Nagasaki: The Necessary Bomb?
1971
The book goes with the idea that, as of August, 1945, Japan was beaten, but the people didn't really know it. The Japanese navy, for all practical purposes, no longer existed.
However, “each country misjudged and misinterpreted the another's intentions, actions, and motives.” The author writes that, if Japan had possessed a good understanding of just how powerful America's military machine could become, and if they had a better understanding of the character of the American people, they would never have attacked Pearl Harbor.
The book says “There were a good many in Japan who could see the shape of the future. But they couldn't admit it in public, some of them found it difficult even to admit it to themselves.”
(There was very tighter control over what the people saw, read and said in Japan. Anyone who spoke out against the war in any way was in great danger of being arrested and worse. The part about finding things difficult to admit even to themselves reminds me of a documentary I saw on the making of the Burmese railroad (and the bridge over the River Kwai), where one of the Japanese who worked on the railroad was sure no POWs were used on one section despite the fact that a picture he himself had taken showed POWs working there.)
The military was the group in control in Japan, and they strictly controlled what the Japanese people were told about the war. Midway, for example, was presented as a Japanese victory even though their navy had been dealt a crushing blow in the battle. When Okinawa fell, though, it became almost impossible to hide the truth and especially difficult when American bombers started bombing Japanese cities on a regular basis.
The book talks about how much harder the battle of Okinawa was then some of the battles that came before it. It took over 250,000 Allied soldiers 83 days to
end the Japanese hold on the island. 12,250 Allied soldiers were killed, but some 110,000 Japanese soldiers died. 7,800 Japanese planes and 16 Japanese ships were also destroyed in the battle.
This is important because it indicated just how stiff the resistance would be if the US would actually invade Kyushu during Operation Olympic. The losses there could have been even worse than at Okinawa, because the Japanese would have been fighting even more fanatically for their actual island homeland than they did for any other place in the war.
Thus, this helped in the decision to use the atomic bomb, in order to save American lives.
In relation to the atomic bomb, the book notes that the military was not really the driving force behind the development of the bomb. It was “a group of civilian scientists, many of them emigres from dictator-ridden Europe, was afraid that Hitler and the Nazi scientists would capitalize on this powerful weapon and come up with it first.”
The book addresses the racial argument about the atomic bomb. There are some who argue that the atomic bomb was only used in Japan since the Japanese were not white. The book says that is “nonsense.” Apparently President Roosevelt had asked if the atomic bomb could be ready faster so it could be used during the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944.
There was a group of civilian scientists who circulated something called the Franck Report that said the atomic bomb should not be used in an unannounced attack, that some form of demonstration should be given first. The book says that a demonstration in an uninhabited area might not have been convincing enough.
The book also presents some arguments pro and con related to the use of the atomic bombs. Arguments against included that the bomb was “inhuman,” the Japanese were already beaten, that we should have continued or firebombing raids, and that Operation Olympic and Operation Coronet should have gone on as planned.
In favor of the use of the bomb, one of the arguments goes that the bomb is not “inhuman” at all. Although it was just one bomb, it still did less damage than the firebombing raid of March 9/10 on Tokyo when thousands of bombs were dropped. In other words, if someone is killed by one bomb or by ten bombs, they are still dead.
There was also a shock factor in the use of the bomb, goes the argument. It was a tremendous amount of death and damage caused by one single bomb, and there was no way to protect the people from it.
The author of the book believes that the bombs were necessary, and that the war would have gone on longer and more would have died, including Americans, from any actual attack on the islands.
The author summarizes: “It was wartime; war is a matter of taking human life and is, therefore, in itself immoral. We developed the atomic bomb and we used it. We had very little doubt that if the Germans or Japanese had developed an atomic bomb first, they would have used it. The question becomes one of degree. Is t that much worse to kill a hundred thousand people with a single bomb than it is to kill one person with a single bullet?”
Although the Nagasaki bomb did not, itself, cause the end of the war, it gave the Emperor a good excuse for ending the war.
(Photos from another source)
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