.
The film, clearly sympathetic to that perspective, fails to explain why Truman made that choice, other than as a decision based on choosing between dead Americans and dead Japanese. That in itself is enough of a legitimate wartime calculation, but the issue was far more complicated than that, and even more complicated than calculations about the cost of an invasion.
As this debate erupted on social media, Twitter follower Crosspatch recommended a book from 1999 that had the full and declassified scope of material from both Imperial Japan and the US about what exactly happened in 1945. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank deconstructed all of the revisionism, especially the fanciful notion that Japan had already decided to surrender before either of the bombs dropped, or even initially after both of them dropped. Frank demolished all of these arguments nearly a quarter-century ago from records of the imperial government, including that of their diplomatic correspondence.
The book is not easy to find; Amazon has a limited source of the paperback version, apparently, but with Prime deliveries nearly a month out. I found a copy on my vacation at a used-book store in St. Paul (salute to Midway Books!) and found it fascinating. The book is very detailed but still a compelling read and impossible to sum up in an article here. In fact, it’s so complicated that Frank ends up using the last two chapters, especially the last one, to deconstruct and rebut the revisionism that had gripped this question in the fifty-four years that passed between the war and the publication of his book.
Nevertheless, let’s roll through a few of the important points, while still recommending that readers should really find the book themselves for the underlying details.
These are just a few of the many arguments Frank puts forward in his book to answer revisionist theorizing about the non-atomic counterfactual. But to this, we must add the context of Japan’s conduct in the war, and their fanatical adherence to bushido code to justify it. No less than Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan was predicated on their belief in absolute racial/spiritual superiority. On that basis, their soldiers had brutalized China, Korea, the Philippines, Manchuria, and everywhere else they conquered. Their fanatical leadership believed in preordained ‘supremacist’ victory so thoroughly that they wanted to lure the US into an invasion of Kyushu, where they believed we would get so badly bloodied that we would thereafter leave them in place. That was the entire point of Ketsu-Go, their strategy for the invasion — to use Japanese civilians and nearly 600,000 soldiers in Japan as fodder for a battle that would have made Okinawa look like a day in the park and force the Americans to negotiate on Japan’s terms rather than ours.
The only way to break that spell was to demonstrate an ability to destroy Japan entirely without an invasion. And even with the atomic bombs, the imperial army nearly conducted a coup in order to keep fighting, which Hirohito only narrowly defeated with his radio address to the nation. It took nearly a week after Nagasaki for Japan to surrender for a reason, after all — and that surrender was necessary to ensure an end to fighting in other theaters, especially in China.
The use of atomic weapons was undoubtedly horrific. There will always be room for a debate over the moral and human issues involved in their use. But there is no doubt that the two bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 shortened the war by several months at least, and may have saved millions of Japanese as well as hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The japs attacked us first.
Thank God for the bomb. Or that bastard Emperor would have killed all the Japanese.
Oh gosh The Japanese are upset. Of course had they never sided with Hitler things might have gone differently
Japan was essentially defeated before we dropped the first bomb. As such they refused to surrender though we had burnt their major cites to the ground with conventional bombing.
One must realize the warrior culture of Japan at this time. Though defeated it is more honorable to fight until the death though death is inevitable but honor in battle is of first importance though it be death.
We dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima and they refused to surrender. We dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki and they did surrender but oddly only because of the emperor. The War Lords wanted to fight to the end in a battle they knew was defeat but honorable defeat. The emperor demanded surrender even though he had no real power over the war lords. As he was the emperor it gave the war lords face saving and thus could surrender. If not for this the invasion of Japan would have been of great American blood but rivers of Japanese blood.
Japan started the war and the USA stopped it.
Japan killed millions of people and the United States stopped them from killing more.
They started it. And wonder what people in Nanking and dozens of other places have to say?
And people like talking about the starvation blockaid? That would have taken another year or 18 months. How many of our men, and our POWs would have died in that time? Even the ones that didn’t die, why should they have to spend another year of their lives in that hell just to appease modern revisionists?
They were an utterly vicious, cruel, and dirty enemy. After we nuked em, they have been as nice as people come. In my opinion, we should melted Mecca and Medina after 9/11.
The world would be unimaginably better to this very day. Bush was spineless.
Look up Unit 731 if you can stomach it. There are no prisoner walking around today with tattoos.
Every. Single. Prisoner was murdered. And in ways that woulda turned Mengele’s stomach.
On Chichi Jima, they committed cannibalism against captured downed US airmen.
We are friends now. But Japan deserved every blow it got and complete capitulation.
The bombing of Japanese cities killed as many, if not more Japanese than the bomb. The difference is fire bombing required dozens of bombers and hundreds of sorties. Nuking only required one.
The incendiary bombs were rotated about several Japanese cities in the months leading up to Hiroshima.
The death tolls from these were many, many times what Hiroshima was.
Leaflets and propaganda was aimed at convincing Japan that a big, big weapon was imminent.
They were warned again and again, and people felt bad about using the bomb.
But, after two spectacular nuclear explosions (not deadlier than a night of incendiaries) Japan got the drift.
They surrendered, saving maybe 5-10 million lives and preserving their country to rise again.
The bomb saved a lot of lives.
bkmk
I am sure that Truman also considered the adage (attributed to Gen. Patton) that in war the objective is not to die for your country but to make the enemy die for his country. When considering the estimates of American casualties regarding an ground invasion of the Japanese islands, the Patton adage looms large.
“Four years earlier”
Back in the ‘Better Red Than Dead” days the horrors and immorality of nuclear weapons were screamed from every cafeteria tabletop and slobbered over by every useful idiot on air or in print.
August 6th always brought the blonde bimbos chasing and collaring Colonel Paul Tibbets, commander of the Hiroshima mission. They would shove microphones in his face and demand breathlessly....
“Do you have any regrets on dropping the atom bomb and killing so many people?”
For many years, he would remain silent. Then, toward the end of his life he said in reply......
“Yes. My regret is that I did not have the opportunity to drop it four years earlier.”
Or words to that effect.
The fact is that the atomic bombs saved millions of lives, both American and Japanese.
WWII was so much more complicated than who used kinetic force first. Just like the currrent russia/ukraine conflict.
BL for me though is using the atomic bombs did end the war earlier and saved millions more than it killed, both American and Japanese. An invasion would have killed millions and then that mass famine would kill millions more.
Read the Franks book years ago and recently re-read it. Highly recommended.
Japan set the rule for that war and the rule was no mercy for anyone considered an opponent.
POWs - no mercy as they were tortured, beheaded, enslaved and worked/starved to death.
Battlefield wounded - no mercy as they were bayonetted.
Unarmed corpsman and medics with red crosses on their helmets - no mercy and use the red cross as a target. Kill the medical help and kill those who could have been helped.
Wounded soldiers in hospital beds - no mercy as they were bayonetted.
Western civilian internees - no mercy as they were enslaved and worked/starved to death.
Asian civilians, Chinese, etc. - no mercy as they were slaughtered in the millions.
The US played by Japan’s rule and had no mercy. Too bad for Japan, but they had it coming.
Yup. No one ever seems to remember, or wants to talk about, any of that.
“Four years earlier”
Back in the ‘Better Red Than Dead” days the horrors and immorality of nuclear weapons were screamed from every cafeteria tabletop and slobbered over by every useful idiot on air or in print.
August 6th always brought the blonde bimbos chasing and collaring Colonel Paul Tibbets, commander of the Hiroshima mission. They would shove microphones in his face and demand breathlessly....
“Do you have any regrets on dropping the atom bomb and killing so many people?”
For many years, he would remain silent. Then, toward the end of his life he said in reply......
“Yes. My regret is that I did not have the opportunity to drop it four years earlier.”
Or words to that effect.
General Tibbets passed away in 2007. His wish was to be cremated, and his ashes scattered in the English Channel. His rationale was to avoid a burial and headstone to be vandalized by knuckleheads described above.
Tibbets was a true leader, an officer and a gentleman...and a great American hero.
If you don’t want Hiroshima and don’t want Nagasaki don’t do Pearl Harbor. Pay back comes with interest.
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