| Subject: Re: The Unjust Bombing of Hiroshima |
Author:
Paul Musgrave
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Date Posted: 11:57:00 01/01/02 Tue
In reply to:
Paul Musgrave
's message, ""Unjust" Bombing of Hiroshima" on 22:28:11 12/30/01 Sun
Date Posted: 17:53:56 12/31/01 Mon
In reply to: MikeKnight 's message, "The Unjust Bombing of Hiroshima" on 17:53:56 12/31/01 Mon
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Hi again,
Isn't this a lot more fun than policy? I mean, in real academic debate you get to argue from assumptions and make realistic arguments.
***
Unfortunately, Knight continues to press on with his arguments. He is wrong, but not necessarily for any obvious reason. It is not obvious because it is not there. He continues to cite American sources on the conduct of the war, while ignoring the primary war aims of the Japanese government after Leyte Gulf. He also ignores the pressure of time on the American government, which constricted their options to a degree unexamined by Knight.
Knight states: "...when Air Force chief General Hap asked in June 1945 when the war was going to end, General LeMay told him September or October 1945, because the majority of industrial targets had already been hit." The fallacy here is not obvious to American eyes, because our wars equate destruction of property with victory. That was not the case here. In fact, a quick comparison here with Vietnam (and to some degree the American civil war) leads us to conclude that the destruction of industrial targets has very little to do with winning the war if one side has the political will to continue. Japan probably had that will. The words "Iwo Jima" should prove that.
Further, Knight quotes Admiral Leahy to support his argument that the empire was crumbling. In fact, the empire was gone, and the Japanese leadership knew it. Yet if, as Knight states, the Japanese had been lost since September 1944, why had they not yet surrendered?
Knight's theory cannot answer that question, because he overlooks the principle guiding Japan's conduct of the war: preservation of the imperial line, "unbroken for ages eternal." Japan's obsession with its kokutai (national spirit) is the key to the entire emperor system and thence to the emperor-centered nationalism. And to any true believer in the tennosei, the kokutai was the emperor. In other words, the imperial Cabinet was interested in preserving the nation -- but to them "the nation" was the same as "the emperor." To men motivated by a principle like that, the mere destruction of factories meant nothing, which is why they fought on even after the destruction of the imperial navy.
Since the emperor was focused on preserving his line even if it cost the lives of all of his subjects (to whom he felt little obligation), and the Americans not yet willing to back away from unconditional surrender, diplomacy was not an option. And anyway how would this diplomacy have been conducted? Knight contradicts himself here, stating that the Americans were at once afraid enough of the encroachment of Communist (read: Soviet) power that they would callously sacrifice two cities in order to demonstrate their superior will and means, but that they would have been amendable to negotiating through the Japanese ambassador to the Soviet Union, which implies a reliance on the Soviet Union's goodwill (for railways and telegraph lines, if nothing else).
No, diplomacy was not an option, and neither would Japan have collapsed of its own accord swiftly enough to serve American interests. Remember that the Soviet Union's entrance into the Pacific war was inevitabe. That implies that the longer the war went on -- and it would have lasted longer without the use of the atomic bomb -- the more territory would have been in Soviet hands by the end of the war. This may appear to serve Knight's original hypothesis (unmentioned in his reply) but it does not; Knight claimed that this was the primary -- in fact only -- reason the Americans used the bomb, while I cite it as an ancillary reason, second to the cost of American lives (and Japanese lives too) in a continued conventional military operation.
Knight states again that only 40% of the Japanese military were in the Home Islands. So? That number sounds if anything a trifle high. But those include only men in uniform, and not men (and women) capable of serving as the partisans did in the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union. Controlling a nation of eighty or ninety million people through force alone would be a losing proposition.
Aha, Knight says, what if the emperor told his subjects to lay down their arms? Well, actually, that's exactly what he did say in his address in August 15 -- he told them to "endure the unendurable" right before he told them that he was not, in reality, a god. The question is then, would Hirohito have made that announcement after diplomacy? No, certainly not as soon as he did.
Knight believes that a surrender in October or November 1945 without atomic warfare would be better than one in August with it. He has also accepted my definition of a "just" war. (Parenthetically, it does not matter how many possible choices there were for American policymakers; there are always an inifinite number of them. My definiton implicitly relies on the two "best" policy choices, thereby ignoring a multitude of ridiciulous policy options. Whether Knight believes that invasion or diplomacy is one of the pair is irrelevant to my definiton.) By my definition again, diplomacy would still be unjust, because in the months of fighting in China and bombing of industrial targets in Japan, many many thousands -- more still than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- would have died. If Knight does not understand this, then he does not understand the Soviets' treatment of POWs and the inaccuracy of strategic bombing during the Second World War.
Knight does offer an alternative: "Even if we did not give a different message at Potsdam, what the United States needed to do was three-pronged: give a warning of an atomic bomb that could destroy cities, reassert the continuity of a constitutional monarchy, and, possibly, continue incendiary bombing on industrial targets." The second is the best of the three, if unlikely for reasons I discussed in my original response, and the third happened in any event (Hiroshima was an industrial target and Nagasaki a critical port). Why, though, should the US have given warning of an atomic bomb? Knight has not thought this one through. First, the bomb was still a secret, and -- until June -- no one knew it would work. (And even after the Trinity test, no one was sure that the other two bombs would work). Second, the thought that Truman would announce that the United States had a weapon and then not use it staggers credibility. He would have been impeached and thrown out of office, because the US Congress did not know about the bomb and would certainly have demanded its use if they had known. Withholding such a powerful weapon while continuing to make plans for an invasion would have infuriated -- justly -- American mothers and wives, to say nothing of American servicemen.
Knight concludes by attacking my comparisons of a hypothetical American occupying force facing an armed resistance (as opposed to the pacific Occupation in this world). He states that my comparisons are logical fallacies, and then states "To see the fallacy in his logic, all you have to do is look at the situation in several other situations were diplomacy has worked: in the aftermath of a Boris Yeltsin takeover, was there armed resistance and guerilla fighting?" Actually, Yeltsin's takeover arose because of armed resistance to the legitimate Soviet government, and Yeltsin himself had to resort to force in 1993 to face down the Congress of People's Deputies in the Russian White House (which is the legislature over there, go figure). In any event, who cares? The fall of the Soviet Union was a domestic matter; it is therefore inapplicable to the situation in the Phillippines and in Vietnam and, in my example, occupied Japan. Those countries were occupied by foreign countries bent on imperial conquest (obviously not so much in Japan). There is a difference between the two, much as there is a difference between dying of cancer and dying of decapitation.
The use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was justified. It is more than a little cruel to say that a hundred thousand innocents had to die to shock the empire of Japan to its senses, and more than a little cruel to say that the destruction of a city is ever just. But then war is more than a little cruel, and the least ruthless side can typically be assured of defeat, ceteris paribus. The diplomatic option is unrealistic, even utopian; the conventional option even more cruel than the leveling of Hiroshima. By the cold-blooded calculus I offered in my first response, Truman did the right thing.
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