On The Atomic Bombing Of Japan

This started as a brief introduction on whether we could mathematically tell the difference between superstition and genuine cause, using certain practices to avoid having bombs drop on one’s head as our example. But it kept going. When I write the superstition article, it will call on this as its introduction.

A while back, as happens from time to time, a discussion developed on whether it was moral or immoral to drop atomic weapons on Japan.

I take no position on this except to give you one word.

Maybe you saw the movie Bridge on the River Kwai, but if you have not, do so. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I am not giving away much by telling you what the doctor at the end of the film said, in his stunned summary of the behavior of everybody, all sides, in the war: Madness.

That’s my one word.

A word well confirmed in the book The Day Man Lost: Hiroshima, 6 August 1945, by the group calling themselves The Pacific War Research Society, issued by Kodansha in 1972. Note the main title carefully.

The book is not an apology. For anybody. It is a clear-eyed a summary of the events in the last year of the Pacific War as you are likely to find.

Here we see delusional Japanese Army brass arming starving shriveled old men with bamboo spears, demanding these pathetic warriors battle American Marines to the death. Here are delusional American scientists who eagerly built their horrible weapon begging that it not be used. Madness.

Let’s go back before The Bomb. Let’s go to when the battle for Okinawa was raging, a battle which killed around forty-five thousand Americans, and twice as many Japanese soldiers, not to mention the 150,000 or so dead Okinawan civilians.

When I was stationed on that island in the late 1980s, I came across a sort of cave, with two chambers, an upper and a lower, carved out of the corral connected by (what I took to be) a concrete speaking tube. In the lower, smaller chamber were two skulls, a big and a very small one. This was just off the Kadena golf course. (Yes, I am aware of the irony of where I was and why I was there.)

Well, it is difficult, at best, to speak of these things without tribal urges taking over. If you are in one tribe you might be tempted to say every casualty, even dead enemy children, were really the fault of the enemy. And vice versa. You will tempted to allow any behavior as long as your side wins.

When American B-29s initially dropped bombs on the Japanese mainland beginning in late 1944, they did so at night. They weren’t very accurate. The planes flew too high to avoid enemy flak, which, loaded with heavy armor and bombs, put too much stress on the planes, causing more than a few of them to abort their missions or splash. The bombs that did get dropped usually went far off target because of the height and wind.

These anemic attacks emboldened Japanese Army leaders, who said, translated into modern parlance, “Is that all you got?” This was one of the reasons they thought it might be possible to fight the Americans off. Indeed, General Tojo (no longer Prime Minister at that point) used that very line of reasoning in a briefing of the Emperor.

Then Curtis LeMay came along. He dared change tactics to those used in Germany. He bid the planes fly low, and carry light incendiaries instead of bombs. The planes’ armor was reduced, and their guns taken out.

On the night of 9 March 1945. LeMay’s fleet headed for Tokyo. The raid was a tremendous success. LeMay only lost a dozen or so planes. The entire eastern half of the city was razed. Some 100,000 people, plus or minus, were killed in the conflagration. Included in the dead were many small skulls.

Gratified at the efficiency of the attack, LeMay went on to fire bomb other Japanese cities. Over and over and over again. He only paused when he ran out of incendiaries. Which were, in time, resupplied. And which were not, as we know, sufficient to cause Japan to surrender.

Then came Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were enough. But only just. There were several attempted coups after the Emperor, horrified by the bombs, decided to surrender. These were small efforts, with just a few men each, who reasoned it was better to have death than dishonor. Which is what they thought Americans demanded, with the Allies’ adamant insistence on “unconditional” surrender. They had heard what was happening in Germany. It was a near run thing.

Since we started this with a pop culture reference, it is well to end with one, especially if you find yourself shaking your head at the after-atomics attempted coups. This one is from the movie Gladiator, where our hero, Roman General Maximus, is arraying his well-equipped disciplined troops for a battle against German barbarians.

Maximus’s lieutenant Quintus scoffs at his enemies. “People should know when they are conquered,” he says.

Maximus replies, “Would you, Quintus? Would I?”

Incidentally, I don’t know if this source has done the math properly, but if you add up the bodies from the firebombings, it seems it is much higher than the number wiped out in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Something like 350,000 versus 200,000. Which were both totals smaller than the number of civilians killed in bombing German cities like Hamburg and Dresden, a total well north of 400,000. To say nothing of all the others massacred in one way or the other in those years.

Benjamin Colby in his ‘Twas A Famous Victory: Deception and Propaganda in the War with Germany, puts the German civilian total at 537,000, with 60,000 dead in Britain. He also reminds us it was Britain that first purposely bombed civilians. “The British military expert and historian, Capt. B.H. Liddell Hart, called it the ‘most uncivilized method of warfare the world has known since the Mongol invasions.'”

Madness.

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