Posted by
Duane Truitt on Tuesday, August 07, 2007 5:50:45 PM
Last evening I watched a new HBO documentary called "White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki". Being an avid amateur historian and having my own personal encounters with nuclear weapons and the US nuclear weapons program, I was curious to see HBO's treatment of this subject on the 62nd anniversary of the first use of nukes to end World War II.
"White Light/Black Rain" provided compelling videography in the form of first person narratives by a few of the survivors of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and by a few of the Americans who contributed to the successful attacks. One cannot help but feel sadness at the losses of loved ones described on camera, and the hellish accounts provided of survival during and after the blasts. But unfortunately the viewer comes away with no understanding whatsoever of the "why?" of the first nuclear battle ... in other words, the viewer is provided no context of the use of those two bombs on those two cities, and what results came of such use. I suspect that the principal reason for that omission is due to the perspective of the Japanese nationals who produced the feature for HBO - it is understandable why they do not express much concern for why ... only for what happened, and for their expressed desire for it to never happen again.
The context of the use of those bombs is essential, however, because indeed the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not take place in a vacuum. The horrors endured by the unfortunate residents of those two cities was not a mere isolated case of man's vile inhumanity to man, without any countervailing repercussions on or benefits to the lives of millions of additional people who themselves likely would have been sacrificed - if not for those two mushroom clouds..
Yes, I refer to the 62-year old argument over whether the USA was justified in dropping the bomb on Japan. The arguments are endless, and in my opinion, completely settled in favor of Truman's decision to use the bomb. But regardless of where humanity eventually comes out on that decision, which will be debated for generations to come, one cannot even begin to address the opposing positions without also considering the context of the decision to drop the bomb.
The context of Truman's decision to drop the A-bomb on Japan was tied inextricably to the unwelcome prospect of forcing a Japanese capitulation, (per the Potsdam Declaration requiring unconditional surrender by the Japanese Empire) via a mass ground invasion of the home islands. More than virtually every other aspect of the swirl of issues Truman had to weigh in his decision to use the bomb, the likely alternative to the bomb (dubbed "Operation Downfall") loomed large. The planning for Operation Downfall and its twin invasions of Kyushu ("Operation Olympic") and Honshu ("Operation Coronet"), entailed a range of potential American casualties running from ridiculously low numbers (as low as 10,000 American casualties) to the better-known casualty estimates of as many as 1 million to 4 million American casualties ... with Japanese casualties, both civilian and military, estimated at as many as 10 million.
The actual number of casualties that American forces would suffer in a massive ground invasion of the home islands - an operation that would have dwarfed the D-Day invasion of Europe in June, 1944 - was of course unknowable. But even if one elects to simply "split the difference" on the wild range of forecasts, one still ends up with a total of anywhere from half a million to a million American casualties. That's a heckuva human price to pay for a war-weary America that had already lost 418 thousand killed and missing in action in Europe and the Pacific - with the lion's share of deaths coming in the final year between the summers of 1944 and 1945. If we think Americans are weary of the Iraq war now, with less than 4,000 KIA to date, how do you think Americans felt after over 400 thousand dead, with no end in sight? In a nation with a population then that was about half what it is today.
Given the fanatical resistance displayed theretofore by the Japanese in the most recent island campaigns in Okinawa and Iwo Jima - where both Japanese soldiers and civilians chose death in battle and even mass suicide over surrender to the Americans - we had no reason to believe that Operation Downfall would be any less bloody. Japanese forces suffered over 99% casualties defending Iwo Jima. And in the home islands, the Japanese would be defending their very homes from foreign invasion for the first time in a thousand years. Millions of Japanese Imperial Army soldiers and millions more dedicated civilian militiamen (and women, and mere boys and girls) would be expected to fight America to the death, at least as fiercely as they had in the remote islands. Each Japanese combatant would be expected by their Emperor, and anticipated by our Commander in Chief, to do their utmost to kill as many of the invading Americans as possible, no matter who wins or loses the ultimate victory.
Even if President Truman were to completely discount the human and political cost of sending possibly a million or more weary American GIs and marines to their slaughter on the soils of Japan - and what President could discount that sacrifice? - he also had to consider the even greater expected human toll on the Japanese in such an invasion. Not including the results of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, total Japanese war dead in World War II came to approx. 2.4 million military and civilians. Most of the civilian deaths resulted from B-29 incendiary and explosive bomb raids on Tokyo and other major Japanese cities, as well as the estimated 150,000 civilians killed in the invasion of Okinawa.
That last casualty figure on Okinawa is rather telling of what we could have expected in a ground invasion of the home islands. About 2/3 of the total Japanese casualties suffered on Okinawa were from the civilian population.
Extrapolate the Okinawa experience to the 70 million residents of the home islands, and the three million or so combatants that made up the Homeland armies, and one can postulate that total Japanese casualties in Operation Downfall could easily have been as many as 8 to 10 million - with 6 to 8 million of those being civilians. Or perhaps even far worse.
So, the context of the decision to drop the bomb on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the expected large (but at the time unknowable) number of bomb casualties in those two cities - perhaps several hundred thousand Japanese, mostly civilian, deaths would have been plausible - against an equally unknowable burden of casualties from Operation Downfall. Perhaps in Truman's judgment that came to somewhere between half a million to 4 million or more dead and wounded American GIs, plus another 6 to 10 million or more Japanese ... with 2/3 of the Japanese total casualties being civilians.
This was not an academic consideration. This was playing God, so to speak, with the lives of millions of Americans (the GIs and their families back home) and 70 million Japanese whose sufferings would have extended over many months of the most brutal and ugly warfare imaginable. Indeed, an extended ground war in the home islands might have resulted in the longterm starvation of many millions more Japanese in the postwar years to come, as the Japanese food production and distribution infrastructure would have been virtually destroyed in such a fight.
Balanced against all of that, the horrible death and maiming of several hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still seems a terrible price to pay. Yet Truman made a humane decision that likely saved many millions more. Such apparently cool-headed calculation of death and destruction on such a massive scale is almost unimaginable for most of us today. But that is indeed the context of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wherein those unfortunate people were involuntarily selected to bear the unbearable in August of 1945.
Any documentary treatment of the horrors borne by those poor people is remiss if the alternatives to such destruction are not even mentioned, let alone considered. It would have been enough, perhaps, if the producers had simply interviewed one or two American GIs - veterans of D-Day and Sicily - who in August 1945 were still stationed in a recently pacified Europe ... and who were pondering their expected redeployment to the killing fields of Kyushu and Honshu. And who (along with their families) certainly experienced tremendous relief upon hearing that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had convinced the Japanese warlords to finally surrender.