| Subject: "Unjust" Bombing of Hiroshima |
Author:
Paul Musgrave
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Date Posted: 22:28:11 12/30/01 Sun
Before wading into a critique and partial rebuke of your thesis, let me make a minor complaint and a major compliment. Complaint: No place to put my URL! Gosh, Mike, no one will know that http://www.paulmusgrave.com is my website. Compliment: Nice webpage. It's very well laid-out, and I haven't found a dead link yet.
The thesis that the bombing of Hiroshima was unjust is unconvincing and implausible. For my purposes, as a habitual utilitarian, I will assume that if two courses of action will win a war, the one which kills fewer people is desirable and therefore just. I could make the debate more interesting by postulating that an American life is more valuable to an American policymaker than a Japanese life, but I don't think I will have to. I can leave my argument in the simpler form because the bombing of Hiroshima was the optimum solution to the problem confronting American policymakers in August 1945.
Why? Certainly the slaughter of a hundred thousand civilians at Hiroshima is an atrocity. Probably so. Note that I do not define moral values as absolutes; my definition of what is "just" is inherently relative. (It also contains at least three major implicit assumptions.) Therefore, I can defend the use of the atom bomb as "just" and still concede it was an atrocity so long as it achieved strategic goals with minimum costs. Inhumane words, but mine is an inhumane subject.
The article makes several sweeping statements without fully considering the context of the Hiroshima bombings or its strategic utility. Knight states, "The citizens of Hiroshima were innocent 'collateral damage' in our war against the Japanese; clearly, there were no military motives in the bombing." This is untrue. Even the briefest of surveys of Allied and Axis air tactics would demonstrate that slaughtering innocents from the air was a key part of strategy. John Dower (and if not John Dower, then it was Gavan MacCormack), I believe, has in fact pointed out that this strategy of aerial bombardment against civilians has its origins in the Japanese campaigns against the Nationalists in China, even before the fabled Fascist attack on Guernica. And it is worth noting that a May 1945 firebombing raid on Tokyo killed more in twenty-four hours than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. In some districts of the city, such as the working-class neighborhoods near Asakusa, civilians fleeing bombs dropped from Curtis LeMay's B-29s sought relief in the Sumida River, which winds through Tokyo's older section. There was no relief in the Sumidagawa that night. The heat from the firebombs was so intense that the river boiled.
The article asserts a theory of imperial decline: "In mid 1945, The Empire of the Sun was following the fate of every empire that had come before it." Was it invaded by Mongols, like the Ming Dynasty? Or by Goths, like the Roman Empire? Certainly the most ardent advocate of the tennosei would agree that the Americans were barbarians, but I hardly think this is the message the article is trying to send. However, it is clear that Dai Nippon was _not_ following a preordained path.
The article tries for a knockout blow by contradicting American officials' rationale for the bombing. "Nuclear physicist Leo Szilard recollected in 1949 that a group of concerned atomic scientists argued that an atomic bomb was simply not needed to win the war. These scientists and still others hypothesized the war to be over in 1946 anyway. Even if the United States did not drop the bomb on Hiroshima, or later Nagasaki, the Japanese still realized that they were fading out." The article further states "the Japanese were going to surrender soon."
First, the authority of Leo Szilard to comment on matters of military strategy is less than obvious. Indeed, Richard Feynman's memoir "Los Alamos From Below" makes it clear that most physicists working on the Manhattan Project were extremely pleased that the bomb was used; many, in fact, were overjoyed after the wild success of the Trinity test.
Second, although many Japanese leaders realized that their position was untenable, that did not imply that they "were going to surrender soon." See MacCormack, "The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence," and Bix, "Hirohito," for a fuller discussion of this point. Without citing at length, however, let me summarize their argument as follows. The Japanese goverment, and especially the Showa Emperor and his military, would never allow the emperor and the three imperial regalia to fall into the hands of foreigners without the guarantee of their safety. In other words, the popular view -- that the military would never accept unconditional surrender -- was largely right. It ignored only the fact of Hirohito's role in policymaking, more active in reality than previously assumed. In the event, the Allies did not demand an unconditional surrender, as the continued existence of the Chrysanthemum Throne amply proves.
Knight further argues that the Americans used the atom bomb in order to frighten the Soviets. This is possible, but unlikely. Considering the stress of wartime decision-making and the inexperience of President Truman, hypothesizing that the American government was capable of making such a masterful grand strategic move can only be based on dubious logic. (If Bismarck or Napoleon had been President, this argument might have more merit.) If true, however, this hypothesis would seem to lead to an even greater tragedy, one that Knight (nor many other critics who adopt this thesis) does not address. That tragedy is, of course, that the use of atomic weaponry did not frighten the Soviet Union into submission, but into an arms race instead.
Knight claims to find supporting evidence in that "the US did not try to stop the ability of the Japanese to make war." It is true: Japanese rearmament, leading to the creation of the SDF, began at America's request. But only after the United States had pursued two and a half years of disarmament, including the drafting of the Japanese Constitution with its Article 9 renunciation of war.
Having examined Knight's hypothesis, I now return to my own. Szilard's assertion that the war might have been over by 1946 is difficult to accept. Japan was (and is) a populous country; it was (and is no more) heavily forested, with huge swathes of undeveloped land (Shikoku, for example). If the Filipinos could prosecute a war against the Spanish and then the Americans for years, if the French Marquis and Soviet partisans could operate against the Wehrmacht, and if the Vietnamese could harrass the Japanese, defeat the occupying French, and humiliate the Americans, then one wonders where the number 1946 comes from. A guerrilla resistance would have certainly developed, fueled by memories of American atrocities committed against civilians, because American troops would have been forced to commit atrocities against civilians in any attempt to take the Home Islands. It is not difficult to imagine the Americans being forced to take drastic measure to impose order, as in the Phillippines and later Vietnam. The choice, then, was not so much one between the use of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and a peaceful and almost immediate surrender by the Japanese. It was between the use of the atom bomb and months and years of bloody combat and counter-guerrilla operations, even as the Soviet Union would have been allowed a free hand in northern China, the British in India, the French in Indochina, and the Dutch in the East Indies. One shudders to think of the magnitude of the suffering. In other words, between the two options in which both would end the war, Truman, Stimson, and the Interim Committee made the just choice.
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