Most people don't think much about history. One way you can see this is by looking at all the insistence that the current Coronavirus pandemic is the worst disease outbreak that the world has seen since the Spanish Flu of 1918.
While this insistence may be necessary to justify the massive overreaction to the Coronavirus, even a cursory examination of the relevant Wikipedia pages will reveal that the Asian Flu of 1957 was quite a bit deadlier than what the world is going through right now. What’s more, the 1957 Flu managed a higher body count on a planet with only 37 percent of the current global population.
But if you ask anybody what they know about 1957, it’s very unlikely that they’ll mention the Asian Flu. Some people remember 1957 as the year that the Russians launched Sputnik; some remember it as the year that Elvis made Jailhouse Rock and then got drafted. For America as a whole, life continued as normal, in the midst of a pandemic that was, objectively, quite a bit worse that the one we’re stuck with right now.
But
there’s no doubting that 2020 is just going to be remembered as the Year of the
Bat. No matter how anticlimactically covid itself ends up fading away, the
economy will still be a wreck and the US dollar will be a lot closer to not
being the global currency anymore.
But I
digress. The whole reason I mentioned the historical amnesia of the current
generation is because I wanted to comment on one of the other, less
bat-infested aspects of 2020, namely, the passage of all those 75th anniversary milestones for famous events near the end of World War II. I
already wrote a little about V-E Day; now I’ll be writing about the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Chronicles Magazine and the American Conservative are on the more thoughtful end of the
media spectrum; each ran articles yesterday discussing, with some depth, the
military and ethical aspects of President Truman’s decision to use the two bombs.
But in most of the media, we get crickets.
Now, I
should probably preface what I’m about to write with a big caveat, namely this:
I do not have a strong opinion about the bombings. I have no desire to pick
apart either President Truman or his detractors on ethical grounds. I wasn’t
there when it happened, and it came at the end of a long and bloody war in
which everyone involved had long since had plenty of reasons to give up on the
idea that it was possible to fight with decency and still win.
But even
though I don’t have strong opinions, I do have some interesting things to say
that I think can make the conversation more reasonable. So, without further
ado, here are some of my reflections on the two bombs.
1.
It’s Rude To Say That The Bombs Saved Lives
It is
pretty common to hear Americans, especially conservatives, say that the nuclear
strikes “saved millions of lives” and justify that statement by comparing the
250,000 or so lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the millions that would have
died on both sides if the United States had proceeded with the plan to invade the
Japanese home islands, which was scheduled to begin on 1 November with
Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu.
Now just
think about how that “saved lives” claim would sound to somebody whose family was
killed in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
But
there’s more to it than that. “Bomb or Invade” weren’t America’s only options. We
could have blockaded Japan, cutting the Japanese off from the world without
bringing the war to their home islands at all. Or we could have dropped the
insistence on unconditional surrender and tried for a negotiated peace after
Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
There is
no telling how those scenarios would have played out, and there are good
reasons to be believe that both would have been bad ideas. But absent the kind
of omniscience that would let us precisely compare every single alternative,
looking at a pair of missions which incinerated upwards of 40,000 civilians
each and left tens of thousands more to die of radiation sickness or cancer,
and then summing them up as something that “saved lives,” is just way too
crass.
I prefer
to stick with saying that, considering what the actual circumstances in 1945
were, the bombings were probably a good idea.
2.
A Blockade Would Have Left A Lot Of People
Dead, Too
Since the
most common argument in favor of the bombings – that an invasion of Japan
would have been much worse for everyone – is so strong, the world of armchair generalship
has found itself in need of new ideas. One of those is to say that, by August
of 1945, Japan’s air and sea power had been reduced to almost nil, therefore, America
could have foregone both bombs and invasion, and just blockaded the Japanese in
their islands and waited for them to surrender. The basic premise is laid out
fairly well in this article at the American Conservative.
There is
some merit to the idea; indeed, much of the reason that the more death-cultish
end of the Japanese high command was looking forward to a ground invasion was
that it would give the Japanese an opportunity to kill Americans, something
which, at the moment, they were largely unable to do. A blockade, on the other
hand, would take advantage of America’s total dominance of air and sea, ensuring
much smaller combat losses.
But that
would require ignoring the rest of Asia. In the Pacific Ocean, Japan was thoroughly
beaten, but in Korea, Manchuria, much of China, all of Indochina, and the Dutch
East Indies, the Japanese occupying armies were still very much in control. And
a continuation in the fighting in these territories didn’t just mean military
deaths, it also meant that the civilian population would be treated with extreme
brutality.
Perhaps
you have heard of the Rape of Nanking – basically, when the Chinese city of
Nanking fell to the Japanese in December of 1937, the Japanese army went on a raping and slaughtering rampage and killed somewhere between 40,000 and 300,000 Chinese civilians. To
put that in perspective, the higher end of that range exceeds the number of
Japanese killed by both atomic bombs. Anything that lengthened the war would
give the Japanese more opportunities to repeat such actions.
Then
there is the Jatropha Famine, which Americans are even less likely to know
about than the Rape of Nanking. The site was the occupied Dutch East Indies (now
Indonesia).
Japan
fought the whole war with a huge oil shortage. Indeed, the Japanese’ massive
logistical inferiority, viz. the United States, was in large part what doomed
their forces to suffer one huge rolling defeat in all but the first few months
of the war.
In an
attempt to shore up their fuel supply, the Japanese forced millions of
Indonesian farmers to replace many of their food crops with Jatropha, a
fast-growing tree whose nuts can be pressed to yield fuel oil.
The whole
project was a complete failure. The Jatropha didn’t make nearly enough
oil to turn the tide of the war, and the only real result of this program of
crop replacement was a famine that killed about 4 million Indonesians.
To put
that in perspective, the number of Japanese who died in every action of the war
from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki is somewhere between 2.5 and 3.1 million.
This is
the sort of thing that would have kept on happening if the Japanese hadn’t
surrendered in the summer of 1945.
3.
Ordinary Americans Were Afraid That Japan Had
The Bomb
When you
get all your history by reading books written long after the events they
describe, and when you begin every story with a rough idea of how it is going
to end, you’re missing out on something, because that’s not how the people who
lived through history experienced it.
We in
2020 know how difficult the Manhattan Project was, and how much cutting-edge
physics and industrial brute-force went into it, and how Germany was the only
other country that even tried to develop nuclear weapons during World War II.
Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin also knew these things, along
with their senior commanders and scientists, but pretty-much nobody else at the
time did.
The typical
American, whether soldier or civilian, hadn’t the faintest inkling of what was
going on until he opened the newspaper on 6 August and read about how “the
atomic bomb weighs about 400 pounds and is capable of utterly destroying a town”
by utilizing “the force from which the sun draws its power.”
Somewhere
near the middle of the New York Times’ long article about the new weapon, the
reader is notified that Secretary of War Stimson is “convinced that Japan
will not be in a position to use an atomic bomb in this war.”
That sounds
like a good thing to know.
I was not on the earth yet in 1957, born too late. The Asian Flu was virulent from what I read. This current assertion of this virus being as deadly seams far-reaching.I don't understand why people are falling for this narrative.
ReplyDeleteMy father served in the Navy 1942-1962 he was a big fan of Harry Truman.
I enjoy your blog very illuminating.
Cheers
I'm glad to hear that you enjoy what I write.
DeleteMy great-grandfather joined the Army Air Corps in 1942; he flew the Douglas C-47 Skytrain and died in Burma in 1945. The people who were alive back then - and who knew what it was like when somebody in your circle gets that telegram every week or two - thought differently about how President Truman handled the Japanese.