It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the massive media coverage given to the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is designed to fill Americans with guilt about using the bomb and to paralyze our national resolve to defend ourselves with modern weapons.
Put yourself in the position of American servicemen in the hours before August 6, 1945. You’ve survived bloody battles in Europe and the Pacific, and now you are with an LST amphibious landing group carrying troops, arms, and equipment between the Marianas, the Philippines, and Okinawa for an invasion of the Japanese islands in the fall of 1945.
You know that Army Chief General George C. Marshall anticipates one million American casualties. That means about 300,000 battle deaths.
Why so many? Because the Japanese not only were tough fighters, but their government was still in the hands of the militarists determined to fight to the death with their army of 5,000,000 men.
Some have tried to second-guess President Truman by saying that, in the closing days of the war, the intercepted Japanese messages indicated a desire for peace. Even if true, that’s irrelevant; the government’s messages showed the intention to fight on.
Previous battles had demonstrated what that meant. When our GIs took Tarawa in November 1943, only 17 Japanese remained alive of the 5,000-man Japanese force. Of the 32,000 Japanese troops who defended Saipan, fewer than 1,000 survived. Okinawa cost the Japanese 110,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilians.
American ships in August 1945 weren’t merely carrying troops for hand-to-hand combat and tanks and guns. Our ships carried coffins—tens of thousands of coffins—and army specialists to identify and box the dead.
The Hiroshima bomb was dropped, but the Japanese militarists didn’t get the message from this dramatic demonstration of power. They suppressed the results (their scientists didn’t report until years later) and still did not surrender. It took the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki to force a midnight session of the Japanese government at which the surrender decision was made.
So, our soldiers and sailors in the LST amphibious group landed as occupation forces instead of combat forces. Among the tangible evidences of the fate from which the bomb saved American GIs were warehouses of 5,000 Kamikaze suicide planes, stacked on their noses to store as many in a building as possible.
They were small planes with just an engine, a cockpit, and a bomb, built to carry only enough gasoline for a one-way trip to incinerate an American target. A thousand American LSTs, each carrying 500 men, would have been their first targets.
Those who try to lay a guilt trip on Americans for Hiroshima have a long way to go before they convince us of their sincerity. Far more civilians were killed in the bombings of Tokyo and at Dresden, Germany, about which we hear almost nothing today.
Before we take seriously the moralizing of those who talk about the immorality of dropping the atomic bomb on civilians, let’s hear their view on the morality of Sherman’s march through Georgia.
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman simply rejected the then-existing rules of civilized warfare and deliberately devastated the civilian population. He expelled Atlanta’s residents from their homes, systematically destroyed the factories and mills so they could never again function, then abandoned the burned city and pushed to the coast, laying waste the countryside as he marched toward Savannah, which he also captured and looted.
Sherman wrote to a fellow general, “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer war is war. If the enemy wants peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.”
It would be great if we could return to the 18th century European rules of warfare which exempted civilians from war and its cruelty. But if we are sitting in judgment on wartime decisions, we must admit that there isn’t any moral difference between using the bomb on Japanese cities and Sherman’s burning of Southern cities, homes, and crops.
Even if we judge the bomb on the arithmetic of numbers, the bomb still comes out as more moral than the alternative facing President Truman. Not to have dropped the bomb would have probably cost a hundred times as many deaths. All Americans who served in World War II are so fortunate, and so are the Japanese, that Truman ended the war as quickly as 1945 technology allowed.
