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The Crime of Nagasaki—The 'Forgotten' A-Bomb City
Few journalists bother to visit Nagasaki, even though it is one of only two cities in the world to “meet the atomic bomb,” as some of the survivors of that experience, sixty-six years ago today, put it. It remains the Second City, and “Fat Man” the forgotten bomb. No one in America ever wrote a bestselling book called Nagasaki, or made a film titled Nagasaki, Mon Amour. “We are an asterisk,” Shinji Takahashi, a sociologist in Nagasaki, once told me, with a bitter smile. “The inferior A-bomb city.”
Yet in many ways, Nagasaki is the modern A-bomb city, the city with perhaps the most meaning for us today. For one thing, when the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete. 
And then there’s this. “The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, once observed, “but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki”—which he labeled a war crime. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who experienced the firebombing of Dresden at close hand, said much the same thing. “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki,” he once said. “Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.”
A beautiful city dotted with palms largely built on terraces surrounding a deep harbor—the San Francisco of Japan—Nagasaki has a rich, bloody history, as any reader of Shogun knows. Three centuries before Commodore Perry came to Japan, Nagasaki was the country’s gateway to the west. The Portuguese and Dutch settled here in the 1500s. St. Francis Xavier established the first Catholic churches in the region in 1549, and Urakami, a suburb of Nagasaki, became the country’s Catholic center. While the rest of Japan was closed to the West, Nagasaki remained open for trade. Thomas Glover, one of the first English traders here, supplied the modern rifles that helped defeat the Tokugawa Shogunate in the nineteenth century.
Glover’s life served as a model for the story of Madame Butterfly, and Nagasaki is known in many parts of the world more for Butterfly than for the bomb. In Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly, standing on the veranda of Glover’s home overlooking the harbor (see left), sings, “One fine day, we’ll see a thread of smoke arising…“ If she could have looked north from the Glover mansion, now Nagasaki’s top tourist attraction, on August 9, 1945, she would have seen, two miles in the distance, a thread of smoke with a mushroom cap.
By 1945, Nagasaki had become a Mitsubishi company town, turning out ships and armaments for Japan’s increasingly desperate war effort. Few Japanese soldiers were stationed here, and only about 250 of them would perish in the atomic bombing. It was still the Christian center in the country, with more than 10,000 Catholics among its 250,000 residents. Most of them lived in the outlying Urakami district, the poor part of town, where a magnificent cathedral seating 6,000 had been built almost brick-by-brick by the parishioners.
At 11:02 am on August 9, 1945, “Fat Man” was detonated more than a mile off target, almost directly over the Urakami Cathedral, which was nearly leveled, killing dozens of worshippers waiting for confession. Concrete roads in the valley literally melted.
While Urakami suffered, the rest of the city caught a break. The bomb’s blast boomed up the valley destroying everything in its path but didn’t quite reach the congested harbor or scale the high ridge to the Nakashima valley. Some 35,000 perished instantly, with another 50,000 or more fated to die afterwards. Those living in the Nakashima area saw the white flash, heard the roar, felt the ground shake, but escaped the thermal rays and firestorms and much of the radiation. The plutonium bomb hit with the force of 22 kilotons, almost double the uranium bomb’s blast in Hiroshima.
If the bomb had exploded as planned, directly over the Mitsubishi shipyards, the death toll in Nagasaki would have made Hiroshima, in at least one important sense, the Second City. Nothing would have escaped, perhaps not even the most untroubled conscience half a world away.
There were bitter consequences for the selectivity of the Nagasaki bomb, however. In Hiroshima, total devastation placed everyone who survived on the same footing. But in Nagasaki, half the city (including the Glover mansion) escaped. While Hiroshima rushed to rebuild, relief efforts in Nagasaki were slowed. The Catholic character of Urakami contributed to the divisiveness. Many Shintoists and Buddhists tried to disassociate themselves from the shame of the bombing. They called the atomic device “the Urakami bomb.” Some of them believed God was sending a message in singling out the Catholics. The problem was, many Catholics felt the same way.
* * *
Hard evidence to support a popular theory that the chance to “experiment” with the plutonium bomb was the major reason for the bombing of Nagasaki remains sketchy but still one wonders (especially when visiting the city, as I recount in my new book) about the overwhelming, and seemingly thoughtless, impulse to automatically use a second atomic bomb even more powerful than the first.
Criticism of the attack on Nagasaki has centered on the issue of why Truman did not step in and stop the second bomb after the success of the first to allow Japan a few more days to contemplate surrender before targeting another city for extinction. In addition, the United States knew that its ally the Soviet Union would join the war within hours, as previously agreed, and that the entrance of Japan’s most hated enemy, as much as the Hiroshima bomb, would likely speed the surrender (“fini Japs” when the Russians declare war, Truman had predicted in his diary). If that happened, however, it might cost the United States in a wider Soviet claim on former Japanese conquests in Asia. So there was much to gain by getting the war over before the Russians advanced. Some historians have gone so far as state that the Nagasaki bomb was not the last shot of World War II but the first blow of the cold war.
Whether this is true or not, there was no presidential directive specifically related to dropping the second bomb. The atomic weapons in the US arsenal, according to the July 2, 1945, order, were to be used “as soon as made ready,” and the second bomb was ready within three days of Hiroshima. Nagasaki was thus the first and only victim of automated atomic warfare.
In one further irony, Nagasaki was not even on the original target list for A-bombs but was added after Secretary of War Henry Stimson objected to Kyoto. He had visited Kyoto himself and felt that destroying Japan’s cultural capital would turn the citizens against America in the aftermath. Just like that, tens of thousands in one city were spared and tens of thousands of others elsewhere were marked for death.
General Leslie Groves, upon learning of the Japanese surrender offer after the Nagasaki attack, decided that the “one-two” strategy had worked, but he was pleased to learn the second bomb had exploded off the mark, indicating “a smaller number of casualties than we had expected.” But as historian Martin Sherwin has observed, “If Washington had maintained closer control over the scheduling of the atomic bomb raids the annihilation of Nagasaki could have been avoided.” Truman and others simply did not care, or to be charitable, did not take care.
That’s one reason the United States suppressed all film footage shot in Nagasaki and Hiroshima for decades (which I probe in the new book Atomic Cover-up).
After hearing of Nagasaki, however, Truman quickly ordered that no further bombs be used without his express permission, to give Japan a reasonable chance to surrender—one bomb, one city and 70,000 deaths too late. When they’d learned of the Hiroshima attack, the scientists at Los Alamos generally expressed satisfaction that their work had paid off. But many of them took Nagasaki quite badly. Some would later use the words “sick” or “nausea” to describe their reaction.
As months and then years passed, few Americans denounced as a moral wrong the targeting of entire cities for extermination. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, declared that we never should have hit Japan “with that awful weapon.” The left-wing writer Dwight MacDonald cited America’s “decline to barbarism” for dropping “half-understood poisons” on a civilian population. His conservative counterpart, columnist and magazine editor David Lawrence, lashed out at the “so-called civilized side” in the war for dropping bombs on cities that kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. However much we rejoice in victory, he wrote, “we shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt which prevails among us…. What a precedent for the future we have furnished to other nations even less concerned than we with scruples or ideals! Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”
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44 Comments so far
Show All"But many of them took Nagasaki quite badly. Some would later use the words “sick” or “nausea” to describe their reaction."
Uhhh, excuse me, but WTF did "the scientists" expect? Too bad they couldn't have been at ground zero in Hiroshima. They could have observed at close hand the event that provided their "satisfaction that their work had paid off".
"What a precedent for the future we have furnished to other nations even less concerned than we with scruples or ideals! "
JFC!! Is there a country on earth "less concerned than we with scruples or ideals" than the USA??
To wit: the time bomb of sequestered humanitarian donations to support the people of Haiti.
Many of the nuclear scientists, like Leo Szilard, were sucked into the Los Alamos project because they were convinced that Germany was about to produce atomic weapons; Japan was not a factor at all. Their fears of what Hitler might do with such a weapon were shared by Albert Einstein who encouraged the inception of the Manhattan Project but did not take part in it. Of course, Germany was defeated before either we or she developed the bomb and it was Japan's poor luck in not having been able to surrender before two of her last undestroyed cities became useful to demonstrate our new power to the Soviet Union in what was the one of the opening chapters of the Cold War.
Tony Vodvarka
"JFC!! Is there a country on earth 'less concerned than we with scruples or ideals' than the USA??"
that line struck me, too!
My beloved wife's father now in his 70's witnessed this atrocity from 15 km. away. That he has welcomed me into his family is a blessing.
Goddamn Amerika!
Perhaps these two observations help to put the issue of nuclear bombs into perspective:
"It is hard to understand a culture that spends more on wars on weapons to kill than it does on education and welfare to help and develop."-Dan George [1899-1981], Canadian actor and chief of the Tsleil-Waututh people
"We have guided missiles and misguided men."-Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-1968], American civil rights leader and Nobel laureate
Sorry but Mr Mitchell's article here shows him as just another one of these apologists supporting the justification of a barbarous war crime and a crime against humanity, that if it had been perpetrated against the USA instead of Japan would have had the persons ordering it hanged. Mr. Truman should have been tried and hanged but the victors never face their own war crimes, do they?
He writes:
Criticism of the attack on Nagasaki has centered on the issue of why Truman did not step in and stop the second bomb after the success of the first to allow Japan a few more days to contemplate surrender before targeting another city for extinction. In addition, the United States knew that its ally the Soviet Union would join the war within hours, as previously agreed, and that the entrance of Japan’s most hated enemy, as much as the Hiroshima bomb, would likely speed the surrender (“fini Japs” when the Russians declare war, Truman had predicted in his diary).
The facts are that the following U.S. military officers who were part of the decision process in the prosecution of the war at the time disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials), and Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet.
"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
"The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. 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 war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman.[quoted from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki ]
So clearly the use of the nuclear weapons was purely political, providing no military advantage, but satisfying the vengeful vindictive interests of the allies and their sociopathic "leaders" who had been thwarted until this defeat, by Japan's imperial ambitions in Asia. The implication of the Truman diary entry is also that these bombs where a demonstration to the Russians who had been advised to expect their deployment and as part of an agreement made with Stalin at the Potsdam Conference from 16 July to 2 August 1945 covering the end of the Pacific war to limit Russian "occupation" to the Japanese Northern Territories (Kuril islands), and their agreed invasion of Manchuria [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_Korea].
Truman did not tell Stalin of the weapon until 25 July when he advised Stalin that America had "a new weapon of unusually destructive force." According to various eyewitnesses, Stalin appeared uninterested. It later became known that Stalin was actually aware of the atomic bomb before Truman was, as he had multiple spies that had infiltrated the Manhattan Project from very early on (notably Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall, and David Greenglass), while Truman had only learned about the weapon after Roosevelt's death. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Conference]
I am sick and tired of repeatedly hearing this American propaganda and false justification of "to shorten the war", of the totally unjustifiable criminal use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima, and especially Nagasaki, since nothing can even imply that the entreaties that Japan had made for cessation of hostility and surrender were not on the very terms agreed by the US in the end, namely that the Emperor should be spared from humiliation.
But in actual fact I concur with the following quote which has far more relevance:
“People go crazy in wars, wanting to kill the enemy. If Japan had owned an A-bomb we might have used it. Arguing about the past is nonsense. Now we have to co-operate to abolish all nukes.” - Keijiro Matsushima- Hiroshima resident and survivor.
And let's not forget that the 2 atomic bombs together caused only 2% of the bombing damage in Japan during the war. IOW, conventional bombs caused 50 times more damage than the atomic bombs, and many times more casualties.
People express their craziness in war, but the craziness, as well as the racism evident in the use of these weapons, is endemic. (The use of bombs of all types against Japanese civilians vs. the emphasis on ground troops against the German military weighs heavily to me).
I think we have to work not just on abolishing nuclear weapons, electricity and materials but on embracing our shadows so we don't feel the need for war and profligate consumption at all.
This is overall a fine article, and I appreciate it.
But I remain skeptical and distrustful of arguments that credit one atrocity, however rhetorically and backhandedly, to justify another-- even when made by persons I revere, such as the late Kurt Vonnegut.
So, personally, I refuse to grudgingly concede that there might have been any real merit at all to the decision and act of bombing Hiroshima, even in the service of asserting that there was REALLY no excuse for bombing Nagasaki.
Vonnegut certainly wasn't one of them, but my standing objection to this two-step logic is that latent warmongers, especially the "I'm no 'pacifist'!" liberal kind, are attracted to this kind of argument in inverted form to support "good" (or even just "better") aggressive military operations-- or "kinetic actions", as they're now officially termed.
So we get comparisons like "OK, Iraq was REALLY inexcusable-- but on the other hand, invading Afghanistan, bombing Libya, etc. is a good call!"
YMMV, but to me it's a variation of the bankrupt but beguiling trap of good old insidious lesser-evilism.
Actually there's no real excuse for any of them. Libya is not a humanitarian mission, and not one of the hijackers on 09/11 was an Afghan or Iraqi. Why didn't we invade Saudia Arabia if retribution was what we were after? Libya is all about controlling African banking and resources and we're willing to support known Al Qaeda affiliates on the rebel side to gain that. So it would appear even if Al Qaeda was behind 09/11 we're ok with that as long as they'll work with us to gain control over Africa.
One of the worst human atrocities in history - my admiration for the quiet resilience of the victims humbles me. They use their suffering for a better world, and didn't try to cash it in like other groups did.
I agree with your sentiment, and am not arguing, just curious--what atrocities were even close?
In 1944, the British colonial government in Bengal cornered the rice market, sent most of it abroad and, because eastern India sympathized with the Japanese, engineered the Great Bengal Famine in which about four million people perished of hunger. It doesn't get much press, does it, with casualties on the scale of the European holocaust?
Tony Vodvarka
Well, more on the level of the Cambodian Year Zero slaughter, but I take your point. Where’s the line between atrocity and genocide?
Using this logic I think you could claim that the worst genocide in history is that going on right now, carried out by corporations, governments owned by corporations, and the WTO against poor people mostly in the third world. The theft of food and wealth that austerity measures and neoconservative economic policies engineer, and especially the destruction of our awareness of connection by neocon media have certainly killed more than any other.
The stated reasons for any genocide are nonsense. And how could we expect people unconscious enough to cause do such immense evil to be aware enough to know why they do it? By definition, it's impossible. Genocide, ecological destruction, etc. are all caused by rage, projected onto beings who don't deserve it, which happens because of childhood development problems. And the particular weapons don’t matter. Gas chambers, bullets, death marches (Trail of Tears, Turkish Armenians)or economic deprivation (American bison slaughter, export economies…) and slavery kidnapping are all just tools. So if we discard supposed reasons and primary methods we come down to numbers. I guess you’d have to pro-rate numbers as percentages of population. Regardless, climate catastrophe is about to be the worst ever, caused by those same corporate manifestations of our own rage.
What are we going to do about it? Talk more about Nagasaki, Nanking and Bengal? Or use our awareness of those to become aware of our own responsibility for what’s going on this minute and what threatens human civilization and do something about it?
"The atomic weapons in the US arsenal, according to the July 2, 1945, order, were to be used 'as soon as made ready,' and the second bomb was ready within three days of Hiroshima."
just following orders.
Perhaps the Great Depression ethos was still strong, and it was felt that since they made it, it would be a shame to just let it go to waste.
Or should that be "NOT let it go to waste"?
there were those among the Manhattan crew who felt an initial demo would have been appropriate, to give the Japanese an opportunity to reconsider - but that would have spoiled the surprise.
This article is utter crap. It is not difficult to understand why the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. All one has to do is perform the due diligence; check the historical record. Mitchell would rather not, of course, since it doesn't support his half-argument here.
The original rationale for the use of the second bomb was simple: the Japanese leadership had to know that we had more than one and would use them. Otherwise they would simply ignore the first one and go on fighting, as they had previously when conventional bombing destroyed cities. Since after Hiroshima the story went around that there was only one bomb, it seems likely that refraining from using the second bomb would have obviated the effect of the first.
The reason it was dropped so soon after Hiroshima was the weather; bad weather was predicted for the original drop date, Aug 11, so it was moved up.
It is not difficult to understand, unless you adopt the right-wing racist revisionist position on the atomic bombings.
Did I say right-wing racist? Yes, apparently certain figures on the Left have adopted the Japanese Right's position on the atomic bombing.
Sad.
Michael
Is your comment supposed to somehow excuse the fact that the bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki landed not on a military installation but instead on a civilian target? That would then mean that the bombing of Nagasaki should have constituted a war crime and a crime against humanity. But as we know no American official has ever been prosecuted for that crime just as no American official or military person has ever been charged for war crimes and crimes against humanity against the people of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
Well stated Erroll-Bombing Civilian populaces, be it Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Dresden constitutes A War Crime...
Since we have no draft, I would prefer that daily actual and real images of blown up women and babies in these insane wars be broadcast on all American television on an hourly, daily basis-Then you might see some REAL public opposition to this Empire's money grubbing lust for War...
"The original rationale for the use of the second bomb was simple: the Japanese leadership had to know that we had more than one and would use them. Otherwise they would simply ignore the first one and go on fighting, as they had previously when conventional bombing destroyed cities."
Not exactly a coventional bomb was it? And they were already preparing to surrender, before the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. There was really no reason to drop either of them.
"The reason it was dropped so soon after Hiroshima was the weather; bad weather was predicted for the original drop date, Aug 11, so it was moved up."
When all other excuses fail it's always worth a shot to blame it on the weather.
What a beautiful article ! I am saddened and touched by the tragedy of Nagasaki.
I agree. It's an excellent article that made me consider Nagasaki in a new light. It's rarely covered in our school system here in the states.
The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was the spiritual nadir of humanity. It was also the best evidence to date that this species was little more than a base, mutant form of primate that would annihilate itself in geologically short order.
Which part? Any facts to back up your sweeping accusation? Didn't think so.
When the truth upsets your belief system, insults won't change anything. You can ignore it or dismiss it, but it's still the truth.
If, as you claim, the United States was right in incinerating over 150,000 innocent Japanese civilians, then perhaps you can explain to us, as Greg Mitchell points out in his article, why the U.S. suppressed a film for decades which showed in vivid detail the carnage that those bombs had wrought upon those cities and people. The answer, of course, which you will probably not address, is that the United States did not want anyone to ponder and to question the terrible effects that those bombs had on those people. And in all likelihood it also did not want anyone to think that perhaps the United States had committed a terrible injustice in dropping not one but two atomic bombs upon, not military installations, but rather on civilian targets.
As I had previously stated, the last thing that the United States will ever do is to admit that its militant foreign policy actions have been not only wrong but also criminal.
"to what had gone before and what would have come after, if not for the use of the terrible weapon. "
No, what you ALLEGE would come after, it not for the use of the terrible weapon.
". Revisionism is very easy, little effort and very safe for the comfortable writer.
.."
Justifying genoiccde is very easy, little effort and very safe for the neoliberal genocidist.
Pam,
If you have a case to make, please make it. Vague references, insinuations, impossible-to-verify predictions-in-retrospect and ad hominem insults do not an effective argument make. Facts and reasoning work better.
To borrow from Ms. Pam's words, it would seem that if anyone had engaged in revisionism it would be the person who ordered those bombs dropped on those two Japanese cities and that would be Harry S Truman as he had a habit of changing the numbers of those Americans who would have been killed if the atomic bombs had not been dropped on those two Japanese cities. As this link points out, from an essay by Arthur Silber [who writes the blog Once Upon a Time]:
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2006/06/culture-of-lie-ii-loathsome-lies-in.html
"Truman kept revising the numbers of Americans who would have been saved if those bombs had not fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In an Aug. 9, 1945 statement to those men and women who worked in the Manhattan Project, Truman declared that he hoped 'that this new weapon will result in saving thousands of American lives.' "
Truman kept changing the numbers years after the bombs were dropped, at times claiming that a quarter million lives would be saved to nearly a million. From the link one discovers that Truman went even further by stating on April 28, 1959 that:
"the dropping of the bombs ... saved millions of lives."
As Silber points out:
"However, in June of 1945 Truman ordered the U.S. military to calculate in American lives for a planned assault on Japan. Consequently, the Joint War Plans Committee prepared a report for the Chiefs of Staff, dated June 15, 1945, thus providing the closest thing anyone has to 'accurate' ":
40,000 U.S. soldiers killed
150,000 wounded
3,500 missing
These numbers are a far cry from the often cited million lives that people like Pam are fond of repeating. It is also difficult not to believe after putting forth those numbers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, that those bombs were dropped on Japan is because the West and, in particular, the United States, had very little regard for the lives of a people who were not of the same color as those who were in power in the White House.
Did you actually bother to read what I had written? It would appear that you have not as my comments could hardly be considered to be, as you so flippantly term it, Monday morning quarterbacking given the fact that I quoted Truman, via the link, from what he had directly stated on June 1945. The link from the article goes even further by quoting Truman from 1945 to 1959. That then means that what Truman said is right on the mark since he had said those things not in the 21st century but rather a few months before those bombs were dropped on those cities which ended up incinerating approximately 200,000 innocent civilians and also less than fifteen years after that horrific event. Given the fact that President Truman went from stating that "thousands" would die in June of 1945 if Japan were invaded to revising that figure years later, apparently for the sake of propaganda in order to justify the slaughter of those Japanese civilians, to "millions", it would then appear that Harry S Truman is the one who should be accused of engaging in revisionism.
I understand that emotion plays a large part with flag wavers like yourself but you should really attempt to use your mind a lot more than you have been unsuccessfully doing by not uttering such visceral and banal statements. If you cannot do so then, to borrow from your words, neither I nor anyone else will be very much impressed with what you have to say.
Each August I debate whether to mention my family connection with the production of the plutonium material in Fat Boy - reporting for this directly to General Groves. And the emotional anguish which followed, and Nagasaki debate.
I chose to begin MY studies in 1931 with the rise of =bushido= and the taking of political power in Japan by uniformed imperialists - over almost no resistance by the more pacific Japanese. That same year, Ambassador Grew arrived in Tokyo and he began keeping a daily diary. The published book is one of the most fascinating documents in U.S. political & military history. It is extremely readable. Treat yourself. Find a rare copy and read it.
1937 saw the publishing in London of =The Rape of Nanking= by China foreign correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, E. J. Temperley. This is another critical book to comprehend exactly who attacked us in December 1941.
NOTA BENE in these saccharine Augusts no one ever seeks opinion about the Nagasaki bombing from survivors or descendants of Nanking. Associating =innocent people= only with Japanese civilian casualties is total horse shit. Japanese authorities kept the details of the Nanking, China slaughter out of their history books more than 50 years. But eventually, truth outs, and generations later Japan issued a National Apology for Nanking.
A third necessary read is an accurate reference concerning the pursuit by Japanese scientists of nuclear power for warfare use. The nation of Japan was absolutely priapic regarding Pan Asian unification (under its armed forces) and, had that nation produced atomic weapons FIRST, no wussy concept of =overkill= ever would have entered the nation's conscience. This is a nation for whom a motto was =Business is war=.
Japan never really understood, from the 16th century onward, that their enemy was not =round-eyed Caucasians=. Their enemy was Christianity, which is bushido by any test of militant identity; it is stalking.
Trylon.
I fail to see how the ugliness of Japanese imperialism somehow equates with "associating innocent people only with Japanese civilian casualties." We can discuss crimes against civilians in any theatre of war, without this meaning that we are ignoring other we are not talking about. Unless that is you mean that Japanese crimes justify Nagasaki - which obviously they do not. One crime does not justify the next!
Locate a copy of the 1937 book =The Rape of Nanking= by E.J. Temperley and his 18 colleagues in Nanking, each one from a different country. EACH journalist wrote the story of what s/he had done and what s/he had witnessed, as a dispatch to their employer. 19 journalists drew straws for the deadly job of getting the news to the outside world. One of them was famous American journalist Edgar Snow. He drew a long straw. His wife had fled with Mme. Chiang kai-Shek to Chunking, the Western capital..
The short straw was drawn by Temperley of the Manchester Guardian, who honored his promise. He stripped to his underpants, and the 18 newspaper despatches were wrapped and taped and tied all over his body.Had the Japanese troops caught him, he would have been used for bayonet practice. A loud diversion was created opposite the direction Temperley needed to go. It worked. He got through the military cordon around Nanking. Amazingly, he managed to reach the ocean shore, obtained sea transport to safety, then wended his way around the world to England. There, he turned over the 18 articles to embassies. The one by Edgar Snow was cabled to the USA and the press wires services. Somewhere I retain a copy of this marvelous piece of journalism completed under severe stress.
Americans are barely familiar with their own history but largely ignorant of any other nation's past. Japanese rape and slaughter at Nanking was one of the worst atrocities in world history, if the misleading metric of numbers is ignored. And if, in stead, the same atrocity had been perpetrated upon American citizens, perhaps in the Aleutian Islands - my belief is that WW2 would have ended with serial atomic bombing of Japan until there was no native body left capable of breeding.
That is no =justification= but simply a =reason=.
=One crime does not justify the next!= This depends upon definitions of crime and justify. When you look in the mirror you are looking at a Great Ape. Great Apes are among those animal species that conduct warfare. There are several of them, including many species of ants.
I've studied the Just War list of Augustine many times. During the Age of Vasco Da Gama a new justification was added to that list. If any newly discovered nation and people refused admission to their land of MISSIONARIES, they were to be persuade otherwise by massacre with gunpowder-based weapons. I have said before and will say again that Christianity is a Stalker.
Trylon
Why are you obsessed with Nanking? Yes, a horrible event. What does that have to do with justifying other horrible events? There are literally millions of such events, involving ever-increasing numbers as our population, food production, armies and the power of our technologies have increased.
Your reasoning is wrong yet tragically common. There is absolutely no evidence that we are biologically evil or even violent beyond hunting for food. There IS considerable--in fact overwhelming--evidence that being violent toward other humans and unnecessarily violent toward other beings is related to childhood neglect, trauma and developmental lacks. The failure to connect enough to refrain from violence is an attachment disorder caused by those parental/societal mistakes. (Gregory Bateson called evil an epistemological mistake, an incomplete but interesting definition, in this light.) And Augustine was sufficiently twisted by Christian shame and guilt and violence that no one should ever take his works as anything but examples of brilliant logic with rotten emotional foundations.
There is no such thing as a just war; all reasoning justifying war is as warped as Augustine’s.
"NOTA BENE in these saccharine Augusts no one ever seeks opinion about the Nagasaki bombing from survivors or descendants of Nanking. Associating =innocent people= only with Japanese civilian casualties is total horse shit. Japanese authorities kept the details of the Nanking, China slaughter out of their history books more than 50 years. But eventually, truth outs, and generations later Japan issued a National Apology for Nanking.
"
Especially not the neoliberal westerners such as you.
I notice that those who scream the loudest about Japanese atrocities during WW2, tend to be American / British neoliberals.
And please read the excellent "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" by David Mitchell - a fictional account of the early trading post of Nagasaki; beautifully and artfully recreated. What a shame us humans cannot control our dark side; hopefully we can mature into a non-violent state?
I had hopes of that in my youth. But now that I am in my sixties and have witnessed the beginning of the 21 century I see no evidence that it will happen in my lifetime, or that of my children or grandchildren.
I just watched one of the fathers of one of the Navy Seals that recently died say on the news that his son was a "born warrior"....how did that kid demonstrate that at birth? Did he come out of the womb with an weapon in his hand? It's that sort of bravado which will stall any sort of the evolution you speak of, because our kids will always try to live up to our expectations. And if what we idolize and revere is violence and mindless killing, they'll try and accomodate us.
Garden...
Nicely stated.
"I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds"
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Too bad he didn't leave the jinn in the bottle. Because there will always be perverted "small" men that swagger with it's possession and ever eager to use it. They get off on the large explosion and devastation, afterall it doesn't affect their life directly.. Perhaps it's the only way they can "get off".
Here's another take on why Nagasaki was bombed. In 1985, on the fortieth anniversary, I read a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle from a man claiming to be the son of a Manhattan Project scientist. He claimed to be writing to clear his conscience by revealing what his father had told him years ago.
The uranium bomb had already been tested here in New Mexico, but not the plutonium bomb. The generals wanted to know whether it worked.
I'm normally not an "Ends justifies the Means" type of guy, but I might make an exception for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Here were President Truman's options for ending the war:
1. Continue to blockade and bomb Japan. This strategy would likely take some time to work. During this time U.S. military personnel would continue to die at the hands of the Japanese, not to mention the 100,000+ non-Japanese civilians who died each month on the mainland of Asia.
2. Wait for the Soviet armies to defeat the Japanese on mainland Asia and pressure the Japanese home islands. Again, more time would be needed and more lives lost.
3. Invade Kyushu on/about 11/1/45 with almost 1M men and invade the main island Honshu on/about 4/1/45 with an even bigger invasion force. Lots of casualties on both sides were expected but this was, indeed, the Plan of Record on August 6, 1945.
4. Drop the A-bombs and convince the Japanese government that refusal to surrender would assure destruction of their country and culture.
Truman knew via intercepted secret Japanese cables from their Foreign Minister to Ambassador Sato in Moscow that Japan would not surrender even if the Allies modified their demand for Unconditional Surrender to enable the emperor to be retained. He was hopeful that dropping the A-bombs would get the Japanese to surrender, but he could not be sure of it. After all, only the Japanese could surrender just as only the U.S. could drop the A-bombs. Fortunately, the Emperor interceded with his military government and was able to engineer a surrender. Whether he did this because of the A-bombs or because of the Soviet declaration of war or a combination will still be subject to debate long after we have passed on. The important thing is that Japan surrendered.
Now, by early August 1945 Admiral Nimitz had started to turn against Operation Downfall (the two invasions of Japan) and would likely have withdrawn his support, causing the plan to break down. But a new bombing strategy was to start on August 11, 1945, just six days after Hiroshima. This new bombing strategy was to destroy the Japanese transportation hubs, of which there were 221.
Here's where the Ends/Means discussion begins. Suppose Truman had NOT dropped the A-bombs, preferring to go along with bombing and blockading. The destruction of the transportation centers (mostly railroads) would have only taken a few weeks. But it would have started a calamity in Japan that would have dwarfed the awful casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese rice crops failed both in 1944 and 1945 and rice imports from the Asian mainland had been cut off by the U.S. Navy. There was precious little food even in agricultural centers but the destruction of the railroad system would have prevented even that amount to be distributed to the major urban centers. Starvation, already extant in Japan, would have become almost universal. Japanese historian Daikichi Irokawa wrote that possibly 10,000,000 Japanese would have starved to death.
Most would agree that destruction of a railroad would be a legitimate wartime target...railroads have always been targeted in modern warfare. And I believe that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were basically civilian centers with but a smattering of military presence; a strong case could be made that both these cities were chosen for their location and their completeness and not because they were legitimate targets.
But the destruction of both cities along with the invasion of Manchuria caused Japan to surrender, and the transportation hubs were not bombed, thus saving literally millions of civilians.
That's why I struggle in this case with the Ends (peace) justifying the Means (atomic bombings)...a great many lives were taken but even more were likely saved.
The arguments are much less certain and clear than you suggest, I think. And you don't even mention the option of escorting a delegation of Japanese leaders to witness a demonstration of the bomb, even the Trinity test at Alamogordo. It would have been possible to exchange US people to guarantee safety so respected-enough Japanese would have attended to influence the Japanese high command, and what was being tested could have been kept secret so if it didn't work there would have been no loss. Some other communication could have been invented in case.
As has been mentioned, the Japanese had already sued for peace and could very likely have been convinced to surrender with some very small, symbolic concessions--or even one concession, retention of the emperor. This could no doubt have been cast as unconditional surrender to the US public, or even lied about as many things were and have been since, thus saving face for the US leadership.
The insistence on total submission to the white people is more indication of racism and domination pathology than of rational or reasonable strategy. Even the more likely reason, that it was the first salvo of the Cold War, is more evidence of this, especially in light of the US history toward Native Americans, African-Americans, Irish, Italians, Jews and Roma, (including issues of the Holocaust and accepting European refugees), Cubans, Mexicans.... and women.
When an action is so reprehensible it is absolutely unacceptable, one pursues the other options no matter what they are.
Here, it is clear, the unacceptable options were the entry of the USSR into the Asian theater and not demonstrating the weapon to them, not testing the bomb(s), not waiting a few days or a couple of weeks while negotiations continued, not accepting some other words denoting surrender... etc. etc. etc. It seems almost everything was less acceptable to the US leadership than killing tens of thousands and initiating a new era of horrific war and ever-increasing government secrecy and power by unleashing this still mostly unknown force on the world. Remember, a fair number of scientists thought the first test might ignite the atmosphere and destroy the planet. This too, was deemed an acceptable risk.
We should well understand these machinelike calculations devoid of humanity, since we submit (meekly? hopelessly? hopefully? pollyannishly? pathetically?) to people making the same choices today in the form of climate catastrophe and ecological destruction. Peace does not exist in the world if it does not exist within us. In decisions like this one are the roots of our current teetering on the cliff; each large or tiny choice to become less peaceful and less human drives us downward further toward the next. Traceable from point to point to point, the ends of those decisions are our predicament now--the end of civilization, the extinction of most of the biosphere and the murder of Gaia.
Also, you don't cite sources for, for example, your 100,000 civilians on the mainland figure.
You bring up some interesting points. First, a bit of housekeeping. The source for my claim of 100,000+ Asian civilian casualties per month can be found in Richard Frank's excellent book "Downfall" on page 359. You can also consult Wikipedia's article on WWII casualties at this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war_ii_casualties#Total_Deaths. You will find that the 100,000 killed per month is probably on the low side. But the overarching point is that a continuation of the war, even by a month, would have brought huge casualties to other innocent civilians in the world, not to mention U.S. military personnel and others. The faster the war ended, the better off the world would be.
I have never heard anyone suggest that a top-secret "show-and-tell" with Japanese officlals re: the atomic bomb testing could have been a strategy to convince the Japanese to surrender prior to any atomic bombing of Japan. The suggestion, while creative, does not seem reasonable. Even Harry S. Truman didn't know about the bomb when he was Vice President of the United States...he wasn't informed until after FDR died. Don't think this would have worked.
I know you mentioned that the Japanese had sued for peace, but that is, as I understand it, a total falsehood. They never did so. If you have a source for this claim, I would appreciate your posting it.
I can't buy your idea that the atomic bombings were racially motivated. After all, the a-bombs were developed to be used against Germany, another mostly white nation. It was only a matter of a-bomb unavailability and Germany's May 1945 surrender.
As for the small concession, as you term it, of allowing the Japanese to surrender but keeping the emperor, I already noted that Japan had rejected that idea. In fact, the small group of Japanese officials who ran the war for Japan rejected such a surrender AFTER both a-bombs were dropped and Russia invaded Manchuria. Also, it would not have been a small concession since allowing Japan to surrender and keep the emperor would have been similar to allowing Germany to surrender and keep Hitler. Truman had to diligently sell the retention of the emperor to the American people and, luckily for all, he did a great job of it.
While I was not alive when the bombs went off, I have read enough about them to know that most Americans were not all that upset that a couple hundred thousand Japanese were vaporized. This was a time of total war, and the lives of the enemy were not nearly as valued as the lives of your neighbors, your relatives or your friends. One can bemoan that fact as one may, but most people at the time thought the atomic bombings were an excellent way to shorten the most destructive war in history. So, yes, I'd say you are right in claiming that U.S. leadership was much more willing to incinerate thousands of Japanese instead of taking extraordinary steps to save them.
Too often we see history through the prism of Today and make judgements accordingly. I believe that tendency will often lead us to believe we are morally superior to some who went before us and we can judge them harshly. But often they are similar to us, just trying to do their jobs in an imperfect and dangerous world without the benefit of 66 years of hindsight and moral indignation.
I think it’s hard, without expertise in wartime Japanese culture and psychology—or at least SOME psychology— to have any idea whether they would have gone for it.
Allowing the emperor to stay was absolutely nothing like leaving Hitler in power. The emperor was mostly a figurehead in practical terms, and as far as I’ve seen, in US public opinion the only Japanese seen remotely as akin to Hitler was, maybe, in a small way, General Tojo (responsible for Pearl Harbor and executed after the war).
Whether a morally bankrupt people are for or against something seems immaterial to me; in any case, most people in the US knew nothing about the subject except what they were told, and most of that was lies. The truth was deliberately hidden from them because, I presume, the US leadership was not sufficiently confident that the people of the US were evil or apathetic enough at that point to approve of what they had done.
Waiting for years and then having the truth come out in tiny bits is a strategy we’ve seen employed with the justification for most of the wars we’ve fought, torture, the Exxon Valdez, the BP spill, Fracking, Fukushima, gas explosions, coal mine disasters, and indeed, every single environmental and human rights travesty we’ve become aware of. Leaders lead people into horrors a little bit at a time and people seem to buy it every time. We ARE similar to the people then; maybe we should do something about that by recognizing the similarities and concentrate on raising children who can feel some connection to other beings.