STATE SPONSORED TERRORISM
On the 63rd Anniversary of Washingtons Nuclear Terror-Attack on Hiroshima,
and three-days later on Nagasaki
by Ralph Raico
LewRockwell.com
August 6, 2008
This excerpt from Ralph
Raico's "Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution" in John V.
Denson, ed., Reassessing the Presidency: The
Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises
Institute, 2001), is reprinted with permission. (The notes are numbered as
they are because this is an excerpt. Read the whole article.)
The most spectacular episode of Trumans presidency will never be forgotten, but will be forever
linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and
of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around two hundred thousand persons
were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast
majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve
U.S. Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also among the dead.87
Great controversy has always surrounded the bombings.
One thing Truman insisted on from the start: The decision to use the bombs,
and the responsibility it entailed, was his. Over the years, he gave
different, and contradictory, grounds for his decision. Sometimes he implied
that he had acted simply out of revenge. To a clergyman who criticized him,
Truman responded, testily:
Nobody is more disturbed over the
use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the
unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our
prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we
have been using to bombard them.88
Such reasoning will not impress anyone who fails to see
how the brutality of the Japanese military could justify deadly retaliation
against innocent men, women, and children. Truman doubtless was aware of
this, so from time to time he advanced other pretexts. On August 9, 1945,
he stated: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped
on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first
attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."89
This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a
military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred
thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the
harbor was mined and the U.S. Navy and Air Force were in control of the
waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been
effectively neutralized.
On other occasions, Truman claimed that Hiroshima was
bombed because it was an industrial center. But, as noted in the U.S.
Strategic Bombing Survey, "all major factories in Hiroshima were on
the periphery of the city and escaped serious damage."90 The target was the
center of the city. That Truman realized the kind of victims the bombs
consumed is evident from his comment to his cabinet on August 10,
explaining his reluctance to drop a third bomb: "The thought of wiping
out another 100,000 people was too horrible," he said; he didnt like the idea of killing "all those kids."91Wiping out
another one hundred thousand people . . . all those kids.
Moreover, the notion that Hiroshima was a major
military or industrial center is implausible on the face of it. The city
had remained untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the
Japanese home islands, and never figured in Bomber Commands list of the 33 primary targets.92
Thus, the rationale for the atomic
bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained
surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a
half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that
would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in
the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the
worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands
was forty-six thousand American lives lost.93 The ridiculously inflated figure of
a half-million for the potential death toll nearly twice the total of U.S.
dead in all theaters in the Second World War is now routinely repeated in
high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant
commentators. Unsurprisingly, the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score
goes to President George H.W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the
bomb "spared millions of American lives."94
Still, Trumans multiple deceptions and
self-deceptions are understandable, considering the horror he unleashed. It
is equally understandable that the U.S. occupation authorities censored
reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs
of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to
reach the public.95
Otherwise, Americans and the rest of the world might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming
to light from the Nazi concentration camps.
The bombings were condemned as barbaric and
unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and
MacArthur.96
The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Trumans own chief of staff, was typical:
the use of this barbarous weapon at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.
. . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted
an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not
taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying
women and children.97
The political elite implicated in the atomic bombings
feared a backlash that would aid and abet the rebirth of horrid prewar
"isolationism." Apologias were rushed into print, lest public
disgust at the sickening war crime result in erosion of enthusiasm for the
globalist project.98
No need to worry. A sea-change had taken place in the attitudes of the
American people. Then and ever after, all surveys have shown that the great
majority supported Truman, believing that the bombs were required to end
the war and save hundreds of thousands of American lives, or more likely,
not really caring one way or the other.
Those who may still be troubled by such a grisly
exercise in cost-benefit analysis innocent Japanese lives balanced
against the lives of Allied servicemen might reflect on the judgment of
the Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe, who insisted on the supremacy of
moral rules.99
When, in June 1956, Truman was awarded an honorary degree by her
university, Oxford, Anscombe protested.100 Truman was a war criminal, she
contended, for what is the difference between the U.S. government
massacring civilians from the air, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the
Nazis wiping out the inhabitants of some Czech or Polish village?
Anscombes point is worth following up.
Suppose that, when we invaded Germany in early 1945, our leaders had
believed that executing all the inhabitants of Aachen, or Trier, or some
other Rhineland city would finally break the will of the Germans and lead
them to surrender. In this way, the war might have ended quickly, saving
the lives of many Allied soldiers. Would that then have justified shooting
tens of thousands of German civilians, including women and children? Yet
how is that different from the atomic bombings?
By early summer 1945, the Japanese fully realized that
they were beaten. Why did they nonetheless fight on? As Anscombe wrote:
"It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of
all evil."101
That mad formula was coined by Roosevelt at the
Casablanca conference, and, with Churchills enthusiastic concurrence, it
became the Allied shibboleth. After prolonging the war in Europe, it did
its work in the Pacific. At the Potsdam conference, in July 1945, Truman
issued a proclamation to the Japanese, threatening them with the
"utter devastation" of their homeland unless they surrendered
unconditionally. Among the Allied terms, to which "there are no
alternatives," was that there be "eliminated for all time the
authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of
Japan into embarking on world conquest [sic]." "Stern
justice," the proclamation warned, "would be meted out to all war
criminals."102
To the Japanese, this meant that the emperor regarded by them to be divine, the direct descendent of the
goddess of the sun would certainly be dethroned and probably
put on trial as a war criminal and hanged, perhaps in front of his palace.103 It was not, in
fact, the U.S. intention to dethrone or punish the emperor. But this
implicit modification of unconditional surrender was never communicated to
the Japanese. In the end, after Nagasaki, Washington acceded to the
Japanese desire to keep the dynasty and even to retain Hirohito as emperor.
For months before, Truman had been pressed to clarify
the U.S. position by many high officials within the administration, and
outside of it, as well. In May 1945, at the presidents request, Herbert Hoover prepared a memorandum stressing the
urgent need to end the war as soon as possible. The Japanese should be
informed that we would in no way interfere with the emperor or their chosen
form of government. He even raised the possibility that, as part of the
terms, Japan might be allowed to hold on to Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea.
After meeting with Truman, Hoover dined with Taft and other Republican
leaders, and outlined his proposals.104
Establishment writers on World War II often like to
deal in lurid speculations. For instance: if the United States had not
entered the war, then Hitler would have "conquered the world" (a
sad undervaluation of the Red Army, it would appear; moreover, wasnt it Japan that was trying to "conquer the world"?)
and killed untold millions. Now, applying conjectural history in this case:
assume that the Pacific war had ended in the way wars customarily do through negotiation of the terms of surrender. And assume the
worst that the Japanese had adamantly insisted on preserving part
of their empire, say, Korea and Formosa, even Manchuria. In that event, it
is quite possible that Japan would have been in a position to prevent the
Communists from coming to power in China. And that could have meant that
the thirty or forty million deaths now attributed to the Maoist regime
would not have occurred.
But even remaining within the limits of feasible
diplomacy in 1945, it is clear that Truman in no way exhausted the
possibilities of ending the war without recourse to the atomic bomb. The
Japanese were not informed that they would be the victims of by far the
most lethal weapon ever invented (one with "more than two thousand
times the blast power of the British Grand Slam, which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of
warfare," as Truman boasted in his announcement of the Hiroshima
attack). Nor were they told that the Soviet Union was set to declare war on
Japan, an event that shocked some in Tokyo more than the bombings.105 Pleas by some of
the scientists involved in the project to demonstrate the power of the bomb
in some uninhabited or evacuated area were rebuffed. All that mattered was
to formally preserve the unconditional surrender formula and save the
servicemens lives that might have been lost in the effort to enforce it.
Yet, as Major General J.F.C. Fuller, one of the centurys great military historians, wrote in connection with the
atomic bombings:
Though to save life is laudable, it
in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every
precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the
pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity
can be justified.106
Isnt this obviously true? And isnt this the reason that rational and humane men, over
generations, developed rules of warfare in the first place?
While the mass media parroted the government line in
praising the atomic incinerations, prominent conservatives denounced them
as unspeakable war crimes. Felix Morley, constitutional scholar and one of
the founders of Human Events, drew attention to the horror of
Hiroshima, including the "thousands of children trapped in the
thirty-three schools that were destroyed." He called on his
compatriots to atone for what had been done in their name, and proposed
that groups of Americans be sent to Hiroshima, as Germans were sent to
witness what had been done in the Nazi camps. The Paulist priest, Father
James Gillis, editor of The Catholic World and another stalwart of
the Old Right, castigated the bombings as "the most powerful blow ever
delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law." David
Lawrence, conservative owner of U.S. News and World Report,
continued to denounce them for years.107 The distinguished conservative
philosopher Richard Weaver was revolted by
the spectacle of young boys fresh
out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust . . .
pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing
atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Weaver considered such atrocities as deeply
"inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built."108
Today, self-styled conservatives slander as
"anti-American" anyone who is in the least troubled by Trumans massacre of so many tens of thousands of Japanese innocents
from the air. This shows as well as anything the difference between todays "conservatives" and those who once deserved the
name.
Leo Szilard was the world-renowned physicist who drafted
the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the
Manhattan Project. In 1960, shortly before his death, Szilard stated
another obvious truth:
If the Germans had dropped atomic
bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic
bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who
were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.109
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war
crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and
Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.
Notes
87. On the atomic bombings, see Gar
Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic
Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995); and idem, "Was Harry
Truman a Revisionist on Hiroshima?" Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations Newsletter 29, no. 2 (June 1998); also
Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb
and the Grand Alliance (New
York: Vintage, 1977); and Dennis D. Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic
Bomb
(Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 1996).
88.
Alperovitz,
Decision, p. 563. Truman added: "When you deal with a beast you
have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless
true." For similar statements by Truman, see ibid., p. 564. Alperovitzs
monumental work is the end-product of four decades of study of the atomic
bombings and is indispensable for comprehending the often complex
argumentation on the issue.
89. Ibid., p. 521.
90. Ibid., p. 523.
91. Barton J. Bernstein,
"Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed
Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 257. General
Carl Spaatz, commander of U.S. strategic bombing operations in the Pacific,
was so shaken by the destruction at Hiroshima that he telephoned his superiors
in Washington, proposing that the next bomb be dropped on a less populated
area, so that it "would not be as devastating to the city and the
people." His suggestion was rejected. Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American
Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 14748.
92. This is true also of Nagasaki.
93. See Barton J. Bernstein, "A
Post-War Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved," Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 6 (JuneJuly 1986): 3840; and
idem, "Wrong Numbers," The Independent Monthly (July
1995): 4144.
94. J. Samuel Walker,
"History, Collective Memory, and the Decision to Use the Bomb," Diplomatic
History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 320, 32325. Walker details the frantic
evasions of Trumans biographer, David McCullough, when confronted with
the unambiguous record.
95. Paul Boyer,
"Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory," Diplomatic
History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 299. On the fate of the bombings victims
and the publics
restricted knowledge of them, see John W. Dower, "The Bombed:
Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory," in ibid., pp. 27595.
96. Alperovitz, Decision,
pp. 32065.
On MacArthur and Eisenhower, see ibid., pp. 352 and 35556.
97. William D. Leahy, I Was There (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), p. 441. Leahy compared
the use of the atomic bomb to the treatment of civilians by Genghis Khan,
and termed it "not worthy of Christian man." Ibid., p. 442.
Curiously, Truman himself supplied the foreword to Leahys book.
In a private letter written just before he left the White House, Truman
referred to the use of the atomic bomb as "murder," stating that
the bomb "is far worse than gas and biological warfare because it
affects the civilian population and murders them wholesale." Barton J.
Bernstein, "Origins of the U.S. Biological Warfare Program," Preventing a Biological Arms
Race,
Susan Wright, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 9.
98. Barton J. Bernstein, "Seizing
the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their
Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Bomb," Diplomatic
History 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 3572.
99. One writer in no way troubled by
the sacrifice of innocent Japanese to save Allied servicemen
indeed, just to save him is Paul Fussell; see his Thank God for the Atom Bomb and
Other Essays (New
York: Summit, 1988). The reason for Fussells little Te Deum is, as he
states, that he was among those scheduled to take part in the invasion of
Japan, and might very well have been killed. It is a mystery why Fussell
takes out his easily understandable terror, rather unchivalrously, on
Japanese women and children instead of on the men in Washington who
conscripted him to fight in the Pacific in the first place.
100.
G.E.M. Anscombe, "Mr. Trumans Degree," in idem, Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Ethics, Religion and Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 6271.
101.
Anscombe, "Mr. Trumans Degree," p. 62.
102.
Hans Adolf Jacobsen and Arthur S. Smith, Jr., eds., World War II: Policy and
Strategy. Selected Documents with Commentary (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1979), pp. 34546.
103.
For some Japanese leaders, another reason for keeping the emperor
was as a bulwark against a possible postwar communist takeover. See also
Sherwin, A World Destroyed, p. 236: "the [Potsdam] proclamation
offered the military die-hards in the Japanese government more ammunition
to continue the war than it offered their opponents to end it."
104.
Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 4445.
105.
Cf. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 254:
"it does seem very likely, though certainly not definite, that a
synergistic combination of guaranteeing the emperor, awaiting Soviet entry,
and continuing the siege strategy would have ended the war in time to avoid
the November invasion." Bernstein, an excellent and scrupulously
objective scholar, nonetheless disagrees with Alperovitz and the
revisionist school on several key points.
106.
J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War, 193945: A Strategical and Tactical History (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948), p. 392. Fuller,
who was similarly scathing on the terror-bombing of the German cities,
characterized the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "a type of war
that would have disgraced Tamerlane." Cf. Barton J. Bernstein, who
concludes, in "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 235:
In
1945, American leaders were not seeking to avoid the use of the A-bomb. Its
use did not create ethical or political problems for them. Thus, they
easily rejected or never considered most of the so-called alternatives to
the bomb.
107.
Felix
Morley, "The Return to Nothingness," Human
Events (August 29, 1945) reprinted in Hiroshimas Shadow, Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz,
eds. (Stony Creek, Conn.: Pamphleteers Press, 1998), pp. 27274;
James Martin Gillis, "Nothing But Nihilism," The Catholic
World, September 1945, reprinted in ibid., pp. 27880;
Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 43840.
108.
Richard M. Weaver, "A Dialectic on Total War," in idem, Visions of Order: The Cultural
Crisis of Our Time (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), pp. 9899.
109.
Wainstock, Decision, p. 122.
August 6, 2004
Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior scholar of the Mises Institute.
Copyright
© 2001 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
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