Such distinctions continue to hold a place in American foreign policy. While there is still an artificial genetic differentiation, religious bigotry is again in play ('Christian' v. 'Muslim') as it was in 1942-45 ('Christian' v. 'Shinto' / 'Buddhist' / others ...) as a foil to block the economic justification for taking from those who 'aren't like US!' A couple of WWII veterans of the Pacific War who would have been personally affected by Operation Downfall — the invasion of the Japanese homelands — still felt it necessary to make amends for the atomic bombings which happened instead of the traditional massive invasion, thus saving their lives to be able to make apologies.
It wasn't just Japanese who suffered from the Bomb - among the Nagasaki dead were American POWs.
Some believe to this day that without these bombs, Japan wouldn't have surrendered, and would have fought to the last person when invaded. I wasn't there, so I can't say who was right. But I can defer to some who were there to tell their story — an Army Air Force chaplain and a US Marine (slated to participate in the invasion of the Japanese homeland).
In Nijyuu Hibaku (Twice Bombed, Twice Survived: The Double Atomic Bomb Victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), by director Hidetaka Inazuka, seven survivors who lived through both atomic bombs recount their experiences. These people suffered the terror of an atomic blast, not once, but twice. For a long time, no one noticed that such double-bombing victims existed. There is no good excuse for this oversight, as Robert Trumbull wrote Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki, published in 1957 by Charles E. Tuttle Company of Tokyo, Japan, from data gathered during the 1950 census conducted by the Atomic Bomb Commission. The only logical explanation for this 'ignorance' is that the Japanese government didn't want to acknowledge that some of its wartime citizens got to experience Hell twice.
Was there another option? Was there another reason? According to this article, the answer to both questions is: YES. So why was the Bomb dropped on Hiroshima?
British scientist P.M.S. Blackett suggested (Fear, War, and the Bomb), that the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war against Japan; the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan. In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was "the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia."
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Dave Nalle
Wow, Realist. This really is a festering pile of...well, I can't even really say what it's a pile of.
But just to set your mind at rest, if that last choice is all we've got I'll go with the 'with us or against us' option, because to be with us is to be for liberty and civilization and to be against us is to be for oppression and a new dark age.
Dave
2 - STM
I heard a great quote recently from one of the people who'd been on the Enola Gay.
It was along the lines of: "No, I was less worried about the people who got killed than I was about all the ones who didn't get killed because we used the bomb". The argument was right, if madly flawed ... less died because of it, but either way, lots of people were going to be killed. What a testement to the insanity of war.
Propaganda, though? Nup. Nil. Nada. Japan's rulers dragged it into a war of aggression and waged it with the utmost brutality.
It's like Germans voicing their anger about the British bombing the shit out of Cologne and Hamburg and Dresden. While I don't agree with it, my feeling is, if Hitler and a more-than-willing German people hadn't given the world a hot foot for the second time in just over 20 years, none of it would have happened in the first place.
The same applies to Japan's wars of aggression. Tragic, but if any Germans or Japanese are still asking "why" after all these years, the answer is still to be had by looking in the mirror.
3 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Realist,
You may well be right about the ultimate motive in using the atom bomb to bring Japan to its knees quickly - as an act to prevent Russia from gaining a foothold in Japan. But, more importantly, it saved a million American military casualties and saved Japan from the suicidal impulses of its military.
The Japanese still have not looked their own sins in the face, and because of this their own sins are being visited upon them - instead of using Korean women for whores, Japanese girls are lining up themselves to be whores in the sick pornographic society that Japan has become.
These are issues that you ignore in an unfortunate attempt to condemn intelligent men for having to take painful decisions to save lives.
Roosevelt saved you and the rest of the United States from the Nazi jackboot. Truman had the guts to take hard decisions to save the soldiers of his country - he had been one, you know.
These are things you discount entirely. Perhaps reading A Man Named Intrepid once or twice would cure you of this foolishness...
4 - Doug Hunter
Would you have preferred a longer, more drawn out conflict with more death? You criticise but provide no logical alternative. Ruvy summed it up much more realist-ically (lame pun intended) above.
5 - troll
weaponizing the atom was an act of absolute evil (a troll's gotta draw the line somewhere) from which it is probable that humans will not recover - eof
500,000,000 Or Bust
6 - Dave Nalle
troll. all weapons are made out of atoms, starting with the first sharp rock and pointed stick.
dave
7 - troll
Dave - while I do see a qualitative difference between sticks and stones and split atoms I'll go with you and and allow that it is the tendency to weaponize that is the real problem
8 - bliffle
The Abomb and Hbomb have been very successful at holding off Ultimate War by virtue of their Assured Destruction threat, but at the same time they've provided cover for destructive conventional wars. So I suppose they're a kinda good thing. Well, maybe not good, but better than some other choices.
As for the japanese nation, which seems to think that the history of WW2 begins in August 1945, it had demonstrated such horrors already in it's mad pursuit of power that there was little sentiment at the time for restraining the powerful blow of a big bomb. The japanese nation chose to fight a take-no-prisoners war of brutality in the south pacific which we know scant little of. The veterans of the pacific war are exceedingly reluctant to recount their experiences, partly because of the horror of what they saw, but also because of their explicit war crimes, both witnessed and performed.
We don't know what the pacific war was really like, partly because of silence and partly because of propaganda. Maybe Ken Burns new PBS documentary "The War" will reveal it. If so, i suspect there will be a lot of protest.
The other thing that people forget is that we weren't at all sure we could win in either Europe or the Pacific in those days. It looked pretty bleak: we weren't prepared for war and we had a string of defeats when we started. And then in 1945 it looked like WW2 would morph into a worldwide war with Russia and it's communist pals on an even larger scale.
Desperation and fear are what made Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary and inevitable.
9 - K
"even though the Nazis did evil things on a larger scale than the Japanese"
Wrong, check your facts. This article sounds like a high school student wrote it.
10 - Alec
RE: Sixty years ago today, the ultimate act of terrorism...
Actually, the ultimate act of terrorism began when Hitler embarked on bringing about "a thousand year Reich," and with his allies Japan and Italy attempted to conquer the world.
It also should be noted that the Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb was dropped and some of their generals wanted to keep fighting even after the second bomb had been dropped. They thought that they could still force a negociated settlement and keep part of their conquered territories.
Dropping the atomic bombs may have been terrible, but so were the alternatives.
11 - Sean
The Japanese also had atomic weapons. Recently declassified reports conclusively show that the Japanese military successfully detonated at least one atomic bomb.
Would it matter to you if they had nuked US targets first?
12 - Dr Dreadful
Sean,
Would you care to cite that?
Or did you just make it up out of whole cloth?
13 - bliffle
Nothing has been more mythologized and lied about than the US role in WW2, especially in the pacific.
And it's true that the japanese warlords were unwilling to surrender, even after the second bomb.
14 - duane
Realist is so dead on. Americans showed themselves as terrorists and war criminals in their conduct of WWII. Americans should apologize to Japan for killing all those poor Japanese people with nuclear weapons. Then we should apologize for having the gall to shoot back when Japanese destroyers and battleships were trying to sink the rest of the U.S. Navy. Then we should apologize for getting upset when the Japanese dropped a couple dozen puny bombs on Pearl Harbor. We should apologize to Japan for not playing fair when it came to firebombing raids on big Japanese cities. I would have invited the Japanese high command to set up an airbase on Catalina Island so they could drop bombs on our big cities, too. That would have shown the world that, when it comes to total war, we're nothing if not good sports. We acted like big bullies.
And that "... day that will live in infamy" stuff. Woooh, boy! There's some rabble-rousing for ya. Racism, plain and simple, dressed up as righteous indignation.
I feel so ashamed that we consciously tried to get the upper hand on the Germans, and especially the Japanese. Just show me where in the battle manuals it says that you should try to devastate your opponents to get them to stop shooting at you. I'm sure that the manuals would say, "Always bring a knife to a knife fight. If you show up with a gun, that's just cheating."
Realist, your moniker is perfect. You've really captured the real essence of the reality of a realistic war.
Sean (#11), no way. The Japanese government would never have permitted their peace-loving scientists to dirty their hands working on weapons.
15 - Baronius
So this is what it feels like to agree with Bliffle. OK, halfway. I think he's overstating (or overimplying) wrong behaviour on the part of the Allies. But there's no doubt that Japan was the aggressor, more racially motivated than the Allies, and more willing to kill Japanese civilians. They were masters of the human shield.
A few people commented on the Japanese willingness to keep fighting. There was even an attempted coup against the Emperor when he decided to surrender.
If Bush takes nuclear weapons seriously, we'll be obliterating Iranian weapons and research sites soon.
16 - STM
There are many thousands of former POWs of the Japanese and Pacific war veterans in Australia who experienced first hand the brutality of the Japanese, some of whom I've spoken to over the years and who would be more than keen to dispel any myths that we engaged in any form of propaganda in relation to Japan's conduct of the war and the role of the Allies.
My uncle told me that he and many Australians in New Guinea made a pact to fight to the death rather than be captured by the Japanese after finding the hacked up bodies of soldiers who had been tied to trees and tortured before being executed. Simply, the alternative was too horrible to contemplate.
The POWs captured in the early campaigns have another story to tell ... shocking tales of brutality, too many to list.
Like I say, if any Japanese are looking for the real reasons for the US dropping the atomic bomb, the answer will be found by looking in the mirror. Perhaps the real story here is that Japan has never faced up to its real role in WWII and continues to gloss over it, even rewriting the history books to ignore the war crimes and brutalities.
You'll read plenty about the atom bomb, but nothing about the other stuff.
Shameful. And it's not us who should be ashamed.
17 - Clavos
"There are many thousands of former POWs of the Japanese"
A neighbor of mine at the marina was one. He died a couple of years ago, but not before we became friends.
He didn't talk much about it to folks, but one day he and I were trading war stories and he opened up to me about his POW days at the hands of the Japanese.
Some of the experiences he had or observed were truly horrifying.
Using the Bomb was justified and saved lives; certainly American ones, and probably Japanese lives as well.
18 - STM
Yep, bizarre as that notion is, it's true. The Imperial Government had told ALL Japanese citizens, even children, to fight to the death even with pikes, pickaxes and shovels or commit suicide rather than be defeated by the Allies in the homelands. There is no doubt most would have obeyed.
That was what was on the cards, along with the accompanying deaths of probably hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers. In a truly insane way, Japan is probably lucky that it was bombed or there might not be any Japanese left.
What an indictment of the madness of war.
19 - bliffle
STM and Clavos are right: the japanese warriors committed torture and atrocity with much gusto. Certainly against Allied POWs and also against, for example, Chinese civilians. Now we know about the Nanking massacres, which were NOT an aberation, but ordered by the government and executed by a relative of the emperor.
Most soldiers made a vow not to be taken prisoner because they had seen what happened to POWs, certainly on the Bataan Death March. It soon became customary to execute japanese soldiers who were wounded or captured. Allied soldiers casually shot them with carbine or pistol. Can you blame them?
That was the war that the japanese nation wanted and the way they acted. Take no prisoners. Give no quarter. Fight to the death.
Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
A lesson that would be well observed by certain high officials in any presidential administration.
20 - bliffle
STM: "Japan is probably lucky that it was bombed or there might not be any Japanese left."
Indeed, William Styron once reported that his Japanese friend, upon learning of Hiroshima, said "we are saved".
21 - STM
Duane: "I feel so ashamed that we consciously tried to get the upper hand on the Germans, and especially the Japanese. Just show me where in the battle manuals it says that you should try to devastate your opponents to get them to stop shooting at you. I'm sure that the manuals would say, "Always bring a knife to a knife fight. If you show up with a gun, that's just cheating."
Mate, that is absolute gibber.
22 - Clavos
I think it was sarcasm, Stan...
23 - STM
Really? :) Moi bad ...
24 - Andy Marsh
After reading this all I can ask is where do you get off calling yourself Realist? Maybe you can go to Japan and help them write history text books. There's about as much truth in them as is in this article when it comes to WWII history.
Holy fuck...talk about American hating Americans!
25 - troll
if the US' use of the bomb is justified as a 'necessary evil to achieve a greater good' so too will be every use in the future...at least to the people using it - and they're the only ones whose opinion will matter