Yesterday was the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb
[NOTE: I missed the anniversary yesterday, but today I’m recycling this previous post on the subject.]
Once again it’s the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Nagasaki followed three days later, and Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945.
To date these two bombs remain—astoundingly enough, considering the nature of our oft-troubled and troubling species—the only nuclear warheads ever detonated over populated areas. (I’ve written at length on the subject of those bombs: see this, this, and this.)
Oliver Kamm wrote a while back:
Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire – and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties.
This context always needs to be kept in mind when evaluating any “terrible thing”—and there is no question that the dropping of these bombs was a terrible thing.
But critics who are bound and determined to portray the West as evil, marauding, bloodthirsty— whatever the dreadful adjective du jour might be—are bound and determined to either avoid all context, or to change the true context and replace it with fanciful myth. As Kamm writes, those who want to portray Hiroshima and Nagasaki as American crimes cite evidence of an imminent Japanese surrender that would have happened anyway.
Trouble is, available information points strongly to the contrary. It’s difficult to know whether those who argue that the bombs were unnecessary and the deaths that ensued gratuitous are guilty of poor scholarship, wishful thinking, or willful lying – but most likely it’s some combination of these elements.
Truth in history is not easy to determine (see this), although it helps greatly if conventions of scholarship (sources, citations) are properly followed. Oh, the main events themselves are often not disputed – except for fringe groups – although the details are often the subject of disagreement. But it’s the motivations behind the acts, the hearts and minds of the movers and shakers, the “what-might-have-been’s” and the “but-fors” that are so open to both partisan interpretation and willful distortion, and so deeply meaningful.
It’s hard enough to determine what happened. How many died in Dresden, for example? Do we believe Goebbels’s propaganda as promulgated by David Irving, or do we believe this work of recent exhaustive scholarship? The former “facts” have reigned now in popular opinion for quite a while, and although the latter mounts a far more convincing case, how many have read it or are familiar with the facts in it, compared to those who have been heavily exposed to the former?
There’s what happened, and then there’s why it happened—the meaning and intent behind the policy. A combination of the two is what propaganda is all about. It takes a lot of time and effort to wade through facts, make judgments about the veracity of sources, and be willing to keep an open mind.
Much easier to stand in a public square (as a bunch of nodding, smiling, waving, elderly peace-love Boomers regularly used to do in a town where I lived) holding huge banners declaring “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB.” Repeat it often enough, and the hope is it will become Truth in people’s eyes.
Especially in the eyes of the young, and of future generations, who don’t have their own memories to go on. It’s much harder to convince a WWII vet that Hiroshima was an unnecessary war crime than it is to convince a young person of same; the former not only has the context, he has own personal memories of the context. World War II veterans are scarce these days and getting scarcer by the minute. And propagandists from the left are more numerous, with larger platforms from which to distribute their products. They are not just interested in changing opinions in the present, they’re interested in history and the future.
[NOTE: The definitive essay on the dropping of the atomic bomb by a contemporary and a fine historian is Paul Fussell’s “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.” And for a good discussion of all the controversy about whether Japan was thinking of surrendering prior to Hiroshima, see this. For a discussion of the idea that Russia’s entry into the war against Japan rather than the atomic bomb was the cause of Japan’s surrender, see this.]
Hell To Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan by D M Giangreco is an excellent book on the end of the War in the Pacific Theater.
I had discussed this with a Vietnamese woman of a certain age, who told me how barbaric the Japanese were during their occupation of Vietnam. In her telling, the Japanese had it coming, and then some.
And my birthday!
After watching “Oppenheimer” people learned what an accomplishment it was to develop the atomic bomb.
“People will remember this day!”
My landlord has a picture in the building showing the mushroom cloud signed by the pilot.
One of the things that people don’t fully appreciate is we had to drop a second bomb and it still took some time for Japan to surrender.
The technology of the Atomic bombs invites expressions of horror because of the immediacy of their destructive and killing power.
Morally, I see no separation between their use and the massive bombing campaigns in Europe and Japan; nor in the intent of the Blitz against London.
For that matter, their purpose aligned with that of the brutal Shenandoah Valley campaign, and Sherman’s march during our Civil War. The intent was to bring the civilian population to its knees so that it would not support the war effort.
The scope of the horror in every case was governed only by the limits of technology.
My pudgy, over aged, draftee Dad was the bowman on an LCVP landing craft in the Pacific Fleet. If Japan were invaded, which it would have been, the attrition among those craft would have been horrific. I am glad that he did not have to participate in such an invasion.
It really wouldn’t be such an issue if we didn’t collectively try to pretend that WWII was a battle of good vs evil. The Allies adopted the same tactics as the Axis when it made sense for them to do so, and as far as atrocities went the Russians gave the Germans and Japanese a good run for their money–and not only that the Germans got blamed for some of them. Discussion of American atrocities is suffocated by the posturing over the use of nuclear weapons and the Japanese internment, but they happened and were often perpetrated against our British and French allies as well as Germans and Japanese. The war was not fought by saints and angels. And?
Yeah, Americans invented a new weapon that allowed the relatively riskless incineration of entire cities, and the Japanese knew they couldn’t fight that so surrendered. And? Anybody would like to end a war that way and will do so when they can. Certainly the Germans thought they’d figured out One Weird Trick to win the war, several times.
War may at times be a necessary evil but it’s not less evil for that. (Sherman understood this perfectly.) Nobody came out of WWII with pure hands, except maybe some of the dead. There’s been too much whitewashing, of things done by the West and things the West turned a blind eye to for military expediency, understandably as many of those who participated were alive until recently, but it’s distorted discussions of wars since then fought by us, by Israel, and others.
But someday we’ll be talking about WWII as dispassionately as we do WWI, and we’ll have a different picture from our carefully curated portrait of a Crusade in Europe fought by the Greatest Generation. Discussion of future wars can then be concentrated on what it takes to win them (or whether they should be fought at all) and not on moral posturing.
There’s an interesting physics background that perhaps may explain why it took two bombs. The Hiroshima bomb was made out of uranium and the Japanese physicists knew that the separation of U235 from U238 is so difficult that the Americans could not produce many bombs fast. Indeed, the American engineers said they could not produce another uranium bomb until Dec 1945.
The Nagasaki bomb was made from plutonium produced by the reactors at Hanford, Washington. This is a much faster process than uranium isotope separation and the Japanese knew that the United States could produce a lot of bombs fast. Indeed the USAAF had several sets of plutonium bomb components available.
Some of the Japanese leaders accepted that they would be obliterated so they persuaded the Emperor to surrender. There were hotheads who still did not want to surrender, and they were going to assassinate the Emperor. Fortunately they were stopped saving millions of lives.
There was actually a 3rd option, which would have cost more in Japanese lives and suffering, but not so much for us. By 1945 we had the capacity to starve them to cannibalism, and bomb roads and rail to the point they couldn’t distribute even such food as they had. We had total sea and air dominance.
In his excellent trilogy on World War 2 in the Pacific, historian Ian Toll stated that even after the atomic bombs were dropped, the Imperial War Cabinet was evenly split on whether to continue the war and fight to the last man. At that point, Hirohito intervened, broke the deadlock, and ordered Japan’s surrender. Although the surrender was “unconditional,” the continuation of Hirohito as emporor was implied and MacArthur used Hirohito to transition Japan into a constituional monarchy. Something else not taught in American schools.
Those of us whose father’s and uncles would have perished in the conventional invasion are getting thinner on the ground, too. My father and four uncles would have been killed. Been said we’ve just finished using the Purple Hearts ordered in anticipation of the conventional operation. The math works.
Niketas:
What a duplicitous strawman comment.
No one here has said that the Allies were angels. That would be absurd.
Take just one example from my post – the quote “Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome.” That’s an acknowledgment of less-than-angelic status. But don’t pretend that the sides were equal in atrocities, although of course atrocities occurred on both sides. It was war, after all.
Nor was this post about the Russians; anyone who has studied WWII knows about their bad behavior, but they were not involved in Hiroshima.
Oh, and then there was the little bitty fact of the Holocaust. I missed the part where the Allies killed 6 million Jews in order to make Europe Judenrein.
And yes, the FDR administration didn’t make it the least bit easy for Jews to come to the US. But that is not even in the same ballpark as perpetrating the Holocaust.
@neo: But don’t pretend that the sides were equal in atrocities, although of course atrocities occurred on both sides. It was war, after all.
Who do you think did that? I certainly did not. By all means, let’s not strawman.
I do not understand why you so often take my comments as somehow aimed directly at you personally, and so often take the least charitable interpretation of what I say. I’m not a bad guy. I don’t always agree with everyone here but I am civil, unlike some folks whose antics you have a lot more patience for.
I think you frequently assume you know my motivation for having said something and then you respond to that assumed motivation instead of what I actually did say, and then misunderstandings ensue. Then I have to choose if I let a mistaken impression go by so that people besides you misunderstand me, or if I have to justify myself at length, which is tiresome for everyone.
I can’t read your mind so don’t know why or what or if you assume so much more behind what I say that I didn’t put there… For the record, the point of what I’m saying is, the discussion of what was done to win WWII is hugely simplified by not having to pretend that everything done to win it was morally justified. I’m not trying to make a case that the Allies were just as bad as the Axis or did anything equivalent.
Nor was this post about the Russians;
Does that mean I’m forbidden to mention them? Your blog, your rules, I’ll abide by them.
But that is not even in the same ballpark as perpetrating the Holocaust.
Who said it was? I said the Allies adopted Axis tactics; that is historical fact. I said there were Allied atrocities, and that is historical fact. What I didn’t explicitly say, is that the Russians perpetrated atrocities similar in magnitude to the Holocaust from the 1920s through the 1950s, but I never claimed equivalence to the Holocaust or anything like it.
Niketas:
Your very first sentence was deeply offensive, about pretending that WWII was a battle of good against evil.
It is not pretense. “Good” doesn’t have to be perfect or angelic.
The Holocaust is also a huge part of the reason it was good versus evil.That should not be ignored when discussing the question. You ignored it.
Niketas Choniates – as Neo said. Some things are not the same.
My Dad was very glad they dropped the Bombs. He was in thick of it in the Navy, from Pearl Harbor to the end.
Niketas Choniates, I expect that everyone takes your duplicitous comments as intended.
You disparage the notion of good and evil. Well, we can acknowledge that the allied side was frequently less than ‘good’ in its execution of the war. As I noted in an earlier post, war is inherently brutal; nothing new there.
But surely you do not deny that the causus belli was a reaction by the United States and Western European democracies to pure evil; and in many cases was not voluntary. It was a fight for survival.
You throw Russia in as a distraction. I doubt that any Allied leader approved of Stalin’s Russia. Sometimes there is no choice but to act as though the ‘enemy of your enemy is your friend’ even when you know that it is a fiction.
I suggest that Neo, and her readers are far more sophisticated than you are willing to acknowledge. You bring nothing new, and trample on nuances.
@neo:The Holocaust is also a huge part of the reason it was good versus evil.That should not be ignored when discussing the question. You ignored it.
We started with nuking Japan so no the Holocaust was not the first thought I had. I didn’t mention the Rape of Nanjing either, but it’s too bad Japan couldn’t have been nuked before they had the opportunity to perpetrate it.
@SHIREHOME:Some things are not the same.
Who was saying they were? It’s true that some decided I must have meant that, but it’s not anything I said.
@Oldflyer:I expect that everyone takes your duplicitous comments as intended.
This is what I’m talking about. Neo mistakenly imputed invidious motives behind what I said, and then others double down on it. So once again, I either choose to let people say things about me that aren’t true and let others also be mistaken, or tiresomely respond.
You disparage the notion of good and evil.
False. I don’t think WWII fits the good vs evil template very well, but that doesn’t mean I disparage the notion of good and evil. Let’s not strawman.
Well, we can acknowledge that the allied side was frequently less than ‘good’ in its execution of the war. As I noted in an earlier post, war is inherently brutal; nothing new there.
And nothing different from what I said. If you start from that point, it’s simpler to talk about things like nuking Japan.
But surely you do not deny that the causus belli was a reaction by the United States and Western European democracies…
That would be silly, and I do not deny it.
I doubt that any Allied leader approved of Stalin’s Russia. Sometimes there is no choice but to act as though the ‘enemy of your enemy is your friend’ even when you know that it is a fiction.
I agree with this 100%. He got away with what he did and subjected tens of millions to the misery and slavery that Hitler was unable to impose, and it went on for decades instead of a few years. At the time it was an acceptable tradeoff. I don’t say they were wrong to accept it. They gave the Soviet Union more than one seat in the United Nations and a Security Council veto, as I pointed out in another comment a few months back, because it was less bad to let Stalin do what he was doing than to try to go to war with him to stop him. These are the compromises that sometimes have to be made.
its arguable the fire bombings of tokyo and every city outside kyoto, and the last two, were probably more agregious, hiroshima was army and nagasaki, if memory serves, now the real value of strategic bombing is arguable according to the esteemed elders of the strategic bombing survey, sarc, it was probably the only way to attrit the Japanese war machine,
now if Stalin had decapitated his entire top Defense Staff because reasons, maybe the war might not have been so grueling at the outset, as well as the continuation of training of German forces on Russian soil, into the 30s,
Niketas:
I repeat: any discussion of good and evil in WWII, and anyone who purports to say it was NOT good vs evil in that war (your lead sentence), is simply ignoring one of the most important elements that made it good versus evil if that person ignores the Holocaust. Period.
The Rape of Nanking was part of Japan’s behavior leading up to the war but not part of WWII in terms of the Allies versus the Axis or the role of the US. The Rape of Nanking occurred in 1937.
I believe Winston and FDR, Winston more so, saw Stalin’s military might, with its unending millions of cannon fodder, as the greatest threat to Europe, Western civilization, and the world.
the Holocaust was about the deliberate attempt to liquidate a whole people off the European continent, it wasn’t a military operation that got out of hand it was as they said of a parallel program, the Devouring, re the Romani,
had the Pacific War continued into the main islands, what impact would that have had not only on the Japanese people but the Allies who were fighting it, the UK US and France, as the fall and winter of 45, recall it took two years after the war for the Marshall Plan to arise, of course how far would the Soviets have gotten would they have partitioned the island, as they would do with Korea,
Would Attlee have continued the fight, or would they have found some reason to seek accomodation
Niketas Choniates,
Re: “I don’t think WWII fits the good vs evil template very well, but that doesn’t mean I disparage the notion of good and evil.”
What conflict(s) would you cite as better examples of a good vs evil template?
In anticipation of your possibly citing Islamic wars of aggression, my objection to such an assertion would be that Islam has always offered the ‘escape’ of ‘religious’ conversion. Whereas the Nazi’s offered no escape from a torturous death to all the Jews.
So what other war is a better example of good vs evil?
it was certainly a war of necessity in the way you probably couldn’t say the First War was, Germany declaring war on us in Tandem, was probably just icing on the cake, it was probably an inevitability, as the set up of the Manhattan project suggested, but the timing was fortuitous,
as to the ultimate consequences of that war, for Eastern Europe for China, that probably had something to be desired, one might say the seeds of a future war was set in the aide giving to Ho Chi Minh, out of the Kunming OSS station,
@Geoffrey:What conflict(s) would you cite as better examples of a good vs evil template?
No major wars are coming to mind. If you arranged the major conflicts of world history along a continuum “worst fit to good vs evil” to “best fit to good vs evil” I guess I’d have to put WWII closest to “best fit”. The only candidates I can think of for better fit might be some of those “pyramids of skulls” wars in Asia but if there were good guys there, they lost, and it’s not like we have the same level of documentation for those as about WWII.
In anticipation of your possibly citing Islamic wars of aggression,
I was not, I assume my handle led you to think so? If so, I award you +10 internets.
my objection to such an assertion would be that Islam has always offered the ‘escape’ of ‘religious’ conversion.
There are Christians and Jews who have considered that option to be worse than torture or death, and who chose accordingly, and so they are unavailable to weigh in on WWII. There were other accommodations though besides conversion.
Niketas: If you think that your original post was misunderstood, perhaps you should take a moment and read, and reflect on what you write before
clicking submit.
Perhaps you did not mean to say that World War II was not clearly a war against ‘good and evil’ in its broad scope. That is hardly debatable. If the premise that it was is accepted conceptually, then a discussion of moral equivalence in its conduct may not be unreasonable. However, I would submit that in a war of survival, the context is an essential element of the discussion. In a fight between life and death, where does a reasonable person draw the line between good and evil tactics? In a brutal conflict, who decides what level of brutality is unacceptable?
I believe that when evil forces ‘loose the dogs of war’ they become solely responsible for the ensuing carnage.
By the way, there are obvious parallels with Israel;s current fight for survival against forces of evil. Should Israel be required to allow an enemy who has vowed their destruction to find sanctuary behind a civilian shield?
Would Israel be wrong to remind the world that they have the capability to obliterate the capitals of their enemies? Would it not be beneficial for their enemies, and the world, to understand that they would not die with their swords sheathed?
‘war is hell’ as one of the most imminent practioner General Sherman, has put forth, the problem with many of wars since World War 2, was there was no real end goal, this is for the NorthEast South East Asia and Middle East theatres
@Oldflyer:If you think that your original post was misunderstood, perhaps you should take a moment and read, and reflect on what you write before
clicking submit.
A wiser fellow than myself used to say that it is impossible to express oneself so clearly that one cannot be misunderstood. I am thinking of how I could have expressed it differently…
By the way, there are obvious parallels with Israel’s current fight for survival against forces of evil.
I think so too, and I think there is a legacy of distorted thinking about WWII that makes their fight for survival harder. It was the same with the war in Iraq and the War on Terror, that one side was being held to this ridiculously high standard and the Western Allies’ behavior in WWII was sometimes cited erroneously as a justification.
For example during the Iraq occupation there were occasional wrongs done by American soldiers, and this was negatively contrasted to the behavior of American soldiers in WWII by people who were either totally ignorant or completely lying. American soldiers in Iraq were far better behaved than American soldiers in WWII. These comparisons were not made in good faith, it’s the same kind of impulse that denies that minorities in America are subjected to less discrimination today than in the past.
The Palestinians are not, in my opinion, a good fit for “people deprived of their lands” or people who were “ethnically cleansed” or people who have been subject to attempted extermination. There are peoples in this world who are a much better fit than the Palestinians, and the kinds of things the Palestinians do would never be tolerated from any other group of people, nor would it be tolerated from them if they were attacking anyone but Israel. (Jordan and Egypt, for example, have very little tolerance indeed for the millions of Palestinians they keep in “refugee camps”.)
One thing few remark on is the restraint that the U.S. showed after becoming the only nation with the bomb and a means to deliver it. Had Japan or Germany achieved that status, I think they would have used it to subjugate the free nations. Or at least as many of them as possible. IMO, they would not have done what we did, which was to try to build a world order that was more democratic and peaceful.
The USSR got the bomb on 8/29/1949 about four years after the Nagasaki bombing. There had been no military action between 1945 and 1949, but once the Communists had the bomb, the North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south in March of 1950. The first of many Communist fomented civil wars.
WWII was a war between authoritarian and democratic governments except for the Russians, an authoritarian government that fought with the free world when it was helpful to their aims. Once the war was over, the Russians consolidated power into the USSR and have been an authoritarian government at odds with democratic nations for all these 79 years.
Today, the democratic nations face a two-pronged threat from the authoritarian philosophies of radical Islamism and Communism. What we had hoped was going to be a better world after WWII, has turned out to be more of the same. The authoritarian regimes want to be able to take over other nations and plunder them – much like humans have operated since nation states were created.
That we have a nuclear sub fleet with the capability of destroying the major cities of Russia and China has kept us safe from an all-out attack and major war. However, we are now more in danger of being brought down from within than at any time since I’ve been alive (91 years). A Fifth Column has wormed its way into our institutions. Our nuclear fleet cannot protect us from that.
Poor Niketas doth protest too much. Folks understand him only too well.
neo has many skills, discernment for example.
Here you go Niketas:
Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II – Michael Burleigh
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FOGA28?psc=1&language=en_US
You aren’t the smartest bear in this forest.
Louise Steinman, in The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War, recounts her visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
The estimated fifteen million civilians that Japanese killed in WW2 dwarf those estimated 200,000 killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A family friend served as a Marine in WW2. His WW2 was, surprisingly, combat-free. After the end of hostilities he was sent to Japan as one of the occupying force. Some three weeks after the bomb fell on Nagaski, he finagled a seat on a short flight over the city. He was shocked at the devastation, perhaps more so because he had never seen combat. The emotional shock he felt made it impossible for him to consider explanations that supported dropping the bombs. To his credit, though he was deeply affected by having seen the devastation, he kept quiet about it until his children were adults: he didn’t impose his pain on his children. I found out about by reading his memoir.
Niketas Choniates,
The historical record reveals that as the Mongols expanded, they first offered every peaceful people they slaughtered, the option of peaceful surrender and incorporation into the Mongol empire. They met violent aggression against them and violent resistance to them with utter brutality.
“There are Christians and Jews who considered that option to be worse than torture or death.”
Which does not eliminate the fact that a choice that allowed them to escape death was offered. Right now every Jew in Israel can convert to Islam and escape jihad. All they have to surrender is their soul.
There was no alternative option to “the final solution”.
Re: “I guess I’d have to put WWII closest to “best fit”.”
If in your view WWII is the closest to a “best fit”, yet again in your view you “don’t think WWII fits the good vs evil template very well” then how can you reasonably dispute the implication that in your view there has never been a war that “fits the good vs evil template very well”?
And if you can’t refute that implication, then how can we not conclude that in your view, at base in order for an accurate ‘template’ to qualify, it must be an indisputable case of pure evil vs pure good…
yes thats remarkably passive voice, the Control Group had commissioned Admiral Yamamoto who had been the Navy minister, an able officer to attack Pearl Harbour, he had reservations because of his experience at Harvard and Naval Attache, had seen America’s Industrial might,
it was part of a multiple offensive against the Phillipines and Singapore, among other targets, part of their Great East Asian Co Prosperity Sphere, and this had consequences that would eventually lead to the home islands,
@Gringo:The estimated fifteen million civilians that Japanese killed in WW2 dwarf those estimated 200,000 killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I think if the nuclear attack on Japan had killed twenty million people, it probably would still have been carried out, and ought to have been from the perspective of ending the war. There’s more involved in these decisions than just the number of people killed.
It’s important to remember that the perceived willingness to kill every human on earth has been largely responsible for preventing a third world war so far. We’d want to be very careful, if we want to avoid more wars of that destructiveness, to avoid giving the impression that we might think it was wrong for us to kill more in retaliation than had been killed. And so I hesitate to embrace a “the nuclear attack on Japan save more lives than it took” argument.
Likewise I think Israel is justified in what it is doing even if more Gazans die as a result than Israels did on October 7. Because the number of deaths is only one part of the consideration.
Niketas Choniates
Jordan is the only Arab country that has granted citizenship to Palestinians. Palestinians in Jordan
Jordan granted citizenship to refugees from the West Bank, but not to those from Gaza.
@Geoffrey:If in your view WWII is the closest to a “best fit”, yet again in your view you “don’t think WWII fits the good vs evil template very well” then how can you reasonably dispute the implication that in your view there has never been a war that “fits the good vs evil template very well”?
I said I’m not sure there’s a major war in world history that does. There’s some smaller and obscure wars that maybe come closer. I’d be willing to classify Israel’s war in Gaza as a decent fit to the “good vs evil” template.
And if you can’t refute that implication, then how can we not conclude that in your view, at base in order for an accurate ‘template’ to qualify, it must be an indisputable case of pure evil vs pure good…
Because it doesn’t follow logically from anything I said.
Does an analogy help? If you want to argue that the A. E. Larson building in Yakima, Washington is a “skyscraper” I might disagree.
If you press me, of all the buildings in Yakima is it not the tallest and therefore closest to a skyscraper then yes, I must agree.
But you cannot then logically accuse me of believing that a real skyscraper does not exist, has never existed, or cannot exist, simply because I do not admit that Yakima, Washington has one.
And, fwiw, the military cabal which ruled Japan considered every Japanese had a duty to attack American soldiers and die for the emperor. So there were NO civilians in Japan.
@Gringo:Jordan is the only Arab country that has granted citizenship to Palestinians.
That does not contradict what I said, as Jordan does still have refugee camps for Palestinians and there are still hundreds of thousands of people in them. Notice that your source cherry picks the period 1948 – 1967.
WW II would have been justified, which is to say justly resisted by the Allies even without the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was, afaict, sui generis. Independent of the war’s strategies for winning, using up resources to the last day of the war which could have been used to at least slow down the Allies. Utterly evil and without any rational thought. Inexplicable.
But, even so, even without it, the resistance of the Allies was completely justified.
A Brit (RAF Bomber Command) general said he didn’t consider Dresden worth the bones of a single British grenadier.
IOW, destroying Dresden and thousands of its citizens from the air with–relative–impunity was preferable to the Allied Army casualties resulting from keeping Dresden intact with its various ways of helping the German defenses.
Which brings up the unanswerable question; what would an intact Dresden have allowed the German military to do that, in the real world, they could not? How many more Allied soldiers would have died? How many around the world if the war lasted another month, for example?
Apply the same question to Hamburg and Berlin and others.
Is it moral that a babe in a crib be collateral damage to reduce the likelihood of the death of one’s own soldiers, adults and with at least some agency? Should we ask the soldier’s mother?
Is there a moral ratio of civilians kept alive to soldiers dead due to reduced massed fires and bombings? Or civilians dead to soldiers kept alive?
Is it worse for civilians to die in mass bombings than to get run over by grinding ground combat? And if less of the former means more of the latter, what then?
And as regards Germany in WW II. It shows the fault with the Versailles Treaty. You don’t let people like this run their own affairs. That thought would be applied to Japan, which is why Downfall was planned rather than just forcing them back into their Home Islands on the promise not to do it again any time soon. And it was the Bomb which saved them and us from Downfall’s millions of dead.
Cheapest, all around.
Neo
Thank you for a very thoughtful remembrance. You’re quite right that while events don’t change interpretations change as memories are lost and replaced by new narratives and changing morals. Regrettably it becomes easier as time passes to second guess and even denigrate yesterday’s decisions when our connection to them is fading away. This is why I really hate to see libraries replaced by cell phones and search engines replaced by AI where there’s no need to learn or think because AI will tell you whatever you want to know.
RIchard Aubrey:
I agree; WWII was a war of conquest on the part of Germany.
But also, one of the goals was not just to annihilate the Jews but to be able to implement Generalplan Ost after the war. If this isn’t evil, I really don’t know what is:
Niketas:
Also please see my comment right above this one.
neo:
As you remind him first the Jews, the the Slavs in the east, then ….. and some still want to play the “but our hands and hearts weren’t pure” game.
Doth protest too much.
All very well said crasey, and I realize you were summarizing neo’s excellent thoughts. I read a lot of history, and I think it’s natural to pick up the latest and greatest book written on some particular topic. But when I really get interested in something I always make it a point to read contemporary accounts of the events, or histories written shortly thereafter. It gives one spectacular insight into those changing narratives and perspectives.
neo
Plan Ost never got much ink. Done in the east, granular, no serious evidence but piles of bodies, Einsatzgruppen units disbanded.
Hard to discern without very serious research how much was deliberate and how much due to destruction of infrastructure and food, looted, in large and frequently unimproved areas offering little support leading to starvation, exposure and disease. Some on purpose, some due to getting run over by the war.
The small scale of the western front gives us a skewed view of how huge the eastern front and what that meant in terms of keeping civilians alive–if anybody wanted to.
WW II would have been justified, which is to say justly resisted by the Allies even without the Holocaust.
Yes, in fact neither the Holocaust nor Generalplan Ost figured in the Allies’ entering the war, as I don’t believe either was really known (or at least not their full extent) until well into the war. The Wansee Conference wasn’t until 1942. We knew Hitler wanted to conquer and capture territory for “lebensraum,” and that he was a ruthless maniac that had to be stopped. That was the valid justification at the outset.
As I’ve mentioned before, my father trained as a paratrooper towards the end of WW II. Without the atomic bombs he would have parachuted into Japan and good luck with that.
Instead he was part of the occupation forces and came to an appreciation of the Japanese. I still have a couple books of his books on Japanese architecture.
I have no problems, personally or in principle, with Truman’s decision.
However, I still have problems with nuclear weapons. Little Boy and Fat Man, the names for the bombs dropped respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were low-yield weapons in today’s terms.
So we saw what two — only two — low-yield nukes could do. It was plenty horrifying.
We, humanity, have slashed the nuclear weapons arsenals at the peak of the Cold War by ~80%. Good for us.
But we still have thousands of these goddamn bombs, and about half are 20x-50x more powerful than those which exploded in Japan.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki have made wonderful comebacks, better than many expected, from the horrors of August, 1945. However, remember, those were low-yield bombs.
But the likelihood of a nuclear exchange today escalating to an all-out war is considered high by those who game those scenarios.
Although the 80s nuclear winter studies were flawed, the current thinking, FWIW, is 6-7 years of nuclear winter, which would end civilization as we know it.
It seems to me we have been damn lucky so far. But luck, when pushed long enough, comes to an end
See latest School of War podcast. Excellent discussion on dropping the bombs
As it happens, well not quite a coincidence, I’m watching Hiroshima Mon Amour, a 1959 French film in which a French-Japanese couple are making love while the French woman is describing her earlier visit to the Hiroshima Museum.
Her Japanese lover keeps telling her, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”
Chills.
@ Niketas > “The war was not fought by saints and angels”
However, it was fought by Saints and soldiers.
(Unpaid advertisement for a film I think is really good, and which was NOT a Hollywood blockbuster.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_and_Soldiers
@ Cornhead > “And my birthday!”
Wishing you many happy returns of the day!
Huxley: not one of my favorite movies, but haunting nonetheless. The scene where the French actress (the beautiful Emmanuelle Riva) walks through the streets of nighttime Hiroshima has stayed with me since I first saw the movie in the mid-1970s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp8X6GCBlAA
Hiroshima: I have mentioned before on this forum that my father served with the 20th Air Force on Tinian, the island from which the B-29s bombed Japan. He often said that the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 exceeded Hiroshima in death and destruction. He never said so in so many words, but I think it horrified him more than the atomic bombings.
As for the morality of WWII, I stand by what I wrote on this forum in April 2023:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2023/04/25/about-dominion-v-fox-and-the-news-itself/#comment-2677557
Grim, ugly, and necessary. Sherman and others (e.g. Curtis LeMay) have spoken famously about war’s cruelty. In his farewell address in January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower spoke instead of “the lingering sadness of war”. Those of us who grew up with veterans of WWII recognize the truth of that phrase. It’s a reminder that Eisenhower could be very eloquent. When he wanted to be.
What?! No birthday wishes for Cornhead?
Happy birthday, Cornhead! Keep up the good fight there in Cornhusker/Bluejay land.
I think the danger of nuclear war is considerably increased if/when Iran has deliverable nuclear weapons. (Not far away, I’m afraid) The Iranian leadership believes, at least in theory, that nuclear incineration will transport them directly to Paradise, and some of them may *really* believe it. Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders had no such security blanket.
The risk is also increased by the advent of hypersonic missile and the considerably reduced warning time that results, leaving less time for human decision-making. Discussed in my review of the 1983 movie War Games:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/70536.html
David Foster:
Thanks for addressing the issues of nuclear weapons post-Hiroshima. I’m about as worried about nuclear war as I was in the 80s. I don’t enjoy it.
I’m all for Israel’s Iron Dome and Ámerica’s successors to Reagan’s SDI. But it’s impossible to test these systems during a major nuclear war with hundreds, thousands of bombs flying around and exploding.
Our only hope is that the offensive weapon systems will likewise fail in such an event.
I am not comforted.
_____________________________________
A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
–“War Games” (1983)
Huxley
The goal of the defenses these days is to make a decapitating first strike chancy. If the other guy will retain sufficient nukes to destroy you–because of his defenses–it would be imprudent to start.
But see Wretchard’s
The “Three Conjectures” The theory in the earlier graf presumes nation states. What about non-state actors with no fixed location to bomb back into the stone age/ What do they have to fear?
My Dad (WWII Army veteran in the 96 Infantry Division) was involved in the Invasion of Okinawa, and he fought and witness as a rifleman a very bloody three months of hell on that rock of an island. Never talked much about that period of his life (except at his yearly 96th Infantry Reunion which He would attend every year no matter where it was held throughout the U.S. with His army buddies.)
The only comment to me about the dropping of the A-Bomb was that the 96 Infantry Division was resting and training to Invade the Main Island of Japan when this date roll around. His comment to me was that I (son), my brother and three sisters would not be here if the Invasion of Japan would have taken place.
Also, my Dad refuse to Buy any automobile from Japan no matter how good the price or durable of the auto was. I can’t imagine the bloody hell he and his army buddies must have gone through on that Island of Okinawa and his few comments was that He didn’t how or why but that the end result of that period in his life was that he survived and he lived a very long & productivity life with a wonderful and loving family as a result of United States dropping two A-Bombs.
God Bless all of the Deceased & people who survival and had to go through that period of their lives in WWII.
Leonard.
My working life was near Flint, MI. Big GM/UA town. There was, some years ago, some hostility to foreign cars. It faded last, and a good deal after the others, for Japanese cars.
Richard Aubrey:
I’m well-read on nuclear weapons and scenarios, including Wretchard’s “Three Conjectures.” I’m aware of the non-state problem too.
I understand how the trap was set. I don’t blame anyone. I just don’t know how we get out of it.
However, if or when a major nuclear war occurs, I’m sure we’ll wish these weapons had never been invented.