Photo-documentation:
1-Text
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki
by
Ralph Raico
by Ralph Raico
This excerpt from Ralph Raico's "Harry S. Truman:
Advancing the Revolution in John V. Denson, ed.,
Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State
and the Decline of Freedom (Auburn, Alabama:
Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001), . (The notes are numbered as they are because
this is an excerpt.
Read the whole article.)
The most spectacular episode of Truman’s presidency will
never be forgotten, but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings
of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around
two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation
poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean
workers. Twelve U.S. Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also
among the dead.87
Great controversy has always surrounded the bombings. One
thing Truman insisted on from the start: The decision to use the bombs, and the
responsibility it entailed, was his. Over the years, he gave different, and
contradictory, grounds for his decision. Sometimes he implied that he had acted
simply out of revenge. To a clergyman who criticized him, Truman responded,
testily:
Nobody is more disturbed over
the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the
unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our
prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have
been using to bombard them.88
Such reasoning will not impress anyone who fails to see
how the brutality of the Japanese military could justify deadly retaliation
against innocent men, women, and children. Truman doubtless was aware of this,
so from time to time he advanced other pretexts. On August 9, 1945, he stated:
"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a
military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar
as possible, the killing of civilians."89
This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a
military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred
thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the
harbor was mined and the U.S. Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters
around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively
neutralized.
On other occasions, Truman claimed that Hiroshima was
bombed because it was an industrial center. But, as noted in the U.S. Strategic
Bombing Survey, "all major factories in Hiroshima were on the periphery of the
city – and escaped serious damage."90
The target was the center of the city. That Truman realized the kind of victims
the bombs consumed is evident from his comment to his cabinet on August 10,
explaining his reluctance to drop a third bomb: "The thought of wiping out
another 100,000 people was too horrible," he said; he didn’t like the idea of
killing "all those kids."91
Wiping out another one hundred thousand people . . . all
those kids.
Moreover, the notion that Hiroshima was a major military
or industrial center is implausible on the face of it. The city had remained
untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the Japanese home islands,
and never figured in Bomber Command’s list of the 33 primary targets.92
Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to
rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency:
that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives.
These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned
invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next
year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion
of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.93
The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll
– nearly twice the total of U.S. dead in all theaters in the Second World War –
is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about
by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly, the prize for sheer fatuousness on
this score goes to President George W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping
the bomb "spared millions of American lives."94
Still, Truman’s multiple deceptions and self-deceptions
are understandable, considering the horror he unleashed. It is equally
understandable that the U.S. occupation authorities censored reports from the
shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of
corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public.95
Otherwise, Americans – and the rest of the world – might have drawn disturbing
comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps.
The bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by
high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur.96
The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s own chief of staff, was typical:
the use of this barbarous
weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war
against Japan. . . . 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 wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying
women and children.97
The political elite implicated in the atomic bombings
feared a backlash that would aid and abet the rebirth of horrid prewar
"isolationism." Apologias were rushed into print, lest public disgust at the
sickening war crime result in erosion of enthusiasm for the globalist project.98
No need to worry. A sea-change had taken place in the attitudes of the American
people. Then and ever after, all surveys have shown that the great majority
supported Truman, believing that the bombs were required to end the war and save
hundreds of thousands of American lives, or more likely, not really caring one
way or the other.
Those who may still be troubled by such a grisly exercise
in cost-benefit analysis – innocent Japanese lives balanced against the lives of
Allied servicemen – might reflect on the judgment of the Catholic philosopher
G.E.M. Anscombe, who insisted on the supremacy of moral rules.99
When, in June 1956, Truman was awarded an honorary degree by her university,
Oxford, Anscombe protested.100
Truman was a war criminal, she contended, for what is the difference between the
U.S. government massacring civilians from the air, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
and the Nazis wiping out the inhabitants of some Czech or Polish village?
Anscombe’s point is worth following up. Suppose that, when
we invaded Germany in early 1945, our leaders had believed that executing all
the inhabitants of Aachen, or Trier, or some other Rhineland city would finally
break the will of the Germans and lead them to surrender. In this way, the war
might have ended quickly, saving the lives of many Allied soldiers. Would that
then have justified shooting tens of thousands of German civilians, including
women and children? Yet how is that different from the atomic bombings?
By early summer 1945, the Japanese fully realized that
they were beaten. Why did they nonetheless fight on? As Anscombe wrote: "It was
the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil."101
That mad formula was coined by Roosevelt at the Casablanca
conference, and, with Churchill’s enthusiastic concurrence, it became the Allied
shibboleth. After prolonging the war in Europe, it did its work in the Pacific.
At the Potsdam conference, in July 1945, Truman issued a proclamation to the
Japanese, threatening them with the "utter devastation" of their homeland unless
they surrendered unconditionally. Among the Allied terms, to which "there are no
alternatives," was that there be "eliminated for all time the authority and
influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into
embarking on world conquest [sic]." "Stern justice," the proclamation warned,
"would be meted out to all war criminals."102
To the Japanese, this meant that the emperor – regarded by
them to be divine, the direct descendent of the goddess of the sun – would
certainly be dethroned and probably put on trial as a war criminal and hanged,
perhaps in front of his palace.103
It was not, in fact, the U.S. intention to dethrone or punish the emperor. But
this implicit modification of unconditional surrender was never communicated to
the Japanese. In the end, after Nagasaki, Washington acceded to the Japanese
desire to keep the dynasty and even to retain Hirohito as emperor.
For months before, Truman had been pressed to clarify the
U.S. position by many high officials within the administration, and outside of
it, as well. In May 1945, at the president’s request, Herbert Hoover prepared a
memorandum stressing the urgent need to end the war as soon as possible. The
Japanese should be informed that we would in no way interfere with the emperor
or their chosen form of government. He even raised the possibility that, as part
of the terms, Japan might be allowed to hold on to Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea.
After meeting with Truman, Hoover dined with Taft and other Republican leaders,
and outlined his proposals.104
Establishment writers on World War II often like to deal
in lurid speculations. For instance: if the United States had not entered the
war, then Hitler would have "conquered the world" (a sad undervaluation of the
Red Army, it would appear; moreover, wasn’t it Japan that was trying to "conquer
the world"?) and killed untold millions. Now, applying conjectural history in
this case: assume that the Pacific war had ended in the way wars customarily do
– through negotiation of the terms of surrender. And assume the worst – that the
Japanese had adamantly insisted on preserving part of their empire, say, Korea
and Formosa, even Manchuria. In that event, it is quite possible that Japan
would have been in a position to prevent the Communists from coming to power in
China. And that could have meant that the thirty or forty million deaths now
attributed to the Maoist regime would not have occurred.
But even remaining within the limits of feasible diplomacy
in 1945, it is clear that Truman in no way exhausted the possibilities of ending
the war without recourse to the atomic bomb. The Japanese were not informed that
they would be the victims of by far the most lethal weapon ever invented (one
with "more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam,’
which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare," as Truman
boasted in his announcement of the Hiroshima attack). Nor were they told that
the Soviet Union was set to declare war on Japan, an event that shocked some in
Tokyo more than the bombings.105
Pleas by some of the scientists involved in the project to demonstrate the power
of the bomb in some uninhabited or evacuated area were rebuffed. All that
mattered was to formally preserve the unconditional surrender formula and save
the servicemen’s lives that might have been lost in the effort to enforce it.
Yet, as Major General J.F.C. Fuller, one of the century’s great military
historians, wrote in connection with the atomic bombings:
Though to save life is
laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to
every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the
pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can
be justified.106
Isn’t this obviously true? And isn’t this the reason that
rational and humane men, over generations, developed rules of warfare in the
first place?
While the mass media parroted the government line in
praising the atomic incinerations, prominent conservatives denounced them as
unspeakable war crimes. Felix Morley, constitutional scholar and one of the
founders of Human Events, drew attention to the horror of Hiroshima,
including the "thousands of children trapped in the thirty-three schools that
were destroyed." He called on his compatriots to atone for what had been done in
their name, and proposed that groups of Americans be sent to Hiroshima, as
Germans were sent to witness what had been done in the Nazi camps. The Paulist
priest, Father James Gillis, editor of The Catholic World and another
stalwart of the Old Right, castigated the bombings as "the most powerful blow
ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law." David
Lawrence, conservative owner of U.S. News and World Report, continued to
denounce them for years.107
The distinguished conservative philosopher Richard Weaver was revolted by
the spectacle of young boys
fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust . . .
pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing
atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Weaver considered such atrocities as deeply "inimical to
the foundations on which civilization is built."108
Today, self-styled conservatives slander as
"anti-American" anyone who is in the least troubled by Truman’s massacre of so
many tens of thousands of Japanese innocents from the air. This shows as well as
anything the difference between today’s "conservatives" and those who once
deserved the name.
Leo Szilard was the world-renowned physicist who drafted
the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan
Project. In 1960, shortly before his death, Szilard stated another obvious
truth:
If the Germans had dropped
atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of
atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans
who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.109
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime
worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If
Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.
Notes
87.
On the atomic bombings, see Gar Alperovitz,
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of
an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995); and
idem, "Was Harry Truman a Revisionist on Hiroshima?" Society for Historians
of American Foreign Relations Newsletter 29, no. 2 (June 1998); also Martin
J. Sherwin,
A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance
(New York: Vintage, 1977); and Dennis D. Wainstock,
The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996).
88.
Alperovitz, Decision, p. 563. Truman added: "When you deal with a
beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless
true." For similar statements by Truman, see ibid., p. 564. Alperovitz’s
monumental work is the end-product of four decades of study of the atomic
bombings and is indispensable for comprehending the often complex argumentation
on the issue.
89.
Ibid., p. 521.
90.
Ibid., p. 523.
91.
Barton J. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese
Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern
Memory," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 257. General Carl
Spaatz, commander of U.S. strategic bombing operations in the Pacific, was so
shaken by the destruction at Hiroshima that he telephoned his superiors in
Washington, proposing that the next bomb be dropped on a less populated area, so
that it "would not be as devastating to the city and the people." His suggestion
was rejected. Ronald Schaffer,
Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 147–48.
92.
This is true also of Nagasaki.
93.
See Barton J. Bernstein, "A Post-War Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved,"
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 6 (June–July 1986): 38–40; and
idem, "Wrong Numbers," The Independent Monthly (July 1995): 41–44.
94.
J. Samuel Walker, "History, Collective Memory, and the Decision to Use
the Bomb," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 320, 323–25.
Walker details the frantic evasions of Truman’s biographer, David McCullough,
when confronted with the unambiguous record.
95.
Paul Boyer, "Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory,"
Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 299. On the fate of the
bombings’ victims and the public’s restricted knowledge of them, see John W.
Dower, "The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory," in ibid., pp.
275–95.
96.
Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 320–65. On MacArthur and Eisenhower, see
ibid., pp. 352 and 355–56.
97.
William D. Leahy,
I Was There (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1950), p. 441. Leahy compared the use of the atomic bomb to the
treatment of civilians by Genghis Khan, and termed it "not worthy of Christian
man." Ibid., p. 442. Curiously, Truman himself supplied the foreword to Leahy’s
book. In a private letter written just before he left the White House, Truman
referred to the use of the atomic bomb as "murder," stating that the bomb "is
far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian
population and murders them wholesale." Barton J. Bernstein, "Origins of the
U.S. Biological Warfare Program,"
Preventing a Biological Arms Race,
Susan Wright, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 9.
98.
Barton J. Bernstein, "Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear
History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the
Bomb," Diplomatic History 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 35–72.
99.
One writer in no way troubled by the sacrifice of innocent Japanese to
save Allied servicemen – indeed, just to save him – is Paul Fussell; see his
Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays
(New York: Summit, 1988). The reason for Fussell’s little Te Deum is, as
he states, that he was among those scheduled to take part in the invasion of
Japan, and might very well have been killed. It is a mystery why Fussell takes
out his easily understandable terror, rather unchivalrously, on Japanese women
and children instead of on the men in Washington who conscripted him to fight in
the Pacific in the first place.
100.
G.E.M. Anscombe, "Mr. Truman’s Degree," in idem,
Collected Philosophical Papers,
vol. 3, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 62–71.
101.
Anscombe, "Mr. Truman’s Degree," p. 62.
102.
Hans Adolf Jacobsen and Arthur S. Smith, Jr., eds.,
World War II: Policy and Strategy. Selected Documents with
Commentary (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio,
1979), pp. 345–46.
103.
For some Japanese leaders, another reason for keeping the emperor was as
a bulwark against a possible postwar communist takeover. See also Sherwin, A
World Destroyed, p. 236: "the [Potsdam] proclamation offered the military
die-hards in the Japanese government more ammunition to continue the war than it
offered their opponents to end it."
104.
Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 44–45.
105.
Cf. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 254: "it does seem
very likely, though certainly not definite, that a synergistic combination of
guaranteeing the emperor, awaiting Soviet entry, and continuing the siege
strategy would have ended the war in time to avoid the November invasion."
Bernstein, an excellent and scrupulously objective scholar, nonetheless
disagrees with Alperovitz and the revisionist school on several key points.
106.
J.F.C. Fuller,
The Second World War, 1939–45: A Strategical and Tactical
History (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948),
p. 392. Fuller, who was similarly scathing on the terror-bombing of the German
cities, characterized the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "a type of war
that would have disgraced Tamerlane." Cf. Barton J. Bernstein, who concludes, in
"Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 235:
In 1945, American leaders were
not seeking to avoid the use of the A-bomb. Its use did not create ethical or
political problems for them. Thus, they easily rejected or never considered most
of the so-called alternatives to the bomb.
107.
Felix Morley, "The Return to Nothingness," Human Events (August
29, 1945) reprinted in
Hiroshima’s Shadow,
Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds. (Stony Creek, Conn.:
Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998), pp. 272–74; James Martin Gillis, "Nothing But
Nihilism," The Catholic World, September 1945, reprinted in ibid., pp.
278–80; Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 438–40.
108.
Richard M. Weaver, "A Dialectic on Total War," in idem,
Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), pp. 98–99.
109.
Wainstock, Decision, p. 122.
August 6, 2004
2- Movie
Rare footage of the aftermath of the atomic bomb attack on
Hiroshima has now been made available to the world -- three years after it was
discovered by accident in a Tokyo film vault. The film gives new insight into
the horrors suffered by the people of Hiroshima in the weeks following the
world's first A-bomb attack. The bomb, dropped by a U.S. plane on August 6,
1945, caused the instant deaths of an estimated 80,000 people.
Click
HERE to see the Movie
3- Gallery
[photogallery/photo24137/real.htm]
