At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.
That’s the first paragraph of John Hersey’s Hiroshima. You can read it in full here.
Seventy years ago today the Enola Gay, a B-29 within the Army Air Force of the United States of America, dropped the first of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. About 200,000 children, women and men died in the attack. Almost all of them were civilians.
I’m not going to add any political notes to that bald statement of fact. There are some to be made, particularly at this precise turn in US decision making. But those who died seventy years ago when Little Boy hit Hiroshima, and then again, three days later, when Fat Man destroyed Nagasaki, deserve attention uncluttered by the noise of the moment.
The extraordinary power of human reason exposed the fundamental behavior of matter at the level of neutrons and protons — and from that gorgeous insight drew disaster and woe and the ruin of two cities. That’s what I’m thinking about right now. The rest can wait.
Image: The Hiroshima Peace Memorial — “The Atomic Dome”
raven
JPL
This is what Lindsay Graham said about the event to Japanese Media
Lindsey G, taking qs from Japanese media in spin room, does not mince words: “If I were President Truman, I would have dropped the bomb”
link
He doesn’t belong on any stage.
Cacti
No more than the 200,000 civilians that died during the invasion and occupation of Nanking by the Imperial Japanese Army.
Gin & Tonic
Well said, Professor. We all need to pause and think.
Tom Levenson
@Cacti: The use of one tragedy, disaster, massacre to diminish the sting of another is not a rhetorical trope I admire.
I’m working really hard to be polite here.
RK
Wasn’t the fire bombing of Dresden worse?
Botsplainer
NPR had a decent piece up about the targeting decision. It wasn’t lightly reached – all options were considered.
Cacti
@Tom Levenson:
Maybe you could ask China, Korea, or the Philippines if they think Japan is owed an apology for World War II.
RK
@Tom Levenson: What would you have wanted the US to do?
mclaren
It’s all very well to deplore America’s war crimes against Japan — the atomic bombings, the napalm firestorm bombings that murdered even more Japanese civilians than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs. The reality remains that Japan was not “about to surrender” in August 1945. The Japanese were conducting negotiations, and claiming that they wanted to surrender, but meanwhile the Japanese military was preparing to fight to the last man, women, and child in an invasion of their main island. The Japanese military in 1945 was training old men and children with bamboo spears to meet Allied troops at the shoreline. It would’ve been a bloodbath, far worse than Tarawa. So the reality is that the two nuclear bombings probably saved millions of Japanese lives, and well as hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers’ lives.
If you read Truman’s radio address after the two A-bombs dropped, it’s clear that he was playing a giant bluff. Truman threatens “a rain of ruin the like of which has never before been seen on this earth” if Japan doesn’t unconditionally surrender. That was pure bluff. America had only the two atomic weapons…but acted as though they had enough to wipe the entire country of Japan off the map. That was what caused the Japanese to finally agree to unconditional surrender, something they resisted fanatically until that point. Better to have no emperor than no Japan, was the reasoning.
It’s easy to condemn American politicians and military planners for the decision to use atomic weapons. Put yourself back in 1945, and you realize Americans have gotten shell-shocked from the news of Japanese atrocities like the Bataan Death March and the insane resistance at Tarawa, where the few civilian survivors grabbed their children and leaped to their deaths over coral cliffs rather than be captured alive, and you get an idea of what an actual allied land invasion of Japan would have been like.
Dropping the bombs was the better option.
raven
You want to get all tingly, read this one:
Tom Levenson
@raven: My father was somewhere around there (on a battlewagon by then, I think, his destroyer days being done by early ’44 at the latest. My father in law commanded an LST in battles from Leyte Gulf up the line, including, I think, Okinawa.
No one, I think, suggests that the island battles weren’t horrific. No one suggests, I think, that the decision to drop the bomb has to be understood in the context of the war that was actually being fought.
But no one, I think, should suggest that the first use of nuclear weapons on people isn’t an event that has its own significance, and meaning worth thinking about within its own framework.
You didn’t suggest that above. But I took it as a possible implication, and here push back against it.
mclaren
@RK:
The fire bombing of Dresden got lots of attention as a war crime because the people who died in Dresden where white. But many many more Japanese died in Japan as a result of Curtis LeMay’s firebombings than civilians died in Dresden. In just one night, a single one of LeMay’s firebombing raids murdered 150,000 Japanese. The firestorm was so intense that the air superheated. Houses exploded as superheated cyclonic winds raced across them. Japanese children and women ran to a nearby lake, and the lake boiled them alive because of the superheated winds.
It was hell on earth. Torture, mass murder, insanity, hell, and demonic torment. If the two atomic bombings stopped that — and there’s every reason to believe they did — then the atomic bombings represented the lesser of two evils.
Incidentally, I’m of the camp that believes Curtis LeMay should have been tried for war crimes. But history gets written by the victors, and the courts belong to the people who win the wars, so LeMay was promoted for his war crimes instead of tried and sentenced to prison.
JPL
@Tom Levenson: Well said. War is hell but the bomb did change things.
Tom Levenson
@Cacti: Don’t be obtuse.
Look for the word apology in the post. You won’t find it, of course. I’m not going to waste time arguing with the straw men in your head.
The effort of memory I’m trying (and in your case, failing) to evoke is not about Japan. It is about the United States and the way we think about nuclear war.
Irony Abounds
Here’s a newsflash: Humans have been and remain capable of doing terrible terrible things and multitudes of innocents of all races, creeds, colors, and nationalities have died in horrible ways due to the human action or inaction. Just because those 200,000 died as a result of one bomb doesn’t mean they are any more or less deserving of attention than the many millions of others who met a fate they did not deserve. It is entirely possible that many thousands more may have died if no bomb had been dropped and an invasion was needed. It is also entirely possible that absent that demonstration of the horrible nature of nuclear war the bomb or bombs may have been used at a later date with even more dire consequences. I agree it was a tough call, but I certainly don’t think it’s an open and shut case that the bomb shouldn’t have been dropped.
Brandon
People are citing Dresden? I think I may have accidentally stepped into a paleocon blog.
*goes and checks*
Nope. It’s Balloon Juice.
*hits submit comment and closes tab*
raven
@Tom Levenson: It was horrible. Was it more horrible than the rest? I don’t happen to think so but I don’t think there is anything wrong with noting the event.
Villago Delenda Est
It is only fitting that Faux Noise and the GOP chose today to run their own reenactment of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Villago Delenda Est
@Irony Abounds: Especially given that we operate today with information that Truman did not have.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: That’s a very good book, actually.
raven
@Tom Levenson: Have you heard of the book I mentioned? It’s a really interesting look at both the Damascus disaster and the history of the nuclear weapons program. The number of accidents is astounding. We have survived by sheer luck.
mclaren
@Botsplainer:
We also have to remember that the American people were sick to death of seeing their sons shipped back to them in coffins. By August 1945, the American people had had enough. They would’ve rebelled if Truman had refrained from ordering the A-bombs to be used and instead marshaled the estimated one and a half million U.S. soldiers that would have been required to invade the main Japanese island of Honshu.
Nobody knows what the actual casualties of a land invasion would have been. Estimates at the time ran up to half a million U.S. soldiers dead, but we don’t know. Nobody knows whether the Japanese would actually have resisted as fanatically as the Japanese soldiers and civilians had at the outlying islands. We do know for a fact that on Okinawa, Japanese women were strapped up with bombs and sent into onrushing American soldiers to kill them by suicide bombs. The kamikaze pilots were welded into their cockpits and ordered to kill themselves by slamming into U.S. naval ships. There is no indication that any of this would change if American troops made a land invasion of Japan’s main island.
If I were an American adult in 1945, I would unquestionably have said “Just drop the damn bombs and get this hellish war over with.” People couldn’t take anymore. They had had enough. As a practical matter, it was politically impossible to refuse to use potentially war-ending atomic weapons late 1945.
Schlemazel
On Okinawa there were 100,000 civilian casualties along with 100,000 Japanese military casualties and 72,000 American casualties. When Okinawa fell Japan had over 5 million soldiers on the mainland waiting and could have many more, they were also preparing civilians to fight with bamboo spears. An invasion would easily have produced 3.5 million American casualties, and 5 to 10 times that for the Japanese. It could easily be argued that the atomic bomb and the bluff that followed saved more than 20 million people. It was an awful, evil thing to do and the best option for everyone involved. War has no good options.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Yea, I really enjoyed reading it. It was given to me by an old KC135 pilot.
Germy Shoemangler
My father missed all the pacific theater drama. He was in the battle of the bulge. Saw his friends blown to pieces. His best friend was shot in the neck. My father remember vividly the long stream of blood shooting from his neck before he died.
He became a P.O.W. after being captured by Germans.
He says prisoners were fed barley water. He ate grass because he was so starved. Weighed about 98 pounds when he was finally liberated.
Sometime in the early 1950s he visited a doctor; told him he was nervous all the time. The doctor was outraged by this for some reason. Told him “Be a man!”
So my father self-medicated with alcohol the rest of his life.
lamh36
Me and baby Zöe
https://twitter.com/psddluva4evah/status/629440498776739840
Cervantes
@Cacti:
What we did was no worse than the Rape of Nanking?
That’s the standard to which we should hold ourselves?
Cacti
@Tom Levenson:
Rubbish.
Approximately 30 million civilians died in World War II, and about 25 million of those were from Axis military invasions, attacks, and occupations.
Singling 200,000 of 30 million out for special consideration because of the weapon used is the “DRONEZ!” argument. Especially when you consider the Empire of Japan’s total lack of regard for civilian life in the countries that bore the brunt of their expansionist aims.
raven
Watching “The Pacific” is also informative. No flag waving Band of Brothers shit there.
Villago Delenda Est
@Schlemazel:
This is precisely why it’s a thing to be avoided.
Which is lost on the entire GOP “presidential” field.
Irony Abounds
@raven: William Manchester’s “The Glory and the Dream” has some good stories about the early efforts at developing nuclear weapons, including one about a scientist whose name I cannot recall, essentially playing chicken with the chain reaction. He screwed up and paid for it with his life. All it will take is one computer foul up that unleashes some nuclear warheads and we could all be ashes.
Germy Shoemangler
@Villago Delenda Est:
Well said. My father was disgusted watching the vietnam war on the evening news. He’d had enough of war, and if he were alive today he’d despise people like Lindsey Graham and Rick Santorum.
Cacti
@Cervantes:
Japan suffered about 360,000 civilian casualties by war’s end, while inflicting more than 10 million.
RK
Is there any truth to the claim that the bombs were dropped to end the war quickly thus preventing the Russians from playing a role in Japan’s surrender?
beltane
As someone born in the late 1960s, I remember growing up hearing a lot more about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and being terrified of nuclear destruction in general. The danger is no less now than it was then, but it’s something no one seems to really fear that much any more. Now we are taught to fear other things a lot more.
raven
@Irony Abounds: Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War is quite good as well, I’ll look that one up.
scav
The people still died horrifically. They should get their moment: it shouldn’t always be about how we feel about it (or justify it).
Germy Shoemangler
I sometimes play the “what if” game and wonder how things would have played out if Nixon had beaten JFK.
I imagine Nixon would have been more amenable to the advice of war hawks during the cuban missile crisis.
divF
@lamh36:
Happy baby, happy Auntie.
raven
@Cervantes: Uh, the standard is that dropping the bombs stopped the war.
raven
So no new thread for part 2?
Germy Shoemangler
Shinichi’s tricycle
beltane
@Germy Shoemangler: The United States has been fortunate in that, just by chance. the right person has usually been in the White House during certain key moments in history. We have been very, very lucky in many respects.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cacti: You don’t see a difference in degree like that of moving from pointy stick to the French 75 in one fell swoop?
Emma
I don’t know how to say this without offending someone but here goes. It seems to be that every once in awhile a story pops up that seems to indicate that the Japanese have learned nothing. They seem to think that the bombing gives them a get-out-of-jail-free card for their own war crimes. It bothers me deeply.
Cervantes
Thanks, Tom.
It is well to remember that at the end of that war, a world was destroyed.
This day is for mourning that loss. The other 364 days are for analysis and argument.
Having said that …
If you have not read Gore Vidal’s review, you should. An excerpt:
Did Gore have a point, or was the disagreement merely stylistic?
Cervantes
@raven:
That’s debatable, of course, but it’s not the notion to which I responded.
Mike in NC
Paul Fussell wrote a famous essay called “Thank God for the atomic bomb” because he, and my dad, and many thousands of other GIs and Marines would have possibly perished in an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
My wife’s dad was drafted and became a career Army officer. One of his poker playing buddies was Paul Tibbetts, pilot of the Enola Gay.
raven
@Cervantes: yea right
PsiFighter37
I’m half-Japanese, and I think it was the right thing to drop the bombs. There were no good choices, but I have no doubt that it saved many, many more lives than it would have otherwise.
I went to Hiroshima more than 15 years ago. Even as a little kid, you see the skeleton of the building that remained, and the vast open field, and you can only wonder what the horror must have been at 8:15 in the morning. Hopefully we can continue the move towards disarmament, although it certainly seems less hopeful nowadays.
Roger Moore
@RK:
No. Far fewer people were killed in Dresden. The firebombing of Tokyo killed about as many people, but there are other factors about how terrible things are.
divF
FWIW, I agree with Professor Levenson. We have a duty to remember the day when the world knew that mankind had the ability to destroy itself. Otherwise, we might forget, and someday be tempted to think of nuclear weapons as a viable option.
Keith G
It was a horrible thing we did, yet not without precedent (except for the specific mechanics of the deadly attack). Throughout history, warriors have attacked civilian populations with whatever martial technology they were capable of using.
And yet it would also have been horrible to not end the brutal conflict as soon as we had the means to do so.
That’s the thing about our attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They did what they were supposed to do.
I wish that is wasn’t necessary for those civilians to die, but it was and I feel no more for them than I do all other of history’s innocents killed by our human proclivity to fight wars.
Mandalay
@beltane:
We are taught to fear just about everything now. That is why my local supermarket has an anti-bacterial gel dispenser. That is why people want to protect themselves by carrying guns into church. That is why we can’t relocate prisoners from Guantanamo. That is why we fret over getting the ebola virus. We have lost all perspective over what to properly fear.
We have to be the most craven and fearful nation on earth.
beltane
@scav: During WWII, my grandmother lost two young children to malnutrition and disease in a German internment camp. She hated the Germans. During the last few months of the war, the soldiers sent to guard them became younger and younger, children themselves really. My bereft and bitter grandmother somehow found it in herself to pray for these child soldiers even though they could be quite brutal. We can judge the behavior of groups of humans in the collective without losing our humanity.
Cacti
@Emma:
About a third of Japan’s parliament and the sitting Prime Minister are the US equivalent of neoconfederates.
They preach the Japanese equivalent of the “lost cause”. That is, the Imperial Japanese forces were a heroic force out to get Asia from under the heel of western interference, rather than…
A brutal invading force that wantonly killed civilians, and also forced them into slave labor, prostitution, and involuntary military service.
Their annual “woe is us” pity party over Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the worst sort of preening hypocrisy.
I’ll not be breaking out any sackcloth and ashes for the demise of Imperial Japan.
Cervantes
@raven:
Eloquent, I’m sure.
Mandalay
@Cacti:
Your analogy is a fair one, but that doesn’t mean it is a worthless argument.
Gin & Tonic
@divF: We were pretty damn close at least twice since 1945.
divF
@Mandalay:
This is why I hate the locution “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. It conflates the truly horrific – nuclear weapons – that we should rightly fear, with many other threats that do not threaten us at that level. It is a trope that is used to excuse the evil foreign policy advocated by the neocons, from invading Iraq to wanting to bail on the nuclear weapons treaty with Iran.
divF
@Gin & Tonic:
Sorry, my memory is slipping. Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and what is the second one ?
tybee
somewhere around 2% of the damage done to japanese cities was done by the two nuclear bombs.
the rest was done by “conventional” weapons.
Mike E
Truman never ‘decided’ to drop those bombs, that ship was gonna sail no matter what others may speculate about this moment in history. He just didn’t intercede with a ‘stop’. Please, somebody, tell me how he could have. Hindsight is bullshit.
About another 1,000 nuclear warheads have been detonated since those 1st three weapons exploded in July and August of 1945. We need to consider these deaths in the context of a greater nuclear war that must never be waged, and how all political/ethnic/racial distinctions are irrelevant …we surely will all burn just the same as those citizens in Hiroshima did, or should have, several times over.
Mandalay
@Emma:
I’m no expert on that, but I have the same impression. And the contrast with Germany’s genuine and open shame, remorse and guilt over what it did is remarkable. Germans refuse to forget or airbrush over what they did, and good for them.
Keith G
@divF: 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Cacti
@tybee:
The single most destructive air raid in human history was the Operation Meetinghouse raid on Tokyo that had taken place less than 3 months earlier.
But incendiary bombs were used, so I suppose it was more sporting.
Mandalay
@Mike E:
Well to be fair to Truman, that ship did really not have to sail; Japan was given the chance to surrender before the bombs were dropped, and they very unwisely said GFY.
Gin & Tonic
@divF: Able Archer, 1983.
Cacti
@Mike E:
Thus far, the advent of nuclear weapons has prevented a third world war.
From the start of WWI in July 1914 to the end of WWII in August 1945, 70 to 80 million people were killed over a 31-year period.
Schlemazel
@beltane: with 2000-2008 being the HUGE fucking exception!
Keith G
@Gin & Tonic: In looking up that, I was also directed to look up the “Norwegian rocket incident”
p.a.
@RK: yes, and as an implied threat to the SU for the future.
p.a.
@beltane:
Not 14 yrs ago we weren’t. A great point about Amerofascists is that they never give up; Social Security, Medicare/caid, voting rights etc. We can’t turn back time, but the Election of 2000 should always be referred to as the RepublicanCourt Putsch. Make them own it.
Bill D.
@Mandalay: We criticize the Japanese for failing to express adequate remorse, but where are our abject remorse, apologies, and restitution for slavery of Africans and genocide of Native Americans? We seem more like the Japanese in that regard.
Mike E
@Mandalay: I believe I was fair to HST who went from being totally in the dark to having a vague notion about a near-incomprehensible, war-ending asset all in a matter of weeks…historical records bear this out. Momentum. They were gonna be used no matter what.
Mike E
@Cacti: Heh, tonight’s The Simpsons has Bart writing on the chalkboard:
WWII could not beat up WWI
Scamp Dog
@raven: That’s not really the consensus any more. The Boston Globe has an article here about the Japanese surrender, based on the work of historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. The nickle summary is that it wasn’t the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (conventional bombing was doing equivalent damage on a continuing basis), it was that the Soviet Union entered the war, instead of helping Japan work out better surrender terms.
LanceThruster
Several years ago before his death, I was at a tribute dinner at the Proud Bird Restaurant near LAX for Gen. Paul Tibbets and the crew of the Enola Gay. I had seen a History Channel documentary where he said that some of his grandkids considered him to be a monster.
I gave him a copy of this essay. He had never seen or read it before.
Paul Fussell – “Thank God For Atom The Bomb”
mclaren
@RK:
The Japanese were certainly terrified of the Russians entering the war against them. The version I’m familiar with says that Truman and his advisors used the two atomic bombs partly to deter Stalin from rolling through West Berlin and taking all of Southern Europe. No one was too certain in mid 1945 that Stalin would keep to his pact and stay within the Russian zone of occupation in Berlin, as well as his agreed zones of occupation in Eastern Europe.
So Truman must also have had in mind that a show of the power of nuclear weaons would prevent Stalin from pre-emptively launching a ground attack to take over all of Europe in late 1945. That’s another consideration we have to take into account. The use of nuclear weapons in Japan not only prevented huge numbers of Japanese civilian and American army casualties, they also showed the horrific power of nuclear weapons and deterred all large-scale land wars from 1945 onward…as well as probably keeping Western Europe out of Soviet hands.
That’s an awful lot of solid reasons to use the atomic weapons, as opposed to some fairly weak humanitarian considerations for not using them. I say “fairy weak” because by late 1945, every major power fighting in WW II had seen so many grotesquely horrific civilian casualties that people were hardened to death. You and I can can’t imagine what it must have been like to live through that nightmare. Not a family in Germany or Russia didn’t have someone dead in that war. Watch Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and you’ll see that every family in Japan had someone dead. American families had a casualty on every block, sometimes entire families wiped out. After you go through that kind of hell for years, you just want it over, whatever it takes.
mclaren
@beltane:
If you’d been born a little earlier, you’d have gotten to watch the 1962 Cuban missile crisis live. I recall vividly seeing JKF talking live on the TV and noticing how scared shitless he was. And how scared shitless my parents were.
For about a week, we got to wonder whether the entire world would disappear in a thermonuclear mushroom cloud. You want scared? That’s scared.
mclaren
@Schlemazel:
Um…and 1960-1980 being the huge fucking exceptions too.
JFK was an inspiring orator and his domestic policies were great — but he a huge disaster for U.S. foreign policy. First, JFK launches the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. Then he makes the insane decision to secretly place short-range missiles in Turkey,k spurring Kruschev to ship nuclear missles to Cuba. So JFK almost blows up the world with that one. Then JFK says, “Hey, I know what — let’s send troops into Vietnam!” Yeah, greaaaaaaaaaaaaaat idea, buddy.
LBJ was even worse than JFK for foreign policy. Vietnam tore the United States apart and LBJ was mainly responsible for that. Then, of course, we elected Nixon in 1968, a thug so corrupt and so dishonest that Nixon actually held secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese prior to his election in 1968 to prolong the war.
I’d say that’s a run of 3 (three) shitty horrible presidents who collectively plunged the United States into a near-nuclear catastrophe and a 12-year-long hellish pointless unwinnable third-world war, Vietnam.
If we’d had halfway competent sane presidents from 1960 to 1980, think of what this country could have accomplished. Without that whole Vietnam insanity.
mclaren
@Bill D.:
What are you talking about, man? There was no genocide, it was Manifest Destiny!
That’s what my high school textbook said, anyway.
CDWard
Where does the US get off lecturing Iran about trying to acquire nuclear weapons when the US is the only country to have used them, and it used them against 2 civilian targets? The arrogance of the US will be its downfall. See http://original.antiwar.com/thomas-knapp/2015/08/05/august-1945-lets-talk-about-terrorism/
brantl
My mother and father were at an Air Force base, as was Doolittle, the captain of the Enola Gay. My mother commented that he was a haunted man. No doubt.
brantl
@Cervantes: Cacti:
No more than the 200,000 civilians that died during the invasion and occupation of Nanking by the Imperial Japanese Army.
What we did was no worse than the Rape of Nanking?
That’s the standard to which we should hold ourselves?
No shit.
brantl
I guess Doolittle must have been on the Hiroshima run.
NCSteve
Just to add to the “a little historical and personal context, please” chorus, my dad was in the Fifth Marine (reppled in as cadre from the First Marine Division after recovering from the malaria he caught on Guadalcanal and a bayonet through that went through his hand at Peleliu. There’s about zero chance I’d be here today if they’d had to push the button on Operation Downfall. And there are millions of Japanese civilians who survived 1945 for whom the same is true.
On March 9, 1945, the U.S. dropped 2000 tons of firebombs on Tokyo, igniting a firestorm that suffocated and incinerated, or most often, just incinerated, between 80,000 and 130,000 people. The atomic bomb deaths were different and the long term toll of premature deaths in hundreds or tens or ones was different in kind than the long term death toll from the firebombing through inhalation of particulate matter, but, by any rational measure, the Tokyo raid, along with a few others, was worse.
It was a war in which atrocity was routine and yesterday’s war crimes were today’s normal. In the 1920’s and 30’s, the consensus was that the aerial bombardment of civilian populations was a violation of international law. After the Battle of Britain, it becomes the norm for two decades. We got into World War I because we considered Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare to be a breach of international law. An order went out to the Pacific submarine command to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan within days of Pearl Harbor.
The Axis nations, and our ally the USSR, committed all the same atrocities we and the British committed and then committed additional atrocities that were, at some moral level, worse than the atrocities we and the British committed. Routine torture, gigantic industrialized murder factories, starvation prison camps, slave labor, routine rape on a literally inconceivable scale.
And, in pretty much every case, they were the first to commit the atrocities in World War II that we routinely later committed ourselves–albeit, in the case of aerial bombardment, on a vastly larger scale because of our greater industrial capacity. But no one should full themselves that we were innocents at war. World War I and II, between them, set back civilization hundreds of years.
Only technology has reduced the scale of our tolerance of civilian collateral loss of life. Only the H-Bomb made the idea of using nuclear weapons truly unthinkable. My father’s generation obliterated entire cities at will, killed tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians in a day and no one called it anything other than a regrettable necessity. In our generation we criticize the military when ten or twenty civilians are killed by an airstrike, not because we’re better people, but because our technology is capable of putting single bombs more or less exactly where we want them, rather than having to send a thousand bombers to drop six or ten thousand bombs in the statistical expectation that one or two would land exactly where we wanted them.
And who are we to judge them at this remove? How can we dare to judge them when so many of us may only be here because this decision was made and not another? What conceit to draw up an alternate history universe where Japan inevitably surrendered without either being atom-bombed or invaded, thus making both totally unnecessary and then, for good measure, pretending like we also wouldn’t have killed the same number or more in conventional bombing raids in order to justify our shaming them?
CDWard
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Gratuitous Mass Murder – http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/07/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-gratuitous-mass-murder/