« The Message Thing by Jim Wallis | Main | A Tale of Two Crawfords »
August 07, 2005
Hiroshima Anniversary: the Aftermath
This 60th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima has brought out a lot of important, and sometimes rancorous, debates. As an educator, I value these things. One the one hand you have those who think Truman was right to end the war with the two existing atomic bombs we had in our arsenal (a third was still in production with an uncertain "ready" date). On the other hand there are those who denounce this mass killing of civilians as a war crime.
The truth is somewhere in between these two extremes. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were categorically not war crimes--both cities were rife with legitimate military and war-production targets. But the destruction of those two cities isn't really what ended the war. The Japanese surrendered primarily to avoid being occupied by Russia, which in a matter of days had obliterated Japan's principal mainland forces in Manchuria.
This debate has gone back and forth among Americans, and the world at large throughout this dark anniversary weekend. The arguments are getting familiar. Opponents of Truman's decision point out that Japan was seeking peace through a couple of different channels. Proponents of the bombing point out that Japan had been doing so for months, but that the war council leading Japan was still dominated by "diehards" who rejected the critical American demand of demilitarizing Japan.
One side points to claims by Secretary of State James Byrnes that part of the reason we bombed Japan was to show a willingness to use this weapon to the Russians. The other side reminds us that the fatalities in Tokyo from one night's conventional bombing raid exceeded the deaths total of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined; and that all three attacks combined killed far fewer people than the Japanese themselves killed in their reprisals against Nanking in 1937.
In all this discussion I am encouraged by two things. First, I think the repetition of this debate each year is great for our country. I think in general I'm seeing more accurate information being passed around to support both sides. You don't hear bombing proponents make the exaggerated claim that the bombing saved "a million American lives" had we needed to invade Japan. I hear from opponents of the bombing far more reliance on historical fact--the political realities of Japan, the partisan and diplomatic calculations of Truman and Byrnes, the economic motivation of using weapons on which millions of dollars had been spent.
The debate, it seems, gets smarter and smarter each year. American citizens care about these matters and they seek to learn more about this vital subject each time we go through this annual ritual. We are citizens of a republic charged by history, for better or worse, with leading the world toward peace and stability. This is exactly the kind of debate our citizens need to have. Altho I'm closer in viewpoint with those who support Truman's decision, I think we have to credit his harsher critics with doing the most to keep this necessary controversy alive and bothersome. Challenging the status quo isn't easy, but it's usually the most patriotic of acts.
Losing sight of human morality is so easy to do in war time. The destruction of Dresden because it was a center of refugee activity, as discussed this summer in an bonechilling article in the Wilson Quarterly, offers a clear example of how immorality can creep oh so quietly into the decision making of war leaders. Morality in war, after all, must often be measured purely by numbers. It is right to send 10,000 to their deaths that 20,000 may survive later. Truman used those brutal mathmatics in 1945 and matters are no different today.
Of course, we do not need sixty year old examples to remind us of how our human values can be twisted and debased in the pursuit of national security. Digital cameras and the bravest of whistle blowers from Abu Ghraib to Gitmo Bay remind us we too are capable of atrocities. So I welcome this Hiroshima debate each year. I hope we never resolve it. I think it keeps us a little more honest; I think it reminds our darker halves of the lines we should not cross.
Mostly I hope that it is a debate in which we never have the chance to update our arguments with more recent examples of moral gray areas. In that, I probably hope for too much. But it is still a hope for a better world that moves us to argue and to care.
Posted by Bucky at August 7, 2005 04:40 AM | Permalink
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.houstondemocrats.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/446
Comments
Dude! What're you doin' up so early?
My wife and I watched the Discovery docu-drama on Hirsoshima last night, followed by the biograph on Hirohito. She was shocked by the similarities to Our Dear Leader.
Neither of us remembered, for example, that one of the reasons the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor was to discourage the United States from attacking them. "Fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em here," was their thinking. (I'd like to hear the Japanese translation of that phrase.) So not just a fatal miscalculation on the part of the Japanese, but the kind of mistake that keeps repeating itself through history. Bush, of course, doesn't read books or newspapers, so how could we expect him to know things like this?
Well, the dumbass could watch the Discovery channel occasionally...
Posted by: PDiddie at August 7, 2005 04:53 AM
Oh, I'm not up this early. This is a cyber robo-Bucky auto-responding to you nightowls who read Democratic subversion in the wee hours. I've given up hoping Mr Bush become an avid reader or even marginally curious about the world outside the bubble. I just wish he'd spend more time reflecting on his favorite political philosopher (a certain Y'shua ben Yushef of Galilee).
Posted by: Bucky at August 7, 2005 05:25 AM
Wow, finally, a reason to post on this generally flea-bit blog. I especially appreciate Bucky's remark about having this discussion every year and learning something each time. I do and have. Thanks, Bucky.
Hardly anything is more written about in modern history than World War I and, yet, stunningly insightful secondary and primary history on the subject was published last year!
I still stand with Truman and Oppenheimer who exhausted the bomb inventory, using both of the different types of device to increase the odds one would work, in order to end the war with Japan before either the US or the USSR had to invade Japan and find out how hard that would be. Remember, our experience in Okinawa, where my Dad was and where very many I have met since were headed to with little more than infantry weapons and training, was terrible.
Some of those as opposed using the two bombs may have been pacifists. Certainly, Oppenheimer and most of the nuclear scientists who knew of and had contributed to its creation were socialists and had probably been pacifists of some sort up until say, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
But, most of those opposed to Truman and Oppie would go on to advocate building the "Super" and using nuclear weapons pre-emptively in counter-force strikes against the Soviet Union. They were not pacifists, they wanted a much larger nuclear war, with the Soviet Union, sooner rather than later.
Oh, and a new generation of the nuclear zealots now rule in Washington. Pacifists are still as uninfluential and disruptive as ever. All they accomplish today is undermining the influence of military-diplomatic realists who might yet restrain bloody-minded fools closer to unchecked power than at any time in our history since 1860.
Please note that far and away the most profound and influential critics of the present wars, opponents of both how we fight "small wars" in Afghanistan and of undertaking the Iraq war at all are orthodox conservatives, not pacifists. They are the renowned military-historical strategists Wm. S. LIND and Martin van CREVELT.
Much of the left-wing critique is self-indulgent and counter-productive. Today, those most effective in restraining the nuclear and other zealots are at Ft. Leavenworth, in the Fourth Generation Warfare Seminar, which is to say around Bill Lind's kitchen table, or in forward operating bases in Iraq or Afghanistan.
If anybody ever gets us out of this damn mess with our republican democracy intact, it will be the likes of MAJ Hackett.
Democrats have to show a robust fitness to govern not just nostalgia for and deference to now mostly mythical "Moderate Republicans".
Posted by: John Robert BEHRMAN at August 7, 2005 08:57 AM
Legitimate targets? Nonsense. We had bombed all the significant Japanese cities into oblivion using conventional armaments; these were the only two cities left and they had food stores warehouses according to the history I have read. Truman wanted assurance that we were going after military targets and the military command gave him that erroneous assurance. These meet the test of war crimes because civilians were the only targets. This creation of the "nuclear age" is the beginning of American Empire. Do you think this fact is lost on those in the middle east who see us as an international parriah?
Posted by: stan merriman at August 8, 2005 01:09 AM