In the reading, listening, and viewing I’ve done recently on the ever-troubling question of the use of atomic bombs on Japan, what I’ve noticed clearly for the first time is the seemingly inexorable retributory escalation in word and deed not so hidden under the ostensible arguments of life-saving necessity.
On the Feast of St. Augustine, 2023
“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“A hand came out of August
And flicked his life away:
We had not time to bargain, mope,
Moralize, or pray.”
―Cecil Day-Lewis, Overtures to Death and Other Poems
“Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August
Among the many august feast days of August—Augustine, Monica, Bernard, Liguori, Vianney, Cajetan, Chantal, Eudes, Roch, Rose, Joachim, Hyacinth, Bartholomew, Louis IX, and Pius X; Our Lady of the Snows, Knock, and Czestochowa; the Transfiguration; the Assumption, Seven Joys, and Queenship of Mary—runs the abundant blood of martyrs: The Holy Maccabees, the Lammas Day Chains of Peter, the finding of the body of the Protomartyr Stephen, Felix, Romanus, Timothy, Hermes, Hippolytus, Cassian, Lawrence, Sabina, Susanna, Philomena, Postgate, Kemble, Clitherow, Ward, Arrowsmith, Benedicta, Kolbe, and, foreshadowing Good Friday, the Passion of John the Baptist.
And to give April a world historical run at being the cruelest month, we have the bookends of the guns of August 1914 and the bombs of August 1945. I have not been able to stop thinking about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in particular and obliteration bombing in general since reading Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy this month, and I would like to explain why in abbreviated fashion.
In the first edition of her work (2002), Neiman used the natural evils of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the human evils of Auschwitz as pivotal moments that reshaped modern thought on the question of theodicy. For the Princeton Classics Edition of the work (2015), Neiman wrote an Afterword, revealing five things she would change in the text based on new insights and the intervening flow of historical events. By far the biggest revision she envisioned was to correct a serious neglect of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as theodically pivotal. Having not at the time of writing the book asked “why the consciousness of Hiroshima, so present in its aftermath, had been so thoroughly overshadowed by our consciousness of Auschwitz,” the answers she later found in preparing an essay on the 70th anniversary of the bombings were eye-opening to the point of scales-falling.
My own scales-falling moment came last year listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia, which effectively addresses the morality of the British and American World War II bombing—total war strategy and tactics obliterating just war principles and prosecution, embraced vehemently and almost from the start by Churchill, and reluctantly but eventually under FDR and Truman, with horrific death and destruction under the command of Curtis “Bombs Away” or “the Demon” LeMay. Gladwell recounts the pivotal decisions and events on the U.S. side first through a technological lens, so to speak, contrasting the proposed use of the Norden precision bombsight, developed in New York City and Zürich, with that of Napalm, developed and tested at Harvard; and then from the human perspective through the careers and characters of Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay (I would recommend the audiobook to all readers, especially for the many interview clips with LeMay and others). So while I would argue that Operation Meetinghouse should be at least as well-known a shorthand for the big moral questions surrounding the war as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Neiman’s recapitulation of the path to her Hiroshima answers has brought me greater clarity on one critical aspect of these questions.
(Credit: From The Bomber Mafia Listener’s Guide by Malcolm Gladwell.)
By way of preface, for many years in conversations at extended family parties, the morality of the atomic bombings finds its way into reconsideration. This happens at various times of the year (not only in August, when the bombings are again in the news), and we are mostly in the 50s-60s age range, with no direct experience of the war and no deaths in our extended family or other life-altering effects of the war. (In fact, the highlight for the young kids at a few family gatherings in the past was Great-Uncle Guido’s story of being shot down in Germany and evading capture for 3 days and nights—kids: ‘stupid Nazis!’—before a benign prisoner-of-war stint that ended in an officer exchange.) I don’t know if we are unique in repeatedly revisiting this conversation about the bombing of Japan, but parallel recurring journalistic focus and cultural commentary leads me to believe that this is a sign both of the importance of the question and of its unresolved status in the American consciousness (to the extent we still seek truth in common on these big questions).
In our conversations, as one might predict, some see the bombings as justifiable, life-saving necessities, which others argue is clearly condemnable consequentialism rationalizing evil acts for the sake of the assumed counterfactual good of fewer deaths. These lines were drawn long ago by Fr. John C. Ford, S.J. before the atomic bombings (“The Morality of Obliteration Bombing” was published on September 1, 1944) and after the war by Elizabeth Anscombe against the consequentialists and realpolitik-ians of their day (see also this interesting collection of 1940’s opposition to obliteration bombing). They have been updated periodically in such exchanges as those between Christopher Tollefsen and Fr. Bill Miscamble, with a response from Tollefson (Fr. Bill, in this Public Discourse exchange, recounts a conference dinner with a trio of his friends—Finnis/Grisez/Boyle—at which Joe Boyle did not hesitate to call him a consequentialist for his arguments in The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan). The best recent public version of this argument that I’ve seen is George Weigel’s First Things essay on the 75th anniversary (“Truman’s Terrible Choice”) and Ed Feser’s Catholic Herald response (“Weigel’s Terrible Arguments”).
And the argument lives on. Roger Kimball just published “The atomic bomb saved Japanese lives, too” in The Spectator World, citing a 2007 Oliver Kamm article from The Guardian, “Terrible, but not a crime,” which carried the subtitle “Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be remembered for the suffering which was brought to an end.”
To state my scales-free position more fully: the moral line still debated with regard to the atomic bombings had been crossed decisively long before Hiroshima. As Fr. Bill Miscamble writes in The Most Controversial Decision:
Barton Bernstein has observed insightfully that “the older morality crumbled in the crucible of what became virtually total war.” In this “emerging conception of nearly total war,” Bernstein explained further, “the enemy was not simply soldiers but non-combatants. They worked in factories, ran the economy, maintained the civic life, constituted much of the nation, and were the core of national cohesion. Kill them, and soon production would tumble, the national fabric would rip, armies would soon feel homeless, and the government might surrender.” Merely listing such cities as Shanghai, Nanking, Leningrad, Rotterdam, Coventry, London, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo makes the point. As a number of writers have noted succinctly, a “moral Rubicon” had been crossed long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Page 119, my emphases.)
Crossing this Rubicon of obliteration bombing was undertaken as an “experiment well worth trying” by Churchill, the results of which were most clearly seen in the firebombing deaths of 25,000+ civilians in Dresden (one of February’s claims to being the cruelest month—see Slaughterhouse-Five for Vonnegut’s fictionalized experience of Dresden as a POW). As Fr. John C. Ford, S.J. recounts in “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing,” the British Air Ministry saw the distinction between civilian and soldier as an “anachronism” which Churchill would solve thus [the parenthetical comments are Fr. Ford’s]:
The civilian population of Germany have an easy way to escape from these severities. All they have to do is to leave the cities where munition work is being carried on, abandon the work [as if the majority were engaged in it] and go out into the fields and watch the home fires burning from a distance. In this way they may find time for meditation and repentance. There they may remember the millions of Russian women and children they [was it they or the German army?] have driven out to perish in the snows, and the mass executions of peasants and prisoners of war which in varying scales they [they?] are inflicting on so many of the ancient and famous peoples of Europe. Note: “Bombing Vindicated,” page 95; Mr. Churchill spoke these words in a broadcast on May 10, 1942.
On the U.S. side, the Rubicon crossing was resisted by Haywood Hansell both early in the war, when Churchill mandated that U.S. bombers join the RAF in nighttime area bombing of German cities, and when U.S. command ordered him to use napalm bombs on Japan. Then FDR and his Generals fired Hansell and replaced him with LeMay, which marked our major Rubicon crossing. After the Tokyo Operation Meetinghouse slaughter of 100,000+ Japanese civilians in 3 hours (March’s claim to utmost cruelty), LeMay ordered the firebombing of 66 other Japanese cities, resulting in the deaths of as many as 1,000,000 civilians with roughly 5,000,000 left homeless. (As he said, “Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much…. I suppose if I had lost the war, I would be tried as a war criminal.” [Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, 21.] I suspect he knew that he would have been guilty as charged. By what fine distinction would we separate him in this from Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman?) Of the 200,000+ killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 96.5% were civilians. Ultimately, what month isn’t cruel? Perhaps it would be more fitting to say that WW2 was the cruelest war.
Clearly seeing this totalizing tendency, Pope Pius XII was a strong voice against it from the war’s earliest days. His April 13, 1941 admonition was one of many, presciently predicting the greater horrors ahead:
We feel obliged… to state that the ruthless struggle has at times assumed forms which can be described only as atrocious. May all belligerents, who also have human hearts molded by mothers’ love, show some feeling of charity for the sufferings of civilian populations, for defenseless women and children, for the sick and aged, all of whom are often exposed to greater and more widespread perils of war than those faced by soldiers at the front! We beseech the belligerent powers to abstain until the very end from the use of still more homicidal instruments of warfare; for the introduction of such weapons inevitably results in their retaliatory use, often with greater violence and cruelty by the enemy. If already we must lament the fact that the limits of legitimate warfare have been repeatedly exceeded, would not the more widespread use of increasingly barbarous offensive weapons soon transform the war into an unspeakable horror? (My emphasis.)
(Credit: From The Bomber Mafia Listener’s Guide by Malcolm Gladwell. Note: 24 residences were built to exact specifications – including 2”-thick Tatamis, which might prevent bombs from penetrating floors, and fish-oil soaked shoji paper, which might be flame-resistant – with the goal of finding the right chemical mixture to create an uncontrollable fire with 6 minutes. In testing, Napalm (a portmanteau of Naphthenic and palmitic acids, which were mixed with aluminium salts) was found to be the optimal incendiary gel, developed and tested at Harvard by Louis Fieser and the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service and then first used at scale on Tokyo:)
(Credits: From The Bomber Mafia Listener’s Guide by Malcolm Gladwell.)
After marking “the destructive milestone of incinerating 102.67 square miles of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Kobe, and Kawasaki” LeMay wrote to his wife: “I think I have convinced the Japs in the last months that they are beaten… and that I will destroy everything in Japan.” (Quoted in Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb by James M. Scott.)
All of this and all that came later at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done ostensibly to shorten the war by ostensively necessary and life-saving means (partly because the decisive Ketsu-Go strategy of the Japanese was assumed to be inviolable, despite signs of cracking before the atomic bombings). That is what leaders, including LeMay, told themselves then, and it is something we still seem to need to tell ourselves today. We have to answer on two levels: First, the Machiavellian moral question of “acting against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion” to protect one’s state, in this case by targeting civilians; and second, the practical question of “necessity” – that is, whether the atomic bombings were the “least abhorrent” of means in these particular circumstances, as Fr. Bill has argued.
First, assuming a just and proportionate cause/end for going to war as a last result with right intention, authority, and chance of success, means must align with the same just war principles. The search for moral justifications to bomb civilians ended up taking on Orwellian absurdities. As Fr. Ford recounted in evaluating the morality of obliteration bombing:
The principal reason alleged to justify the infliction of enormous agonies on hundreds of thousands and even millions of innocent persons by obliteration bombing is the reason of military necessity, or of shortening the war. We hear that “it must be done to win the war”; “it will shorten the war and save our soldiers’ lives”; “it will liberate Europe and enable us to feed the starving sooner.” Major General J.F.C. Fuller, writing long before obliteration bombing was an issue, said: “When however it is realized that to enforce policy, and not to kill, is the objective [in war] and that the policy of a nation though maintained and enforced by her soldiers and sailors is not fashioned by them but by the civil population, surely then if a few civilians get killed in the struggle they have nothing to complain of – ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!’” [quoted in John K. Ryan, Modern War and Basic Ethics, 115, note. Dr. Ryan gives many references to writers who hold the theory that attacking civil populations is a humanizing element in war.] Mr. J.M. Spaight makes the amazing claim that the long-range bomber, built for operations like the present one in Germany, is the savior of lives, of civilization, and the cornerstone of future peace.
Now in the practical estimation of proportionate cause it is fundamental to recognize that an evil which is certain and extensive and immediate will rarely be compensated for by a problematical, speculative, future good. The evil wrought by obliteration is certain injury and death, here and now, to hundreds of thousands, and an incalculable destruction of their property. The ultimate good which is supposed to compensate for this evil is of a very speculative character. (Ford, “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing,” 298-99. Emphases mine.)
The very speculative character of the ultimate good of the atomic bombings has since been assumed to be true, with “old morality” Just War-aligned solutions becoming speculative “counterfactuals.” I will bring René Girard’s thought into the question of compensatory “ultimate good” to conclude these reflections, foreshadowing that with this comment by Fr. Ford:
To all these bizarre claims, that attacks on the civilian population are a humanizing element in modern war, I think the following words of Dr. Ryan are relevant: “From a merely utilitarian standpoint these attacks cannot be justified, for they would spread destruction rather than restrict it, lengthen a war rather than shorten it, provide bitter causes for future conflicts rather than the conditions of a lasting peace.” (Ford, 302.)
On the “necessity” question, I take Fr. Bill Miscamble’s challenge on this second level seriously: “As future anniversaries of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki occur, one might hope for less moralizing condemnation of Truman’s decision until the critics specify at least a less immoral and yet still feasible course of action to end the terrible war.” (The Most Controversial Decision, 123-24.) There were, of course, military leaders who claimed the atomic bombs were unnecessary at the time. General LeMay firmly believed that they were superfluous, having already dealt so much death and destruction himself. LeMay’s estimate of the end of the war was this: “We’ll run out of big strategic cities and targets by October 1 [1945]….I can’t see the war going on much beyond that date.” (Scott, Black Snow, 329.) And along with LeMay, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Eisenhower, and Joint Chiefs Staff Chairman Admiral Leahy all argued against the atomic attack. (Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 344). Admiral Leahy’s later comments were devastating:
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons…. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. (I Was There: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to President Roosevelt and Truman Based on His Notes and Diaries at the Time, 1950, 513–14.)
And Admiral Nimitz, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet: “The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.”
To pile on, Admiral Halsey, Jr., commander of the U.S. Third Fleet: “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment…. It was a mistake to ever drop it. Why reveal a weapon like that to the world when it wasn’t necessary? … [The scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it…. It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before.” (Nimitz & Halsey quoted in Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 329 & 331.)
And as far as Harry Truman goes, despite calling it “the greatest thing in history” there was a moment at least when “just weeks after Hiroshima, Truman himself publicly declared that the bomb was not necessary to win the war.” (Neiman, 343, citing Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, 83.)
But leaving that evidence aside, as it has not been convincing to Fr. Bill (who was a close friend of my greatest mentor and is someone I admire and have enjoyed speaking with at Notre Dame over the past few years), I suggest a new statistical study on the economic and military incapacity of Japan by 1945: “An Economic Case against the Atomic Bombing of Japan” by Edward W. Fuller (The Independent Review, Volume 28, Number 1 [Summer 2023], 87-116.) For 35 years prior to WW2, U.S. war planners refined War Plan Orange to defeat a bellicose Japan by strategically destroying its military capacity and economic life. Mr. Fuller shows how well this plan was implemented during the war and how little war-making capacity remained to Japan by 1945. Every industry was at 10% capacity more or less (mostly less), and famine conditions were spreading. Fuller’s study, I think, backs us convincingly away both from the “necessity” argument in relation to the atomic bomb but also from invasion (the planned Operation Downfall) as a necessity/inevitability:
U.S. leadership certainly knew Japan was suffering severe metal, oil, and food crises in August 1945. Admiral Ernest J. King was commander in chief of the U.S. fleet and chief of naval operations. He had near-complete control over the U.S. Navy throughout the war. King recognized that the crushing U.S. economic war against Japan made the atomic bombing unnecessary. In fact, given the metal, oil, and food crises, King did not believe an invasion of Japan was necessary: “[I] felt, as [I] had pointed out many times, the dilemma [between invading Japan and using the atomic bomb] was an unnecessary one, for had we been willing to wait, the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials.” (Fuller, 99.)
This, of course, does not mean that Curtis LeMay’s obliteration firebombing wasn’t a material factor in bringing Japan to the economic-military brink or that it would have been morally justified in doing so, but it does argue powerfully, even on a utilitarian basis, against the final step of atomic bombing and against the inevitability of an Allied invasion of Japan had the bombs not been dropped (negating a counterfactual!). And given how freely we were already able to move through the skies over and waters surrounding Japan, we could have done as much as needed to deliver food and other essentials to the Japanese populace, thus alleviating starvation and moving closer to the old and lasting moral obligations in wartime. I sincerely hope that Fr. Bill will take this up and work through the data supporting the argument. I’ll leave the question here with Mr. Fuller’s conclusion, and turn to my own next:
There were many great battles during the Second World War. However, the production battle was far and away the most important. And the U.S. dominated it…. Japan could never have won the war against the U.S. It could not produce enough war goods to defeat the U.S., let alone the combined economic strength of the Allied powers (Hanson 2017, 303). Wartime production statistics strongly suggest U.S. war planners understood victory was inevitable long before the atomic bombing.…U.S. production of many vital war goods declined after 1943, and in many cases the declines were considerable. The timing of the falloff in U.S. war-goods production is significant. U.S. war planners cut war-goods production when it was still uncertain the atomic bombs would ever be available. This strongly suggests that U.S. leadership was confident the war could be won without atomic bombs. In other words, wartime production statistics suggest U.S. military planners did not believe the atomic bombs were necessary to win the war. (Fuller, 113-14.)
In the reading, listening, and viewing I’ve done recently on this ever-troubling question, what I’ve noticed clearly for the first time is the seemingly inexorable retributory escalation in word and deed not so hidden under the ostensible arguments of life-saving necessity.
We have already seen Churchill’s conflation of the German army and civilians in carrying out “mass executions of peasants and prisoners of war” as justification for bombing those civilians indiscriminately. We have also noted his pressure on the U.S. to join in that indiscriminate obliteration bombing of Germany, which General Hansell managed to resist (after pulling an all-nighter to boil his arguments down to a 1-page memo that came in under the limit of Churchill would read).
We can also note that though the area bombing Blitzkrieg of the German air force not only did not demoralize but strengthened the resolve of the British, Churchill and his Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Arthur “Butcher” Harris ignored this in choosing the same bombing strategy against the Germans.
Germany’s strategic bombing of England was held to be a failure partly because it stiffened the resistance of the English. Who can say to what extent our obliteration will strengthen rather than weaken the German will to resist – or to what excesses of cruel retribution against our soldiers the people will be aroused? There are many military men who still agree with Marshal Foch: “You cannot scare a great nation into submission by destroying her cities.” [Note: Quoted by John K. Ryan, Modern War and Basic Ethics, 117, note.] Members of the French hierarchy have warned us that our bombing in France (the argument holds a fortiori for Germany), “by striking blindly at innocent populations, by mutilating the face of our country, might engender between our nations a volume of hatred which not even the peace will be able to assuage.” (Ford, 301.)
So with the British response there was a kind of escalating reciprocity from the early days of the war that wasn’t tied to the “reasonable chance of success” principle of Just War theory and was, in fact, amplifying retribution in the face of clear evidence that the strategy hadn’t been effective against them:
We will mete out to the Germans the measure and more than the measure that they have meted out to us. (Churchill on July 15, 1941; Ford, 296, note.)
And:
Mr. Churchill gave the Golden Rule a new twist in a speech broadcast on May 10, 1942. He said that Bomber Command had done a great thing in teaching “a race of itching warriors that there is something after all in the old and still valid Golden Rule.” (Quoted Spaight, Bombing Vindicated, 103; Ford, 296-97, note.)
So for Churchill the Golden Rule was both a useful scapegoat mechanism and a valid tool of escalating mimetic rivalry.
Harris signaled the British approach of “cruel retribution” quite starkly in announcing the area bombing total war directive he was charged to carry out by Churchill and his Cabinet, quoting Hosea 8:7:
The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind. [Harris notes that he had unleashing the whirlwind on Germany in mind since 1940 in his Bomber Offensive, 52.]
Harris later spelled out what this meant to him and how it should be articulated and understood by all parties:
The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive… should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany… the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories. (Quoted in Stephen A. Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities, 32. Note: Malcolm Gladwell in The Bomber Mafia: “Arthur Harris was a psychopath. I’m not using that word lightly.”)
In sum, Harris did “not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” (Quoted in A.C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, 215.)
We have noted that there was at least some resistance to a total war airpower approach among U.S. Commanders, especially Hayward Hansell; but from FDR’s Day of Infamy speech forward, there was a contagious retaliatory tide that swelled over time and drowned out the resistance. This promise from FDR articulated the ‘natural’ (that is, postlapsarian) path of mimetic escalation:
But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. (FDR before the joint session of Congress on December 8, 1941.)
The emphases I’ve added foreshadow both the whirlwind and demand for unconditional surrender in absolute victory, with righteous might as the battle standard that will cover a multitude of immoral means.
Public sentiment by 1944, when Fr. Ford wrote the article against obliteration bombing, was at a fever pitch, and by 1945 people openly wanted more atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Here is a sample of blood lust tempered by the righteous claim of civility in vengeance:
At the present time there are numerous calls for revenge of the robot bombing. An editorial in the Boston Herald asks: “Why not go all out on bombings? … Why be nice about the undefended towns and cities? … The time-honored system of tit for tat is the only one which Hitler and his Germans can understand.” The New York Times had an editorial along the same lines: And in a letter to that paper one Carl Beck demands an ultimatum from the chiefs of the four United Nations, threatening Germany that “for every prisoner murdered we will take ten German lives, for all civilian mass murder we will take an equivalent number of Germans the minute we reach their soil – we ourselves will treat all prisoners according to civilized warfare.” [New York Times, July 20, 1944.] [Fr. Ford’s note to this: The question of revenge does not constitute any theoretical problem for the moralist. Such a motive includes hatred and is deadly immoral. It violates the Gospel law. But reprisals, as that term is used in international law, must be distinguished from revenge. When used as a last resort and with due regard for the moral law, they can be legitimate…. But their use is always dangerous, because it leads to a grim competition of frightfulness….] (Ford, 297.)
Fr. Ford, even as he distinguishes reprisal from revenge, captures something that seems to have been forgotten or at least not much noticed in the recent debates: the “grim competition of frightfulness.”
Harry Truman may have been ignorant of the real nature of the atomic bomb, given that FDR didn’t brief him on the Manhattan Project, and he may even have willed a continued ignorance once he was president, but he was absolutely clear on carrying the grim competition forward without real regard for means. In a response to a protest by Samuel McCrea Cavert, the general secretary of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ of America, over the indiscriminate nature of the atomic bombing, he wrote:
“The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable,” he acknowledged, “but nevertheless true. (Truman, August 11, 1945; quoted in Miscamble, The Most Controversial Decision, 116.)
Fr. Bill goes on to say:
Fire, it seemed to him, needed to be countered with even greater fire. Long after the war ended, he regularly reacted to critics of the atomic bomb – whom he once referred to (in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt of all people) as “sob sisters” – by sneering at their failure to criticize the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and “the murders committed there.” It revealed to him a “double standard of morality.” (Ibid.)
Certainly, as Gavan Daws said, “Asia under the Japanese” was “a charnel house of atrocities” (ibid., 114). Without question the Manshu Detachment Unit 731 human experimentation under Surgeon General Shirō Ishii exceeded the inhuman cruelty of Joseph Mengele exponentially. Assuredly, the sustained murderous Rape of Nanjing ranks among the greatest atrocities in history. And, yes, Pearl Harbor continues to live in infamy for good reason. Yet will all that in mind, using the atrocities of the enemy to project a double standard accusation and deflect from being accused of murderous mimetic escalation against a rival/double is remarkably cynical, even if an understandable and perhaps predictable psychological move. [Note: Truman did come to understand that the atomic bomb “isn’t a military weapon….It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses” [July 1948]. In 1953 he even brought “murder” into the conversation. The atomic bomb was “far worse than gas or biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them by wholesale.” These realizations neither kept him from approving the Hydrogen bomb development nor from stating a willingness to use atomic bombs again if “we absolutely have to” – he threatened China with them, of course – and trusted in rational actors: “starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable for rational men” (Farewell address, January 1953; all quotations, ibid., 117.)]
I think we know enough and have read enough to see that irrational elements were lighting/darkening the path to Hiroshima. To bring the U.S. role in this escalation full circle, first watch Truman’s speech to the nation from the USS Augusta after the bombing of Hiroshima. The text:
A short time ago, an American airplane dropped on one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many-fold, and the end is not yet. With this bomb, we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form, these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe, the force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the far east. We are now prepared to destroy more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake, we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July the 26th was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware. We have spent more than $2 billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history, and we have won, but the greatest marvel is not the size of the enterprise, its secrecy or its cost, but the achievement of scientific brains in making it work. And hardly less marvelous has been the capacity of industry to design and of labor to operate the machines and methods to do things never done before. Both science and industry work together under the direction of the United States army, which achieved a unique success in an amazingly short time. It is doubtful if such another combination could be got together in the world. What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.
“They have been repaid many-fold, and the end is not yet.” Once he was back on land,
Harry Truman retreated back into the White House simply content to call his elderly mother back in Missouri and to report to Eleanor Roosevelt that the promise her husband made following the Pearl Harbor attack had been kept. (Ibid., 108.)
Full circle, full stop, promise paid – unless and until provoked again. The whole nation, no matter the time or cost, in self-righteous might won through to absolute victory.
There are just a few thoughts from René Girard that I want to bring in to conclude these reflections.
Similar to Truman, though always more eloquently, Churchill trusted “rational statesmen” in “this process of sublime irony” “where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation” (Churchill’s final major speech to the House of Commons on March 1, 1955, quoted, ibid., 150). Girard, too, at one point trusted in rationality as a hedge against evil:
This faith in the necessary reconciliation of men is what shocks me most today. I was a victim of it, in a way, and my book Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World expressed the confidence that universal knowledge of violence would suffice. I no longer believe that… (Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre, 44.)
His last conversations can be read back through all of the ground we have covered above. Whether German, Japanese, British or American fighting in World War II—read all of it in this light:
We have seen that Hegel thought that a world state would emerge out of inter-state conflicts. Likewise, modern forms of wisdom have not wanted to give up seeing bad reciprocity as the precursor of good reciprocity. However, this alibi of the last remaining obstacle to be overcome before reconciliation, this means of postponing universal peace, has necessarily made violence grow. More violence is always needed before reconciliation. Auschwitz and Hiroshima have reminded us of this. We can no longer continue thinking in this way. This unconscious apocalyptic reasoning is revealed through the escalation to extremes. We now know that suspending violence, failing to renounce it straight away, always makes it grow. Violence can never reduce violence. Yet humans continue to refuse to see the catastrophe that they are preparing by always introducing new differences and new conflicts. This misapprehension is simply part of mimetism, which is denial of our own violence. (Ibid., 45-46.)
The denial pairs well with amnesia and incapacity. As John Gregory Dunne wrote in 2001 just after another “never forget moment”: “almost immediately after Hiroshima, the unremitting horror of the Pacific campaign began to slip even what tenuous claim it had on American attention.” (New York Review of Books, Volume 48, December 20, 2001; 56). But our consciences won’t let any of this fade completely. On incapacity, we have this from Girard:
In a way, our progressism has come from Christianity but betrays it. More precisely, it could only have issued from a watering down of the apocalyptic feeling. I am convinced that it is because Christians have gradually lost the sense of eschatology that they have ceased to influence the course of events. It was probably beginning with Hiroshima that the idea of the apocalypse completely disappeared from the Christian mind: Western Christians, French Catholics in particular, stopped talking about the apocalypse just when the abstract became real, when reality began to match the concept. (Battling to the End, 63-64.)
In some perverse passive parallel to John’s decreasing as Christ increases, we tend to fade as actors as the end nears:
Human relations are essentially relations of imitation, of rivalry. What is experienced now is a form of mimetic rivalry on a planetary scale. When I read the first documents of Bin Laden and verified his allusions to the American bombing of Japan, I felt at first that I was in a dimension that transcends Islam, a dimension of the entire planet. (Conversations with René Girard: Prophet of Envy, 142.)
This deep dimension can lay hidden for decades and even centuries. Recall how easy it was for Slobodan Milošević to resurrect and repurpose (or invent and foment?) ancient hatreds—ancient or modern, real or contrived makes no difference—there is always postlapsarian rancor, rivalry, and malice in potentia. What was Japan to Bin Laden? Nothing but a pretext; but pretexts serve to cover over what we don’t want revealed.
I’ll close with the closing line of John Hersey’s Hiroshima – Aftermath: “His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty.”
[Coda: There is a fascinating story of an early postwar effort to shape and control the necessity narrative, which has lasted to this day not in small measure, I think, out of psychological need, in the form of Henry Stimson’s Harper’s response to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” New Yorker issue, since published in book form. Stimson’s “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” was commissioned and edited by Harvard President James B. Conant, an organic chemist who had taught Louis Fieser and who was a both a researcher and leader in the Manhattan Project. But we’ll have to leave that for another day.]
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image, uploaded by Max Nossin, is a photograph of Atomic bomb dome by dawn, taken on September 12, 2012. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.