Hiroshima: 62 years ago today

mram: “If the atom bomb was the more humane choice instead of ground invasion, well what does that say about humankind? Even though the current interpretation of the events at Hiroshima is far off, I still feel no love towards those that were in charge of the Manhattan Project.”

Perhaps you would have felt admiration for those in charge of the Manhattan Project were you one of the men assigned to land on the beach in Japan under withering gunfire. Or their families. Or one of the children they had after the war.

Your facile and morally feeble criticism of the atom bomb makers is easy to come by at such a far remove from the risks of WWII.

WillBarrett: “I cannot wrap my head around the slaughtering of so many innocent civilians. Why did Truman find it necessary to drop the second bomb? Why not drop it on a military target or display its power elsewhere (i.e. not on civilians)? I’m sure there are reasonable answers to these questions, but I’m afraid I’m with Elizabeth Anscombe on this one ….”

Will, more civilians would have been slaughtered had we pursued a conventional war. The navy would have sealed off Japan. The air forces would have shut down the transportation net and levelled what was left of the cities. The army would have invaded the Japanese home islands.

Of these conventional mechanisms, the navy’s blockade of the sea lanes would have been the worst, stopping food and materials from reaching resource-poor Japan. Japan was almost capable of feeding its 65 million people. However, it had to redistribute that food largely by train. Japan is compartmentalized by mountains. The air forces would have blown up the bridges and choke points in the passes which would have prevented food from reaching much of the populace, who would have slowly begun starving, perhaps by the millions.

Meanwhile, the Allies would be methodically invading the home islands. The experience of the Okinawa invasion showed that many civilians would be killed, some inadvertently caught in combat, but more by Japanese hands. The Japanese army thought it was doing Japanese civilians a favor by killing them before they fell into the hands of the American barbarians. Civilians also killed themselves en masse.

Millions of Japanese would have been killed in a conventional fight. However, the atom bombs were able to circumvent all that death at the cost of 300,000 dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you are against the atom bombings, then you are for greater slaughter by conventional means, which is the inferior moral choice.

A display of the atom bombs was considered and rejected. The main problem was that nobody was sure they would work. The practical problem was that if you told the Japanese where you planned to make such a demonstration, they might well mount a raid to shoot down the bombers. There was too much at stake to play such games.

It may be hard for you to wrap your head around such mass killling, so try wrapping your head around this: The Japanese were killing the equivalent of the population of Hiroshima every two weeks in China. Don’t you think it a good thing that atom bombings brought the slaughter of innocent Chinese to a screeching halt?

WillBarrett: “Still doesn’t change the fact that slaughtering innocent civilians en masse is murder…Sorry.”

Will, Hiroshima was a military town and had been for a century. It was proud of its samurai roots. The Japanese Second Army was headquartered in Hiroshima, where an eighth of its population were in uniform. When the atom bomb detonated, it killed 29,000 soldiers do their morning exercises. Much of its industry was devoted to manufacturing war materiel. The Japanese system of manufacture was decentralized, with small machine shops supplying parts to a central assembly plants. These shops were family affairs, located in or next to their homes. This made all of Hiroshima a proper military target. Same for Nagasaki, which, incidently, made the torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor.

Your characterization of the Japanese people as innocent civilians is in error. The whole of the Japanese populace had been militarized and expected to fight in the coming invasion. Every household had been given grenades and told to kill an American before they themselves were killed. Kindergarteners were given bayonet drill and expected to fight. The bottom line was that the whole of Japan was one big camp of combatants. They were just dog nuts crazy.

To be blunt, you have the innocent and guilty in the Pacific war completely topsy turvy. It was the Japanese who were mass-murdering innocent civilians all over the Pacific and Asia, not America. It was America who stopped it. It took two atom bombs to awe them into submission and cease their war of conquest.

Spirit of 1776: “Yes, they were brutal. But to make the Germans look like schoolchildren? Did they make lampshades out of human skin?”

The Japanese ate the Allied dead. In New Guinea, the Australians found that when they returned to the battlefield to collect their dead, steaks had been carved out of them. They found their comrades’ remains among cooking gear in abandoned Japanese camps. The commanding Japanese general had to issue a field order forbidding Japanese troops from eating each other, but allowed for the continued cannibalism of the enemy.

It wasn’t unusual for individual soldiers to eat the livers of Allied dead and prisoners. On the island of Chichi Jima, an officer had American prisoners killed and the unit doctor cut out their livers for preparation by the unit cook. They thought it made them braver. This was the island near which George Bush was shot down and barely escaped.

There is a chilling story in the book “Japan At War: An Oral History” where a Japanese soldier tells of a young woman he encountered in a Chinese village who could speak Japanese. He raped her, then bayonetted her to death. He field dressed her for her meat, which he carried back to his unit where it was cooked and served to his friends. He made a pouch of the skin of her breast which he carried for much of the war.

I consider mass cannibalism a magnitude of evil worse than mass killing. Do you?

Tantor on August 6, 2007 at 7:12 PM

WillBarrett: “Nevertheless, I guess I would say that I’m not convinced that the dropping of the atomic bombs was necessary to end the war. People in this thread love making a false dilemma of: “if we hadn’t dropped the atomic bombs, we would have to have invaded.” This claim is disputed by many of the officers of the time (most notably, Gen. Eisenhower). Many in the military viewed the bombs as unnecessary. So, yes, the state should act morally, but that does not mean it should be suicidal (by “turning the other cheek,” for example).”

The close advisors to Emperor Hirohito said that the atom bombings were the deciding factor in making the decision to surrender. Even so, the military did not change its position. It still believed that it could inflict enough damage on the Allied invaders to dictate terms of a surrender. The military leadership advocated an approach called “the crushing of the jewel,” in which Japan would be destroyed rather than surrender. This was propagated through the public in such slogans as “One Hundred Million Lives For The Emperor.”

When the Emperor’s decision to surrender became known, the army tried to stop it. An army unit invaded the Emperial residence, killing the commander of the household guard, and desperately searched for the surrender instrument so as to destroy it. By an amazing stroke of luck, a B-29 raid forced a blackout in Tokyo which aborted their search. It was that close.

Even after the surrender, many Japanese refused to acquiesce to it. Hundreds of Tokyo citizens gathered on a hill and committed mass suicide. The Japanese military had to remove the propellors from their aircraft to stop hotheaded pilots from going on kamikaze missions. Scattered fighting continued after the surrender by die hard Japanese.

Surrender did not come easy to the Japanese. Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima fought on until 1949. Japanese soldiers on Guam fought on into the 1950s. Japanese soldiers in the Philippines fought into the 1970s.

It took the shock of two atom bombs to convince such a combative people to lay down their arms.

Tantor on August 6, 2007 at 7:28 PM

Bradky: “Would you be kind enough to share your sources for the facts in that post?”

I’m not sure which post you’re talking about so I’ll shotgun a bunch of sources. Sources for Japanese atrocities are inumerable. The oral history of the war, “Japan At War,” features the Chinese cannibalism story among other horrors. Beheading captives was quite the sport for the Japanese during the war. You can learn about the Japanese cannibalism atrocities in the field in the first fourth of the book, “Flyboys: A True Story of Courage,” by James Bradley. You can learn all about the greatest invasion that never happenned in “The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb” by Skates.

Tantor on August 6, 2007 at 7:51 PM