Never mind ghosts, monsters in the closet, killer clowns — my childhood nightmares were of atomic warheads and a post-apocalyptic world where the living would envy the dead. I’ve never understood the reflexive “but the Japanese did worse things, not to mention all the other war dead” responses; a new and terrible form of death was released upon the world, and we have yet to draw back from treating it as just another tool. It’s like the urge to respond to natural disasters by insisting the victims should’ve known better than to be in the path of the wind or the water. Will the dead be less dead if only the debate judges award sufficient style points?
From the BBC, “Japan remembers Nagasaki atomic bomb, 70 years on“:
An emotional memorial service has been held in the Japanese city of Nagasaki where US forces dropped an atomic bomb exactly 70 years ago.
Speeches at the ceremony criticised the attending Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his plans to loosen the restrictions on what Japan’s military can do.
At least 70,000 people died in the attack, which came three days after another bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Nagasaki was only chosen after a cloud obscured the original target, Kokura.
A solemn ceremony in front of guests from 75 countries, including US ambassador Caroline Kennedy, began on Sunday with a declaration read out by children.
A minute’s silence and bells marked the time of the explosion in 1945 at 11:02 (02:02 GMT)…
Alex Wellerstein, in the New Yorker, on “The Last Bomb“:
At 3:47 A.M. on August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress took off from the American airbase on the island of Tinian, in the North Pacific Ocean. Operation Centerboard II, the mission to drop the second atomic bomb on a Japanese city, had begun. Already things were not going as smoothly as they had three days earlier, in the run over Hiroshima. That attack had been textbook—“operationally routine,” as a classified Army history later put it. The Enola Gay had reached its target and returned home without complication; an announcement sent out under President Harry Truman’s name had trumpeted its success. But Bockscar, the strike plane chosen for Centerboard II, had been delayed on the tarmac because of fuel-pump problems. Only the day before, four B-29s in succession had crashed on takeoff, causing extensive fuel fires. As one of the scientists on Tinian wrote, “We all aged ten years until the plane cleared the island.” But clear the island it did.
Bockscar had been stripped of most of its armor and weaponry to accommodate its five-ton atomic payload, known as the Fat Man. Thirteen minutes after takeoff, at 4 A.M. Tinian time, the weaponeer made his way aft and removed two green safing plugs from the bomb, replacing them with red arming plugs: it was now live. Whereas the weapon dropped over Hiroshima had been a relatively squat cylinder, this one was shaped like a giant egg. It was five feet around and eleven feet long and painted mustard yellow. At one end was a rigid, boxy tail fin known as a California parachute, designed to help keep it from spinning wildly once it was released. The pit crew who assembled it had signed their names on the casing, and some also wrote messages to the Japanese—“Here’s to you!” and “A second kiss for Hirohito.” On its nose, the bomb bore a stenciled acronym, JANCFU, which stood for Joint Army-Navy-Civilian Fuckup.
The plane beat its way through dark and stormy skies for six hours before it arrived over the small island of Yakushima, where it was to wait for two accompanying B-29s, the Great Artiste, which was outfitted with instruments to help assess the power of the bomb, and Big Stink, a camera plane. Big Stink never showed. After fifty minutes, Bockscar and the Great Artiste proceeded to their primary target, the city of Kokura. It had a population of a hundred and seventy-eight thousand, about half that of Hiroshima, and was home to what U.S. military planners called “one of the largest arsenals in Japan.” The Enola Gay, now serving as a weather plane, had radioed that conditions were good…
When we remember the destructive birth of the nuclear age, we tend to focus on Hiroshima. It was first, and firsts get precedence in memory. It was also more devastating an attack than Nagasaki, with nearly twice as many dead and injured and three times as much land area destroyed. (This was in spite of the fact that the Little Boy, the bomb dropped by the Enola Gay, was only three-quarters as explosive as the Fat Man.) But if Hiroshima was, from a military perspective, relatively well considered, well planned, and well executed, Nagasaki was almost the opposite. From the very beginning, it was a JANCFU—a sign that this new era was as likely to be a comedy of errors and near-misses as the product of reason and strategy…
Jonathan Sobel, earlier this week in the NYTimes, “Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Survivors Pass Their Stories to a New Generation“:
Hiromi Hasai was being trained to make machine gun bullets when the flash from the atomic bomb that destroyed his city lit up the already bright morning sky. Just 14, he had been pulled from school a week before to help Japan’s failing war effort.
Mr. Hasai, now 84, has often talked publicly of his experiences that day, 70 years ago Thursday, when the first of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war ultimately killed more than 100,000 people. The victims included hundreds of his classmates, who were still at their school near the blast’s epicenter. The bullet factory, 10 miles out of town, was paradoxically a haven.
Yet the things that Mr. Hasai saw and felt that day are not recounted by him alone. The person who knows his story best, after Mr. Hasai himself, is Ritsuko Kinoshita, a woman 25 years his junior who is serving as his “denshosha” — the designated transmitter of his memories. It is part of an unusual and highly personal project to preserve and pass on the experiences of atomic bomb survivors, whose numbers are dwindling rapidly.
Mr. Hasai, a retired university physics researcher with a quick and infectious laugh, is still healthy, as are many of the survivors. But the object for Ms. Kinoshita and roughly 50 other volunteer denshosha is to keep telling the stories they have inherited once the witnesses become too frail to do so, to keep alive memories of a traumatic event that has anchored the pacifist sentiment that has pervaded the country ever since…
Anne Fifield, in the Washington Post, “In Hiroshima, the Horror Is to Be Remembered“:
The crowd sat entranced as 78-year-old Emiko Okada recalled the horrifying events of Aug. 6, 1945, a day that started hot and cloudless. There was the buzz of the plane, the huge flash, the cries for water, the kids like ghosts with skin dangling off them, the people with their guts hanging out.
“We don’t want you young generations to go through what I did. You can help by spreading what you just heard from me to other people,” Okada — a hibakusha, or “atomic bombed person” — said this week in Hiroshima, not far from the spot where American forces dropped Little Boy, the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare, 70 years ago Thursday.
Not only is Okada telling her own story, but she has also begun to train an apprentice to continue disseminating her tale after she’s gone: a memory keeper, one of a growing number here being designated as an “A-bomb legacy successor” as the number of survivors dwindle.
While there are still more than 183,000 survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki alive in Japan today, their average age is 80, according to official statistics…
Okada is strongly dismissive of Abe’s plans — she wishes he wouldn’t come to the memorial here Thursday — and is worried that lessons are not being learned.
“Of course, I hope that students will be taught about this at school. I want young people to learn why the atomic bombs were dropped,” she said in an interview after her talk. “We also need to talk about what happened on the other side. We need to talk about what Japan did to other countries, too, so we understand all the events of this period of history.”…
Baud
I don’t understand the second part of this statement. We have not treated nuclear weapons as just another tool of war. That’s why they’ve never been used since WWII.
Keith G
So, I guess no puppies.
gelfling545
My childhood too was tainted with an undercurrent of constant fear. Every time we had to do the (futile) dive under the desk drill, every time a plane that seemed just too loud went over. As an adult I came to believe that “no sane person” would unleash that horror again and was comforted by that thought. Now, in my old age, I am having to face the fact that we (or another nation – but it looks like being us) could put someone who is not terribly sane into a position of executive authority.
Emma
They started a war that included thousands of deaths — ask a Filipino or a Chinese how they feel about it — and got smacked. And they have learned nothing except how to throw a pity party for themselves.
Am I horrified by nuclear weapons? Yes. Do I try to contribute in every way I can to their disappearance from this Earth? Yes. But I’m not going lyrical because a bunch of suicidal old men decided to take their country with them. Okada is an exception, not the rule.
Botsplainer
I lament the horrendous waste of trillions of dollars and scientific and engineering expertise on the development and maintenance of nuclear arsenals, their c3 functions, defense mechanisms and intelligence on same. Those dollars will not be recovered.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Emma: And not just the old men. It’s impossible to overstate the effect that thousands of civilians throwing themselves off the cliffs of Saipan rather than surrender affected the mentality of American troops in the Pacific. It was already a cruel, vicious, no-quarter war, but that incident really convinced U.S. forces that, if the Japanese didn’t value their own lives, there was absolutely no reason for us to do so, either.
The perversion of bushido (which had never before included a prohibition on surrender) that the Japanese militarists imposed on their country was horrific.
RepubAnon
Isn’t it interesting that both US and Japanese conservative politicians resist telling school children about shameful or horrific things their governments did in the past… Japanese and WW2, US conservatives and AP history about the Trail of Tears, or the slavery at the heart of the Civil War…
JPL
@Baud: After 9/11/01, several mainly conservatives, don’t see a problem using nuclear weapons. It wouldn’t surprise me if we discovered that Cheney thought that was a good approach.
schrodinger's cat
A fine way the country paid back Oppenheimer for the successful completion of the Manhattan Project. Did anyone else the PBS show on the bomb? Edward Teller’s spiritual successors live on, and they are trying to scuttle the Iran deal.
Baud
@JPL:
I can see that.
raven
Thousands?
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: I did watch that. It was horrifying, it will be even more horrifying if this cadre of evil people is allowed to scuttle the deal.
Myiq2xu
War is hell.
Spirula
In the early to mid sixties I lived in South Dakota. At elementary school we had “civil defense” drills concerning what to do in case of an atomic attack (for good reasons as many silos were located in the area…so ground zero). We were instructed to hide under our desks and cover our heads with or hands (or books…depending on the instructor).
We had been shown what atomic bombs (they didn’t call them nuclear bombs until later I believe) do to cities/towns/houses etc.. Even as a child I wondered why they didn’t just make all those things out of the fucking school desks.
randy khan
If you’re looking for a happier anniversary, this also is the 41st anniversary of Nixon leaving office. My mother always said it was the best birthday present she’d ever gotten.
Chris
@JPL:
Like I said a few days ago, at this point I’ve basically resigned myself that Republican politicians, at some point within my lifetime, will again start calling for the use of nuclear weapons in theaters of war as if they were just another big bomb, the same way Goldwater and LeMay did fifty years ago.
(As was pointed out to me at the time, George W. Bush already had a hard-on for the idea of developing tactical nuclear weapons for “bunker buster” purposes, even if he didn’t actually recommend using them in Afghanistan or Iraq).
Linnaeus
@Chris:
Hey, dead is dead, right?
Mike in NC
@JPL: MacArthur wanted to use nukes against the Chinese during the Korean War, which possibly would have brought in the Soviets and launched WW3.
During the Vietnam fiasco, plenty of people suggested just nuking Hanoi to bring things to a speedy conclusion.
Maniacs all.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@raven: Was that a response to me? The estimates are that between 1,500 and 5,000 Japanese civilians on Saipan committed suicide rather than surrender. About 11,000 civilians died, many of them hiding in bunkers that U.S. troops destroyed with flamethrowers and explosives, so bodies were never recovered and so it’s impossible to say how many died in different ways. There are films of Japanese civilians jumping off the cliffs into the sea.
Oatler.
“I Come And Stand By Every Door.”
Emma
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: It might have been to me. I did say thousands– it actually was between 500,000 to 900,000 Filipino and over 5,000,000 Chinese, IIRC. It’s amazing, though, how often Americans, when quoted those figures, seem to go into denial mode.
(edit) I just checked Wikipedia. Over 10,000,000 is the latest number.
kdaug
Highschool, 80s, north of Dallas. I remember walking to school (late to a car) thinking about the fastest way to off myself when the flash happened.
It wasn’t hypothetical. If it weren’t for glasnost and perestroika, a small turn of events would have made us cinders.
There’s a man I credit with my being alive. His name ain’t Ray-gun.
RepubAnon
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Indeed – one of my uncles was on Okinawa and watched civilians kill themselves to avoid capture (many were frightened of the US troops due to propaganda.) My father was stationed in Japan after the war, and saw the Japanese coastal defenses – an invasion would have been a bloodbath for both sides.
Here’s the US Army’s site on Operation Downfall, including details on its two components: the planned invasion of Kyushu (Operation Olympic) and the assault on Honshu (Operation Coronet).
On the other hand, there’s a good argument to be made that it was the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan, not the atomic bombs, which forced Japan’s surrender. See Foreign Policy’s article: The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan… Stalin Did
Benw
A strange game. The only winning solution is not to play. Would you like a game of chess?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@RepubAnon: Honestly, it was the combination of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the Bomb. Even so, Hirohito was only barely able to push surrender through and just avoided a coup to prevent it.
The Japanese chain of command during World War II was fucking insane. There was no individual in government who could give orders to both the army and the navy, so they fought completely separate wars.
p.a.
I have a US gvt booklet from the early ’60’s: how to build a dry bar that converts to a small fallout shelter.
Remember the yellow and black fallout shelter signs? Note they never said “bomb” shelter. At least they were honest that the buildings weren’t bomb-survivable.
oldster
I feel bad about our having dropped the bomb, esp. the second one. Hell, Truman felt bad about it. I don’t know if it was wrong to drop it, but I know it would be wrong not to mourn the loss of life.
But I sure as hell wish that the Japanese would come clean about their behavior in the war, and all throughout the 30s. Somebody up-thread compared it to the Southern Lost-causers, and that’s a fair comparison, only Japanese denialism makes our Southern Lost-causers look soft and bashful.
As Emma said, talk to a Filipino. Talk to a Korean person. Talk to any of Japan’s near neighbors about how they behaved back then, and how they behave *to this day* about accepting responsibility. Abe’s behavior in particular has been shockingly retrograde–you hope attitudes like that are dying off, and then they spring up in the new generation.
Cervantes
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
And if I commit suicide (fleeing these meretricious attempts at argument), why, you should feel free to kill my family and friends as well!
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Cervantes: If you don’t understand how that sort of event could shape the mentality of troops at war, there’s no point in trying to explain it to you.
Keith G
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Since you seem highly conversant on this, I would like to find a book or two that deals with what was going on in Japan 1930-1945. Anything you are familiar with?
Cervantes
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
I can’t blame you for avoiding the comparison!
But what if you don’t understand that “the mentality of troops at war” is not the only factor to be considered?
Do you know what the Fifth Army did at Monte Cassino in 1944? It was done, some argued, for the sake of “the mentality of troops at war.”
Villago Delenda Est
One needs to remember that during WWII, the fear was the Germans would develop an atomic bomb, so we’d better get one put together too. This was a true existential war. The Germans had every intention of conquering all of Europe, pausing for some rearmament developing weapons that could deter the US from ever undoing what had been done.
Once we had the bomb, we faced the prospect of an utter bloodbath ending it by conquering Japan. We were also facing a post war world where it was forseen that the Soviets were still around and would become a threat, even if they were exhausted at the moment for fighting the Germans tooth and nail for four years.
The United States, to this day, is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons in anger. The realization of just how powerful they were brought nearly everyone to stop and ponder just how game changing they were.
Villago Delenda Est
@RepubAnon: The problem with all the post game show analysis is that it relies on information not available to decision makers at the time.
There is no doubt that Truman had Stalin’s reaction to Truman’s disclosure of the atomic bomb at Potsdam in mind. Stalin was not at all surprised. Truman took that into account when thinking about the post war world…that a US nuclear monopoly would bring stability, and Stalin didn’t blink when Truman told him.
There was talk of a nuclear “demonstration” off the coast of Japan, within sight of land, but the fear was something would go wrong and it would fizzle and the effect would be lost.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Cervantes: I’m not even sure what you’re arguing.
raven
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: So many jumped and died in the sea that they clogged the screws of ships that were steaming offshore.
lucslawyer
All I know is that my dad was sitting in a transport waiting to be a part of an invasion that the JCS estimated would result in 1,200,000 U.S. casualties (KIA, wounded, missing) when he and the other soldiers heard the war was over. Selfish I guess but there it is.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: The Eastern Front and the Pacific Island campaign were two sides of the same coin; no quarter asked or given.
Both were horrible.
p.a.
How much are people without political power responsible for the actions of their nations, no matter the political system? It’s a philosophical question beyond my capacity to answer in any definitive way, especially for totalitarian systems. No gvt can survive without at least the grudging/tacit support of x% of the population. But when dissent= torture and/or death? I like to think I wouldn’t have conformed in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, etc. but I don’t know. Hell I’m guilty of doing nothing but sign petitions in the 2002-2003 runup to Iraq.
raven
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
“They started a war that included thousands of deaths — ask a Filipino or a Chinese how they feel about it — and got smacked. And they have learned nothing except how to throw a pity party for themselves.
Am I horrified by nuclear weapons? Yes. Do I try to contribute in every way I can to their disappearance from this Earth? Yes. But I’m not going lyrical because a bunch of suicidal old men decided to take their country with them. Okada is an exception, not the rule.”
Chris
@oldster:
I’ve not seen that thread, but I was thinking the same thing. It reminds me of all the stories that were told about the horror of Sherman’s march to the sea – I’d agree all things being equal that many innocent people were harmed and that it’s something to be mourned, but it takes on a whole different light when you consider it in a context of complete denial of the Confederate crimes and conviction that, really, the Confederates weren’t such bad guys. Which is basically the Japanese relationship to their history, too. “We’re the real victims, yo!”
And like Confederate LostCauseism, it’s something that’s spread well beyond its original home. I can’t speak for American schools (which I suspect don’t do this), but I remember being struck as a kid that the French texbooks I was given mentioned Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not the rape of Nanking or, well, any of the Japanese military’s long record of war crimes. Can you imagine an official state-approved history of the European theater that remembers Dresden and forgets Auschwitz? (No, of course these books didn’t do that – that was Europe, after all).
raven
@lucslawyer: So was William Styron although it was the coast of Okinawa.
Mike in NC
@Keith G: “The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s” by Piers Brendon. Excellent scholarly exploration of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan.
HumboldtBlue
This hand-wringing over the use of two weapons that combined took the lives of less than 200k people in a world-wide conflict that claimed the lives of more than *50 million has always struck me as absurd.
The Allied strategic bombing campaign over German cities claimed more than 10 times the number of civilian lives the two atomic bombs claimed in Japan, incinerating and blowing to pieces an estimated 2.4 million Germans.
The war on the Eastern Front claimed in the realm of 25 million human beings and it’s estimated that more than 50 million people lost their lives in China alone (ahem, Japan).
It is only the singularity and unique nature of the atomic bomb that stands out because it was far from being the most destructive weapon used in the war. The bomb was not dropped in a vacuum and it was used to end a conflict in the Pacific region that the Japanese had started nearly a decade before.
Paul Fussell, a Lt. in the U.S. Army serving in Europe when the bomb was dropped wrote about why, from his standpoint as a man whose chances of dying in combat were nigh on 100%, the bombs were justified in their use.
The false piety, the head-scratchingly dense and simple-minded revisionist history that surrounds the development and the deployment of nuclear weapons remains a mystery. The world was engaged in a conflict as vicious and as a deadly as any the human race had seen and one of the key proponents and practitioners of that viciousness and inhumanity learned that there were weapons they could no longer resist and it ended the conflict.
The Japanese can wring their fucking hands all day and they can bow their heads at shrines all they wish, they started the fucking conflagration and the fact that it ended with words from the Bhagavad-gita that shattered their Bushido bullshit is a lesson they should not soon forget.
* — The 50 million number is a general number for the conflict across the globe excluding China, where, as pointed out above, it’s estimated that 50 million died in that nation alone.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@raven: I’d need to see a solid citation for that.
realbtl
@Keith G: I would highly recommend John Toland’s 2 volume The Rising Sun. Toland had a Japanese wife and writes fairly neutrally about how the social climate of 30s Japan led to the war of folly.
bystander
Americans will always on the whole be completely at ease with the two bombs because they ended the war early and saved many more Americans from losing their lives fighting the Japanese.
Speaking of becoming death, I see Frank Gifford passed away today at age 84.
oldster
@Chris:
I was referring to RepubAnon at #7, who refers to:
“US conservatives and AP history about the Trail of Tears, or the slavery at the heart of the Civil War…”
browser
@Emma:
Yeah, yeah, “They” deserved it. Reflecting on the horror of thousands of innocents burned to a crisp is a “pity party”. Because Manila! Nanking! Bataan! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11!
Japan – and Germany, for that matter – hasn’t started a war since. Seems like they learned an important lesson that the US refuses to even acknowledge existing.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Cervantes:
I don’t think TTP is defending the mentality, only describing it to help explain why the decision was made.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
There’s a big article on the Fat Man at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scietists:
Cheers,
Scott.
Chris
@oldster:
Ah, thank you. I misread that as “in an earlier thread.”
NCSteve
@Baud: Yeah, I was wondering about that myself. Nuclear weapons are surrounded by safeguards and limitations, technical, organizational, procedural, legal, and cultural, utterly unlike anything you see with any other category of weapons. I don’t see anyone following the President around with a briefcase containing the launch codes for the Hellfire missiles we fire from drones.
People who strain to try to find a reason why the use of the atomic bomb on Japan was more horrific and blameworthy than anything that happened in the Second World War don’t really know anything about the Second World War.
PurpleGirl
An acquaintance of mine, after the fall of the USSR, said that now she could sleep without worrying about a bomb being dropped overnight, etc. I told her, “Wrong, India, Pakistan have A-bombs and either side would (at that time at least) gladly use them on the other. We’d get fall out if they used their bombs. It was as if she didn’t realize just who had the capacity to build and deliver A-bombs.
All time great movie: Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
NCSteve
@lucslawyer: Mine too.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@browser:
I think it’s possible to simultaneously think that the atomic bomb is a horrific weapon that should never be used again and to worry that Japanese militarism is making a comeback. If the bomb had been dropped on Berlin instead of Tokyo, would the Nazis be making a return to respectability today based on the country’s suffering?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Mnemosyne (tablet): I don’t know what I was doing in that regard, but I will defend that mentality, at least to some extent. As a combat soldier, you have to decide how much risk to take, and what you are risking is your own life. As a general, you are risking the lives of your own men. If you have a situation in which the Japanese emperor orders civilians to kill themselves rather than surrender and a significant number of them obey that order, that is a rational and justifiable part of the calculus of deciding whether or not to add to the risks that you are taking or ordering in order to spare civilians’ lives.
As to Cervantes’ argument that you shouldn’t let what one person does affect how you treat other people, it’s idiotic. In this situation, you had had almost three years of fighting in which Japanese troops almost universally refused to surrender. Now, in the first instance in which there have been significant numbers of Japanese civilians present in a combat zone, those civilians have demonstrated the same tendency. As a soldier, you can’t go ahead and treat each person you encounter as a separate individual whose reactions you need to calibrate. It is appropriate for us to ask police officers to do that, but for soldiers it’s a great way to get yourself killed. (This is a large part of why asking troops to treat an area as both a combat zone and a community to police, like we did in Baghdad, is so fucking stupid; combat troops will always default to the rules of a war zone.)
They have to base how they treat enemy soldiers and civilians based upon what they’ve seen already. In the case of U.S. troops in the Pacific, this meant treating all Japanese as if they valued their own lives very little. Sure, there were all sorts of nuances of Japanese culture that meant that Japanese civilians had much more complicated relationships with their Emperor and their own lives, but there was no way to expect the troops to know that. They’re too busy trying to simultaneously win a war and not get killed to worry about that.
Villago Delenda Est
@realbtl: Admiral Yamamoto, who had gone to school in the US and was a military attache in Washington, knew that war with the US was folly, but he was overruled by the generals of the Japanese army who were incredibly arrogant and about as aware of their own limitations as any Rethuglican Presidential candidate clamoring for war with Iran today.
Mike E
@PurpleGirl: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.” So many great lines…
Emma
@browser: Basically, in plain English, f*uck off. I didn’t say “they deserved it”. I said the Japanese government brought it on themselves. And to this day, they insist in trying to whitewash what they did, unlike the Germans.
You super-sentimentalists drive me out of my mind. My early training (Catholic) says that before forgiveness comes repentance. Or have you decided on blinders across the board? Because I bet you haven’t forgiven George Bush.
Mike in NC
We lived in the DC area back when the Smithsonian decided to remove the B-29 Enola Gay from storage for eventual display in a new aviation museum being built near Dulles Airport. The early exhibit captions were written by the “both sides do it” crowd, and pissed off veterans groups by suggesting the Imperial Japanese militarists were merely defending their culture against Western influence.
Villago Delenda Est
@NCSteve: This.
Nuclear weapons are treated in a way that nothing else in the US military arsenal is treated. I know this from first hand experience, having been involved in what is probably still called NRAS: Nuclear Release Authorization System.
I cannot tell you how happy the commander of division artillery (where I served then) was in 1989 when the game changed and tactical nukes were taken off the table after the Berlin Wall fell. All the sudden a huge attention stealing burden was removed from his shoulders.
John Revolta
@RepubAnon: I’ve heard the argument that Stalin’s invasion was Japan’s reason for surrendering before. People argue back and forth, but has anybody from the Japanese side ever weighed in? Seems we could clear up the controversy easily enough if we had some info from some people who actually knew the facts.
The article states that it was in Japan’s interests to blame the Bombs for their surrender. But has no Japanese authority ever told another side of the story, all these years later?
raven
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: sorry, my dad is dead.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
Not only this, but he was a hated enemy of extremists in the government. There’s this:
Threats, distrust, and hatred by militarists followed him up through 1941.
It is also interesting that army generals had so much input over what would be a largely naval conflict.
But what were the odds that the US would remain neutral? He gambled that a preemptive strike would lead the US to negotiate, but again,
Not surprisingly, there appear to be American war hawks who think that a preemptive strike against Iran will force that nation to capitulate to US and Israeli demands.
Brachiator
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
But it is up to the generals and the politicians to understand this before they unleash troops.
NotMax
Germane.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@John Revolta:
There are comments to the Bulletin article (at #50) that indicate that while there were noises from the Japanese Foreign Ministry about possible surrender before the atomic bombs, there was no sign that the military was giving up their “no surrender” policy. See General_Chaos for the details.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the combination of the atomic bombs and Stalin entering the war that did it.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
While “Dr. Strangelove is a fine movie, my pick for atomic film gold medal winner is “On the Beach” – based upon the novel by Neville Shute.
I only saw it once – it blew me away. Of course I grew up during the Cold War, duck and cover in a classroom with one wall glass windows up to the 12 foot ceiling, a wooden building. The YMCA was the downtown “fallout shelter” with boxes of military rations, canned water, etc.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis I was 11 or so, and tried to dig a shelter in our home’s crawl space, which wasn’t a basement because the house was built on a ridge top, capped with some of the hardest sandstone anywhere. I didn’t get very far down, but it kept me tired enough to go to sleep at night.
Shute’s novel is still in print, and I imagine every library in the English-speaking world has a copy. I won’t be reading it, as it is far more grim than Dr Strangelove, which was more of a crazy black comedy. On the Beach was the gradual death of every survivor, facing death at every hand. Too realistic, probably, for a 12 or 13 year old kid. But I’m still here, so maybe not.
Wikipedia has this about that:
Here’s hoping that will still be true in another hundred years! I wouldn’t bet on it if John Ellis Bush-league or any of his Republican fellows get elected, ever.
NotMax
@J R in WV
Also too, Fail-Safe.
PurpleGirl
@J R in WV: One of the first science fiction novels I read was “Alas Babylon.” Not as grim as “On the Beach” but scary in its own way. It’s author, Pat Frank, postulated that the atomic war would be started in the Middle East. How little things have changed.
Chris
If we’re counting movies with nuclear nightmare fuel, I’m putting in a word for Sarah Connor’s dream in the second Terminator movie. There’s something to be said for short, simple, horrifying and to the point.
Chris
@J R in WV:
My dad would’ve been just about your age in the Cuban missile crisis. His memory is one of going to confession every day, on account of being fairly certain that it was all over.
SiubhanDuinne
I hadn’t really thought of this before, but interesting that Caroline Kennedy’s father famously engaged with a Japanese destroyer when his PT109 was rammed by the Amigiri. I expect she has a few mixed emotions. (We never seem to hear or read anything about her these days. I assume she’s doing a competent job in her diplomatic post.)
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Brachiator: True, but I think there was plenty of justification for unleashing the troops from 1941 to 1945.
oldster
@NotMax:
I had not known that Eisenhower thought the bombs were unnecessary for Japan’s surrender.
I’m not sure it changes my mind about the question “should we or shouldn’t we have done it.”
But I sure think we were lucky as hell–the world was lucky as hell–to have a president in office during the ’50s who felt that sort of deep moral revulsion at the use of nukes.
Not every leader would have felt that way. Indeed–in the history of humanity, very few leaders have shied from using any military advantage that they thought they had.
To think that guy was a Republican. Then again, he did choose a certain vice president….
Tyro
The conventional firebombing of Dresden killed more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The firebombing of Tokyo killed between 75,000 and 200,000…. even the minimum estimate is probably more than was killed at Nagasaki. Two million people died at the battle of Stalingrad. The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that a single plane with a single bomb could cause so much destruction. But in context, it was not any different than the massive death toll that had already been faced in WWII, and it managed to get the Japanese to accept an unconditional surrender.
But the last part is the crux of the issue: “unconditional” surrender is a huge ask and usually only comes when the last of the armies are defeated and captured or killed. There may have been some negotiated peace that Japan was willing to accept, but the US demanded absolute capitulation, and that wasn’t going to come unless the Japanese saw that the alternative was complete destruction of their country.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@NotMax: Would Japan have surrendered eventually? Probably, though as I said, it was a near run thing even with the bomb and the Soviet invasion. However, the U.S. Strategic Bombing is not a very reliable instrument, for a lot of things. For one thing, it accepted a lot of eyewitness testimony at face value. In this case, captured Japanese leaders had a lot of incentive to tell interrogators that they were ready to surrender before the bombs dropped. In many cases, they were lying, and in other cases, they may have been willing to surrender but they didn’t have the power to force the military to do so.
I mentioned the fucked up Japanese chain-of-command before. One aspect of it is that every civilian’s opinion on whether they were ready to surrender mus be discounted, because none of them had the authority to commit the military to such a policy. Both the War Ministry and the Navy Ministry were set up completely independent of all civilian control (and independent of anyone who could give orders to both of them), save what Hirohito could persuade them to do; even his authority was more theoretical than real, depending entirely upon an unwillingness to go against what he said rather than formal control.
In addition to asking whether Japan would have surrendered without dropping the bombs, we need to ask how long it would have taken. Understand that, had it taken even an additional two months, there would have been more Allied POWs who died of starvation than there were civilians killed by the atomic bombs. That says nothing about the number of civilians, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, and so on that would also have died during the interim. The Bomb was the right call not just for making the Japanese surrender, but for making them surrender quickly.
As for the argument that the Bomb was used to prevent the Soviets from gaining more ground before the surrender, take a look at the difference between North and South Korea before saying that it was improper to use an approach that let us control half of that peninsula.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Tyro: The Allies demanded unconditional surrender for a good reason. Several of them, actually:
1) In both Germany and Japan, the political culture needed to be completely uprooted and it was essential to get all of those who had been in power out of power;
2) Not demanding unconditional surrender in 1918 worked out rather badly, and no one wanted a repeat of a country that could nurse grievances by telling itself it hadn’t really been defeated.
3) Had the Allies put together a list of demands for a conditional surrender, some of them, such as a complete withdrawal from the Asian mainland, would have produced about as much intransigence as a demand for unconditional surrender. The idea that allowing Hirohito to remain on the throne was the only sticking point in getting the Japanese to accept defeat really isn’t true.
4) On the point of Hirohito, there really is an important symbolic difference between, “We will surrender as long as you let us keep our emperor,” and “We surrender unconditionally and are grateful that you have allowed us to keep our emperor.”
Tyro
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Sorry for not making it clear, but unconditional surrender was the absolute best way to go. It’s just that I don’t think people realize how hard it is to get an opponent to surrender unconditionally. That had to literally realize that if they didn’t, there would be almost nothing left of the country. When people claim that Japan could have surrendered without the atomic bomb or a ground invasion, they’re not realizing that the best the allies could have gotten was some kind of negotiated surrender rather than the opportunity to uproot the entirety of Japan’s political culture and rebuild it from the ground up.
oldster
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Also see:
“2) Not demanding unconditional surrender in 1865 worked out rather badly,”
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Tyro: Gotcha.
Robert Sneddon
@Tyro: If the ground invasion of Japan failed, and it was by no means certain it would succeed, the Japanese islands would have been bombed into rubble even without nukes.
In the month of September 1945, AFTER Japan surrendered, the Boeing plant in Seattle built three hundred brand-spanking new B-29 bombers, each of which could carry a five-tonne bombload to pretty much anywhere on the Japanese islands. The planners were already configuring the bombloads to be mostly 4lb incendiaries, stripping out armour and weapons to increase the total tonnage needed to firestorm the cities. Losses over Japan were minimal, the Japanese AA and fighter cover was pitiful compared to Germany and the experienced USAF bomber crews from that theatre of war were being retrained to fly the B-29 over Japan.
There’s an SF story about the nukes not working, the invasion gets beaten back with mind-numbing losses and Japan never surrenders. The Allies set up a sea and air blockade and proceed to bomb everything that looked like human civilisation on the islands — cities, towns, railways, roads, bridges, fields, everything. By the mid-1950s there’s nothing left to bomb. The story involves a bomber pilot who takes commissions from veterans groups to go and drop a symbolic bomb on Japan in memory of someone who died there, usually funded by bake sales and the like. Things do not go well for him.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@p.a.:
I sometimes wonder exactly how willing those suicides in Saipan were. If it was a choice between jumping off a cliff or being clubbed or shot to death by Imperial soldiers, it’s not really much of a choice. The fact that propaganda cameras just happened to be there makes it even more suspicious to me.
ETA: Add in the fact that everyone knew exactly what had happened during the Rape of Nanking and that people were told that Allied troops were no better than Imperial troops, and I probably would have jumped, too.
mike in dc
I have no problem with making a big public to-do about the atomic bombings. I do have a problem with no similarly globally publicized commemorations of the Rape of Nanking, where as many people died as in the two atomic bombings combined. I also have a problem with the Japanese whitewashing of their own history in this and related atrocities. It’s not shocking that Japan is regarded with lingering hatred, bitterness and mistrust in the Asia Pacific region.
mellowjohn
i may well have had a childhood because of the bomb.
in august 1945, my father – a newly minted ensign – was serving on an LCI (landing craft infantry) in an amphib flotilla stationed in the phillipines. they were training to invade japan as part of operation olympic later that year.
instead, he got home in february 1946 and i was born nine months later.
SiubhanDuinne
For anyone who didn’t hear it, Bob Edwards devoted both hours of his weekend program to the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima-Nagasaki. Very interesting interviews (from a few years ago, repackaged for this weekend):
http://www.bobedwardsradio.com/blog/2015/8/7/bob-edwards-weekend-august-8-9-2015.html
WaterGirl
@J R in WV: The book On the Beach had a huge impact on me. It was very powerful, not something you forget.
Cervantes
\@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Not to worry: if you want to find out, answer my questions directly and in as much detail as you can.
Or don’t!
Brachiator
@Tyro:
But even unconditional surrender included one important exception:
This was essential to Japan’s political culture.
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
I remember reading it and subsequently seeing the movie (Fred Astaire [!], inter alia, in a powerful dramatic role). My introduction to the concept of “suicide pills” to escape an even more painful death. I saw it only once, during first run in 1959 or 1960, but I’ve never forgotten it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator: Allowing Hirohito to remain head of state made it possible for the complete revision of the Japanese Constitution and the provision in it that war was never again to be an instrument of Japanese policy.
The fiction that this was “the will of the Emperor” made it possible.
sapient
If people haven’t watched this video graphic, they must do so. It’s an amazing 20 minutes: https://vimeo.com/128373915
The atomic bomb was horrific. But context is important.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Cervantes: Maybe I answered them in #56. Or maybe not. The problem with trying to answer your questions directly is that you didn’t ask them coherently. So I have no idea if I answered them. Your comment at #31 doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, I think largely because you are trying to ask the questions in a very leading way rather than honestly, and that interferes with your clarity. Trying writing them in a less convoluted fashion.
gian
What I haven’t really understood is how the nuclear weapons we used on Japan were worse than the incendiary attacks on Tokyo Coventry or Dresden
About the same time as US planners were doing the logistics to get the bombs in place the Soviets were redeploying from Europe to Manchuria and had initiated an offensive which was quite successful within a week or so of the nuclear attacks.
A joint soviet-western ally ground invasion of the Japanese homeland would probably have resulted in a partition of Japan like Germany. The cold war started while WW2 was still hot
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
Of course, but getting rid of the kokutai would have been an even greater shock than, say, if the British royal family were to be eliminated.
Even when the samurai ruled, the fiction of the will of the Emperor was maintained. And the continuity of the Imperial family still gives hope to the small number of ultra-nationalists and militarists who still exist in Japan.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: The book was formative for me. I’m certain that it helped shape my views. Never saw the movie, though. I wonder if it could possibly have been as powerful as the book, but it sounds like it was.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Brachiator: This is a fantastic piece by Brian Phillips that’s nominally about sumo, but really touches on a lot of that stuff, including the ultranationalists.
Brachiator
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Thanks very much. I will take a look.
I have an interest in Japanese history and culture (but freely admit that I am a total amateur).
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Brachiator: Let me know what you think of it. I don’t know much about modern Japanese culture; I found the essay because I really like Phillips’ writing.
oldster
@sapient:
Thanks for the link to that video.
It’s extremely interesting, and I recommend it highly.
randy khan
@mellowjohn: Me, too. My dad was in the Marines in the Pacific. He ended up in the occupation force.
Brachiator
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
It’s a long article and I don’t think I will finish it in one sitting. I like that the author doesn’t assert that he has quickly gained insight into Japanese culture, nor the other cliche that the Japanese cannot be understood. He offers the information he has discovered with some historical background, and some good understanding on the impact of foreign wrestlers on Japanese fans of the sport, among other insights.
A couple of other thoughts…
Many non-Japanese have a fascination with Mishima, especially because of his prodigious literary talent and his homosexuality, even more than his militarism. I am not sure that this brief interlude tells us much about a very mercurial figure or the persistence of militarism in Japan.
Some of the author’s attempts to “envision the scene” when Mishima took a military official hostage are not poetic, but off-putting:
But I appreciated the understated irony in contrasting Mishima’s failed attempt at completing ritual suicide with how the deed was actually completed.
Mishima’s militarism was somewhat pathetic, failed nobility. This makes me wonder whether he might be viewed in Japan with more contempt than sadness.
Still, a very interesting article. Much more than one would expect from the average story about sports.
Brachiator
@gian:
Well, how many bombing runs were used to create the destruction in Tokyo or Dresden?
It is difficult to imagine what post-war Japan would have been like had it been split in two, or how the Japanese would have responded. I can’t imagine that the Soviet portion would have retained any connection to the Emperor. And I wonder whether there would have been any lingering bad memories of the Russian Japanese War of 1904-1905, when the Japanese destroyed the Russian fleet and humiliated Russia. Life in the Soviet sector might have been particularly brutal.
Competition between the Soviet Union and China might have been more intense. There might not have been a Korean War, with the West countered by both the Soviet Union and China in the region.
sapient
@oldster: Thanks for looking at it, oldster. It provided me with a lot of perspective.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Brachiator: It’s really tough to see a Korean War in any scenario that ends up with a partition of Japan, because it’s really hard to see a scenario that involves a partition of Japan that doesn’t involve the Soviets overrunning the entire Korean Peninsula.
Competition between China and the USSR might have been more intense eventually, but in the early 50s, the Chinese Communists would have only recently won their civil war, with Soviet assistance, under any alternate history that deviates in 1945. The competition wouldn’t really break out into the open until Mao and company feel secure in their positions.
CDWard
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Gratuitous Mass Murder – http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/07/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-gratuitous-mass-murder/
heckblazer
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: A partitioned Japan wasn’t really in the cards, as the Soviet Union lacked the sealift capability to invade the home islands. That also would have exceeded what was required by the Yalta agreement, so if the US considered such an invasion an act of war Stalin was screwed. The Soviet declaration of war on Japan pushed the Japanese government towards surrender not because of a direct military threat but because it crushed their hope of the USSR acting as a neutral party that could mediate a favorable end to the war.
gian
@Brachiator:
How many bombing runs needs to be resource compared to the Manhattan project
Robert Sneddon
@Brachiator: In the case of the Tokyo firestorm, one bombing raid on 9th March 1945 did it. The mission planners had learned from the German bombing campaign and especially the firestorm multiplier effect seen in Hamburg and Dresden. The major part of the bomb load was napalm incendiaries and white phosphorus, about 1600 tonnes in total from just over three hundred B-29s flying at low level. The firestorm was intended, it was not an unforeseen effect of that particular bombing raid.
I’ve seen some of the results preserved in a park in Tokyo, the twisted slagged-down remains of trucks and trams heated to over a thousand degrees by the firestorm. The raid doesn’t have the goshwow prominence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it didn’t take the Manhattan Project to make it possible, just good old-fashioned US industrial production and planning.
Robert Sneddon
@heckblazer: The Russians did actually invade Japan during the Manchurian offensive of August 1945, occupying the Sakhalin and Kuril islands to the north of the Home Islands which they still hold to this day. They had been taken from the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.
The Soviets could have gone on to invade the Home Islands too but only later in 1946 after consolidating the territory they took and resupplying their forces but the Sakhalins would have made a perfect jumping-off point for an invasion as they’re only 40km from the closest point in Hokkaido, similar to the distance covered by the Normandy invasion forces on D-day.
The Manchurian campaign was highly successful but the Soviets ran out of logistics after a couple of weeks, fuel mainly. It’s the reason they stopped half-way down the Korean peninsula. They couldn’t have simply driven on to invade the Home Islands in the autumn of 1945 for that reason.
brantl
@Baud: And you haven’t heard Republican candidates talk about dropping a nuke in Iran? I did, multiple times.
brantl
@HumboldtBlue: How about the radiation? That’s a wonderful bequest to a small island.