Some new pictures of Hiroshima post-bombing have provoked what has now come to be the expected response from some liberals in the HuffPo comments section. Ridiculous things like how the bombing could have been avoided, or stupid things like creating a moral equivalence to Hitler.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a necessary extreme action to end the war. At the end of the day the atomic bomb saved millions of American lives. The Japanese attacked us and declared war on us and we ended the fight.
I am no less tolerant of when people on the left rewrite history as I am when people on the right do it.
IN all honesty, if we hadn’t used Atomic weapons then and shown to the world just how powerful they were, I can almost guarantee you they would have been used at some time during the cold war and none of us would have be standing here today.
They are just so powerful, people would have had no way of conceiving them, particularly the later built ones that could demolish a small state or country, without actually seeing them in action. They are a lot more than just a really big bomb, and if we hadn’t shown the world that when we needed to, thats how some crazed Generals would have treated it. Hell, thats how some still think of it.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a necessary extreme action to end the war.
There is a strong case to be made that dropping The Big One(s) on Japan was the wisest course to take, but it was hardly “necessary.” There were alternatives.
Wow, what a complete load of shit.
There is compelling evidence that it was the impending Russian invasion (Russia declared war on Japan on August 8th, right after Hiroshima)that not only compelled the Japanese to surrender, but was the actual impetus for the use of the bombs as a demonstration of force to curb Stalin’s ambitions. It’s also well known that the Japanese were actually prepared to negotiate a surrender months before Hiroshima was bombed. Try looking up the Potsdam Proclamation and asking yourself why any and all assurances for the Emperor were removed despite everyone’s full knowledge that without those assurances and the Emperor’s support, no agreement could be reached.
If Hiroshima didn’t do the trick, nor the fire bombing of Tokyo, why would Nagasaki tip the scales? It was, after all dropped a mere 3 days after Hiroshima, so it can’t be said that the U.S. even tried to leverage the first bombing to end the war. I thought we couldn’t invade because the Japanese were going to fight to the last man, woman, and child?
Which brings up the incredibly ludicrous claim that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved “millions” of American lives. There isn’t a speck of evidence to support that contention. There are many who bandy about the number 500,000 as an estimate of U.S. troop casualties had there been a land invasion, but even that number is fiction. The actual number, coming from the U.S. military itself at the request of president Truman, was something on the order of 40,000 dead, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500 MIA. Not exactly millions, or even half a million, but reality doesn’t make a “slam dunk” case for war very often, does it?
And lastly, even the man who now famously gave us his warning about the rise of the military industrial complex, Dwight Eisenhower, opposed dropping the bombs (and he wasn’t alone, even among the other generals).
I guess I can call out bullshit on the Left as well as the Right, too.
Soullite, as for whether the use of the bombs prevented their use in the future, that’s impossible to guess. However, you have to remember that we (and many other nations) have been openly testing nuclear bombs for decades (just ask the natives of Bikini). Their power wasn’t exactly kept under wraps.
A useful analysis of the question of the necessity of the use of the bomb is Gar Alperovitz’s book “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” a follow-up to his earlier book “Atomic Diplomacy.” He documents that there was agreement between the Navy and the Army Air Forces that Japan would have to surrender within a short time, even without an invasion. His thesis is that new and uncertain President Truman was influenced by Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes (who believed he should have had Truman’s job) to use the bomb more to intimidate the USSR and to deny them a more significant voice in the occupation, which they would have had if they had fought a significant land campaign against the Japanese in Manchuria. The oft-quoted figure of “a million casualties” in the invasion of Japan was an after-the-fact number that first appeared in a 1947 magazine article by Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The actual army estimates in 1945 were much lower.
The truth is that we will never know if Japan would have surrendered exactly when they did if the bomb had not been used. It is an oversimplification to assert that the use of the bomb, of itself, prevented the invasion.
Robert Jay Lifton’s “Hiroshima in America” offers an interesting examination of how we Americans, the “good guys” who have been the only ones in history to use nuclear weapons against civilian populations, have as a nation come to justify these actions.
Wars are all alike in beginning complacently. The reason is psychological and compensatory: no one wants to foresee or contemplate the horror, the inevitable ruin of civilized usages, which war will entail. Hence the defensive exercise of the optimistic imagination.
Paul Fussell, Wartime
A singular fact about modern war is that it takes charge. Once begun it has to be carried to its conclusion, and carrying it there sets in motion events that may be beyond men’s control. Doing what has to be done to win, men perform acts that alter the very soil in which society’s roots are nourished.
Bruce Catton, The Civil War
140,000 people died after the Hiroshima Atomic bombing.
80,000 people died after the Nagasaki Atomic Bombing.
100,000 people died with another 100,000 wounded after the NON-Atomic Firebombing of Tokyo.
Close to 2,000,000 died during the battle of Stalingrad.
At least 150,000 died during the German invasion of Poland.
At least 340,000 died during the Rape of Nanking.
40,000 died with 100,000 casualties in the Battle of Britain.
Between 75,000 and 150,000 civilians were missing or dead after Okinawa.
From the Rape of Nanking in 1937; through the invasion of Poland, the battle of Britain, and on to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 there is no part of World War II that was not horrific. Bombing Hiroshima was horrific. As was bombing London and Dresden. Stalingrad was horrific as was Okinawa and Tarawa. World War II was horrific. Even without including the tallies from the holocaust or the Japanese atrocities it was the most bloody conflict in history.
Claiming that dropping Fat Man and Little Boy was somehow unethical and beyond the pale is removing the events from their historical context.
Total military and civilian casualties for World War II are estimated at 67,004,300. Yes that is 67 Million. An additional 6 million holocaust victims brings the total to 73 million. Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 220,000 immediately with another 200,000 to the effects of radiation. (Radiation sickness was so little understood that a Manhattan Project scientist died of radiation poisoning because he manipulated plutonium with his bare hands,)
Given the context of the times had I been President I would have done it. Chances are given the horrors that had become commonplace over the preceding 8 years most of us would have come to the same conclusion.
Bill, I know human beings. You can say it’s impossible to guess, but it really isn’t. If all you told your generals and your populations was that you had an incredibly powerful weapon capable of leveling cities, most of them would think you’re exaggerating, and others would think ‘Great, lets use it.’. If people have power, they will use that power. It was better we used it early, when nobody else had it and couldn’t retaliate.
Make no mistake, humans are not intellectual beings. They are sensual ones. There is a big difference between knowing that kind of power exists, and actually seeing it in action. For most people, it just never would have been ‘real’ without being faced with those results.
The only possibly justified criticism of the use of atomic weapons against Japan, to my admittedly infantry-trained and -biased mind, would be that the war was prolonged past when the Japanese had offered to surrender in order to drop them for the demonstration effect, and that US servicemen died to provide that opportunity.
Not that I’ve seen any evidence to support that contention, but it has been made.
The US deliberately attacked 2 non-military targets-That is the very definition of a war crime. The reason non-military targets were picked is that the US wanted to see what damage the atomic bombs would do without having to distinguish it from damage caused by conventional bombing. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been conventionally bombed because they were not military targets.
And, CD, to provide a way to judge the effect on civilians. And the after effects which were not fully understood.
It was a eugenics lab, pure and simple.
The power of the atomic bomb (fission and eventually fusion), was no mystery, regardless of the context provided by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the military frequently and openly tested A-bombs, as did their counterparts in Russia (after 1949). We vaporized an entire island with one. If anything, it was the demonstration of the power behind the atomic bomb that no doubt prompted the Russians to scramble to build an arsenal of their own and actually helped escalate the cold war. Looking back, we came astonishingly close to all out nuclear war with Russia on several occasions, with the Cuban Missile Crisis being the most famous.
Listing statistics about the number of dead from WWII also misses the point entirely. For one, it disregards the difference between civilian and military casualties, a sustained invasion/assault versus the titanic devastation wrought by a single bomb in SECONDS, the immediate carnage as opposed to the long term effects of radiation, both on the population and the surrounding environment, and so on. To top it all off, as I said, it may have all been utterly unnecessary as there is evidence the Japanese were ready to surrender before the bombings. After the Japanese loss at Okinawa, around the middle of June, Foreign Minister Togo was authorized to go to the Soviet Union to mediate an end to the war. This was shortly before the Potsdam Proclamation I mentioned previously. The only significant obstacle to surrender was the provision of a guarantee that the Emperor would remain as leader, if only symbolically. Guess what the Allies, more specifically the U.S., refused to concede at Potsdam.
There’s plenty of evidence to support all this, if you are willing to look, of course, though apparently a significant number of people still cling to the idea that every last thing the U.S. did in WW II was the work of angels.
Bill I writes: “The power of the atomic bomb (fission and eventually fusion), was no mystery, regardless of the context provided by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the military frequently and openly tested A-bombs, as did their counterparts in Russia (after 1949). We vaporized an entire island with one.”
Bill that happened after WWII. At the time of the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki we had 2 bombs. Trinity was a test of the Fat Man design.
“Listing statistics about the number of dead from WWII also misses the point entirely. For one, it disregards the difference between civilian and military casualties”
Bill the numbers I gave were for both civilian and military deaths. Civilian deaths alone were 42 million. Are you saying that 41,780,000 of those deaths are okay but the 220,000 killed in the Atomic bombings go too far?
Simply put bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was no worse than any other attack conducted during WWII. Trying to provoke some national guilt trip over it is crazy.
Yes we came astonishingly close to nuclear war on several times during the cold war (I am old enough to remember duck and cover drills in school). That was during the Cold War. That was a conflict with the USSR that started around 4 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The weapons we never launched were hundreds if not thousands of times more powerful than those used in WWII.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not cause the Cold War. The US and the USSR would have been at odds regardless. Both countries would still have developed large nuclear arsenals.
In 1990 the then mayor of Nagasaki Hitoshi Motoshima said “It was a matter of course for atomic bombs to have been dropped on Japan, which had launched a war of aggression. Japan does not have the right to criticize the atomic bomb.” As a result a member of a Japanese right-wing group shot him in an assassination attempt.
I can’t fault Truman for dropping the bomb, I don’t think he had any other choice.
Soulite Says:
“IN all honesty, if we hadn’t used Atomic weapons then and shown to the world just how powerful they were, I can almost guarantee you they would have been used at some time during the cold war and none of us would have be standing here today.
They are just so powerful, people would have had no way of conceiving them, particularly the later built ones that could demolish a small state or country, without actually seeing them in action. They are a lot more than just a really big bomb, and if we hadn’t shown the world that when we needed to, thats how some crazed Generals would have treated it. Hell, thats how some still think of it.”
I think you are absolutely right.
Macarthur wanted to use nukes on China during Korea. Westmoreland would have loved to nuke Hanoi.
In justifying their use in WWII I am in no way disavowing how devastating they were. They were devastating, they surprised even the scientists who built them. These were firecrackers compared to the devices created five, ten and twenty years later.
I think you are right, using small ones as the last horrible chapter of a horrible 8 year conflict likely did prevent the much larger ones from being used in a later conflict.
You are way off boys,
See http://www.dannen.com/decision/hst-jl25.html
There is other evidence also but I am too lazy to google it all up for you.
The fact is that Truman was bamboozled into to dropping them on the cities. He thought he was hitting military targets.
That Nazi Groves wanted to see what his toys would do on an untouched civilian targets.
And yes that certainly makes it a war crime.
bill l:
I don’t buy your 40,000 KIA/150,000WIA numbers, but let’s run with them for the sake of argument. Are you saying that the president of the United States should weigh the lives of 40,000 American service members against 220,000 Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and decide in favor of killing Americans and sparing Japanese?
I’ve heard numerous arguments against the Iraq war that say that removing Saddam (and, good lord willing and the creek don’t rise) was not worth a single American life, let alone over 4,000. How does that tie in with your observation?
Truman’s duty was not to Japanese civilians, or humanity in general, but to the American people and the American Constitution, who he had taken the oath of office to protect, preserve, and defend. If dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not only spare even only 40,000 American troops’ lives (and all those Japanese who would be killed resisting the invasion) but also head off the seemingly-inevitable war with the Soviet Union (remember, Patton wanted to re-arm the Germans and keep going east after crushing the Nazis — he saw the conflict as inevitable) and check their advance in conquering and enslaving nation after nation after nation, “slam-dunk” seems like a fairly good description.
For that, as well as many other things, Truman is rightly viewed today as one of the better — if not one of the best — presidents we’ve had.
And oddly enough, until recently he also held the distinction of being considered the “worst” president by contemporary polling… funny how things like that work out.
J.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were valid military targets in the same sense that Bremen, Hamburg and La Rochelle were valid military targets
Nagasaki had the second largest deep water port on Honshu. They were both rail centers with extensive factory infrastructure.
Yes they were both spared from the fire-bombings which had devastated so many other cities in the summer of 1945. And yes they were spared from the fire-bombings to provide pristine targets for the Atomic Bombs. That doesn’t make them less a military target. American bombers could not safely bomb Honshu until after Okinawa in June of 1945. Trinity was in July. Target selection was probably begun shortly after Okinawa.
War stopped being between two opposing armies sometime during the late 18th or early 19th Century.
Tokyo was destroyed with conventional weapons. Was it a valid military target?
Incinerating civilians?
Shock and awe, baby!
Jay Tea, don’t be a schmuck. My numbers aren’t “mine” at all. They came from the military and were requested by Truman himself. Truman actually kept revising the number of imaginary people saved for years after WWII ended. He went from thousands, to hundreds of thousands, to millions. Given time, I would be surprised if “billions” didn’t work it’s way in there. I take your contempt for Japanese civilians to mean you have no problem with 9-11 as it can easily be argued that the twin towers and Pentagon were valid civilian/military targets to al-Qaeda as they represented something of a symbolic nexus for U.S. economic influence and oppression around the world. It’s not al-Qaeda’s job to worry about American civilians, after all. This is precisely the slippery slope that crap like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay lead to. The notion that only our guys matter and everyone else is in the way. Do you subscribe to the notion that the Geneva Conventions are quaint, too? Whatever the U.S. does is just dandy but everyone else is meat for the grinder, right?
As for the supposed benefits of dropping the bombs like avoiding a war with Russia. I’ve got one word, “fiction.” You can’t say conclusively one way or the other as that particular series of events never happened. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had deep sea ports and rail access, so what? What navy could they build with our B-52 bombarding them? Where were they going to get the raw materials now that they were effectively trapped on the mainland? Couldn’t we have tried a naval blockade? Weren’t there other military targets that could have been hit and provided the same effect? Hitting nominally military targets with significant civilian populations seems to have been a deliberate choice to make the U.S. appear particularly determined and ruthless. A sort of “f*ck with us and we kill your whole family” bit of intimidation for, arguably, more the Russians than the Japanese (who, as I have already said, were making overtures to surrender months before August 1945).
Colorado Dave,
I’m not sure I take your point(s). I know atomic tests came after WWII. My point was that even if Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened, the world would get a good look at how powerful the A-bomb was regardless, so to argue that their use in WWII prevented their use later (by illustrating their destructive power) is not as compelling as it might seem at first blush.
As for the other deaths during WWII, how does that justify the unnecessary bombing of two largely civilian targets in Japan? I also think the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden were wrong, so this isn’t a case of simple opposition to the atomic bomb. I also think there is a HUGE difference between those who put themselves in harm’s way as part of an organized military operation and those caught in the crossfire, i.e. Japanese school children. Would people here be opposed to 10,000 marines dying to protect a few hundred school kids? Think about it. Would you say, “let them die, the numbers don’t justify it?” In theory, we are supposed to be defending ideals, not simply individuals or territory. We didn’t fight Japan solely because they hit us first. They were a threat to world stability, peace and, G.W.’s perversion of the phrase aside, our way of life.
As for the Cold War, I never said Hiroshima and Nagasaki started it (though if you assume a war with Russia was imminent and was only prevented by the demonstration of our military might to the Russians, then the Cold War stand off could conceivably be laid at the feet of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), I merely said that it is likely that after seeing what we had in our arsenal, the Russians were compelled to develop their own bomb to counter our strategic advantage, thus leading to MAD and a 50 year nuclear staring contest.
Didn’t you even bother to follow the link:
“This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.
He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful…”
LEARN TO READ.
Neither Nagasaki nor Hiroshima were military targets as defined above by Truman.
My 2 cents,
My father was an FDR liberal till the day he died in 1995. He was also a WWII combat veteran in the foxholes of Europe. He did not discuss his experiences much, despite his sons curiosity about his days in Pattons army.
When I was a young man, I do recall asking him for his opinion regarding the use of “the bomb” on Japan. My father’s response was simple and concise. Thank god for the atomic bomb! He was a common foot soldier who had seen and done horrible things to help defeat the nazi’s in Europe, but following VE day he was training for transfer to the Pacific Theater and the invasion of the Japanese mainland.
My father was probably typical of men who fought for the US in WWII in that he had zero sympathy or compassion for the Japanese. Afterall, the Japs had started the war, were ruthless in the execution of their plans, and had committed numerous large and small atrocities.
Now most men in times of war lose some of their huminity, and are capable of horrific actions. Those who actually witness or participate in the horrors of war have a perspective that non participants can’t possibly imagine. My father simply wanted the war to end as quickly as possible, and he spoke of being overwhelmed when the Japanese surrendered. He had survived, but had lost one brother.
All my father could do is trust the politicians to make the right decisions to end the killing. When the killing stopped, and he went home, the bomb was seen as the weapon that finally forced the Japanesse to quit.
It seems that one overlooked factor in this debate is the fanaticism of the Japanese to their cause. They almost always fought to the death regardless of the odds. Japanese civilians even killed themselves rather than submit to US will. That fanaticism was a huge factor in determining the use of the bomb, alathough certainly not the only one. If the Japanese could be intimidated into surrendering, then NO MORE GI’s would die in an invasion. At that late point in the war comapassion for the Japanese people was nil, but we did want SAVE OUR BOYS. Regardless of the weaponry used, the Japanese knew an invasion was inevitible and they could have surrendered and ended the nightmare, but they simply WOULD NOT QUIT.
We can debate geopolitical strategy in the light of history, but our current perspectives are meaningless to the men, women and children who faced death every day in 1945. My father’s viewpoint may have been blunt and cold, but at that moment in time reality was ugly and anything that could stop the madness was welcome.
Rob, you haven’t been paying attention, the Japanese did send an envoy to pursue peace in June of 1945. The only stipulation was a guarantee that the Emperor would remain as a figurehead with no real political power but as something of a symbolic salve for the Japanese people. Again, look up the Potsdam Proclamation and you’ll see that the U.S. refused to grant that request…until they dropped the bombs and Japan surrendered, then it was fine.
Nobody is denying the Japanese army committed terrible crimes, nor is anyone pretending the Japanese weren’t capable of fanatical devotion to their emperor and country. The idea, though, that they would never surrender is simply wrong. Were that the case, two atomic bombs and a full scale invasion by the Allies would have simply led to the virtual extinction of the Japanese as a people and culture. Think about it. The argument is effectively this, “we, the crazed fanatics of Japan, will never surrender to U.S. domination, we will throw ourselves into the ocean first! Holy SH*T, did you see that bomb?!?!? F*ck that, we surrender!” So much for not quitting.
And again (and for the last time), the dropping of the A-bombs coincided with the Russian declaration of war on Japan. It is virtually impossible to separate the two events as being wholly independent of each other and the evidence strongly suggests they weren’t. Simply put, the assertion that the A-bombs definitely, without a doubt, unquestionably forced the Japanese to surrender (and not the Russians, or some combination of the two) is tenuous at best.
Oliver, if you are going to make a blanket smack at war historians as “rewriting history” - as if that were a bad thing if we got it wrong the first time - you should cite sources well or expect skepticism, even from your fans.
While conventional wisdom is that dropping the bombs was necessary, ain’t necessarily so. Could have been that it was bloody useful, or that it was necessary to show that the damn things actually worked in real war. Maybe firing bombing the hell out of the same cities without nukes would have gotten the job done. Maybe conventional fire bombing would have been even more inhumane (cf the bombings of Tokyo and Dresden.) Maybe the conventional wisdom was correct, is correct. But it isn’t clear to me exactly why dropping those bombs was necessary when more ordinary firebombing was doable. Your serve.
Even if you are right, it doesn’t follow that the critics deserve to get smacked for bad faith.
Bill,
I don’t deny any information you present, and don’t want to debate any particular points. In fact you certainly seem more informed of the details than myself. And admittedly, I have not read every post in this thread.
My intent was simply to recount my father’s perspective as best as I can recall, not necessarily my own personal opinions. Since he lived the history being discussed I thought his opinions could add something to the discussion. One significant impression my father left me was that the domestic politics of the time made use of the bomb an easy decision of Truman. In fact, not using the bomb could have been used against him by Republicans.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong but I recall reading that some Generals in charge of the Japanese army attempted to assassinate Hirohito for even considering surrender, but the attempt failed.
Rob