Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. This is the 80th anniversary of the Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, bombings—with nuclear weapons, atomic bomb—on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And this past week we’ve seen more of the usual revisionism that either the dropping of the atomic bombs were barbaric, criminal, had no effect, were unnecessary, and/or a bad mark on the history of the United States’ activity in World War II.
It’s part of a larger revisionist attempt in this generation. Winston Churchill—under these revisionists—is a terrorist. Adolf Hitler didn’t really mean to start World War II. He could have sued for peace, had the British not been so stubborn. The war really wasn’t worth the cost and lives and destruction entailed in defeating the Axis powers.
Nevertheless, though, there’s nothing more wrongheaded than looking at Nagasaki and Hiroshima as preventable or unnecessary. Let me just go through three points.
No. 1, why didn’t they drop it, as suggested, in Tokyo Bay? Drop it—the bomb—as a test. There were a variety of reasons.
Robert Oppenheimer was the head of the program to develop the bomb, at least the scientific element of it. And he organized a task force. And he suggested that they not use a test. And there were reasons why. They only had the uranium Hiroshima bomb and the plutonium Nagasaki bomb available. They might have had one in a few weeks. They might have had two or three more in months. But the point is, they didn’t know if it was necessarily going to work.
The uranium bomb had never been tested. It was very dangerous to trigger it. They weren’t even sure that it could not go off accidentally. The point is, they were afraid since the uranium bomb had never been tested. The plutonium bomb had only been tested on July 16, a little earlier. But it was never dropped from a bomber. They didn’t know what were the atmospherics or what would be the effect, or if it was even feasible to drop it from a B-29. They had practiced, but they weren’t sure.
So, in other words, they were afraid if they dropped the bomb and it didn’t work or it didn’t go off with a blast capacity they anticipated, the Japanese would sort of slough it off and say, “Is this all you have?” And then they wouldn’t have had other bombs to remind them that they should surrender under duress.
More importantly, it was very dangerous to fly from Tinian, the Mariana’s base of the B-29 bombers that were alone capable of handling this 10,000-pound monstrosity among American aircraft, to fly 1,600 miles into the Japanese mainland to drop the bomb and then fly back. The B-29s had lost 400 planes because of the weather, fighters, flak, and the sheer distances, navigation.
And more importantly, they felt that if they announced the test in advance and it didn’t work, of course, the Japanese would even be more emboldened. They weren’t even sure that a test, if it did work, would affect them. And that was proven correct. After the Nagasaki’s second bomb, there was a coup, attempted coup, to try to force the Japanese government not to settle.
There were other reasons as well that we should look at this decision in a favorable light. The other was, did it save lives? It did. And it did in a variety of ways.
Of all the belligerents in World War II, the Japanese army, military, government—whatever term we use—killed more civilians and soldiers versus the amount of soldiers and civilians that lost than any other belligerent. More than the Russians. More than the Germans. In other words, it was a deadly killing machine that averaged 10,000 deaths a day at its hands. How else could you stop it?
No. 2, they had just fought six weeks earlier at Okinawa. That was the bloodiest battle of the entire Pacific War—50,000 American casualties, 12,000 dead. The period—the last 12 months, from 1944 in August to August of 1945—was the deadliest period in the American-Pacific War.
In other words, the people at the time thought things were getting worse, as far as American casualties, not better. After they looked at Okinawa and the horrific conditions and taking the Philippines, they estimated a million or more Americans would be killed in taking Japan by a land invasion.
There’s another macabre fact to this. Okinawa was just 700 miles to 800 miles from the Japanese mainland targets. Not 1,600 like the Marianas. Once it was captured, Curtis LeMay wanted to bring in 2,000 new B-29s, on order, to augment the 2,000 that they might have had soon on the Marianas. And remember, the European Theater was over. There were plans to bring in B-17s and B-24 four-engine bombers that were idle. The British wanted to chip in and bring hundreds of Lancaster heavy bombers.
What I’m getting at, had they not dropped the bomb, the fire raids would’ve continued, but not three or four times a week, every single day, from Okinawa. And not with 1,000-2,000 heavy bombers, but with an envisioned 5,000-6,000. That led Curtis LeMay to say, “The bomb wasn’t necessary. We could have burned Japan to the ground and forced its surrender.” Much more people would’ve died had that entailed.
And so, what did the bomb do? It stopped this Japanese war machine from killing people. It stopped a horrendous battle on the mainland of Japan, where the Japanese were waiting for an American invasion with 3.5 million soldiers and 6,000 kamikaze planes. These were the equivalent of or much more lethal than the V-1 buzz bomb rockets that the Germans used. The human mind is a very sophisticated computer and when put in a zero with a 500- or 1,000-pound bomb, it was an unstoppable cruise missile of sorts. And they had over 3,000 of them ready to hit the American fleet.
Add it all up and there was only bad and worse choices. We chose the bad choice that entailed 150,000 to 200,000 deaths from the actual shock and blast to the after effects. But the other alternative—of letting this Japanese killing machine continue to murder Chinese, Asians, Pacific Islanders, British Commonwealthers, and Americans, or invading the mainland, or continuing the fire raids—paled in comparison.
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