65 years on, Hiroshima was still the right thing to do
Posted on August 8, 2010Today is the 65th anniversary of the first use in war of the atomic bomb, which destroyed Hiroshima. 145,000 people died. On the 9th of August another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and on the 15th Japan surrendered, ending the Second World War.
There are, of course, major memorial ceremonies taking place for those who were killed in the bombing. It’s right that that happens, and no-one would deny the pain and suffering that occurred as a result of the bombing.
But for all that, after 65 years for the world to reflect on the dropping of the atomic bomb, I cannot think anything other than it was the right thing to do.
While we remember today the people who died, we should also remember all the people who were saved as a result of the dropping of those two atomic bombs.
The war was brought to an almost immediate end, whereas it would otherwise have ground on for months or more. A war of attrition and island-hopping, ending with an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands and lasting into 1946 or even 1947 would have claimed the lives of untold servicemen and civilians on both sides.
Millions were freed from slavery – not just the 100,000+ Allied POWs who even with the early end of the war suffered an estimated 25% fatality rate, but the 4 million+ Javanese, the 10 million+ Chinese and the 5 million+ Koreans forced into slave labour by the Japanese military, and many more.
The novelist JG Ballard, whose childhood experiences in Japanese internment camps were immortalised in Empire of the Sun, was a teenager caught in a mad world of death marches, torture, murder and starvation on the Chinese mainland when the bombs were dropped. As he wrote later:
“the atom bombs…almost certainly saved the lives of myself and my fellow internees in Shanghai.”
So while we remember today those who died in the flash and poisonous aftermath of those bombs, let us also remember all those who were saved and freed as a result. The decisions taken 65 years ago were horrific, but they were also the right thing to do.
Tags: Atomic Bomb, China, Hiroshima, Japan, JG Ballard, Nagasaki, World War Two
Your knowledge of actual history is disturbingly lacking but no doubt as a Daily Mail reader not too surprising, but it is currently acknowledges by historians that the war was effectively already over, Japan had no capacity to fight and the bomb was dropped as a warning to the USSR not to meddle in the area and contest the US sphere of influence. However, not being able to look at the real context of what happened in the light of how things are presented does not surprise me coming from some the likes of you and your organisation.
06.08.2010 14:56
Japan could have and would have continued to resist a conventional invasion, which would have led to far greater loss of life than that caused by the atom bombs. Kleep, your knowledge of any kind of history is non-existent.
06.08.2010 19:15
I suggest you don’t unthinkingly digest the tripe standard version of history that you are no doubt used to reading in the Daily Mail or whatever other rag you read, and go and read MacArthur’s biography or Herbert Bix’s biography of Hirohito to learn about Japan’s ability to do any resisting, and the events around negotiating a surrender to the USSR before accusing anyone else of having a non-existent knowledge of history.
09.08.2010 14:49
There was an attempt by senior members of the Japanese military to seize the “tape” of the Emperor’s broadcast and persuade the Emperor to carry on fighting. The civilians knew the War was lost and indeed tried to persuade Russia to act as a mediator but the military did not, in particular those who were campaigning in China to who defeats such as Imphal, Rangoon, Manillia, Iwo Jima and Okinawa were meaningless
Had hostilities not ceased on August 15th but say August 16th, how many British, Anzac and American lioes would have been lost on that one day and how would any political candidate have fared had it been known that we had the means to end the war even one day sooner.
It is also a valid argumnent put by the writer to cite the number of Japanese civilian lives who were saved. The fall of Siapan and the mass suicide by Japanese civilians (no doubt pressured by their military) displayed the willingness of the Japanese to fight to the last
There are many of us whose father or gandfather was in Burma waiting for Operation Zipper or in the Japanese death camps welomed the prompt ending of the war that both bombs portended. We might not have been here- my father might have been one of those killed on August 16th
07.08.2010 12:19
“the bomb was dropped as a warning to the USSR”
This is true but it is also true that Japan refused to accept the war was over and was even more wedded to the concept of fighting to the last man, for the last inch, than the Germans had been. See accounts of the preparation for Operation Zipper, the bloody and protracted back-up plan for if the bomb didn’t work and accounts of the war in Burma, including Col Tanahashi’s address at Arakan.
Japan’s determination provided a valid excuse for using the ultimate weapon. Unluckily for them, it also provided a coincidentally convenient one for the Americans (and for us). Had they withdrawn from the war – not even necessarily surrendered – that excuse would have been denied to the allies.
I’m not sure about second bomb, though. That seems to me to have been precipitate, given that the communications system had been smashed to the extent tha the Japanese government was unable to grasp how completely they had already been defeated.
07.08.2010 08:28
I think the biggest legacy of the Japanese surrender was that they lost face. That is unforgivable in their culture. They would rather die than lose face. They have never forgotten that humiliation and have worked tirelessly since then to get their own back. The US have never ever been able to understand the different values and worldviews of their opponents, hence the disasters of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Third World War was a trade war. We lost.
Our factories and cities are as dead as they would have been had a bomb been dropped.
Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was the right thing to do. However, we failed to recognise the consequences of our actions.
07.08.2010 20:33
The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was just. American military strategists extrapolated that a full scale invasion of mainland Japan, based on casualties from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, would of resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million allied servicemen. If the Japanese had continued fighting to the death, devoid of munitions, petrol and food, deaths of 20 million are considered to be the minimum.
Quite frankly the bestial way that the Japanese treated POWs and the treatment of the Chinese (Rape of Nanking in 1937 alone killed 250,000), Koreans et al exceeded even the worst atrocities of allied POWs, bordering on genocide, I can only commend Trueman’s actions.
Also did you know that the building of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan project, 10% of the physicists were British?
08.08.2010 12:25
While the treatment of Allied prisoners by the Japanese was cruel it was not unique.
One in four Allied soldiers captured by the Japanese died.
Of the 90,000 Germans captured at Stalingrad only about 6000 returned.
During the winter after the war ended hundreds of thousands of German POWs were kept in prison camps with almost no shelter and inadequate rations. Tens of thousands died. Germans civilians who tried to get food to the POW camps were shot.
15.08.2010 08:15
@Kleep
Most history text books are written my Marxists and abused therein. The roots of the cold war began on the 1st August 1944 with the Warsaw Uprising. Encouraged by Stalin with the promise of Soviet support the brave Poles fought vicious SS regiments in the streets. Co-incidentally Stalin conveniently “rested” his troops while the Poles perished. Subsequently Stalin reneged on a promise to Churchill that Poland would be returned to democracy.
The American atomic programme had its roots in the 1930s as a direct consequence of fears of a Nazi bomb. German scientists won over half of the Nobel prizes for science in the 1930s, such was their dominance. However it began in earnest in 1939 with the “Uranium Committee” before the Nazis and Soviets had entered the war. The crucial discovery was in 1941 when discovering the fissile properties of uranium-235 by British physicists and the British government gave its full permission to share the data with the Americans.
The reason why the nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan by Truman (spelt it wrong above) was not commie bashing but also as I previously described to end a conventional conflict that would of seen tens of millions of deaths. So how a project that was started before WW2 to counter a Nazi bomb and never can be seen as a Cold War propaganda exercise.
08.08.2010 18:53
The theory that “Kleep” in the comments puts forward, that the dropping of the bomb was done to impress the Russians, was put forward most famously by Gar Alperovitz in his 1965 book, “Atomic Diplomacy” (updated many years later in his book, “The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb.”) This theory has been thoroughly discredited not least by Robert James Maddox in his 2007 edited book, “Hiroshima In History: The Myths of Revisionism.” This book also satisfactorily demolishes the claim that the Japanese were ready to surrender.
I also suggest reading Michael Kort’s book, “The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the bomb.” Specifically Part II on pages 79-116. The impressing the Russians theory is discussed on pages110-111 and can be seen via Google books at the following address:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sCOl-q3OymoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=michael+kort+the+columbia+guide+to+hiroshima+and+the+bomb&source=bl&ots=Q045_E94lm&sig=mEQOPZ-B7_Zk0xhCnCV28Nee2wg&hl=en&ei=QGhmTPHiEcmX
On whether Japan was ready to surrender – see pages 82-8 on line at
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sCOl-q3OymoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=michael+kort+the+columbia+guide+to+hiroshima+and+the+bomb&source=bl&ots=Q045_E94lm&sig=mEQOPZ-B7_Zk0xhCnCV28Nee2wg&hl=en&ei=QGhmTPHiEcmX4gb3yYGZBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Was%20Japan%20ready%20to%20surrender%22&f=false
14.08.2010 10:02
Most history books are written by Marxists – what, this is possibly as pathetic as it gets. Mr Wallace fails to consider the moral legimacy of Nagasaki, as it is conveniently left-out of his already perverse effort to say something as opposed to nothing. What strikes me is that blogging is almost always devoid of substance, its practicioners, capable of saying things like ‘it is was the right thing to do’ – ‘I cannot help but feel that it was the roght thing to do’ – ‘think about all those service men’. Mr Wallace sounds like a farmer in a local pub talking to his poor nephew. An enthusiatic 12 year old could say something more stirring on a regular basis then Mr Wallace. Shock and awe may possible have jutified the first bomb, whereas the second, exhibits the extent of man’s almost careless disposition towards cruellty.
15.08.2010 11:26