Oh, it's that time of year again! On August 6th, the first atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima; days later, after the Japanese did not surrender, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
Now, I've been to the Hiroshima museum, and I've read horrifying accounts of what happened. The bomb was a serious, sobering, horrifying event, and anyone who says otherwise, I encourage you to read more about it. Whether you believe it was necessary or not, it was definitely something that, on its own, was not a light action.
Which brings me to this article from the Foundation for Economic Freedom, with the title that goes, "Ike and Leahy Were Right: The Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Were Wrong; The deliberate killing of innocent men, women, and children by the hundreds of thousands cannot be justified under any circumstances."
Now, the title itself is nothing extraordinary, and nor is it a particularly uncommon point of view. What intrigued me were the particulars of this author's arguments (and what he left out). So I'm going to go through parts of this and add some context. To be clear, I don't bear any ill will against the author (Alan Mosley, if you're curious), but I also don't think he made a very strong case.
Furthermore, he links to an article that links to another article defending the atomic bomb, by a gentleman called Micahel Barone, that... also doesn't make a very strong case. So, let's analyze these different articles.
Now, full disclosure: I'm not going to be explaining which side I support. I teach this topic in class, and like any history teacher, I don't want my students to be influenced by my opinion. I want them to be influenced by facts only.
Besides, I love talking about history, and finding someone's fairly well-researched article that still has some flaws in it is a great excuse to talk about history.
Understanding the Situation
To Mr. Mosley's credit, he pointed out that the USSR, led by Josef Stalin, had gotten involved in east Asia (after their western border was shored up). And in order to understand the war in the Pacific, we must understand the situation between Japan, the United States, and the USSR. However, I noticed that he missed a rather crucial part of international concern, so let's dig into that here.
Remember, first of all, that the first conflict of WWII wasn't in Europe--it was in Asia, when Japan invaded China. According to Rana Mitter's book Forgotten Ally (I've been listening to it on audiobook, and I don't know how to cite specific locations in audiobooks--not that I could find that location again anyway), Stalin was politically involved in the three-way fight in China, between the Chinese Nationals, the Chinese Communists, and the Japanese (and not always in supporting the communists, ironically). So the USSR was displaying interest in Asia, even before the invasion of Poland.
Fast forward to 1939 and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This pact laid out the USSR's entry into an alliance with Germany, but the secret parts included imperialistic plans for Germany and the USSR to divide eastern Europe between them--a direct plan to conquer countries, in other words. So at the beginning of the war, there were four Axis powers--Germany, Italy, Japan, and the USSR. The USSR was a belligerent.
Fast forward again to 1941 and Operation Barbarossa, when Hitler unexpectedly invaded the USSR. Stalin was astonished at the invasion and had actually refused to believe a staggering amount of evidence that Hitler didn't sincerely hold to the Pact. (Rana Mitter says that even Chiang Kai-shek was less surprised than Stalin!) Following Operation Barbarossa, of course, the USSR switched sides. I cannot stress this enough--the USSR was kicked out of the Axis. Stalin joined the Allies, not because he agreed with the Allies, or because he had rejected any of the Axis, but because he had no other choice. (Except possibly fighting both the Allies and the Axis at once, but I don't think even Stalin was maniacal enough for that.)
Fast forward again to 1943-1945. Beginning in 1943, there were a series of conferences including the Tehran Conference, the Yalta Conference, and the Potsdam Conference. These conferences discussed what would happen after the Allies won. The main item to focus on is the Yalta Conference's declaration, which, when discussing the fate of Japan, promised the USSR several things: USSR dominance in the Chinese city of Dairen/Dalian, control over a Chinese railroad that led to Dalian, and control of new islands. This was all in exchange for the USSR joining the war against Japan--they would gain territory. Stalin didn't sign that at the time, but the promises were laid out if he ever wanted to sign that.
Fast forward one more time to 1945. Germany and Italy were defeated and gutted. From the Axis, only Japan is left, and, as all accounts agree, they put up a mind-bogglingly stiff fight. In the east Pacific, you have the Americans... and I think the British, but I've never seen them discussed in any Atomic Bomb documents. But the USSR has already promised to join the war against Japan, and they're starting to move in that direction. It is understood that the USSR will not be conquered like the other three Axis powers. WWII will not end with the defeat of all of the belligerents. One of the instigators--an evil instigator--will be allowed to walk away from having started the war (and from committing war crimes) with no punishment. Nothing inside the USSR has changed since it was an Axis power.
And now, the United States needs to think about how the USSR will act after the war is over. By rights, they should have been invaded, defeated, and their leaders put on war crimes trials like Germany, but (first of all you can't invade Russia, as has been well-established, and) their status as an ally to the United States means instead that they will emerge victorious, respected, and with more territory. So the only thing the US can do is limit the victory that the USSR can claim. In order to do that, the need to keep the USSR from being able to claim to have helped the victory against Japan. That way, they will have less political clout and won't be able to demand as much.
Winston Churchill said this:
On July 17 world-shaking news had arrived…. The atomic bomb is a reality….Moreover, we should not need the Russians. The end of the Japanese war no longer depended upon the pouring in of their armies for the final and perhaps protracted slaughter. We had no need to ask favours of them. A few days later I mentioned to Mr. Eden: “It is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan.”And Eisenhower also wrote this (he wrote this in 1948 and never endorsed the Atomic Bomb; in 1963, he said he had always opposed dropping the Atomic Bomb):
Another item on which I ventured to advise President Truman involved the Soviet's intention to enter the Japanese war. I told him that since reports indicated the imminence of Japan's collapse, I deprecated the Red Army's engaging in that war. I foresaw certain difficulties arising out of such participation and suggested that, at the very least, we ought not to put ourselves in the position of requesting or begging for Soviet aid. It was my personal opinion that no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in. [Emphasis mine]
The question of whether the bomb should be used in the war against Japan came up for discussion. Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war. He knew at that time, as the rest of the Government knew, that Japan was essentially defeated and that we could win the war in another six months. At that time Mr. Byrnes was much concerned about the spreading of Russian influence in Europe. [Emphasis mine]
The point of all this is that part of the need to end the war soon was about protecting American lives during WWII, and protecting more lives after WWII. Part of limiting the war also meant limiting further war, beyond the war with Japan. If you want to be really imaginative, it could be argued that Japan was actually the first battleground of the Cold War.
I'm mentioning all of this because neither article, neither the pro-bomb article nor the anti-bomb article, ever mentioned that. They mentioned that the USSR was militarily involved, yes, but they did not mention Stalin's political involvement. The people surrounding the decision to drop the bomb were concerned with Soviet political involvement; the events from 1939-1945 explain why they wanted to limit Stalin's power.
Basically, the point was to entirely avoid this article from Foreign Policy. It didn't work--the Soviets entered the war on August 8, which meant that then all the Allies could do was limit the USSR's role in the victory against Japan. They couldn't keep them out entirely, so they did the next best thing, which was do what they could to end the war before Stalin could claim too much success from that victory.
Mr. Mosley linked to an article that clearly explained this, but I'm assuming he didn't mention it because he was concerned with constraints that I'm not, namely deadlines and word limits.
The Japanese Were Ready to Surrender?
Mosley's article claims that the Japanese were probably going to surrender, even without the bombing or an invasion. Now, this leaves a couple of questions: a) whether the Japanese were planning to surrender at that point, and b) whether or not Truman knew that they planned to.
One of the articles that Mosley links to (from Foreign Policy) says this:
Japan’s leaders had not seriously considered surrendering prior to that day. Unconditional surrender (what the Allies were demanding) was a bitter pill to swallow.
In other words, no, the Japanese government was not ready to surrender before Hiroshima. (The Foreign Policy article goes on to say that Russia's intervention on August 8 was the real reason the Japanese first began seriously discussing surrender, because then the USSR proved they would no longer be the mediators.) That doesn't mean they shouldn't have surrendered, or could possibly have won the war, but it does indicate that they were willing to fight on. (And of course the Allies demanded unconditional surrender. If they hadn't... well, the USSR post-WWII was a pretty good indication of why you don't let murderous totalitarian regimes get away without consequences.)
A lot of the arguments that Mosley uses say that Japan was militarily defeated--which means the different investigations thought they should have surrendered. But the Japanese had a long history of not surrendering when others thought they should have, so just that doesn't mean they did surrender.
Furthermore, military reports didn't give an indication of surrender:
Although an estimated 300,000 Japanese civilians had already died from starvation and bombing raids, Japan’s government showed no sign of capitulation. Instead, American intelligence intercepts revealed that by August 2, Japan had already deployed more than 560,000 soldiers and thousands of suicide planes and boats on the island of Kyushu to meet the expected American invasion of Japan.
Several articles mention that Japanese military leaders were talking about surrendering, but how was the US military supposed to know that? And how does that compare with the very obvious deployment of soldiers, ships, and planes?
They lost any chance of ever winning a war far before the bombs, anyway; that was apparent after the Battle of Midway, in 1942. According to the Naval History and Heritage Command:
In a larger strategic sense, [after Midway] the Japanese offensive in the Pacific was derailed and their plans to advance on New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa postponed. The balance of sea power in the Pacific had begun to shift.
Again, that was in 1942. Similarly, the National WWII Museum says:
This critical US victory stopped the growth of Japan in the Pacific and put the United States in a position to begin shrinking the Japanese empire through a years-long series of island-hopping invasions and several even larger naval battles.
Midway was the point the American fleet was able to start forcing the Japanese to retreat. Midway was the turning point. And furthermore, as per the US Fish and Wildlife Services (who run a wildlife refuge and a memorial on Midway Atoll):
The Japanese Navy never fully recovered and its expansion into the Pacific had been stopped. American naval power in the Pacific was restored. The American victory at Midway was the turning point of the Pacific campaign of World War II.
A momentous, turning point battle that the Japanese navy never recovered from, and all of this, may I point out, merely six months and only two major battles after Pearl Harbor (Coral Sea was the major battle in between them).
If your measure of when the Japanese were going to surrender is at the point when they stood no chance of winning the war, then that began far before the bombs were dropped, and you can start to make the argument that some of the invasions prior to the bombs were also unnecessary. Was the invasion of Okinawa necessary? What about Iwo Jima? If Japan never recovered after 1942, then were those two costly invasions really necessary? And yet, Japan still didn't surrender. The nation kept fighting on. It is clear they were willing to fight even when they stood no chance of winning.
Never Okay to Attack Civilians?
Given all the uncertainty, both at the time and with modern historical revisionism, it’s better to look to principle rather than fortune-telling. One principle that should be near the top of everyone’s list is this: It’s wrong to target civilians with weapons of mass destruction. The deliberate killing of innocent men, women, and children by the hundreds of thousands cannot be justified under any circumstances, much less the ambiguous ones Truman encountered.
First of all, military intelligence and inferences drawn by experience aren’t “fortune-telling”.
Secondly, I wouldn't describe Truman's circumstances as ambiguous, or at least, no more ambiguous than any wartime decision. Japan had defied all American understanding of how war worked. Okinawan civilians committed suicide rather than surrender. That applied to Japanese children, too. (In fact, Mosley talks about killing civilians by the "hundreds of thousands"--according to the Japanese Times, 94,000 civilians died during the invasion of Okinawa, the only Japanese home island to be invaded during the entire war. Invade two more small islands, and you'll have outstripped the death toll from Hiroshima, according to Mosley's source; the Atomic Heritage says about 317,000 people died total in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including cancer deaths from years later, which is not much bigger than three Japanese islands the size of Okinawa. Although, the next island the Americans planned to invade was Kyushu, which is a lot bigger than Okinawa.) And that was just on Okinawa--why should it have been any different on the main Japanese islands? Japan has 430 inhabited islands, by the way. (I know that's Wikipedia, so take it with the appropriate quantity of salt, but still.)
But on to the statement that it's wrong to attack civilians. A lot of people would point out that this particular sentence doesn't necessarily convey the full picture. Part of warfare includes logistics--the creation of weapons, the production of military supplies, and the transport of all of that. Attacking a weapons factory means that your enemies have fewer weapons and can't produce replacements; attacking the railways or transport ships means that those weapons can't be deployed effectively. That does mean that the war might be over faster, and that your own soldiers will have an easier battle, and hopefully fewer losses. Regrettably, civilians work in all those places. Now, you can say that it's still wrong to attack any civilians at all, but consider this: they are actively contributing to the war effort, not by fighting, but by producing. Targeting those things is different from going house-to-house and killing civilians just because they're there. One of them serves a clear and direct purpose towards ending the war; the other one is just cruelty.
Which brings me to Hiroshima and Nagasaki: admittedly, the only city that I can find any sort of information about weapons-building is Kokura, which was supposed to be the second city hit with a bomb (but got saved by bad weather), "where Japan had one of its largest munitions plants". I remember hearing that Hiroshima was a shipbuilding city (although I can't find that information anywhere on the internet--I heard it in Hiroshima, but I can't find it now). Of course, you also have to take into account the fact that the US bombings had already flattened all but eleven cities (counting Hiroshima) of more than 100,000 people in Japan, and it was important to choose a city that hadn't been destroyed yet just so that the total damage would be completely apparent. Again, factories producing weapons are in cities--limiting that production would limit the war, invasion or no invasion.
The Washington Examiner had this to say about civilian deaths:
In modern war against an evil regime attacks on civilians are regrettably necessary and indeed civilian deaths cannot be avoided. Civilian deaths are unfortunate, even tragic; but so are the deaths of those who have volunteered or have been conscripted into the military.
Many, many more deaths, of Japanese as well as Americans, would have occurred if the atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As demonstrated by the numbers from Okinawa, and...
...here's what I was going for: the four major Axis regimes (Italy, Germany, USSR, and Japan) were totalitarian regimes; a huge part of their power came from the fact that they had their civilian population so completely whipped up and dedicated to their cause. So why would anyone think the Japanese civilians during WWII would just sit back during an invasion? On Okinawa, some were given grenades and blew themselves up if American soldiers got too close (that wording is vague, but I think it's implied that they were supposed to use the guise of surrendering to blow themselves and the American soldiers up).
There is, of course, a massive gray area; and some regimes will claim that civilians are a threat and use that as an excuse to lock up political dissenters or other innocent people. But if you ever believe that it's acceptable to bomb production plants and other places where civilians are, Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't in that gray area.
Dependent on Philosophies?
The Washington Examiner article that supports the bombing said this (emphasis mine):
I have been to Hiroshima and have contemplated the horrifying impact of the atomic bomb there. Recently I’ve been reading Rana Mitter’s China’s War With Japan 1937-1945, which describes how fiercely the Japanese fought and the horrors they inflicted on literally millions of civilians.
I'm not going to go into the details of what the Japanese army did in China because absolutely none of it is appropriate for this blog; I'll just say that it was unquestionably horrifying. He goes on to say that "War is indeed hell", I presume implying that war is hell because it is sometimes necessary to attack places where civilians will be hurt. Which... pardon me, sir, but that passage does not help your argument much. Equating the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which you argue were necessary evils, to the acts committed in China (and the Philippines, and Singapore, and Korea...), which are universally denounced by anybody with a conscience, is not making the atomic bombings look good. Putting them all in the same category does not support your claim.
That was just what the paragraph sounded most like to me, but I suppose he could also be arguing that one side in a war is not obligated to strictly abide by rules that the other side has completely abandoned. If one side in a war deploys chemical weapons, the other side is no longer forbidden from retaliating in kind; after Germany bombed London, there was no reason the British couldn't bomb Berlin; and after the Japanese oppressed millions of civilians, the bomb raids on Japanese cities, which were directly designed to shorten the war, are not reprehensible. Ordinary American soldiers are not obliged to die so that civilians of a totalitarian aggressor state can live.
Now, that is clearly a philosophy, and I doubt you can prove that as objective moral truth, as anything that someone is obligated to believe.
Contrast that with:
Americans must strive for complete and honest analysis of the past (and present) conflicts. And if she is to remain true to her own ideals, America must strive for more noble and moral ends—in all conflicts, domestic and foreign—guided by our most cherished first principles, such as the Golden Rule. At the very least, Americans should not try so hard to justify mass murder.
Now, in this case, Mr. Mosley is arguing that Americans are obligated to treat other nations as we wish to be treated. He doesn't say this, but the implication of this argument is that Americans must act this way even if a) we are the reactors, not the initial actors, and b) even if the other side has been treating their enemies horribly (Bataan Death March, anyone?). Whether or not the other side abides by rules of honor (according to the American understanding of honor--which the Japanese military, at the time of WWII, did not share), America must always take the high road.
Again, that is a philosophy, and not provable as an objective moral truth (or at least, it's not objective that the Golden Rule applies to wartime strategy, just like the "thou shalt not kill" doesn't apply to wartime strategy).
Dependent on Hindsight?
Both of these articles make arguments dependent on hindsight at certain points. In the case of Mr. Mosley, he cites a review that Truman commissioned, which said [emphasis mine]:
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
Mosley then describes this as "an intensive condemnation of Truman’s decision, seeing as Russia did enter the war and that plans for an invasion had been developed". But we need to remember that this survey was published in 1946, after the war was over. Did Truman know all this prior to Hiroshima? See my comments above about the army at Kyushu, because he definitely knew about that. And especially, did he know what the "surviving Japanese leaders involved" were talking about? Did he know what they were discussing? Notice how Mosley never gives any primary source of what the Japanese military was saying before the bomb was dropped--which is what Truman would have needed to base his policy upon. Was there some secret communication where Japan indicated they were willing to surrender? Did someone send a message offering to discuss terms of surrender? I don't know one way or the other. If there was, cite it, because that is what Truman would have needed to rely on--not whatever the defeated leaders would have told the commission in 1946.
Two other people we might hear from were the two people most directly in charge of the American forces in the Pacific in 1945: General Douglas MacArthur, who was commander of the allies in the southwest Pacific and directly involved with the invasion of the Japanese-held Philippines, and Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded the entire American fleet in the Pacific. Both of these men were directly involved in the Pacific while Eisenhower was still occupied with Europe (Europe-first policy), so let's see what they said.
Apparently, neither one of them publicly said anything about Japan's state of defeat. Sigh. The best I could find about MacArthur (during WWII, anyway) was this:
One of his aides, Col. Sid Huff, wrote in his 1951 memoir My 15 Years With Gen. MacArthur, “I feel … that he didn’t like the idea of using the atomic bomb against Japan, although I never heard him express a direct opinion on that question either before or after Hiroshima.”
First off, I doubt anyone really likes the idea of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and secondly, I wouldn't call that a conclusive statement. So, Admiral Nimitz? What did he say? Again, not much, but I did find this:
Nimitz neither openly condemned nor supported the atomic bomb, but it is clear that he had certain misgivings about its use. His biographer E.B. Potter observed that the Admiral did in fact consider the atomic bomb somehow indecent. After his death, Nimitz’s wife Catherine also remembered her husband feeling badly about the dropping of the bomb "because he said we had Japan beaten already."
Assuming that his wife and biographer properly represented his views, and that he formed his views before the bombs were dropped, that statement means more than the retroactive study that is based on what people knew after the bomb. Of course, that's still a lot of assumptions.
My point is just that you can't make decisions based on retroactive studies.
Retroactive argument goes both ways, however. At one point, the Washington Examiner wrote this:
I have long thought that the horror which contemplation of those bombings naturally inspires may have served to inoculate world leaders against using nuclear weapons again. Would nuclear tests or demonstration explosions have had the same effect if Harry Truman had decided not to order the bombs dropped on Japan? Maybe not. In which case the explosion of two (puny, by today’s standards) nuclear weapons that ended a war may have prevented the explosion of other nuclear weapons in the last 68 years.
So? What does any of that have to do with Truman's decision? Again, maybe this is true retroactively, but if Truman was thinking this, evidence is required for this to be considered a vindication. I doubt Truman planned this (because we know what Truman thought about the bomb), but you don't get to use this as a defense of Truman's actions if he didn't know about this or consider this.
What Truman Said
In August of 1945, Truman made a radio announcement, in which he explains his reasons for using the Atomic Bomb:
I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb. ... Having found the bomb, we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned the pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.
I can't tell if the lines about Pearl Harbor and Japanese treatment of American prisoners are about revenge or just about why he felt he no longer needed to feel guilty about the dead civilians. Either way, this was Truman's reasoning, and he never expressed regret for the Atomic Bomb.
No one was happy about the bombs, and no one today is happy about it, but no one argues whether it was a good thing or not. They only argue over whether it was necessary or the least appalling option.
I've been to Japan twice, and I would encourage everyone who can go to Japan to go when you can. I've also been to Germany and Italy, and I would also encourage people to visit those places as well. They are most definitely not the totalitarian regimes of WWII anymore. And everyone on earth should be grateful that there have been no atomic attacks since WWII.
No comments:
Post a Comment