Sixty-five years ago
Yesterday was the sixty-fifth anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Monday is the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing. When news of the attacks reached the U.S., the editors of Commonweal (led at that time by Edward Skillin) reacted with disgust:
We had to invent the bomb because the Germans were going to invent the bomb. It was a matter of avoiding our own possible destruction. We had to test the bomb and we tested it in a desert. If we were to threaten the use of it against the Japanese, we could have told them to pick a desert and then go look at the hole. Without warning we dropped it into the middle of a city and then without warning we dropped it into the middle of another city.
And then we said that this bomb could mean the end of civilization if we ever got into a war and everyone started to use it. So that we must keep it a secret. We must keep it as sole property of people who know how to use it. We must keep it the property of peace-loving nations.
The argument over whether the bomb was necessary, whether it saved lives in the long run, was just beginning. The long-term effects of exposure to radiation — the hell that survivors of the blast would go on living in — were still unknown. But one thing about which the Commonweal editors were indisputably correct was that the use of nuclear weapons marked a turning point, an entirely new era in warfare and moral calculation, after which “the future of humanity and the atomic bomb” would be an all-consuming subject. Sixty-five years later, we’re still stuck there.
To mark the occasion, we’ve posted a section of that editorial from August 24, 1945, on our Web site: “Horror & Shame.”
I have written several times on this blog about how my visits to Nagasaki while serving at a nearby U.S. Navy base in the mid 1970s led to my decision to request (and receive) a dischare as a conscientious objector. Needless to say, this August 6-9 period each year is always a solemn time for me, taking me back to my roots as a Catholic peacemaker.
In the years since I received my honorable discharge (1976), whenever I have spoken publicly or one-on-one to people — especially older folks — the context of the bombing always affects their opinion of my decision. That is, the conventional “wisdom” that the two bombings brought about a rapid end to the war and saved the U.S. from having to invade Japan, thus saving thousands of American soldiers’ lives, made it “worth” it…and made my decision “questionable” at best…unpatriotic at worst.
As the WWII generation passes on, though, and the post 9/11 generation grows, I am now finding that people “get” what the United States actually perpetrated in those two cities in Japan 65 years ago on two hot August mornings: on August 6 at 8:15am a single bomb exploded above Hiroshima and indiscriminately killed 120,000 people — almost all civilians — and three days later did exactly the same thing to the city of Nagasaki, killing around 75,000 women, children, elderly, disabled and a few POWs. These acts were what we now call “terrorist acts” — killing unarmed and innocent civilians in order to scare the populace, and since 9/11, we Americans know how terrible this type of act and fear are.
In his 1976 World Day of Peace message, Pope Paul VI called the bombing of Hiroshima (and by implication, Nagasaki) “butchery of untold magnitude” and implored us to follow the nonviolent example of “a simple man, Gandhi.” Gandhi, it must be pointed out, often pointed out that he was simply following the example of Jesus. It is so simple, and yet it is so complicated.
This is what is called being prophetic in the best sense. An editorial grounded solidly in the gospel. Especially, given the tenor of the times. Do American Catholics value the lives of others on the same plane as American lives. This is special.
I’m not asking this to be argumentative–it is a live question for me. In moral terms, what is the difference between Dresden and Nagasaki? The similarities are evident to me: the massive destruction, the civilian targets, the lasting human consequences.
In other words, the focus of WWII missions on civilian populations seems to be a dirty aspect of the Allied campaign (the other side, too, in Europe). WWI was a war to “bleed” armies “white”–a war of attrition of combatants. In Europe at least, WWII was a war of attrition of nations, which targeted civilian populations as a matter of course.
Obviously the bombs were technologically more destructive, exponentially so. And gradation can affect morality. But what is the difference in kind between conventional and atomic weaponry, if both are aimed at civilians?
Hello Kathy (and All),
I, too, earlier today was again wondering if is there is any morally relevant difference between the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the conventional bombing attacks against Dresden. Likewise, I’m unsure there is any morally relevant difference between the attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the conventional bombing attacks against Tokyo earlier in 1945, which if memory serves caused an even greater loss of civilian lives than did the Hirishima and Nagasaki attacks.
The use of atomic weapons against these two cities did at least rivet the attention of the world, so that hopefully we who still live on this planet will be somewhat less prone to attack civilian populations even in wartime. (Not that I mean to ignore the many attacks upon civilian populations that have occurred since WW II and continue in our time.)
The horror of Hiroshima was brought home to me by a children’s book, Sadako and the paper cranes based on a true story about a young girl born in Hiroshima several years after the bombing but killed at a young age by radiation caused leukemia.
Was Dresden the same as Hiroshima? Probably yes at the time, when they knew little about after-effects. It would not be the same today, when we know atomic weaponry can continue to kill the innocent for years after deployment.
I was baptized many years ago, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, when the Church celebrates the Transfiguration of Jesus. The two have been linked in my mind and heart in different ways, always a puzzle. This year the brilliance of Christ Transfigured is the brilliance of the many innocent whose lives have been lost, especially those who died at Hiroshima by becoming blinding light.
In Paul Fussell’s 1981 essay for The New Republic, ironically entitled “Thank God for the Atom Bomb”, he discusses how easy it is to make facile judgments of the past from the safety of the present. The essay concludes with the following observations:
Lord Louis Mountbatten, trying to say something sensible about the dropping of the A-bomb, came up only with “War is crazy.” Or rather, it requires choices among crazinesses. “It would seem even more crazy,” he went on, “if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese.”
In one of [George Patton’s effusions, he suggests] the experiential dubiousness of the concept of “just wars.” “War is not a contest with gloves,” he perceived. “It is resorted to only when laws, which are rules, have failed.” Soldiers being like that, only the barest decencies should be expected of them. They did not start the war, except in the terrible sense hinted at in Frederic Manning’s observation based on his front-line experience in the Great War: “War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.” Knowing that unflattering truth by experience, soldiers have every motive for wanting a war stopped, by any means.
The stupidity, parochialism, and greed in the international mismanagement of the whole nuclear challenge should not tempt us to misimagine the circumstances of the bomb’s first “use.” Nor should our well-justified fears and suspicions occasioned by the capture of the nuclear-power trade by the inept and the mendacious (who have fucked up the works at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, etc.) tempt us to infer retrospectively extraordinary corruption, imbecility, or motiveless malignity in those who decided, all things considered, to drop the bomb. Times change. Harry Truman was not a fascist but a democrat. He was as close to a genuine egalitarian as anyone we’ve seen in high office for a long time. He is the only President in my lifetime who ever had experience in a small unit of ground troops whose mission it was to kill people. That sort of experience of actual war seems useful to presidents especially, helping to inform them about life in general and restraining them from making fools of themselves needlessly – the way Ronald Reagan did in 1985 when he visited the German military cemetery at Bitburg containing the SS graves. The propriety of this visit he explained by asserting that no Germans who fought in the .war remain alive and that “very few. . . even remember the war.” Reagan’s ignorance or facile forgetfulness are imputed by Arthur Schlesinger to his total lack of serious experience of war – the Second World War or any other. “Though he often makes throwaway references to his military career,” says Schlesinger, “Mr. Reagan in fact is the only American president who was of military age during the Second World War and saw no service overseas. He fought the war on the film lots of Hollywood, slept in his own bed every night and apparently got many of his ideas of what happened from subsequent study of the Reader’s Digest. ”
Truman was a different piece of goods entirely. He knew war, and he knew better than some of his critics then and now what he was doing and why he was doing it. “Having found the bomb,” he said, “we have used it. . . . We have used it to shorten the agony of young Americans.”
The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.
The complete essay can be found at:
http://crossroads.alexanderpiela.com/files/Fussell_Thank_God_AB.pdf
General Curtis LeMay, who developed and carried out the strategic bombing campaign against Japan, had no comforting illusions about just wars or the rules by which wars are fought. According to him, war is about killing people. If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.
In that regard, the Wiki article describes the first firebombing raid over Tokyo as follows:
“The first pathfinder planes arrived over Tokyo just after midnight on March 10. Following British bombing practice, they marked the target area with a flaming “X.” In a three-hour period, the main bombing force dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs, killing some 100,000 civilians, destroying 250,000 buildings and incinerating 16 square miles (41 km2) of the city. Aircrews at the tail end of the bomber stream reported that the stench of burned human flesh permeated the aircraft over the target.”
Cathy and Peter, et al:
The Council Fathers at Vatican II, I believe, answered your questions about the similarities between the bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima (as well as any future use of “weapons of mass destruction”) in No. 80 of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes):
80.1 All these considerations (reflections on the “horrors and perversity of modern developments in war) compel us to undertake an evaluation of war with an entirely new attitude. The men of our time must realize that they will have to give a somber reckoning of their deeds of war for the course of the future will depend greatly on the decisions they make today.
80.2 With these truths in mind, this most holy synod makes its own the condemnations of total war already pronounced by recent popes, and issues the following declaration:
80.3 Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their populations is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.
One would think, with such a clear condemnation of such weapons and such use of them, that the catechesis of American Catholics in particular would include at least as much emphasis on conscientious objection to military service as it does to conscientious objection to abortion, another situation when defenseless life is ended.
It is not a matter of hindsight. Both McArthur and Eisenhower saw the bombing unnecessary.
Antonio Manetti: Thank you for posting the link to Paul Fussell’s great essay, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb”. Since it first appeared, I’ve considered it the most accurate portrayal of what the bomb meant for those whose lives were saved. (I don’t think the title was ironic in any way.)
Fussell and his division, having survived the war in Europe, were being shipped to Japan for the invasion when the news came. “. . . we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all.”
Those who are looking forward so eagerly to the death of all who remember the war, so that living memories may be replaced by the notions of those who “get” it, should be heartened to know that 1100 veterans of World War II die every day.
Soon, even those of us who were children will be dead and buried. (One of my earliest memories is of my mother and other women on our block in Kansas City standing in the street beating on pots and pans, overjoyed. My mother explained to me: “It’s VJ Day!”)
The quotes from Fussell are from his 1988 book, where he apparently rewrote parts of the essay. (just in case anyone else was as confused as I was when reading about Reagan’s 1985 visit to Germany in an essay written four years earlier)
Fussell quotes Eugene Sledge in “Thank God for the Atom Bomb”. Those who watched The Pacific on HBO became familiar with Sledge (and Robert Leckie and John Basilone, et al.)
For those who missed The Pacific:
http://www.amazon.com/Pacific-HBO-Miniseries-Blu-ray/dp/B001VNB54A/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1281279468&sr=1-1
Eugene Sledge’s books about the war in the Pacific:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_12?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=e.+b.+sledge+with+the+old+breed&sprefix=e.+b.+sledge&ih=11_1_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_1.140_208&fsc=11
Michael,
Thank you for the GS quote.
I think the rubicon was crossed when the bomber was built. Fighter jets are one thing, bombers another (unless the fighters strafe columns of civilian refugees, which is not exactly unheard of). Airplanes provided a new way to lay siege to a city, and the news of raids in one place easily terrorized all the other cities.
Maybe the political difference is that a few atomic bombs can wipe out an entire nation. Conventional bombing raids demoralize (or oddly galvanize) whole nations by wiping out representative cities. It’s like shooting every tenth man. But 10 Hiroshimas = the empire. Japan wouldn’t have known that we only had the two bombs.
Thanking God for the bomb is an atrocity as I see it. Fear of Russis getting a part of Asia seems to be a very strong motive. Japan was ready to surrender. Mythology is always employed to cover-up bad actions.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0806-25.htm
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
A more recent (fictionalized) memoir of the war in the Pacific was William Styron’s “Rat Beach”, published in the New Yorker last summer:
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/07/20/090720fi_fiction_styron
Interesting to note the alternative to taking part in the invasion chosen/contemplated by so many Americans.
“One would think, with such a clear condemnation of such weapons and such use of them, that the catechesis of American Catholics in particular would include at least as much emphasis on conscientious objection to military service as it does to conscientious objection to abortion, another situation when defenseless life is ended.”
Michael,
For me, WWII is an important factor in my decision that I cannot in conscience take a completely pacificst approach. Since evil empires exist, if entire populations can be put at the service of the maniacal nationalism that was Nazi Germany, then I think military preparations must be made so that these threats cannot prevail.
If I’m right, then the questions are not whether to fight, but when and how.
United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946:
“Even without the atomic bombing attacks air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
The argument that the bomb saved lives is an absurd lie.
” Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.””
Brian –
Given how tenacious, yes, even fanatical the Japanese sodiers were during the war, I find “even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated” impossible to believe. If that was so, then why did Japan wait for the second bomb to be dropped before surrendering?
What I most object to about our dropping the bombs is that Japan was given no illustration of just how awful the power of the bombs were. We could have wiped out a small island in proof before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. But they were given no warning. Anscombe was right. Harry Truman was a terrorist.
What I don’t understand is: how come the Japanese don’t hate Americans?
Among the great things available on Ancestry.com are newsreels from the war years. Those too young to remember the war can get a sense of what those days were like.
————–
Not everyone interprets the USSBS of 1946 as Brian does.
http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm
“The USSBS reports do not state or even suggest that the use of the atomic bomb against Japan was unwise. On the contrary, a careful analysis of the USSBS findings supports the wisdom of using the bombs. For a full discussion, see How the United States Strategic Bombing Survey reports endorsed the use of the atomic bombs.”
http://www.anesi.com/bomb.htm
What should our policy be today?
Claire –
After the Japanese surrender Gen. Douglas MacArthur ran the country, and there were land, industrial, and political reforms. The military was prohibited, but the emperor was allowed to retain his position. All this was popular with the people, if not the ruling classes. It formed the basis for the remarkable emergence of Japan as a very rich industrialized and democratic nation.
Remarkable. It’s hard to imagine the analog happening in the US.
Jim,
The violent siege is replaced in peacetime by the process of demoralization of a populace by embargo. I would like to think about whether and when this can be justified, and what sorts of goods can be morally withheld. (Not to mention, whether it is effective.) I would think that food, water, fuel and medicine should never be embargoed. But what about then means of infrastructure?
So many things in this world happen because somebody thinks they would be a good idea, without thinking it through.
Michael Hovey, I’d like to hear more about how you were able to obtain an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector. I recall, from reading Studs Terkel’s “The Good War” a number of years ago, that conscientious objectors in WWII suffered greatly.