Japan and U.S. both needed atomic shock to end their war

By Chris Powell

The ritual observances of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 suggest that some people want the United States to apologize for ending a war that Japan still cannot bring itself to apologize for starting.

Two wrongs indeed would not make a right. But the piety here has lost all proportion, for even if the horror inflicted on those cities is acknowledged and regretted, the atomic bombings were not quite so special as acts of war.

If the complaint is the immorality of total war, the killing of civilians, it is not uniquely made with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For Japan had been waging total war in Asia for a decade, even before going to war against the United States at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese army’s Rape of Nanking in China in December 1937 slaughtered as many as 250,000 civilians, more deaths than were caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And the issue of total war was settled in principle many times elsewhere just prior to and during World War II — by the Nazi bombing raids on cities in Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Britain, and Russia; by the Nazi murder camps; by the British and U.S. firebombing raids on Hamburg and Dresden; and the U.S. firebombing raids throughout Japan in the last year of the war.

Indeed, the most deadly bombing attack in history is believed to have been not either of the atomic bombings but the conventional U.S. firebombing raid on Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945, in which more than 100,000 people died.

As industrial and military centers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reasonable targets, and long before the atomic bombings it was already U.S. war policy to level every major Japanese city to diminish the country’s capacity and will to make war. That policy was nearing completion when the atomic bombs were dropped. Gen. Curtis LeMay, in charge of the U.S. air war against Japan, estimated that when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, the Army Air Force was only weeks away from running out of targets.

Still Japan fought on and continued its brutal occupation of much of Asia.

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There is a better argument if the complaint is that the atomic bombings were not necessary to induce Japan’s surrender — that Japan was already effectively beaten and would have surrendered soon enough anyway.

But Japan was effectively beaten in large part precisely because of the bombing of its cities, the policy of which the atomic bombs were just a more dramatic part.

Yes, Japan was soliciting peace terms through the Soviet Union and received in reply the Potsdam Declaration, which repeated the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender even as a public promise to let Emperor Hirohito remain on his throne might have encouraged Japan to give up.

And yes, strongly influenced by Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, President Truman seems to have been glad of the chance to use the atomic bomb to demonstrate to the Soviet Union the new invincibility of American power, to intimidate the Soviets generally and to keep them from invading Japan and exploiting a victory in the Asian war they so far had done nothing to win.

But the Japanese government was sharply split between war and peace factions and, beaten or not, did not just surrender as it might have done to avert the destruction the United States had been warning it about. No, the war faction was still in control of Japan and thereby still in control of much of Asia.

Even as Japan was quietly soliciting peace terms, it noisily was preparing for what its war propaganda called “the honorable death of a hundred million,” the mobilization of every man, woman, and child in the empire against an invasion of the home islands. Japanese culture long had venerated ritual suicide, and Japanese fanaticism — the suicidal, kamikaze insistence on death over surrender on any terms — recently had made a profound impression on the Americans in the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Suicidal Japanese resistance there argued that the Japanese regime was sincere in declaring that only extermination would get Japan to stop fighting.

As it turned out the bombing of Hiroshima alone didn’t induce surrender right away; even the bombing of Nagasaki failed to accomplish that. Rather than simply end the war, the Japanese government dithered for a few more days over the status of the emperor. The peace faction of the Japanese government actually welcomed the use of the atomic bomb in the hope that it would make the war faction see reason.

And when, after the two atomic bombings and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, the emperor finally agreed to surrender with the assurance that he would be left on the throne while subordinate to the U.S. military occupation, a military coup tried to avert his radio broadcast to his subjects and nearly sent kamikaze airplanes into the USS Missouri during the surrender proceedings in Tokyo Bay.

Critics suggest that Truman’s eagerness to use the atomic bomb to scare the Soviet Union was illegitimate. But the president’s concern about the Soviets was well-founded; they already were imposing a new tyranny in eastern Europe and were to become as cruel and dangerous as the powers the United States had just struggled to defeat. At first Japan itself sought to condition its surrender on the Soviet Union’s staying out of the Pacific war, and Japan today may know best of all how bad the Soviets were — for while the American military occupation of Japan ended in just a few years, Russia still holds the islands the Soviet Union seized from Japan in the last few hours of the war.

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Clearly Truman didn’t do as much as he might have done to avoid the atomic bombings, and clearly he had little sympathy for Japanese civilians. By today’s precious standards, presumably Truman might have begged the Japanese for terms, in the name of their own children about to die otherwise. (Who today, free of the hatred of that war, would not get down on his knees before Japan’s former rulers to plead for their surrender to save the civilians of the doomed cities?)

Yes, Truman might have offered earlier to let Japan keep the emperor. Yet it is doubtful whether such an offer made prior to the atomic bombings would have been accepted. Instead it might have been seen as evidence of American war weariness, a change in policy that would have encouraged Japan to hold out for better terms.

In any case in the context of the time Truman would have been thought quite mad to make any concession to Japan and particularly to Hirohito, who was considered as much a war criminal as Hitler. And in the context of the time it is easy to see how Japan’s exceptional brutality at war invited such disregard even from a nation ordinarily as benign at war as the United States.

For in the emperor’s name and with his consent Japan had not only waged aggressive war but had done so outside the Geneva Convention, which it pointedly had refused to sign. Further, the very nature of Japanese society was totalitarian and barbarous, as represented by the emperor’s absolute rule, his people’s worship of him as a god, and the fanaticism not just of Japanese soldiers but also of Japanese civilians, some of whom admitted afterward that, upon the emperor’s command, they would have killed themselves.

Japan’s criminal abuse of prisoners of war, while almost forgotten today, invited many more atomic bombings than the country got.

The Pacific War did become a race war, but racism was a symptom rather than a cause of American war policy and attitudes toward Japan. To realize this it is necessary only to compare the gentle and infinitely uplifting American occupation of Japan with Japan’s own military occupations from 1931 until 1945.

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Defenders of the use of the atomic bombs may make too much of one alternative to the bombings, an American invasion of Japan and its likely massive casualties. For since March 1945 the United States had undertaken what it frankly called Operation Starvation, the blockade of Japan, and as of August 1945 Japan was probably less than a year from being starved into submission.

But blockade without use of the atomic bombs would have cost many more Japanese lives than the 200,000 or so taken by the bombs; the Japanese government’s own estimates predicted 7 million deaths from starvation by the spring of 1946. That is not to mention the tens of thousands of Allied war and civilian prisoners who were already marked for execution immediately upon the commencement of any invasion and who surely would have been starved first, nor to mention the tens of millions of people throughout Asia who remained under Japanese rule and who also might have been starved to feed their conquerors while Japan took its time making peace. Even today there is little sympathy for Japan throughout much of Asia.

The U.S. government’s motives for using the atomic bomb surely went far beyond avoiding an invasion, but Japan still wasn’t ready to surrender even after the bombing of Hiroshima, even if the emperor’s position was to be guaranteed. Japan was not ready until both bombs had been dropped and the Soviets had joined the war by attacking in Manchuria — and even then Japan’s offer of surrender was conditional, still dependent on maintaining the emperor.

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Japan’s decision to surrender was a matter of Hirohito’s making it and his warmonger generals’ allowing it to stand, if resentfully, out of their loyalty to him. Thus what ended the war precisely when it ended was largely a matter of the psychology of those few people, and if the use of the atomic bombs then seemed as terrible as its critics maintain today, the bombs must be considered decisive in ending the war.

For the bomb suddenly raised for Hirohito and his generals the prospect of the annihilation of the whole Japanese people in a way that made impossible the “honorable” mass death they had been pursuing.

That is, once the atomic bombs were in use, Japanese deaths would not, after all, serve to defend the homeland and emperor against invasion; the Japanese would not be able to shout a fanatical “banzai” one last time and take an enemy soldier with them and maybe inflict enough casualties on the horrified Americans to obtain better surrender terms. Because of the atomic bomb the Japanese now would just be caught helpless wherever they were and be vaporized in flash after flash from the sky.

It may not have been the mere slaughter inflicted by the atomic bomb and the prospect of more slaughter that turned Hirohito and his generals around; they already had shown themselves indifferent to slaughter, including the slaughter of their own people. No, the slaughter inflicted by the atomic bomb may have been so different because it promised to deprive Japan of its sick conception of honor and glory.

Hirohito and his generals had just been led to believe that the Americans had a hundred more atomic bombs and that Tokyo itself well might be the next target. The bomb suddenly had made mass death not honorable and courageous but meaningless.

Hirohito said as much in his address announcing Japan’s surrender. Continuing to fight in the face of the “new and the most cruel bomb,” the emperor said, “would not only result in the ultimate collapse and the obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also the total extinction of human civilization.”

Thus with their shock and horror the atomic bombs broke the political deadlock on both sides — relieving Japan of what it had considered its duty to fight to the last, and relieving the United States of what it had considered its duty to bring down the leader of the criminal Japanese regime, to hang Hirohito along with the rest.

If it is much easier for people today to pity the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it may be less because of any defect in the American character or leadership of 1945 than because of the comfortable distance in time from the monstrous evil the atomic bombs helped to destroy.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. This column was first published in August 2015.

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