The US Was Right to Nuke Imperial Japan
How fanatical Japanese imperialism and 20 million corpses forced one of history's most heart-wrenching trolley problems.
This post is by contributor Johan Pregmo.
On December 7th, 1941, Imperial Japan attacked the United States at the Hawaiian naval base of Pearl Harbor, completely taking the nation by surprise. It was a date, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “which will live in infamy.” It sparked one of the bloodiest conflicts in history, culminating in the deployment of atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th of 1945. These were the first and only instances of nuclear bombs being used on humans in war. Not once in the 79 years since has any nuclear-armed power chosen to go beyond threats. The Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs remain a symbol of nuclear weaponry’s world-ending potential. They feature in every schoolbook as examples of war’s most horrific atrocities, and have been universally condemned by celebrated figures including Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Pope Francis, and the Dalai Lama. Sympathetic portrayals such as The Bells of Nagasaki (1949), Children of Hiroshima (1952), Black Rain (1965), Sadako and the 1000 Paper Cranes (1977), and Rhapsody in August (1991) tell heart-wrenching stories about those on the receiving end of such awesome destruction.
It’s little wonder, then, that in large parts of the West’s collective memory, the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings are seen as unjust, needless tragedies at best, and unthinkable war crimes of the highest order at worst. But this view is deeply flawed. More than that, it’s wrong, both factually and morally. When examined beyond a superficial analysis of the Japanese as innocent victims, and weighed against the alternatives in World War II, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only justified — they were morally correct.
To most educated people, and to many ordinary folks as well, the popular narrative about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that has taken root over the decades frames Japan as the helpless prey of US aggression. In this view, the bombings were a grossly disproportionate retaliation on America’s part, done either out of callousness or malice as a way to punish the Japanese and test the bomb by using innocent civilians as guinea pigs for this shiny new toy of mass destruction. Japan, we are told, had been willing to surrender, and therefore the use of nuclear weapons was unnecessary and evil. Coupled with the US’s legitimately shameful Japanese internment camps, America is framed as a colonialist villain, wickedly exercising its incredible power to bully Japan. This is the perverse reading of history that has become common in society.
Remarkably absent from this narrative are the upwards of 20 million people killed by the fanatical Imperial Japanese forces, or the grotesque acts of barbarism they regularly committed. Also absent are the imperialist wars of expansion waged by Japan, or the sexual slavery it visited on Korea and China. Indeed, the task of casting Imperial Japan as the victim is nearly impossible — unless carried out in a complete and total ignorance or disregard of the extreme violence and mass murder the Japanese committed during this time period.
Some Background
Fresh off the heels of the rapid modernization of the Meiji restoration in the late 1800s, Japan immediately set out to copy and even exceed Western colonial powers. Starting in the early 1900s, Japan invaded Korea, the Chinese region of Manchuria, French Indochina (modern Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos), and eventually the Philippines. Japan left devastation in its wake, killing an estimated 20 million by the end of WWII. They used slave labor. They raped some 20,000 to 80,000 Korean and Chinese women. The Rape of Nanking saw nightmarish, almost cartoonishly evil atrocities visited upon the population. Women were brutalized and raped in front of family members before being killed. Soldiers held beheading contests. Babies were bayoneted and civilians were slaughtered en masse. The events in Nanking were so horrific that a visiting Nazi Party member, John Rabe, was shocked by the atrocities and moved to help what Chinese civilians he could.
Also absent from the Japanese victim narrative is the reason Japan attacked the US. In response to its repeated acts of violent conquest, the US government embargoed Japan, cutting off all oil exports. Japan, a small and resource-starved nation, got the vast majority of its oil from the US. Unable to secure imports from other places thanks to its aggressive foreign policy, this cut-off was a deathblow to the Japanese war machine. Within a year or two, it would have meant a forced halt to all their plans of expansion.
A saner regime would have taken the hint and ceased expanding. Bogged down in China and slowly losing an unwinnable war of attrition, Japan’s days were already numbered. But the Japanese government was a dysfunctional mess. Its armed forces did not answer to its government, only to the emperor, who, by political tradition, almost never interfered. Thus the rabid army and navy — who deeply hated each other — had free rein to do whatever they wanted. And in their irrational, frothing zealotry, they launched a surprise attack on the United States on December 7th, 1941 without a declaration of war, sinking a multitude of ships. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the fleet at Pearl Harbor consisted mainly of outdated battleships, while the few aircraft carriers the US had were safely tucked away in another harbor.
2,390 people died in the attack. It was war.
Perhaps Japan’s delusions of grandeur weren’t entirely delusional. In a surprise knockout victory against a superpower, they’d beaten Russia in 1905. Forcing the US to reopen oil exports would have given them the lifeline they needed. But their hope was ultimately unrealistic — America was not Russia; it was a fully modernized economic superpower, and despite an early string of losses, the defeat at Midway sealed Japan’s fate. With four carriers sunk, their navy — the backbone of their military power — had its back broken, and Japan was in full retreat. After painstakingly clearing Japanese forces from isle to bloody isle, the US and Allies finally stood at Japan’s doorstep after Okinawa.
A Costly War
War is never easy, especially in the era of machine guns and air strikes. But the Pacific War had taken on an especially gruesome characteristic even by those standards. The tropical climate led to endemic disease and the logistics of transporting supplies across thousands of miles of sea led to problems with starvation. And that’s to say nothing of the terrible casualties; over a 100,000 Americans died during the campaign, 12,000 of which happened in Okinawa, the very last battle before a potential push into Japan itself. The US faced enormous public pressure to curb the mounting casualties. Families were understandably hesitant to see their sons killed on some faraway rock in the sea.
Japan, for its part, was as fanatically committed as ever. The country was in the grips of a political death cult, the kind where any politician or businessman found insufficiently patriotic — that is, not ultranationalist enough — might find himself murdered and his killer treated with leniency. Secret societies like the Sakurakai, run by junior military officers, had an outsized influence on policy, and the civil government had no control over the military. Among the civilian populace, there was a high level of support for their government. The emperor was viewed as something akin to a deity. Whether through force, propaganda, or genuine commitment, virtually every sector of Japanese society appeared ready to fight to the last man, woman, and child.
A reasonable point at which to stop would have been the oil embargo. A second stage would have been the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway, which put victory officially out of reach. But the Japanese army and navy were dead set on keeping all their imperial gains, and would not agree to any peace that did not include preserving their oppressive empire. Utterly deranged, the Japanese regime would rather sacrifice their civilians in doomed resistance efforts or mass suicides than even consider surrender.
These facts sit in stark contrast to the popular narrative that Japan was willing to surrender. The situation was dire enough that when Emperor Hirohito finally intervened, the military attempted a coup to oust him and keep fighting. The insanity of Imperial Japan was such that its leadership would rather drive the whole country off a cliff than negotiate — a far cry from the poor victims of colonialism.
US leadership therefore faced an impossible situation. Based on the incredibly bloody battle of Okinawa, an invasion of mainland Japan would have cost between a quarter million and a million US lives and at least as many Japanese. To blockade the country would have starved millions of Japanese civilians to death. US General Curtis Lemay’s firebombing campaign, which killed almost as many people as the nukes, had not softened Japanese resolve.
The US command was left with a set of choices, all of them involving an absolutely tremendous loss of human life. Imperial Japan could not be allowed to keep going — 20 million corpses was reason enough to break their rule. All of Southeast Asia was experiencing widespread famine, Japan included. An invasion would kill millions; so would a blockade. As it turned out, there was another option.
Little Boy and Fat Man
Headed by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the US’s Manhattan Project produced the world’s first nuclear weapons. On August 6th, 1945, the first bomb, code-named “Little Boy”, was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Despite the catastrophic damage it did, the Japanese government refused to surrender. Three days later, on August 9th, a second bomb, code-named “Fat Man”, was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The death toll was colossal — as many as 135,000 in Hiroshima and 64,000 in Nagasaki. About 200,000 dead. That a single weapon could do such damage in an instant was and remains terrifying.
The sheer horror of the bomb’s destructive potential is a core aspect of how these events are remembered. No matter how many statistics, facts, and figures one sees, it’s hard not to feel overawed and deeply disturbed by the thought of a nuclear holocaust. It’s hard not to imagine oneself or one’s family in such a situation. It’s hard not to have a strong, visceral, emotional reaction. But when it comes to the fate of millions, runaway emotions become dangerous. More dangerous, in fact, than the atomic bombs. The facts matter, and when viewed in context, they tell a very different story.
Imperial Japan was a blood-drenched, genocidal dictatorship run by fanatics with no regard for human life — be it their own or those of others. Despite having lost, they refused to surrender under any terms that would dissolve their conquests. Japan had to be stopped, but every available strategy would kill millions — except one. 200,000 dead civilians is truly terrible. When the alternative is millions of dead civilians, however, the choice is clear. Of course, this is no great comfort to those who died in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or their families, but this unthinkable trolley problem was forced by the obstinacy, radicalism, and threat of the Japanese regime. With the full context in mind, to argue against the atomic bombings is, in effect, to argue for millions more to have died from firebombs, bullets, disease, and mass starvation.
More importantly, to argue that dropping the bombs was unjustified because it killed civilians is to place more importance on the perpetrator than their victims. Every month that Japan did not surrender, tens of thousands of civilians in China, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines would continue to die. Did their lives matter less than those in the country invading and brutalizing them?
Those Who Know, and Those Who Don’t
The legacy of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings as crimes against humanity and a blemish on the soul of America comes down to an emotional knee jerk response and plain ignorance. It is remembered in the light of later, morally worse conflicts, such as the waste of life in Vietnam, the continuous Cold War regime change coups and proxy wars, and the Iraq War born of the George W. Bush administration’s lies. These informed the perception of US interventionism, or any expression of US military power, as evil imperialism. This, in turn, opened the door for anti-Western historical revisionism that portrays the US as a one-dimensional villain picking on helpless victims.
The war crimes of Nazi Germany have never been never forgotten, and the horrors of the Holocaust have been hammered into us from an early age. But most people have never heard of Japan’s human experiments in Unit 731, despite it being just as nauseatingly inhuman as anything Josef Mengele’s imagination could conjure. People had their limbs frozen solid, while alive, to test frostbite. People were vivisected while alive. Bayonets and knives were tested on live prisoners. Men with syphilis were made to rape women to infect them, so that the disease could be studied. The list goes on.
As frustrating as the ignorance about Japan’s atrocities is, it’s not entirely the public’s fault. The US took a different approach to Japan. Needing an ally in the Pacific against the mounting threat of the Soviet Union and later communist China, the US quickly launched extensive reconstruction efforts, rebuilding, rehabilitating, and pacifying the country. Emperor Hirohito’s role in the war was downplayed, the military’s role was played up, and Japan was rapidly transformed into a different country. An ally. As generations passed, their tremendous war crimes were largely eclipsed by the Nazis and Soviets and eventually forgotten amid the thriving techno-cultural powerhouse postwar Japan had blossomed into.
For those who don’t know the history, condemning the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is understandable. The colonialist US, so fond of bombing foreigners, overreacted to Japan and brutally suppressed them, most likely because they were extremely racist. Just look at the internment camps at home. Sure, maybe Japan was bad, but were they that bad that we needed to nuke them?
Unfortunately, this is how many people think.
If you don’t know, the atomic bombings look like some of the worst crimes man has ever committed against man.
But if you do know, you might marvel at the restraint of only dropping two bombs.
See also: “No, the Trains Never Ran on Time”
Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this article on your social networks, and hit the like button so more people can discover it. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com.
 | A guest post by
|
Good article. One of the most amazing things about racist 'progressive' indoctrination is the way the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities was "one day big racist America woke up and decided to nuke poor, peace loving Japan". It's absolutely ahistorical, amoral and ridiculous.
It wasn't really a level of destruction that we weren't already involved with in Japan. It just took one bomb instead of many bombs. But the rationale was mapped out well before the big one.