空爆 (Hiroshima)
There are always, in the week before the anniversaries of the atom bombings, articles run about the decreasing numbers of survivors and the effort to keep their stories alive. One such piece was an AP story picked up by the Yomiuri on-line (not sure whether it ran in the print edition:
Monday’s anniversary comes just a month after Fumio Kyuma was forced to quit as defense minister for seeming to implying that the bombing was inevitable, because otherwise Japan would have gone on fighting and would have lost territory to a Soviet invasion.
Not so, says Steven Leeper, the first American to head the Hiroshima Peace and Culture Foundation. “Historically, that’s not correct,” he said in an interview, “And it’s unbelievable that he said it.”
Leeper shares the view of most Japanese: that Japan had already lost the war and that the bombing of Hiroshima, and of Nagasaki three days later, was wrong and unnecessary.
“Everybody knows on the left and the right that Japan was finished at the time the bomb was dropped,” Leeper said.
Historically, the American justification was that the bombing ended the war and limited the number of U.S. military and Japanese civilian lives that would have been lost in a land invasion.
The Japanese perspective argues that Japan was already working on negotiating a peace treaty, as well as a surrender, and that the U.S. dropped the bomb to test its destructive power and to intimidate the Soviet Union.
I love Japan and am glad that we’re allies today. But sixty-odd years ago, our grandfathers were enemies. It was the responsiblity of ours to crush theirs. I’m glad they did it conclusively. One hopes that no civilized society has to resort to nuclear warfare again, but it’s a mistake to prettify history for the sake of expedient would-be humanitarianism.
I’ve never seen it disputed that Japan had already lost the war by August, in the sense that it clearly wasn’t going to win. Whether it was “finished,” however, is another matter. The government was hedging over the Potsdam Declaration. There was vocal opposition to surrender from some military leaders–even after both bombings, they tried to prevent the emperor’s surrender proclamation from being broadcast–who wanted to make good on previous promises to resist an invasion of the mainland by any means necessary. The Japanese people’s meek acceptance of occupation and immediate dedication of energy to rebuiding a peacetime economy seems inevitable now, but only because we know that’s how it happened.
And as for sending a minatory message to the Soviets, that does indeed appear to have been a factor, but I can’t see why it’s evidence of moral turpitude. Japan had mindedly inserted itself into an international conflict, betting that the United States and British Commonwealth would not have the resources to fight effectively in both Pacific and European theaters. It turned out to be a bad bet of global dimensions. What would be done with Japan after its surrender would affect the post-war balance of power, and our military leaders would have been nuts not to factor that in when deciding how to attack it.
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There seems to be a bizarre attempt to put the moral responsibility on the US for Japan’s failure to surrender both pre-Hiroshima and pre-Nagasaki.
As though there was a moral obligation on the US to interpret “We’ll keep on fighting” as “We’ll surrender in a few minutes,” but none on Japan to actually say “We surrender.”
It’s almost an infantilization of Japan, as though they were incapable of actually making a pre-Hiroshima (or post-Hiroshima, pre-Nagasaki) statement of surrender, even if they really really meant it in their hearts, and the US should have been omniscient enough to figure out what Japan really meant.
Well, the Japanese communicate in nuances, Zak.
Contemporaneous generations at the time had no compunction about the bombings, Japan deserved to be nuked. As you point out, we have to put ourselves in their shoes. After its history of no surrender fighting to the death throughout the Pacific; its barbaric regime throughout Asia; its merciless, in fact evil, maltreatment of POWs – civilians and military alike -, Japan wasn’t a conventional enemy. The level of its atrocities is well known, at least outside of Japan, and especially in Australia where thousands of our own were made to suffer the most grotesque inhumanity ( the effects of which lingered for decades after.)
The Okinawa resistance was a preview of what to expect on the mainland. With all this in mind, responsible Allied leaders couldn’t have been expected to risk more lives of their forces after years of sustained carnage, when it could all have been done with in a figurative instant. Japan got nuked, which is tough, but there was no other way when after four years, swift certain victory was imperative.
Making a sacrifice for the greater good, both big and little, used to be a common more that ran throughout society, but which has become pretty much alien in this ego-driven age. It’s no wonder then that the nuking of Japanese towns doesn’t resonate with those weaned in an affluent world with a UN, and a dubious concept of consequence-free peacemaking.
Ross, there are few things that drive me up the wall more than the way we colonials are now expected to sit still for lectures from Teutonic, Gallic, and Japanese types about the Virtues of Being a Peaceable Nation, lessons they would know nothing of had our grandparents’ generation not liberated them and given them a defense umbrella to cavort beneath from then on.
“It turned out to be a bad bet of global dimensions.”
The understatement of the century. A massive miscalculation.
Yamamoto didn’t make that miscaculation.
Those people don’t know any history. Take into account the Saipan suicides (sensationalised, but still real), and the long, bloody battles for Okinanwa and Iwo Jima, and one comes to the conclusion that the US was absultuely correct in estimating that the battle for the mainland was going to be long, bloody, and last until 1948. Stalin took Sakhalin with the little time he had, he would have entered the fray on the mainland for a land grab of Hokkaido and a lot of northern Honshu. Imagine a North and South Japan, today. How well would the Japanese ahve done as a battle ground on that front? I’m absulutely certian they would not be the economic powerhouse they are today.
Then take a look at some books such as the Time Life series and see the pictures of schoolchildren in Japan being trained to use bamboo pikes to incapcitate armored vehicle treads in mid 1945, and tell me more than 200,000 lives would have been lost in an invasion. Lets be generous and claim 500,000 for the after-effects plus the blasts of the bombs. An invasion would have killed ten times that many between the two sides. These idiots are unwilling or unable to do the caclulus of death.
Yeah, John, but it was Tojo who was prime minister.