Today is the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
[NOTE: The following is a slightly changed version of a previous post of mine. If you follow the links in the second paragraph, you’ll find three other pieces I’ve written about the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.]
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. 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 changing history to change the future.
[NOTE: The definitive essay on the dropping of the atomic bomb by a contemporary and a fine writer is Paul Fussell’s “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.” (That link no longer works, and I’m having trouble finding another that links to the actual text of the essay. If anyone can come up with one, please post the link in the comments.) 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.]
My Dad was at Pearl Harbor, and then other points West. The Bomb may have saved his life.
The Bomb allowed Japan to (mostly) save face in their Unconditional Surrender. Plus very light occupation and little War Crimes punishment for their cruel POW treatment and their raping of Korean pillow women.
Thru ending the war, it saved millions of lives.
A Hamas surrender could end the war in Gaza now, and save lives, but most countries don’t want Hamas to lose.
For five years we were the only country with the bomb and a means to deliver it. Had either Japan or Germany achieved that weapon five years before any other nation, the world would be a much different place today.
That we did not use the bomb as a weapon of aggression and forced submission is a demonstration of the ethical standards we held as opposed to such aggressors as Japan and Germany.
Unfortunately, when the USSR achieved the weapon, they felt free to continue their aggressive international plot to Communize the world. Had they achieved the bomb five years before any other nation; the world would also be quite different today.
We need not apologize to anyone for what we did eighty years ago.
I was working at an independent coffee shop in my home town about 25 years ago. Lots of high school kids and community college kids. And punks. Anyway, one day I stumbled on a WW2 textbook one of the students had brought in. I was reading the foreword and it mentioned among the usual highlights of the war, the first use of nuclear weapons and the decades of controversy it led to. There was a mention of the motivation to end the war quickly to save American lives as well as the moral dimension of using the bomb on civilians, but one sentence stood out. I can’t remember it verbatim, but the gist was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the final spasms of extreme violence in a war unparalleled in cruelty.
That’s maybe the way to think of it. Not gladly, but ruefully. It was going to happen. You can’t blackmail someone with a nuclear weapon unless they know what it can do. And all the massacres and Blitzes and bombing campaigns and sneak attacks and atrocities had shown us (meaning humanity) exactly what we were capable of.
Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow to like it too much.” Learning what nuclear weapons could do was so horrible, so terrible, that we’ve gone 80 years without using them again. It’s definitely a Rubicon that no one dares cross lightly, and to prevent them from falling into the hands of those who would is considered universally justified, like the bombing of the Iranian facilities.
I think the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are martyrs to the idea that these weapons should never be used again. That gives their deaths meaning. It’s not enough for them, but it could be for us.
Historically, there is much discussion about the decision to drop the bomb. The Pro bomb postition speculates on the casualty count among the American forces, and the effect on the Japanese of a prolonged ground war.
I don’t know about those things.
I do know that my Dad was a crew member on a USN Attack Transport, and assigned to the boat crews. He suffered a ‘minor injury’ at Okinawa. I am very grateful that he did not have to make the landing in Japan. (Incidentally, due to the corruption of a local board, headed by Mother’s former father-in-law, he was drafted at an age of 30+, with three children. Either should have exempted him. But, he served.)
I am also grateful that my older cousin, who survived a tour with the 8th Air Force over Europe, (and took me for my first airplane ride post-war) did not have to fly the missions he was poised to fly over Japan.
Clearly, the effects of the Atomic bombs were startling. Sometimes lost in debate is that the destruction and death from prolonged bombing attacks on cities such as Dresden and Tokyo were on a par.
Oldflyer…yes, it’s interesting that there has been so much less attention to the conventional bombings of Hamburg, Toyko, Dresden, etc…part of it is due, I think, to the black-magic nature of the nuclear weapons.
There is a German movie about Dresden which I think is very good. I reviewed it here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59058.html
the crux of it, was that nagasaki and hiroshima, which were military bases, were the last targets to be bombed, alperovitz makes a point that Kyoto, the old Imperial capitol, was not touched for sentimental reasons, on the part of Stimson who had honey mooned there many years before,
since then Lemay as with Bomber Harris on the European front, have been painted as monsters, for Dresden among other targets but as Sherman put it ‘War is Hell’ Eisenhower made similar remarks in his later life, there were honorable Japanese officers like Yamashita, who were scapegoated by MacArthur and others like Prince Chiribuchi, who was party to the Nanking massacre, who were never held accountable, because of their connection to the Meiji dynasts,
yes distance obscures the raw pain of the event, look at that letter from Bin Laden, that tracked on tiktok not that long ago,
I ran into an interesting argument that most of Russia’s current nuclear weapons are likely duds.
RUS Yearly Military Budget — $149 billion
US Yearly Military Budget — $849 billion
US Yearly Budget Nuclear Weapons — $95 billion
Such weapons need frequent, expensive maintenance. It seems certain that Russia is cutting corner on its nukes.
Furthermore, we learned in the Ukraine War how poorly much Russian military equipment worked. There is a lot of corruption in Russian defense procurement. Who knows how much money for Russian nukes ended up in someone’s pockets?
I tried to put the contemporary (that is, WWII-era) perspective on it when I did a novel about the experiences of two women at that time. I have gotten rather weary of just doing the sober totting up of what was going on at the time, what was possible – and what the horrific casualties would have been, if the Bomb hadn’t forced the Japanese to surrender.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/74732.html
Oldflyer, David Foster, you must not hang out with any Germans. They mention Dresden often and have all the statistics memorized. And Americans’ treatment of natives (“the Indians”) is a common topic they surface for discussion.
huxley,
For decades I have assumed the same. What are the odds the Russians are keeping all those weapons in sound, working order and how many were even built to function successfully from the start? Of course, even if it’s less than half one doesn’t want to find out.
they really shouldn’t speak of rope, where theres still a hanging, but you know old habits die hard, like the IG Farben heir in that flotilla,
had they been able to incinerate London, they would have, Coventry was a close equivalent, they certainly tried with the V1 and V2 bombers,
@huxley: Important to check your Russian budget figures to see that they are PPP adjusted, because the currency conversion method would be misleading, scale of prices is very different in Russia. I don’t know if your numbers are or not. For Russia the difference between nominal and PPP is a factor of 3, and for the EU it’s a factor of 1.5.
I’ve been pointing out the smallness of the Russian military budget relative to Europe here for some time now. Russian military spends more on what you might call guns and butter, rather than family leave, child care, and sex reassignment surgery than Western militaries do but even so the level of spending is not even close. Russia hawks retreat to % of GDP figures to obscure this difference. But to the extent that EU NATO members divert military spending to frivolous uses, it’s a revealed preference of how seriously they actually take Russia, as opposed to their rhetoric.
Using one source (SIPRI) just for apples and oranges, 2024:
Russia: $149 B
European NATO: $454 B
Assuming these are not PPP adjusted, I estimate these would restate to $450 B for Russia and $680 B for European NATO. (US is about $1000 B, with PPP adjustment being 1 by definition.)
I too have wondered if and how many Russian nuclear weapons still work and also wondered how many of ours still do. It’s the the kind of thing that the logic of deterrence forbids too much public discussion of, or nuclear war becomes winnable and countries can nuke each other a bit.
Really there’s only one way to find out. And then we’re in one of two outcomes: Crapsack World where countries nuke each other a little sometimes, or Meme Heaven.
There is a possible third equilibrium that chemical weapons have landed in, where they exist and have been used some but are almost never used now. The three big nuclear powers probably can’t explore that equilibrium because their stockpiles are too large.
one nuke will ruin your day, now Russian strategic theory has been very flexible about the deployment of tactical nukes, this was noted in the war plans uncovered in the event of a thrust into Western Europe, to my recollection neither British nor
the French Force de Frappe, really incorporated these elements, they have some 6,000 nuclear weapons even 1% would make a big dent
and consideing who was recently in charge of our nuclear stockpiles I wouldn’t be so sanguine on this score, either
Medvedev’s bluster not withstanding in recent days,
@miguel cervantes:they certainly tried with the V1 and V2 bombers,
Not really, that was a stunt. The resources expended relative to delivered load of explosives was absurd. I mean, they killed people. But the V2 had a 1000Kg warhead. Takes 18 or so to match one B-17. They built 3000 V2s.
For context, Coventry on one night was attacked with 500 or so bombers, each good for about 6000 kg. In a single raid, that’s as much as all the V2s.
Sped up the US space program a bit though.
The big Kodak flash in the sky!
Quite a few years ago, one of my Chicago Boyz colleagues wrote about the increasing attacks on the morality of America’s participation in WWII:
“The overall leftist goal is to make the Allies and the Nazis moral equivalents. That program is well advanced. Delegitimizing the Allies is a way to delegitimize the United States and its military. If World War II, the “good war” was a holocaust and an atrocity, there is nothing of value in the American past, and the American regime is real, existing Third Reich, today, that has to be reformed out of existence to atone for its crimes. That’s the goal. Also, by making the poor Germans and Japanese victims of a holocaust, the Jews are rendered just one more victim group, and the legitimacy of Israel is undermined. That’s a goal, too.”
I don’t think this is a conscious goal on the part of most leftists (“progressives,” to call them what they generally call themselves)but it is an implicit consequence of the way that many of them think–and I’m afraid that there are quite a few for whom it is a conscious goal.
Also:
“This discussion proves my larger point, that two generations of Leftist indoctrination have left people in a state of intellectual damage. The typical American under age 40 or so really cannot discern the difference between a brutal, shameless, overt tyranny rounding up and slaughtering its own civilians and embarking on wars of conquest, using ruthless and lawless means and indiscriminately slaughtering civilians in the process (the Nazis) and the countries that were assailed by these people, who did not seek war, some of whom were democracies, who had to be dragged into it, and who finally responded with increasing levels of force, to try to destroy the tyranny and force it to give up, which it refused to do even when it was clearly beaten.”
and
“Reagan in his final message to the American people said that his greatest fear was the loss of historical memory among the American people.
The enemy has won this battle. For now.”
What I find particularly alarming is that this is now not just a phenomenon on the Left, we’re seeing it quite often among some who identify with the Right.
The Paul Fussell essay is here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kzb22Hz7NMoH-A5uj3RhIJXGj2867cZ0/view
@David Foster:one of my Chicago Boyz colleagues wrote about the increasing attacks on the morality of America’s participation in WWII:
“The overall leftist goal is to make the Allies and the Nazis moral equivalents….
That may be, or may not be, but there has a been a lot of whitewash applied to WWII, as the linked Paul Russell essay describes. There are some people who want to try to understand what actually happened, and yes, they are going to scrape some of it off.
No amount of whitewash removal makes the Western Allies as bad as the Axis. The Soviet Union is quite a different matter. The deal with the devil that resulted in Allied victory put us–we and Western Europe–under the yoke of a self-perpetuating elite in government and industry that has been picking our pockets and running things to suit itself ever since, and it put Eastern Europe and Asia under something much worse than Nazis for much longer than the Nazis lasted.
The Left’s motive to denigrate the Western allies may have been to make Communism look better by comparison perhaps, but mostly to perpetuate their own power in their own way today. The huge expansion of government and military following WWII was very good for the Left, and they are always lamenting the loss of “unity” that follows a war and always looking for a “moral equivalent”–because they wish to be in charge of that unity to remake society as they wish, without the restrictions of peacetime. And the comparison of Republicans to Hitler began, from what I can tell, in 1948–they simultaneously invoke Hitler as a boogeyman and then call everybody they disagree with another Hitler. On Instapundit today I see a Texas Dem comparing redistricting to the Holocaust and Don Lemon nodding along. Clearly it’s lost all meaning for them, it’s just some handy feces for the blue monkeys to fling at the red monkeys.
For others, there are lots of people who follow a “false in one thing, false in everything” heuristic and when they see some of that WWII whitewash get removed, they erroneously conclude that it is whitewash all the way down. I think this is what operates on the Right (to the extent that it DOES operate on the Right, which is in my opinion greatly exaggerated). They see that there have been lies, and that their cultural enemies have propagated and benefited from those lies. From there it is a very easy step to decide that it’s all been lies all along invented by their enemies to serve their enemies’ purpose. It’s not less wrong than what goes on on the Left, but it’s wrong in a different way for a different reason.
The people who complain about the use of the bomb are the same people who celebrate the deaths of Americans.
We are still working through the inventory of Purple Hearts produced in anticipation of the invasion of Japan.
Keep this in mind when listening to the Leftists spout off.
A WWII invasion of Japan would have resulted in far more Japanese deaths than the estimates of American deaths. Saipan demonstrated the then Japanese fight to the death culture. Modern Israel’s history has repeatedly demonstrated that anything less than a complete defeat with an unconditional surrender, simply allows the enemy to regroup and live to fight another day.
I’m like Oldflyer; my father was in a Navy aerial patrol squadron operating out of a seadrome off Okinawa when the bomb was dropped. If it hadn’t been I might not be here. And don’t forget there are also a lot of Japanese who might not be here today either.
Oldflyer and North of the One O One bring out the old arguments, which apply to me and I am entirely in support of. Both father and father in law would have been sent and likely I or my husband would not be here. Hard to argue with that.
But the thing that really stands out to me at this distance, and people the world over should remember, is this; ‘Don’t piss America off.’
I think people forget how deeply angry we were at Pearl Harbor, 4 years of war, and how Japanese atrocities had exhausted all sympathy for that country. And whatever – WHATEVER – it took to bring an end to it was justified.
People forget, we crossed a freezing river at night to kill the British while they slept.
On Christmas!
Our patience is long, but not endless.
People forget, we crossed a freezing river at night to kill the British while they slept.
On Christmas!
For some reason this made me think of “David Clayton.” 🙂
I don’t understand why we thought we needed to invade Japan. It could not feed itself and the US navy completely controlled the waters around Japan. We could have starved them.
Operation Starvation, the aerial mining of Japanese waters by B-29.
“ After the war, the commander of Japan’s mine sweeping operations noted that he thought this mining campaign could have directly led to the defeat of Japan on its own had it begun earlier. Similar conclusions were reached by American analysts who reported in July 1946 in the Strategic Bombing Survey that it would have been more efficient to combine the United States’ effective anti-shipping submarine effort with land- and carrier-based air power to strike harder against merchant shipping and begin a more extensive aerial mining campaign earlier in the war. This would have starved Japan, forcing an earlier end to the war.”
Yeah, starving the whole nation slowly and painfully to death would have been much more humane, and no one would be criticizing us for it nowadays.
Sorry for the tone – I’m a bit tired today.
… we crossed a freezing river at night to kill the British while they slept.
On Christmas!
Technically not Brits, but Hessians (German mercenaries hired by the British).
Thanks for the historical reminder, Molly Brown!
@Selfy:Hessians (German mercenaries hired by the British).
Technically they were auxiliaries and not mercenaries–“mercenaries” is American propaganda–and about a 1/3 weren’t even Hessian. The distinction is that they were part of a foreign army sent as a unit by one country to fight for another country. It was their country that was hired, not the soldiers individually; they were paid just as British soldiers were. “Hessians” were regular soldiers in the armies of the German principalities they came from.
One should also add the British Royal family‘s direct connection to the (German) House of Hanover, of which George III was also Duke and Prince-elector before becoming King (called George I) in 1814.
(From the Wikipedia entry on George III.)
@Barry Meislin:George III was also Duke and Prince-elector before becoming King
Victoria was unable to inherit the throne of Hannover, so the personal union ended in 1837 and her uncle Ernest Augustus, fifth son of George III, inherited Hannover.
spiked has long-read article out on Hiroshima, putting forth the argument that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary because the Japanese were going to surrender soon enough anyway.
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The shock, awe and terror of Hiroshima
…Eighty years on, amid mounting geopolitical conflict between nuclear powers, it is worth asking what drove America to do something that no other nation had done before or has done since – deploy a nuclear weapon.
The argument that the Bomb shortened the war and therefore saved lives is a familiar one. But it’s been disputed, even by many US militarists, including Paul Nitze and his colleagues on the government’s Strategic Bombing Survey. They declared that ‘certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped… even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated’.
Their view was supported by America’s top military commander, General Douglas MacArthur, who had always opposed the use of atomic bombs. He held that Japan would surrender ‘by 1 September at the latest and perhaps even sooner’. Dwight Eisenhower, president from 1953 until 1961, declared the bombings ‘completely unnecessary’. Top brass Chester Nimitz and William Leahy and even the rabid US airforce general Curtis LeMay thought the same, with LeMay saying: ‘The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.’
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/06/the-shock-awe-and-terror-of-hiroshima/
_________________________________
I’m not so sure.
@huxley:I’m not so sure.
No one at the time was so sure, and none of the people from whom they have cherry-picked quotes were infallible. They had to make hard decisions in real time with limited information, unlike people who’ve had 80 years to read about it.
The 15 – 20 million Chinese civilians murdered by the Japanese weren’t killed by nuclear weapons. Japan got off relatively lightly.
It’s Enola Gay Pride Day!
Just for the record in re the debate over other options, David Foster’s post on the bombing led to this essay by Paul Fussell, laying out the facts-on-hand at the time, and the state of mind among the American leaders and people.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kzb22Hz7NMoH-A5uj3RhIJXGj2867cZ0/view
It should be noted that the US dropped leaflets on Hiroshima urging people to evacuate.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/warning-leaflets/
As for starvation, the Japanese were already beginning to starve, but they showed no signs of surrendering. Even after the bombs were dropped, the top brass still wanted to fight it out, and only the personal intervention of the Emperor convinced them to surrender. The US bought food to feed the Japanese, and narrowly averted a famine.
So, should the bombs have been dropped?
Yes.
Unfortunately, there weren’t any good options: sometimes the only thing you can do is choose the least bad one. President Truman chose the one that would save the most American lives, as he was obligated to do Commander in Chief. It was a terrible way, but it was the least bad option.