Tomorrow is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Greg Mitchell knows as much about the history and controversy as anybody. Did you know that Douglas MacArthur was never consulted and later said that he saw no military justification for using the bombs?
I didn’t.
re: D-Mac .. it’s interesting .. in light of what he’d say just a few years later when he was Commander in Korea.
No I didn’t, but I did know the war would have ended without it I the US wasn’t obsessed with unconditional surrender. It was a war crime of epic proportions.
Is that so? I thought the consensus was that Japan wouldn’t have surrounded to a ground invasion without a scorched earth campaign w/an incredible amount of casualties. Also, how to get such an intensely militaristic society to surrender except unconditionally?
That’s bullshit. You should educate yourself. Under no circumstances was that a war crime. It was merely a bigger and more effective weapon.
Read about Nanking. That was a war crime. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nothing more than legitimate actions of war, against the party that STARTED THE WAR. Perhaps you have forgotten that.
Do you believe firebombing also to be a legitimate act of war? I do not. I wasn’t aware that another country’s war crimes diminishes our own.
Most especially the firebombing of Dresden.
You have a great ability to find fault with the US and Britain. The firebombing of Dresden was a retaliation for the ongoing bombing of London. I suppose you excuse that?
Depends on what part of the Blitz you’re talking about. The Terror Bombings were almost certainly war crimes, but it was never official state policy to target civilians. And considering Germany started this war of aggression, and if we go by Nuremberg — which was decided by the victor — it obviously was a war crime, as a war of aggression was concluded to be the worst war crime there is.
You may wish to discuss the comparative actions of the US and Japan with someone from China or Korea. You may be a little surprised.
The US has some culpability, however, at least in the way our European and Asian opponents were perceived in popular culture at the time. Nobody was sending trophy skulls of Germans or Italians back home to their girlfriends.
Specifically what action of the military does the US have culpability for? Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were war crimes.
While I am certain that many US soldiers did bad things – raping women, taking plunder, etc – there are few actions of official US war conduct that should be considered war crimes. And no, air raids are perfectly fine in my opinion.
The notion that wars are conducted between soldiers on a battlefield is laughable. This has NEVER, in human history, been the manner in which war is conducted. NEVER. So I am VERY reluctant to hold the US to a ridiculous standard of a bunch of people looking backward with 20-20 hindsight 70 years after the fact.
Wars are horrible bloody affairs. Read about WWI to understand a lot about WWII. WWI – now that was a horrible horrible war, in many ways much worse than WWII.
Is getting lost in a mush of subjectivity. There is a fairly rich body of historical work on the reluctance of the USAAC in Europe to abandon precision daylight bombing, for a variety of reasons, which is often cited as distinct from the controversy still surrounding the policy of ‘Bomber’ Harris and the RAF toward civilian populations. Yet no such distinction was made with any enthusiasm toward Japan.
Have a look at this and imagine if that trophy had been from the European Theater of Operations. That was Life magazine’s ‘picture of the week’ for pity’s sake.
What is your point about the picture? That civilians were caught up in the war? I can assure you that your concerns about “Bomber” Harris were not shared by Brits during the war. They were getting the brunt of Werner von Braun’s little missiles, and they were more than happy to return like for like.
Carpet bombing of Dresden, Tokyo and other “civilian” targets served legitimate military purposes. The Doolittle Raid brought the war to the Japanese homeland, for the first time. This reminded the civilians that they were involved. Civilian morale is hugely important in war, especially wars in the last 100 years, in which civilians can be isolated and propagandized into complicity with the military.
In addition, military establishments can be placed within civilian housing. This is a deliberate strategy. Is it then a problem to bomb these military targets?
70 years after, a lot of Americans seem to think that the war was Hogan’s heroes or something. The war was a terrible event. At least the trophy was not ears or dicks.
I think we are arguing at cross purposes. I never said anything about my concerns about Harris, you might notice, but I did suggest the US has some culpability in its framing of the war in the European theatre as opposed to that against Japan, at least in our contemporary popular culture. I thought this might be relevant to the discussion of Hiroshima and seabe’s original post but you seem to be arguing something else altogether.
I don’t want to argue with you. I certainly believe that millions of horrible things happened during the war. I would guess that we both agree upon that point. I do not believe that the hands of US troops were clean. I have always believed that American soldiers were unwilling to talk about the war because of guilt (survivor and perpetrator) and because of inability to really understand the logic of war within the context of peace. Because war is hell.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not war crimes.
Nanking was.
The comfort women were.
The treatment of civilians in the camps in the Phillipines were.
Treatment of war prisoners were war crimes.
You do not seem to understand that, at the time, there was no understanding of the nuclear issue. The bombs were a secret weapon. No one knew about them except 1000 guys in the desert at Almagadro in NM.
So that notion of war crimes is crap, honestly. It is simply the need to impose a guilt on a perfectly legitimate decision of war.
So, your notion of what makes something a war crime is directly linked to the amount of people who knew about the weapon used to commit a war crime.
Strange.
Doubtful. Even after the Nagasaki bombing there was a cabal of officers who tried to steal the recording of Hirohito acknowledging the surrender. The idea that unconditional surrender was the hold up doesn’t hold water either, as the US did permit the retention of the emperor.
Both the unconditional surrender requirement and the use of the bomb had more to do with Stalin and the Soviet Union than anything else. Our WWII history often fails to place the Soviet contribution, and their consequent impact on geopolitics, in proper perspective.
This period 1944-45 was instrumental in setting the pattern of the Cold War and is punctuated with numerous missed opportunities which would cause trouble later.
And a lot of that was possibly due to Stalin being well and mostly sober, Churchill being drunk, and Roosevelt dying. A lot of what happened at Yalta supposedly occurred due to Roosevelt’s ill health. He died on April 17, 1945.
But sadly it is not quite so simple. I was thinking more along the lines of the Dixie Mission and our post-war diplomacy in Viet-nam and Indonesia juxtaposed with that of their previous colonial rulers, just for example.
Very true. If you ask a Russian, they’ll tell you that it was the Soviets who won the war, and American/British actions in the West were just a sideshow. And they have an excellent argument for it. They lost something like 20-30 million people and bled Germany dry. The human cost of WW2 was staggering beyond belief.
The Russians paid hugely, and few in the west are willing to give them credit. Stalingrad was a terrible situation, in which millions on both sides died.
Recently, the soviet military archives were opened, and a British historian, Anthony Beevor, wrote several extremely interesting books about the fall of Berlin from the Russian perspective, and Stalingrad. I am mightily glad that I was at neither.
I am reading a WWI history now. One thing that is pointed out is that Russians think differently from French or Germans or anyone else. While the French are unwilling to concede territory, the Russians do it gladly, knowing that the most devastating weapon in the Russian arsenal is the vast frigid country that must be conquered and held.
I heard yesterday that the Russians lost more men in the assault on Berlin than the US did in the entire war, both in Europe and the Pacific. The person who told me this failed to acknowledge that he had been berating Roosevelt five minutes before for ordering Patton to pull back and let the Russians take Berlin. In hindsight, if those casualty figures are correct, Roosevelt made the right decision. Of course the Germans may have fought harder against the Bolshevik “sub-human” Slavs. And yes, dataguy, I doubt that the Japanese would have fought any less hard for their God-Emperor. Okinawa and Iwo Jima pretty much proved that. But there is a faction of the Left for which America must always be wrong. They fail to see that that is why the public, even Obama, trusts the Republicans more on foreign policy.
The German population was desperate to surrender to Americans. The German-Russian hatred was deep and strong. The Russians were still pissed at the Germans and their invasion in light of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty.
I think this is why we never saw a serious insurgent problem in Germany as we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan. The alternative to the USA was the USSR.
I’d like to see how well the Russians would have done if they hadn’t had western trucks delivered to them..
Also, it’s no surprise the Russians are willing to concede territory. How many times the size of France is the territory seized by the Germans during WWII? If you had less territory you’d be more worried about losing it too. That, and I thought it was the mud in spring and fall that did more to slow the Germans than even the winter.
I remember being in a little Polish village and being shown the cemetery for Russian WWII soldiers. It was large and there were 20 men to a grave. One realized very quickly how devastating the war had been.
I was there in 1994. Poland was just emerging from behind the Iron Curtain. And still, the Poles hated the Germans and didn’t resent the Russians nearly as much. Many loved Russia and didn’t much appreciate the transition to capitalism. Counter balancing that was a huge reservoir of good will toward the U.S. Yet people would ask me why Roosevelt sold them out at Yalta. So it was a complex brew of beliefs and feelings.
There is a good documentary that discussed Stalingrad from a number of perspectives including how it was the turning point of the entire war (I saw it just last week actually):
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/features/deadliest-battle-preview-this-episode/550/
I think it was in the McNamara documentary that he said that the atomic bombs were unnecessary especially given how destructive the firebombing had been.
And now the Japanese are dealing with the ongoing disaster at Fukushima with incredibly grim news about radiation levels in the ocean and water table. The situation is far from stable.
McNamara – such a military genius.
I encourage you to watch The Fog of War. It is one of the most interesting documentaries I have seen. I’m linking McNamara’s obituary in the NYT discussing this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
If the firebombings were to have worked, they would have worked already. While they were no doubt horrific, the experience of World War II was that the strategic bombing leveling cities did NOT undermine the will to fight.
The atomic bombs, however, were so destructive that they created an alternative that was unpalatable, even to the Imperial Japanese government.
That’s quite a superficial take on the matter. That sort of thinking dismisses all the previous blows to the Japanese homeland and economy as meaningless. It takes the atomic bobc out of the context of the previously firebombing raids and the sinking of virtually the entire Japanese merchant marine to US subs. Heaped upon that the atomic bombs were the final straw. not in an of themselves a backbreaker.
That runs counter to his public style. But I trust Norman Cousins’s reporting.
Essentially, South Carolinian Jimmy Byrnes made the decision to a Truman not yet confident in his role. Not the first time Truman erred by going for “toughness” on national security issues.
I wouldn’t trust anything MacArthur had to say involving Harry Truman.
Bingo. And as was mentioned above, he was hellbent to use the bomb in Korea, at a time when the Soviets had nuclear capabilities.
MacArthur was capable of believing whatever benefited MacArthur, updated by the minute.
The Japanese have never admitted that they have any culpability for the war. They have never admitted that the comfort women (mostly Korean and Chinese women forced into prostitution for Japanese soldiers) were wronged. They have never admitted that the Japanese army raped, murdered, and killed hundreds of thousands, even millions, during the Rape of Nanking which occurred on Dec 17-23, 1937. There was a march of Bataan, which killed thousands. There were internship camps for British citizens (Empire of the Sun, by JG Ballard, depicts this), and unlike our camps which were equally wrong, the camps had starvation and civilians were deprived of food. Also there was the unannounced attack on Pearl Harbor.
When the Japanese admit one or two of these, we can consider their whining about Hiroshima. Until then, it is best ignored. For every dead person in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, there were 10-20 dead Chinese. Don’t hear much about them, do we?
And another point about the coming whining tomorrow from the Japanese. Shinseko Abe, the current prime minister, is a hawk. He will go to the shrine at Yasukuni, and do some Shinto thing to commemorate the Japanese war dead. Abe is pushing for a return to Japanese military power (good idea, let them cover their own butts), but has not acknowledged any culpability. That is not a good combination.
Shinseko Abe, the current prime minister, is a hawk. He will go to the shrine at Yasukuni, and do some Shinto thing to commemorate the Japanese war dead. Abe is pushing for a return to Japanese military power (good idea, let them cover their own butts), but has not acknowledged any culpability.
And who is cheering Abe re: the military build-up? We are!! And the defense contractors, also, too!!
I thought August 6 was the anniversary of Hiroshima, August 9 Nagasaki.
Bad move by Truman, unnecessary and even “barbaric” according to HST’s own chief of staff, Adm Wm Leahy.
Eisenhower was also against its use (though he too, like Dugout Doug, also contemplated using nukes to end the Korean War). Gen George C. Marshall, supported the decision but supposedly preferred to have it dropped on a non-urban area.
I think Truman, Byrnes et al had a lot of sending a message to the Soviets on their mind in making the decision, and the projected US casualty figures for the alternative of invading Japan tended to get wildly exaggerated from reported earliest low-six figures estimates by the military. Later Truman and others claimed the bombs saved a million or even “millions” of lives.
In my opinion, it was worth it if it saved one American life. The U.S. didn’t ask for the war with Japan. Yes, Japanese civilians may have been equally innocent. No doubt many of them were. But still, it was their government that made the choice to bomb Pearl Harbor.
I’m Japanese and can pretty much see much of you believe in the old US propaganda that has been circulated to justify the annihilation of women and children in these Japanese civilian city. These cities were not military hubs, they were cities eking an existence that was the very most an appalling life because of Japan’s selfish ignorance to pursue Imperialism. War is ugly and both sides have done evil’s work to pursue the never ending easing of fear our souls cannot extinguish. Most of the US propaganda yesterday, today, and tomorrow can never wash the abhorrence of attacking civilians only to gain a victory….America will pay one day for its ignorance….
Just like Nanking, a chinese city in which more than 3,000,000 chinese were raped, murdered, and otherwise war-crimed to death. So, any thoughts about that? Most Japanese are not informed about the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, in which the Japanese ruled from 1931-1945, committing huge war crimes over 14 years. Of course, it is official Japanese policy to discuss none of that.
For the invasion of the Philippines. The US Navy wanted to go into Taiwan. Manila got pounded into rubble for the man’s ego.
He got caught with his pants down once in Manila and twice in Korea because he was an arrogant, racist, self-serving fuck who was dismissive of anyone who wasn’t Douglas MacArthur.
It’s hard for me to comment on any of this. You see, I have lived in Hiroshima for 21 long years now. These people, grandchildren and great grandchildren are my friends and loved ones now, and they also happen to be survivors of August 6th. How can I look them in the face with this attitude of, “well, you know, it was for your own good that we obliterated 175,000 of you in one fell stroke, and look at the carnage of Okinawa when you folks refused to surrender and 12,000 of our guys were killed and 250,00 of your people were killed.” I’ve been through all of that on Great Orange Satan with people who have never even ventured outside of the United States, except for that one other guy who also lives in Japan, the ex-military guy, who doesn’t seem to get along with his Japanese in-laws.
So, let me tell you about my mother in law Sachiko. She lives way off in the sticks along the seacoast in a town named Otake, or “Big Bamboo!” which is thirty miles or so west of Hiroshima. She was a sweet little toddler who everyone loved to bounce on their laps. Her cousins in the Tokaichi neighborhood of Hiroshima 200 yards from where the bomb was dropped, especially loved her.
Once a month, Sachiko’s mother who recently passed away at 97 years of age, would take sweet Sachiko into town to visit all her first cousins, fourteen in total. Even during the war they managed to give her a little hardened sugar candy that’s shaped like a star. Her favorite cousin Yoshi would tell her that’s because Sachiko was like a star. She shone brightly.
On the day the bomb was dropped all fourteen cousins who were conscientious objectors because they were Quakers after all, were incinerated by the bomb. Sachiko lost 14 people near and dear to her. Her own mother carried scars that lasted a life time because she was in a railway station on her way to the Tokaichi neighborhood to perform mandatory work on widening the roads of Hiroshima in preparation for saturation bombing. As a result of her extensive scarring, she could no longer bathe herself because the scar tissue restricted her movements. Neighbors offered to help bathe her in a local bathhouse in my wife’s hometown, but the grandmother was far to embarrassed to be seen with deep scarring that lasted a lifetime.
My mother in law Sachiko escaped the fate of her cousins and her mother because she was safe in Otake, and hadn’t accompanied her mother into town that fateful day. My loving wife wouldn’t be here today if her own mother hadn’t decided to stay home with a stomachache that morning.
There are lots of stories like this that are small personal things which are well outside the closed corridors of “my personal patch of intellectual sternness and earnestness having to do with my understanding of global projection and reach and achievable goals and blah blah blah.” Most of the time, precious, innocent people get chewed up in the machinery of war. When we debate so fiercely, it’s like they don’t exist anymore because they are considered superfluous to our argument. Have any of us actually met a Cambodian victim of Richard Nixon’s saturation bombing of that country in 1970? I haven’t. I’d like to someday, just to hear their story.
Follow up: Years later, Sachiko, the mother in law, beamed from ear to ear on our wedding day. An American, myself, whose Aunts are Quaker and hail from Philadelphia where my mom’s family has lived for close to 250 years had married into her family. A pacifist American Quaker marrying into another family of pacifist Japanese Quakers! Imagine that. What does that say about forgiveness and compassion and just trying to get along? A few things, I suppose. And that’s my life story the past twenty years or so. The point of all of this is,open your heart a little more when you discuss the big important things of history. I feel comfortable sharing all of this with you in this particular forum, and I will flatter you a little. You have a lot more compassion and understanding than I’ve experienced on other blogs. Thank you for that.
Thank you for your story. It is always different to deal with a person than to deal with an abstraction.
In my case, my mother’s family is Donau-schwaben. These were German-Austrian people who lived in S Hungary/N Serbia from 1800 – 1945. After the war, the US government, the Roumanaians, the Hungarians, and other central european countries forcibly expelled the German peoples from that area. Perhaps 12,000,000 germans were taken from their homes in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Roumania, Bulgaria, and other areas and sent to either Russia or Germany. These were people who had not been in Germany for 4-5 generations, since 1800 or so. They were sent to some of the same camps the Germans used. In 1960-1961, we saw many of these who were 3-4 cousins of my mom, still in the DP camps 15-16 years after the war.
War sucks.
holding you and your family in the light.
Thank you for sharing this with the BT community, byzantium.
Starting a war is a war crime. Ending a war is not.
Would the Japanese have surrendered any time soon if we didn’t drop the atomic bombs? Nothing I’ve read is convincing on that subject.
That is interesting. I’m only convinced of two things about dropping the bombs:
I visited Hiroshima two years ago, and I must say the Peace Park (where the city used to be), along with the Peace Museum really moved me and got me thinking about what happened in a way I hadn’t before. Frankly, I don’t see how some of you can so easily reach a conclusion about what was one of the most horrific events in human history. It was justified. No it was not. Go there and see for yourself. Read the accounts of survivors, many of who lived with the aftermath in ways that are impossible to imagine. No, this doesn’t justify what the Japanese military did in its efforts to create a pan-Asian colonial empire, but many of those people who were killed on that day or who died in the following weeks or who lived with disease caused by the radiation were innocents. There were also Koreans and Chinese and other foreign communities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on that tragic day.
My heart bleeds for the enemy. Do you laugh at Nanjing, Pearl Harbor, the Black Ship, the Death March. Go give up your US citizenship and migrate to Japan.
I”m not sure what I said gave you the impression that I was laughing at Nanjing, Pearl Harbor, the Black Ship, and the Death March, and why you can only respond by attacking me. Japan is currently a US ally and a democratic country (unlike China), so no need to still be thinking of them as the enemy. Were the children who were vaporized after the blast or who died years later from symptoms caused by the radiation our enemies.
I teach Chinese and Japanese history and have lived in China and Taiwan for several years, so I know what happened in the 1930s and 1940s. I’m not laughing at or condoning anything the Japanese military did. Their actions were atrocious. People in China suffered a great deal during those years, suffering caused also by their own leaders from both rival parties. The 1950s and 60s, when there was no longer a Japanese military presence in China were not exactly peaceful times.
I’m sick of the hand-wringing and cries that Harry Truman was a war criminal. Everyone is good except the USA. Someone else mentioned Marines taking hands and ears. Yes, that was war crimes, but they are silent about the Japanese being the first to cut off the heads of prisoners. Always excuses for the enemy. And yes, Japan is an enemy, an enemy that seeks the economic destruction of America, a sick culture that allows the degradation of women and tolerates child pornography.
And you’ve been there before?
At the time the Japanese (and German) people had collective mental illness. The behavior of the citizens of Okinawa and the guards of Auschwitz are plenty evfdence. Some think if FDR hadn’t undertaken the New Deal the same might have happened in the USA. That can’t be proven but it is plausible.
I doubt anyone at the time were clueless about the sacrifice and ruthlessness required of the Soviets to defeat the Germans. Nor was there much doubt about who Stalin really was. Good or bad, “necessary” or not it proved useful to demonstrate to them that we had and were demonstratedly willing to use Atomic weapons. It played a role in the Cold War and may have kept other bombs from dropping.
MacArthur was also a mad man. The kind of ego maniac you want on your side to win a war. LeMay too I suppose. But they are also examples of why you want civilian control over the military. That is still not perfect but better than the alternative.
Events have to be viewed in context of the time. Not to excuse but to ne’er stand and avoid the mistakes.
I am not sure if it was mental illness. It certainly was a situation in which propaganda was used to effectively convince a people that a solution was needed. The situation that Germany was in in 1932, when Hitler ascended to the chancellorship, was dire. Inflation was unbelievable – look at some of the stamps from the time, in which a 1 DM stamp would be over-printed with 1,000,000 DM or so. Plus there was the Versailles peace, which saddled Germany with the cost of the war. This in turn was a direct response to the Franco-German war of 1870, in which Germany saddled France with a huge war debt. It’s all connected in Europe. You cannot understand WWII without understanding WWI, and this in turn is a response to the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, the Franco-German wars, and the French Revolution. The Serbian actions in the Balkan war of 1989 can be directly traced to the Serbian defeat by the Turks in 1389.
In America, no one remembers. In Europe, no one forgets.
So much of the criticism of the bombing or Hiroshima and Nagasaki works off hindsight. Both Germany and Japan were trying to create a nuclear weapon. Both would have used. Truman put together a panel of experts including scientists who basically said, “Use it.”
As John Gaddis has argued, there are very few weapons that – having been developed – are not used. There are also a few that – having been used – were never used again. Most nations have not used chemical weapons since 1918. No nations have used fission weapons.
And that includes Truman in Korea when it looked like the Chinese Army was going to push it into the sea.
If you want to condemn Truman for Japan, credit him for Korea.
Of course we’re using hindsight. How else do you establish war crimes? what was legal is no longer legal. Why do you think most of the world powers in the West — except the US — has signed on to never indiscriminately area bomb countries again? Britain delayed signing on until 1977. They didn’t want to have to admit in 1949 at the fourth Geneva convention to committing mass atrocities, after all. If we signed on with Britain, George Bush’s war of aggression would have been more of a war crime than it already is and was.
That is absolutely, totally, historically false. War crimes are NOT a retrospective reevaluation of an action deemed appropriate at the time. War crimes are a determination that rules about war in place at the time were not followed. Historical revisionism IS NEVER appropriate for war crimes.
I have no idea where you came up with that definition, but no sensible person could possible agree with that.
It is certainly the case that historical judgements about actions result in the actions being considered war crimes. That is certainly true, but you cannot apply the standards established at a certain time to apply to actions before those standards were set. That is not feasible. It’s not even constitutional – there is a constitution prohibition against ex post facto laws, which explicitly define such approaches as wrong.
Then nothing that occurred during WWII was truly a war crime because war crimes as we know them today were established at Nuremburg. There was no functional definition of genocide either. Was the Holocaust a not a genocide? Was the slaughter of the indigenous population of America a genocide? Armenians? Cambodia? Shit there still are contested definitions of genocide.
Yes we had The Hague, but again, this really only became more binding with Geneva which first banned gases used during WWI. I suppose that was the only “war crime” (bio warfare).
Semantic correction – poison gas is chemical warfare not bio. Selling smallpox blankets to Native Americans was bio warfare (Brits, I believe).