War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. – William Tecumseh Sherman
One humid Japanese summer day. One bomb. 8:15 am. 135,000 casualties. 66,000 dead (including 38,000 children). 69,000 injured. Three days later, World War II ended.
Eighty years later, we commemorate the brutal yet ultimately just conclusion of World War II. Victory in Europe, then victory in Japan, and we welcomed a victory for the entire world. August 6th, 1945, is essentially significant because on that day, the United States military first unleashed unprecedented nuclear carnage, and then our country accomplished an erstwhile unattainable miracle. The United States dropped the atomic bomb, with a pledge to drop more if needed (Nagasaki would follow).
The United States had been at war with Japan for nearly four years. The Japanese instigated this carnage by bombing Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It is a rank offense to hear dissident pundits and military historians suggest that the United States was responsible for the attack due to our embargo on Japan.
What was the United States supposed to do? Allow the Japanese to annihilate Southeast Asia? Do nothing while fascist regimes threaten America? They bombed our harbor. They killed our soldiers unprovoked. Japan deserved everything that happened to them, especially on that August morning.
Modern pundits scorn President Harry Truman and the United States for “dropping the bomb.” Should they? They ask, “Why not unleash the bomb on a neutral target to warn the Japanese? Why not invade Japan or sue for peace?”
These pacifists not only condemn the United States for dropping the bomb, but they also want a complete phasing out of mass destruction. Such thinking is naïve. No matter how welcome and powerful the exhortation from Isaiah may be, we cannot yet beat spears into pruning hooks or swords into plowshares.
The United States’ war against Japan evolved into an island-hopping invasion. The fighting was beyond brutal, combining trench warfare with sweltering heat against a fanatical foe whose state religion ordered honor for the Emperor up to death itself—not just for the combatant, but for the family and fellow countrymen.
The United States defeated Japan at Midway, Iwo Jima, and then Okinawa. The next islands? Japan itself. Japan would not surrender. Could the United States sustain a full invasion of Japan?
Consider D-Day: June 6th, 1944. Young men from Commonwealth countries and the United States submitted themselves to hellish barrages of machine-gun fire while taking the beaches of Normandy. Brutal incursions into Western and Northern Europe met stiff resistance (Anzio, Battle of the Bulge, Berlin).
The Germans and Italians surrendered. The Japanese were different. Civilians and soldiers, children and adults, resolved to take their own lives, sacrificing themselves for the honor of the Emperor. To surrender was beneath contempt for every Japanese citizen. In Hiroshima, the Japanese were even training children to become kamikaze pilots for ships as well as planes.
Military calculations estimated that as many as 15 million Japanese lives would be lost in a United States invasion, along with five million American lives.
What was to be done?
President Truman convened his staff. They discussed options. They had the atomic bomb.
Should they use it? Would it trigger an arms race? What if the blowback proliferates nuclear expansion and strikes worldwide? Could they live with the decision?
Truman had to stop the war. They had to win. They had to stop Japan’s unprecedented brutality: the Rape of Nanking. Pearl Harbor. The March to Bataan. My hometown hero, Lou Zamperini, endured unprecedented torture from his Japanese captors. They also vivisected their captives and they ate them, too—even when they possessed foodstuffs: the ultimate humiliation for the enemy.
These atrocities would continue if the Japanese were not defeated. It was not enough to obliterate their weapons or slaughter their soldiers. The United States had to destroy their will.
How do you break an enemy whose civilians throw themselves off cliffs with their children? How do you defeat an enemy prepared to lose their lives and the lives of all their loved ones to defend the empire?
Truman could. He would stop this war. He would win.
Truman gave the order. He dropped the bomb.
It was not a necessary evil, as the self-righteous claim. It was a necessary good.
There was no better means to victory than by dropping the bomb. The sheer destruction of one nuclear device outstripped all the blood, sweat, and tears of kamikaze pilots and bonsai jingoism.
We should be glad Truman did it.
The carnage wrought by Little Boy and Fat Man was unforeseeable. The Hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bomb) relate harrowing accounts of men, women, and yes, children walking around like moaning zombies, their skin falling off their bodies. Charred, blackened faces, some disfigured beyond recognition, littered the city. Young and old rushed to the river to slake their thirst, to put out the unbearable burning of their bodies. While many of the inhabitants died instantly, there were many Japanese who survived for thirty minutes, a day, a week, or even a month in excruciating pain, covered in burns, their skin falling off, in unbearable agony.
Yet for all these horrifying scenes, I am glad Truman dropped the bomb.
He won the war. Three days later, after the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the Emperor cast the tie-breaking vote to seek peace. Japanese civilians and military did not all celebrate. A rebel force assembled to attempt a coup and remove the emperor, install a provisional war government, and continue their nation’s suicide. Every historian and commentator must understand this often-overlooked event. The Japanese people were so committed to the cult of war, they would topple (their) God to continue!
There is no easy path to peace or reasoning with such machine-like, genocidal madness.
Truman made the right call, and he should be honored for that.
He dropped the bomb. We should all be glad he did.