A World-Changing Anniversary
Sixty-two years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan has yet to embrace thankfulness for that blessed event, that allowed so many untold millions to live. By continue to insist on Japanese victimhood, Japan and the world have yet to properly honor the martyrs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It remains one of the most misunderstood events of modern history. The retrospectives you hear around this anniversary period are going to focus heavily on the undeniable suffering of Japanese civilians, 214,000 of whom were killed on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, precipitating the sudden about-face and unconditional surrender of the previously suicidally intransigent Japanese high command. The reports you hear, out of a sense of fairness, may touch briefly on those who didn’t die: the estimates of hundres of thousands of American soldiers not killed in the invasion that never happened.
That number is academic, rarely deemed of much importance in historic presentations, a footnote to the reality of more than 200,000 people incinerated, stripped of their flesh, poisoned by radiation.
But, in the wake of the recent forced resignation of Japan’s defense minister, let’s consider what that suffering bought. Because war, by its nature, forces the brutal calculation of loss to gain, unless you are one of those who believes war can be wished away. The Pacific war was certainly not a war of that variety.
We’ll start with what the ousted Japanese defense minister, Fumio Kyuma, a native of Nagasaki, said in his speech in late June:
The atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima “couldn’t be helped” and was “inevitable.” Kyuma noted the bombings had the desirable effect of precluding a Soviet invasion of northern Japan, and the prospect that millions of Japanese might have suffered the kind of decades-long Soviet nightmare suffered by Germany, Eastern Europe and Korea. Perhaps, as in the case of Korea, a division enduring to this day. Undoubtedly, as in the case of Germany and eastern Europe, ongoing social and economic trauma.
Let’s consider the hypothetical American dead. Some estimates run as high as 800,000, twice the number of America’s World War II dead by the time it was over a few days later. More conservative estimates run as low as about 200,000 … roughly the number of Japanese killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a neat one-for-one calculation.
Estimates of Japanese civilian and military dead if the United States were forced to invade run from 1 million to 10 million. Those estimates are based on what happened at places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Readers will recall that at Iwo, as on some other islands, Japanese soldiers fought virtually to the last man, taking out as many Americans with them as they could. You may have seen the haunting color footage — no safe historic black-and-white distance in these images — kimono-clad Japanese women on Okinawa throwing their babies off cliffs and jumping themselves.
It is important in any understanding of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to reflect on the fact that Japan started this war, long before it began in Europe. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and followed that with an invasion of China proper in 1937. Headline events include the Rape of Nanking, estimated purposeful, one-on-one murders of civilians by Japanese soldiers roughly placed between 150,000 and 300,000.
There was the Pearl Harbor surprise attack and onslaught through Southeast Asia in 1941. Death marches from the Philippines to Malaya, and the slow murder of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers and hundreds of thousands of native slaves in forced labor camps.
Some people call it racist, Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop the bombs on Japan. Scholarly books have been devoted to this. It’s absurd, of course. The bombs weren’t ready in time for the Nazis. And you may want to ask millions upon millions of Germans whether they might have gladly swapped a couple hundred thousand others to keep the Russians at bay. A chance to claim victimhood with a straight face. They won’t answer you honestly, and its all hypothetical at this point.
An estimated 25 million people were non-hypothetically shot to death, burned to death, bombed to death, beaten to death, beheaded and starved to death as a result of Japan’s war. They were dying at a rate of 200,000 a month. The Japanese Imperial Army intended to murder more than 100,000 Allied prisoners of war as the Allies closed in, and in some cases, brought those plans to bear. If you are Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Malaysian, Indonesian, British, Australian, Dutch or American, you may know men and women or the children and grandchildren of men and women who are alive because of the shock that foreclosed all that murder.
One day in August, 62 years ago, another sun rose in the sky, and all of it stopped. Came to an abrupt halt. All of the murder for which the Japanese people should hang their heads in shame. For which they should herald Fumio Kyuma as a visionary leading them out of a wilderness of shameful denial rather than driving him out in anger.
Finally, a word for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They receive a lot of sympathy in current views of those incidents, and rightly so, if not always within an appropriate perspective. What happened to them, like much of what happens in war, was a tragedy. A Japanese tragedy, caused in whole by Japan, brought upon them by their leadership. But there is nothing fair or just about what happened to them, the blood price they paid for their nation’s sins. Today, they are just martyrs who should be honored, for the unwilling sacrifice they made that saved so many millions of lives.
Jules Crittenden blogs at Forward Movement.
The A-Bomb actually saved about 75 million lives – 50 million Allied and 25 million Japanese. Japanese Imperial General Headquarters issued orders in July 1945, provided to us courtesy of code-breaking (MAGIC), to murder all Allied prisoners of war, all interned Allied civilians, and all other Allied civilians Japanese forces could catch in occupied China, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Malaya, etc., starting with the impending British invasion of Malaya in late September 1945.
The Imperial Japanese Army was every bit as evil as the Nazi SS, and more lethal. Given these massacre plans, they’d probably have killed at least an additional 50 million people, more than had died in all of World War Two to that point, before Allied armies could eliminate Japanese forces overseas.
And our backup plan if the A-bomb didn’t induce Japanese surrender was to gas the Japanese people from the air like bugs, and keep doing so until Japanese resistance ended or all the Japanese were dead.
The United States government decided on June 18, 1945, to commit genocide on Japan with poison gas if its government did not surrender after the nuclear attacks approved in the same June 18 meeting. This was discovered by military historians Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen while researching a book on the end of the war in the Pacific. Their discovery came too late for inclusion in the book, so they published it instead in the Autumn 1997 issue of _Military History Quarterly_.
An estimated ONE THIRD of the Japanese people (25-30 million) would have died of starvation, disease, poison gas and conventional weapons during a prolonged ground conquest of Japan. The Japanese Army planned on locking up the Emperor, seizing power and fighting to the bitter end once the US invasion started.
I have a great deal of admiration for Japan and the Japanese people, but they desperately need to face up to their responsibilities for what they did in World War II.
Excellent piece. I was recently watching the Thames series “The World at War” and the images of the Japanese woman on Iwo Jima throwing her baby off a cliff and then jumping after it was chilling. The Japanese had a lot to answer for for the evil they wrought from 1931 onwards and they certainly have no business claiming victimhood. Even the German populace worked out that “victim” status was out of bounds when they realised what went on in the camps…
My late mother-in-law agreed. She was a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing who maintained that without it, Japan would not have surrendered, even though everyone knew the war was lost.
I believe that the average Japanese civilian of that time had no influence on the course of their government, which was a de-facto military dictatorship nominally headed by the Emperor.
Guilt? The generation that started that war is dead. The people who lived in Japan immediately after the war suffered years of poverty. My wife’s uncle was believed to be dead, and turned up in 1949 after being held as a POW for 4 years by the Russians. He was a conscript who was grabbed up by the Imperial Army. His alternatives? Probably execution at the hands of the Secret Police if he didn’t serve.
The government that started that war is gone. It’s neither reasonable nor productive to try to judge the past through the enlightened multicultural standards of today.
“War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
William Tecumseh Sherman
So everyone understands that ending the war with nukes resulted in unconditional surrender of a murderous government, the establishment of a strong and stable democratic government, and one of the strongest economies in the history of the world.
Why don’t we fight the current war this way? Why do we not fight to win not “hearts and minds” but an overpowering desire to stop fighting and join the modern world?
In Afghanistan and Iraq, we made the same mistake by not dictating that religious thought (no more “the Emperor is a diety”) has no place in the constitution or government process and that continued support of/for resistance results in massive death and destruction.
We are currently fighting insurgencies that are supported by the people of the countries that we supposedly defeated. Unless we make it clear that support for the insurgents will results in massive destruction, it will continue until, as in Vietnam, we give up and come home.
I’m not advocating that we use nukes in Iraq or Afghanistan, but I am suggesting that we fight more to win the war and less to win the hearts and minds of the other side.
We don’t need their hearts and minds, we need them to quit attacking us, and we need their oil to keep our economy running. The rest is just liberal/multicultural BS.
My grandfather fought in Europe in World War II. Had the Japanese not surrendered he would have been one of the ones sent from Europe to form the Japanese invasion force.
I probably would NOT be alive today.
Anyone who says democracy cannot be enforced at the end of a gun (or in this case two bombs) is an idiot. It was the right thing to do and the decision was made by mature adults who knew the stakes and were not afraid to make tough, hard decisions.
Today I have lost faith in our government to fight and win a war in an undeniable and decisive manner such as World War II. There are very few adults in Washington these days.
I agree with Walt C completely. You can’t win hearts and minds by going to war, it’s absurd. Either you fight to win or you don’t fight at all.
I had the occasion to work with an architect that was on board a US Navy destroyer as an Ensign that was near the vicinity during the summer of 1945. They were there in preparation for the possible invasion of Japan later that summer. I asked him once who he thought the best president of the United States ever was and he lifted his right hand and extending his index finger he said, “one, Harry S. Truman – he dropped the bomb and saved my life.” He went on to say how it was his understanding that they were expecting 1,000,000 casualties on the allied end. I also knew a former B-29 Superfortress pilot (now deceased) that expressed similar feelings of gratitude towards President Truman.
The Kempeitai were every bit as brutal as the Gestapo, if not more. But few if any were persecuted for their war crimes. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were payback for the horrors the Japanese inflicted all over Asia, especially in Manchuria with Unit 731 and their germ warfare experiments and other atrocities that would make Mengele blush. In fact, another three bombs wouldn’t have gone amiss if vengeance for the nigh-forgotten Asian victims of Japanese imperialism were a consideration for dropping them.
Until the Japanese as a people face up squarely to their history as the Germans did – and by that I mean no wishy-washy statements of ‘regret’ while perpetuating a victim myth amongst their own people – they’ll get no sympathy from me.
prosecuted for their war crimes.
I am one of those who is probably alive because of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father, a veteran of the Normandy invasion, got to return home and marry my mother instead of being sent to the Pacific Theater to be part of the invasion of Japan. His older brother, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, was liberated from a Prisoner of War camp in Japan instead of being killed as the invasion started. I am thankful for both their lives, and those of many others saved by the use of these bombs.
The destruction of cities in war is terrible, whether it is by a single bomb (like Hiroshima or Nagasaki) or thousands (like Tokyo or Dresden). Indeed, nearly everything about war is terrible. That is one of the things we need to remember about it. But we must also remember that war is sometimes necessary.
More of my thoughts on this anniversary are incorporated in posts on Hiroshima and its preceding Trinity Test on my own site.
This month HBO is showing “White Light/Black Rain,” a one-sided account of the WWII atomic bombings of Japan. The documentary main theme and goal is to show the horrifying infliction of death and suffering the US placed on the Japanese civilians and the atomic survivors. Like clockwork on the August anniversary, the liberal media puts America back on public trial, and finding us guilty of mass murder and suffering. They never show the hundreds-of-thousand of civilians and Allied POWs Japan killed in China, Philippines, and Southeast Asia. I researched and visited many WWII sites in the Pacific and Western Europe while stationed overseas. There is no doubt President Truman made the ONLY decision he could have made. As one historian has stated, “…Imagine the public outcry once it was known America having spent billions on the A-bomb’s development, had the capability of ending the war a year early, preventing over a million US causalities as well as millions of other deaths, had we NOT used the bomb…”
To those of us who were alive at the time it was a great joy and the realization of a wild boastful rumor that boys whispered to each other in the 40′s. “We have a bomb so powerful that 10 of them would destroy Japan.”
My brother and I were in the back seat of the Plymouth as my dad filled up the car. After paying for the gas he was extremely excited when he returned to the car telling mom to turn on the radio, something is happening. And we learned that day that indeed such a bomb did exist and was used in Japan.
Americans were ecstatic because they knew the war would soon be over.
Oh,yes…the Japanese fought to the death on Iwo Jima and Okinawa,but they were ready to give up the Home Islands if the bad old Americans had just asked politely…every year we have to listen to this left wing bullsh*t
The “hearts and minds” strategy isn’t soft-hearted “liberal/multicultural BS,” it’s a pragmatic strategy. The enemy we’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t a regime that can surrender in the name of its citizens. We need to contrast, in the hearts and minds of the people caught in the middle, the kind of world the enemy would build against the kind of world we’re helping them build. And we need to come out ahead in that comparison.
To avoid disaster in both countries, we have to stay until that comparison runs in our favour for an overwhelming majority of the citizens and until the institutions that protect those citizens are stable and self-sustaining.
The story is perhaps apocryphal, but an American businessman from Detroit was in Hiroshima for some business with Mazda, which is headquartered there. Like all VIP visitors, he was taken on the obligatory tour of ground zero and the Peace Park. At the end of the tour, his host turned to him and somberly asked him what his thoughts were. His response? “I guess you’ll never attack the United States again.”