22 May 2001
The controversy over whether we needed to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always cast a shadow over our country. As the only nation to use these weapons in anger, the USA is an easy target for finger pointing and second-guessing by revisionist historians and those with an axe to grind about nuclear weapons and power. In our victim obsessed nation it is not surprising to find that Japan has been cast as the oppressed minority with the USA portrayed as an evil despoiler of different cultures. A look at the actual situation at the time of the bombing shows that, not only was it necessary, it was ultimately a moral choice compared to the alternatives.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941, the United States declared war on the Empire of Japan. On September 2nd 1945 the formal signing of the documents of surrender took place. During the long years between these two dates the United States, China and the British Empire fought a horrific war against the Japanese army and navy from one end of the Pacific Ocean to the eastern borders of India. The early stages of the war saw the advent of the carrier-borne aircraft as the decisive element of naval warfare. The first months were spent trying to find and sink the other side's aircraft carriers and thus cripple his fleet. After the Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk during the Battle of Midway in June of 1942 the initiative changed hands and the war became one of attrition rather than maneuver. This war of attrition was characterized by having Allied troops assault one Japanese held island after the other, each a fortress held by fanatical defenders dedicated to defeating the enemy or dying in the attempt as the ancient Japanese code of Bushido demanded.
One of the reasons that the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan was to avoid the need of an invasion of the Japanese home islands. American casualties in the attrition of the Japanese held islands in the Pacific had been very high and there was no reason to expect an invasion of Japan to be any easier. In fact just the opposite was to be expected if the previous two campaigns against the Japanese held islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were an example. An idea of the tenacity of the Japanese defenders can be seen from the following statistics. The battle of Iwo Jima took from mid-February 1945 until late March, during these five weeks the 20,700 Japanese defenders were killed at the cost of 6,800 US Marines dead and 20,000 wounded. The conquest of Okinawa from April 1st 1945 until late June cost the lives of 83,000 Japanese defenders and killed 12,500 US Marines and wounded 35,500 more. In both cases very few Japanese were taken alive, either by choosing to commit seppuku or ritual suicide, rather than surrender or due to a reticence on the part of the Marines to take prisoners. Simply extrapolating these figures provides us with an inkling of what an invasion of the main Japanese islands would have entailed. The Japanese nation had 80 million citizens, most of who were, in theory, prepared to fight against the invaders, with spears and bows and arrows if need be (Coox 88). Even taking a conservative percentage of, say 10%, we would still have 800,000 people willing to do their duty and fight to the last bamboo spear. Using the same casualty ratio as the fighting on Okinawa, we can assume US casualties of around 120,000 dead and perhaps three times that number wounded. It is unlikely that the Allies would have the political will to take such losses; after all they had been fighting for many years at this point. And surely the conservative estimate of 800,000 Japanese killed makes the 210,000 killed in the two atomic blasts pale in comparison. If looked at purely in terms of the possible lives saved, the choice to drop the atomic bombs was clearly the least costly.
During the summer of 1945 the government of Japan was slowly coming to the realization that they were going to lose the war. However, there was a large "hawkish" faction among the military that advocated a final, apocalyptic stand rather than surrender. Even after the atomic bombs had been dropped there was an attempted coup d'etat by the pro-war faction to convince the Emperor to ignore the advice of the "doves" in the cabinet (Coox 134-139). Once discovered, the members of the coup attempt committed suicide, and the decision to surrender went ahead as planned. Without the shock that the use of the two atomic bombs caused, would there have been the will to resist these hawks in their attempt to bring about a final battle? It was only after the atomic bombs were used that the Emperor stepped in and took an active role in the proceedings in the Japanese Cabinet. Prior to this he had been required by tradition to refrain from getting involved in the actual discussions that made policy, his role was to simply "rubber-stamp" the decisions of the cabinet, as a god he was expected to be above human politics (Butow 167). Without the Emperor, who was literally considered divine, throwing his active weight behind the decision to surrender it seems unlikely that the peace proponents would have had the strength to stand up to the pro-war faction. The fact that there was an attempted coup even at this late date in the war does not support claims that Japan was looking for a way to surrender honorably. Perhaps certain members of the government, including the Emperor, sought a way to surrender with dignity, but the armed forces, who had advocated starting the war, were still thinking in terms of a "draw" with the Allies, which would be moral victory for the Japanese (Toland 936). Only fear of the imminent death of the Emperor moved the "doves" to risk arrest or assassination at the hands of the military (Butow 193). Without the threat of further atomic bombs being dropped, the "doves" may never had the courage to get the Emperor to speak out in favor of peace.
Shortly after midnight on August 9th 1945 the Soviet Union invaded Japanese controlled Manchuria (Glantz 79). The Japanese Kwantung Army that was tasked with the defense of Manchuria was woefully unprepared for the type of war that the Soviets brought to them. The Soviets attacked with complete strategic surprise and ripped through the Japanese defenses in true blitzkrieg fashion. In the course of a single month the Soviets conquered Manchuria, northern Korea and had taken the Kurile Islands, which were parts of the Japanese homeland (Glantz xvii). If the Japanese had not surrendered at the time they did, with an atomic Sword of Damocles hanging over them, it is possible that the Soviet Union would have taken all of China and Korea and possibly initiated an invasion of Japan herself. Such a situation would have been disastrous for the post-war balance of power, and would have made it difficult to prevent all of Asia from becoming communist. Only by dropping the atomic bombs were the Japanese forced to accept the unconditional surrender that the Allies required of them.
One of the arguments used by those who were against the dropping of the atomic bombs is that in July of 1945 the Japanese government was seeking to have the USSR act as a mediator between themselves and the western Allies (Coox 112). However, the fact is that the USSR was, in July of 1945, already in the final stages of preparing to declare war on Japan and invade Japanese Manchuria and Korea. To accept the idea that the Soviets would have put this undertaking on hold if only the western powers had agreed to let them mediate is naive in light of post-war Soviet activities in Eastern Europe.
The blast that destroyed Hiroshima killed 80,000 people instantly and a further 60,000 by the end of the year had died from radiation effects or burns. The bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki killed 40,000 people in the fireball and 30,000 more by the end of the year (Krieger). During the first five months of 1945 Japan was struck by 17,000 American aircraft and lost over 214,000 people to conventional explosives and firebombing (Coox 35). Surely the dead were no less dead having been killed by conventional explosives or fire. Yet these bombings were evidently not enough to convince the Japanese military that it was beaten. Only when confronted with the possible obliteration of the Emperor by an atomic weapon were they willing to concede.
The tendency of today's revisionist historians to re-cast the Japanese as the victims of "Imperialist aggression" is exemplified in this description of Japanese war aims taken from the Smithsonian Institute's Enola Gay exhibit, "For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism" (Nobile 20). This sort of whitewashing of the truth is misleading in several ways. First, the Japanese had instigated the war, first by invading China in 1937 and perpetrating horrific war crimes upon the Chinese people and second by attacking US and Allied bases and possessions in the Pacific. Second, it could be argued that all wars are fought to defend a unique culture, for what culture is not unique? Perhaps for guilt-ridden westerners, only non-white cultures are given the privilege of being "unique". It could easily be argued that Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy were unique cultures, yet to defend either of those regimes is to be considered a dangerous fringe element. Or further, perhaps we should say, "for most Americans, it was a war to defend their unique western culture against Eastern imperialism", which would be accurate, yet not politically correct.
The idea that the atomic bombs were only used against Japan out of some racist preference for incinerating Asians also does not hold much water. Germany, Italy and Rumania were bombed mercilessly by the US and Britain during the final three years of the war. The German city of Dresden was firebombed out of existence and it contained no real military targets. It was fairly well known that the Japanese mistreated their prisoners, an example would be the Baatan Death March where Allied POW's were forced to march for several days without adequate food or medical attention while any stragglers were shot or bayoneted. This sort of activity leads to a spiral of reciprocal atrocities, as each side begins to see the taking of prisoners as undesirable. This was very common in the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union, and the western Allies were unlikely to take members of the German SS prisoner because the SS had a reputation for shooting Allied POW's. As this shows, racism is not a prerequisite for the willingness to commit acts of violence on ones fellow men.
Once it was seen that atomic weapons were awful in their power and destructive ability, they, like poison gas, were banned from warfare as being too terrible. This is as it should be, since the nuclear weapon of today makes the Hiroshima bomb look a child's toy in comparison. Without the knowledge of what the bombs would accomplish when used against a city, it is certainly likely that they may have been used in a general war between the communists and the west. Unfettered by the fear of just such a holocaust, Cold War tensions would have no doubt turned to direct conflict, with disastrous consequences. Perhaps in a way, the bombing was necessary to see the danger in using such weapons, an X-ray of Pandora's Box in a sense. But ultimately, the dropping of the atomic bombs probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives, both Allied and Japanese. If this would have been preferable to using atomic weapons, one has to ask, why? By what measure would the deaths of possibly millions and the destruction of the Japanese homeland been a better choice than the two bombs. The atomic bombs that destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the exclamation points that marked the end of a horrible and brutal war that was started by fascist nations and brought to its end by those they sought to defeat.
Works Sited
Butow, Robert. Japan's Decision to Surrender. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1959
Coox, Alvin. Japan, the Final Agony. New York: Ballantine, 1970
Glantz, David. August Storm: The Soviet 1945 Strategic Offensive in Manchuria. Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute, 1983
Krieger, David. "Nuremberg and Nuclear Weapons." The Nuclear Files. Date unknown. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. 09 April 2001 <http://www.nuclearfiles.org/ethics/nuremberg/nurembergandnuclearweapons.html >
Toland, John. The Rising Sun. New York: Random, 1970
Nobile, Philip, ed. Judgement at the Smithsonian. New York: Marlowe, 1995