Thoughts on Nagasaki Day

My mother served as a WAC — Women’s Army Corps — in General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo during the Korean War, and she came to know the Japanese people, inasmuch as that was possible for a white woman who didn’t speak Japanese, in the early 1950s. She met and married my father there, so I’m pretty grateful for all of that; without the Korean War, I wouldn’t exist!

Mom didn’t really discuss her life in Tokyo that much. She was one of hundreds of WACs who typed up letters to the families of servicemen killed in action, and she did tell me that she could not refer to the “Korean War”, but only the “Korean conflict” or “Korean Police Action.”

But one point that she made several times was that we should not have used the atomic bomb. Rather, she said we should have detonated it in Tokyo Bay, a demonstration shot as it were, to show the Japanese what could happen to them if they didn’t surrender. The problem with that argument, though I didn’t make it at the time, was that we only had two atomic bombs at the time. What if it had failed?

Today being the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, I’ve seen several things on Twitter claiming that it was immoral to use the atomic bomb, shouldn’t have ever been done, you get the idea.

But the military’s estimates of American casualties, had we needed to actually invade Honshu were staggering. “Casualty estimates for American forces ranged from 220,000 to several million, and estimates of Japanese military and civilian casualties ran from the millions to the tens of millions.” And I am stuck on one point: President Harry Truman’s job was to finish and win the war with the fewest American casualties as he could. Japanese casualties should not have been that great a concern for him.

We can’t really know how the invasion would have gone, had it been necessary to carry it out. But the two atomic bombings killed far fewer Japanese than the projections in the proposed invasion. The exact figures will never be known, but estimates have between 150,000 and 246,000 dead due to the bombings by the end of 1945.

The United States Army Air Force had already been bombing Japan’s home islands for months. When high-altitude precision bombing failed to be as effective as hoped, Major General Curtis LeMay switched tactics over to low-level incendiary fire-bombing raids. Operation Meetinghouse, the firebombing of Tokyo, on March 9-10, 1945 killed an estimated 100,000 people, more than the upper end of the deaths in Nagasaki, and more than the lower end of Hiroshima bombing estimated deaths. The bombing campaign killed far more Japanese without the two atomic bombs than were killed using them.

I can see how some have argued that it was simply immoral to use the two atomic bombs, but that raises the obvious question: is it somehow more moral to kill the enemy using conventional or incendiary bombs?

The simple fact is that Japan started the war in the Pacific. We tend to see it as having started with the surprise attack on Pearl harbor, on December 7, 1941, but war had been raging in the Pacific long before that, since Japan’s invasion of Manchuria on September 18, 1931, and continued sporadically after that, as Nationalist Chinese forces kept trying to recapture the area. The massacres by the Japanese following the Battles of Shanghai and Nanjing occurred in 1937, before World War II broke out in Europe. At some point, it had to be held that the total defeat of Japan under its military-dominated government had to happen.

War is a terrible, terrible thing, and no one should ever want war. But there were those who did want war, from Adolf Hitler to Hideki Tojo, who saw war as a means to strengthen and enrich their countries as well as to dominate and defeat their perceived enemies. I have mocked, in other fora, those calling for a ceasefire in Gaza as being the equivalent of people saying, in January of 1945, ‘OK, we’ve expelled all of the German forces from the countries they attacked, so let’s stop the war, now, to avoid killing any more innocent German civilians.’ It’s easier for Americans to understand that such would have meant the survival of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi henchmen, and the concentration camps which were in Germany proper, an intolerable situation. Americans have less of a grasp of Japanese politics at the time, but allowing the military government to survive would have been just as intolerable.

Even after the bombing of Nagasaki, many in the Japanese government did not want to surrender.

Finally, at 2 A.M. August 10, 1945, Prime Minister Admiral Baron Kantaro Suzuki respectfully begged His Imperial Majesty Hirohito to make a decision. Hirohito did not hesitate, “…I do not desire any further destruction of cultures, nor any additional misfortune for the peoples of the world. On this occasion, we have to bear the unbearable.” The emperor had spoken.

Unfortunately antisurrender sentiment and objections from much of the Japanese military was widespread. Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, founder of the kamikazes, argued the Japanese “would never be defeated if we were prepared to sacrifice 20,000,000 Japanese lives in a ‘special attack’ effort.” He later committed suicide rather than surrender.

Hirohito was determined. Against all precedent, the emperor himself convened an Imperial Conference and at noon on August 15, 1945, announced Japan’s surrender. The war was over.

In 1945, only the United States had the atomic bomb. In April of 1949, the Western allies signed the North Atlantic Treaty, to protect the European democracies from the feared Soviet invasion, pledging that an attack on one was an attack on all, and the American nuclear umbrella as the major deterrent. At the time, it was estimated that it would take the USSR five more years to develop an atomic bomb.

It actually took just four more months.

The atomic bombs could be used to end the war in the Pacific because no one other than the US had them. Now, eighty years later, several countries, including a couple, North Korea and Pakistan, which cannot be counted on as anything but unreliable, one governed by Islamists and the other by a crackpot dictatorial family. Russia has not just nuclear weapons, but the world’s largest strategic nuclear arsenal. If nuclear weapons are ever used again, we cannot count on the usage being stopped, but have to fear continued escalation, an escalation which could end all of civilization.
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