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.
“the popular narrative about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that has taken root over the decades frames Japan as the helpless prey of US aggression”
I don’t think anyone seriously makes that argument.
I don’t think there’s much historical
sympathy for pre-war Imperial Japan. At least one Japanese general was noted to express surprise that there would be debate about the American dropping of those bombs stating that Japan certainly wouldn’t have thought twice about doing it to the US if the roles were reversed. There is little debate that the Japanese were horrible.
I’d claim the modern criticism of the nuclear attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are this: The US deliberately twice targeted a civilian population with an WMD for the purposes of applying political pressure on the government to change its policies. There were no significant military dimensions specifically to the two nuclear attacks wherein civilian deaths were merely collateral. Mass civilian deaths were the objective. The moral ramifications of that in US foreign and defense policy lasted well into the present. When a non-state actor does that today, we have a special word for it.
The war planners of the Tokyo firebombing and nuclear bombing campaigns, such as Curtis LeMay, knew they’d all hang for war crimes if the Allies lost the war. They understood what they were doing.
It was LeMay years later who confessed about the bombing campaign of Korea of having killed 10-15% of the North Korean population—which in 1950 totalled 10 million—so 1-2 million people were killed by UN/ US bombing most of which was well after the war had settled into a stalemate between 1951-53, far dwarfing that of Japan, and when there was no war to be won. So the notion that the devastating US nuclear and fire bombing to end the war in the Pacific in 1945 were extreme only because of the extreme threat of Japan doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There was no such threat in Korea and they did far worse simply because they could. It stands to reason that the US decided to bomb Japan with the most devastating tools in its arsenal simply because it could then too.
Also all “surrenders” are not created equal. Japan was indeed ready to surrender conditionally by the summer of 1945, but not on the unconditional terms the American public demanded having lost some 200,000 of its sons to the Pacific and European Wars. Truman would not have survived the razor-thin 1948 election had he
So there were domestic political considerations as well that probably trump the moral ones.
I agree dropping the first bomb was unavoidable, but some have argued, fairly convincingly to me, that the US should have waited a bit longer before dropping the second on Nagasaki, in order to give the Japanese leadership more time to realize their hopeless situation. Related to this, Stalin had recently kept his commitment to declare war on Japan and the very battle hardended 1945 Red Army was making short work of the Imperial Army in August 1945. The argument that the second bomb was unecessary also posits that Truman's decision was driven more by a desire to keep the USSR out of any post war role in Japan than military necessity. As an aside, of course, the US only had 2 bombs available in August 1945, although Japan did not know that, and while Hirohito did not politically intervene, he pushed a much more aggressive war policy than was traditionaly known by the whitewashed history of his role that MacArthur and the US put out in order to keep Japan as a firm Cold War ally in subsequent years, although Hirohito was decisive in making the decision to finally surrender.
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.
“the popular narrative about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that has taken root over the decades frames Japan as the helpless prey of US aggression”
I don’t think anyone seriously makes that argument.
I don’t think there’s much historical
sympathy for pre-war Imperial Japan. At least one Japanese general was noted to express surprise that there would be debate about the American dropping of those bombs stating that Japan certainly wouldn’t have thought twice about doing it to the US if the roles were reversed. There is little debate that the Japanese were horrible.
I’d claim the modern criticism of the nuclear attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are this: The US deliberately twice targeted a civilian population with an WMD for the purposes of applying political pressure on the government to change its policies. There were no significant military dimensions specifically to the two nuclear attacks wherein civilian deaths were merely collateral. Mass civilian deaths were the objective. The moral ramifications of that in US foreign and defense policy lasted well into the present. When a non-state actor does that today, we have a special word for it.
The war planners of the Tokyo firebombing and nuclear bombing campaigns, such as Curtis LeMay, knew they’d all hang for war crimes if the Allies lost the war. They understood what they were doing.
It was LeMay years later who confessed about the bombing campaign of Korea of having killed 10-15% of the North Korean population—which in 1950 totalled 10 million—so 1-2 million people were killed by UN/ US bombing most of which was well after the war had settled into a stalemate between 1951-53, far dwarfing that of Japan, and when there was no war to be won. So the notion that the devastating US nuclear and fire bombing to end the war in the Pacific in 1945 were extreme only because of the extreme threat of Japan doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There was no such threat in Korea and they did far worse simply because they could. It stands to reason that the US decided to bomb Japan with the most devastating tools in its arsenal simply because it could then too.
Also all “surrenders” are not created equal. Japan was indeed ready to surrender conditionally by the summer of 1945, but not on the unconditional terms the American public demanded having lost some 200,000 of its sons to the Pacific and European Wars. Truman would not have survived the razor-thin 1948 election had he
So there were domestic political considerations as well that probably trump the moral ones.
I agree dropping the first bomb was unavoidable, but some have argued, fairly convincingly to me, that the US should have waited a bit longer before dropping the second on Nagasaki, in order to give the Japanese leadership more time to realize their hopeless situation. Related to this, Stalin had recently kept his commitment to declare war on Japan and the very battle hardended 1945 Red Army was making short work of the Imperial Army in August 1945. The argument that the second bomb was unecessary also posits that Truman's decision was driven more by a desire to keep the USSR out of any post war role in Japan than military necessity. As an aside, of course, the US only had 2 bombs available in August 1945, although Japan did not know that, and while Hirohito did not politically intervene, he pushed a much more aggressive war policy than was traditionaly known by the whitewashed history of his role that MacArthur and the US put out in order to keep Japan as a firm Cold War ally in subsequent years, although Hirohito was decisive in making the decision to finally surrender.