32 Comments

1. john lynch:

Niall Ferguson isn’t very revisionist. If you read his book on WW2, War of the World, it’s an endorsement of the long held view that the Allies should have acted sooner against Germany, and that the bombing of Axis cities helped the Allied war effort. He does not equate bombing with the Axis slaughter of civilians. He specifically says otherwise in his book. He characterized Germany’s demands as an attempt at world domination.

Ferguson is a very thought-provoking historian, not anti-Western at all, and deserves to be read.

Now, his view of WW1 is not orthodox, but to say he’s in the same boat with people who condemn the Allied war effort in WW2 is not accurate.

May 1, 2009 - 1:27 am 2. Tom W.:

Jon Stewart is so cute. He’s like an eight-year-old.

Dropping atomic bombs that killed 250,000 was a war crime. It would’ve been much more moral to invade Japan and kill millions, along with hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Ending the war–a total war, in which the Japanese enslaved, murdered, and performed experiments on countless innocents–with the minimum loss of life is a war crime, according to this luminary of liberal thought.

I wish I could be a childish liberal. It would make my life so much easier. No difficult decisions ever have to be made. America is always wrong. Surrender is always the best option. There are no evil cultures except for that of the United States.

I wish I could be a perpetual eight-year-old.

May 1, 2009 - 1:56 am 3. Don Meaker:

Of course if GW Bush had been president, he would have send a Marine regiment to throw the Germans out of the Rhineland, Hitler would have been asassinated by the German General Staff, and the Soviet Union would have collapsed without western aid, saving 50 million casualties.

And the leftists would have complained.

May 1, 2009 - 1:57 am 4. Gabriel Hanna:

@Don Meaker:

No, Bush would have spent 14 months in the League of Nations as a favor to Chamberlain, trying to convince the League to authorize enforcement of the Versailles treaty.

May 1, 2009 - 2:45 am 5. Cris:

The version I saw on UTube (from Comedy Central) has several minutes missing from the middle. I assume that’s where May delivers the goods to a baffled Stewart, who then mouths his Truman gaffe.
The final few minutes shown have Stewart babbling like an idiot, ensuring May gets in not one more word.

May 1, 2009 - 3:15 am 6. Friendly Girl:

Thank you for posting that, Mr. Driscoll.
Also thanks to Mr. Robinson, Mr. Hanson and Mr. Hitchens for a stimulating and intelligent discussion.
As a postscript, though I do not always agree with Christopher Hitchens, he does prove that it is possible to be a left winger and not be a propaganda fed ignoramus.

May 1, 2009 - 3:19 am 7. CraigZ:

It’s about time. Obama is the triumph of Henry Wallace’s Progressives over the old Democratic Party of Harry Truman. It’s too bad that the McCain campaign didn’t have either the historical sense, or conejes to bring up the fact that the current crop of Democrats are the heirs of Wallace. Let’s publicize the Democrats’ bipolar disorder. Next up: Remember the Copperheads!

May 1, 2009 - 3:24 am 8. Sammy Benoit:

You have to excuse Buchanan’s revisionism, Professional Courtesy between Nazis

May 1, 2009 - 3:41 am 9. William:

I have to agree with john lynch here. Niall Ferguson takes a very strict view about the rights and wrongs of the war – that the Western Allies were solidly in the right (he is, rightly, less forgiving of the Russians). But he doesn’t make the mistake of assuming that because their cause was just, that they were always angels. For example, Ferguson is very much of the view that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary evils – but he’s smart enough to recognize that the necessity of these acts doesn’t reduce their brutality.

There is no comfort for ‘liberals’ in any of Ferguson’s books. Ed Driscoll needs to take the time to read them, instead of heating up over a bit of youtube.

May 1, 2009 - 3:53 am 10. Richard Aubrey:

Given the Bush rules–anything that happened is certainly bad and his fault–apply to Clinton, those complaining about, say, torture will certainly insist on arresting Clinton operatives for extraordinary rendition.
Starting with “grab his ass” Gore.
That would show that they are acting out of principle, not insane Bush Hate.
Hope Clinton’s guys are lawyered up and forget foreign travel plans.
’cause all the folks complaining about Bush are operating on strictest principle.

May 1, 2009 - 4:06 am 11. johnc:

Nuking two cities was EXACTLY the right amount of force. Why? Because even then there was almost a military coup in Japan by hardliners who wanted to fight to the last man even against a nuclear America. It was a very close thing that these hardliners didn’t succeed. Anything even slightly less than two destroyed cities wouldn’t have been enough. Japan was just too fanatical. It’s also worth noting that the Allies were already destroying whole cities with incendiary bombing, killing equivalent numbers of people just on a slightly longer time scale. Was that also a war crime? Dropping our nukes off target and wasting the limited stock of fissile material would have been a tragic mistake. God bless Truman for having the will that no Democrat today possesses. Liberals today are like children–unequipped to deal with harsh realities, and we may all pay a horrible price for it.

May 1, 2009 - 4:19 am 12. jim2:

The Allies most carefully avoided bombing the palace of Emperor Hirohito thoughout the offensive campaigns of WWII, beginning with the Doolittle Raid in April 1942. The reasoning was that only the Emperor would ever be able to effect a surrender. Hirohito was only able to make surrender work because the unique and unanswerable weapon that the A-Bomb represented, and which even the military could not ignore. Even then, the military initially claimed that the US may only have had one such weapon – a fluke or anomaly. It took the second bomb at Nagasaki to silence those arguments and let Hirohito prevail.

Trying to create a revisionist history of those last weeks of WWII is conceptually similar to Holocaust denial revisons.

Imagine, if you would, what even a “successful” invasion of Japan would have looked like. The US manufactured 500, 000 Purple Hearts. Even if the Japanese forces shattered like glass, total japanese expected casualties were in the 1 million range.

The invasion casualties would have been only the beginning. The Allied air and naval bombardment campaign before the invasion would have severely degraded or even totally incapacitated the rail and road net and prevented much of the harvesting of whatever might somehow have been planted in the Summer of 1945. Whatever did get harvested could never get to the cities in any bulk.

The first invasion was set for November 1, 1945. The Allies invade a country already starving. Japan surrenders, though how the individuals would ever know that remains never addressed. Even if only 1 million Japanese die, 70 million Japanese are now facing starvation and it’s already December.

Disease, cholera, and starvation, and the Allies are there in the middle of it all trying to occupy. 70+ million Japanese and, say, 2 million occupiers. 10 million dead? 20 million? How many occupying troops and civilians and Red Cross workers die also? 10,000? 25,000? 200,000?

By surrendering in early August, and preserving the harvest perions and more of the transportation system, all that was averted. And that took the Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

May 1, 2009 - 6:00 am 13. David Thomson:

Pat Buchanan seems to imply that Adolph Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism was almost an accident. Nothing could be further from the truth. It pervaded every bit of his existential makeup. Buchanan obviously does not believe that Hitler’s Mein Kampf should be taken seriously. The Fuhrer was apparently only shooting his mouth off. On the contrary, Hitler consistently and unambiguously asserted his deeply held belief that Jews were genetically defective and therefore had to be removed from the gene pool.

May 1, 2009 - 6:31 am 14. Rob Mandel:

Stewart apparently has never studied military history. If war is “temporary insanity” then almost the whole of human history has been insanity. He has obviously never read Thucydides nor Keegan. Perhaps he should.

War has been an almost perpetual and constant state of man throughout time. He is a fool who reads/knows enough to make himself appear erudite. But that only requires he know more than his audience, which, well, doesn’t set the bar too high.

May 1, 2009 - 6:32 am 15. tom swift:

Pat Buchanan apparently has the power to cloud men’s minds. I found that in reviews of his books he is attacked for saying certain relatively vile things and thinking impure thoughts. But those who bother to actually read the books in question find that he does not, in fact, say the vile things, and that he has perfectly good and closely-reasoned reasons for thinking impure thoughts. I don’t agree with some of those thoughts, but that hardly makes him a madman or a fascist.

In other words, read the goddamn books before opening yer traps.

May 1, 2009 - 6:38 am 16. demhistorian:

Democrats have always been for torturing non-combatant civilians through aerial bombing campaigns, including nuclear bombings. ONLY Democrats have ever used nuclear weapons.

How else can you square the Democrat bombing of Dresden in World War II and the Democrat nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or Bill Clinton’s bombing of civilians in the undeclared Kosovan War? Or his bombing of a civilian aspirin plant in Sudan? Or Obama’s bombing of civilians in Pakistan?

Democrats are always lobbing bombs at people without authorization. Just look what Obama is doing in Pakistan, using unmanned Predator drones routinely to assassinate civilians they claim to be terrorists (of course, they never prove who got killed since they’re using unnecessary force). Let’s not forget that neither the US Congress nor the United Nations has approved of the use of force against Pakistan. No lawyers, no trials … just murdering them from the air-conditioned comfort of a remote drone facility.

It’s sickening what Democrats are doing with the power they’ve been given.

May 1, 2009 - 6:46 am 17. jim2:

French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault reported that John Foster Dulles (Eisenhowers’ SoS) had offered him two nuclear weapons if France would use them to save Dien Bien Phu.

May 1, 2009 - 7:26 am 18. mark l.:

fire bombing anyone?

fdr/curtis lemay killed more civilians in Japan via fire bombing than those killed in nagasaki and hiroshima.

I’m sure germans remember dresden.

May 1, 2009 - 7:30 am 19. TW Andrews:

To be fair, Stewart offered a rather profuse apology on his show last night for what he said about Truman in his discussion with Ciff May.

May 1, 2009 - 7:31 am 20. bbb:

@Jim2: I’m sympathetic with your argument, but the notion that the Allies “carefully avoided bombing the palace of Emperor Hirohito” is risible. Bombers of that era had a circular error of at least five miles. There is no way that Jimmy Doolittle or Curtis LeMay could have conducted a surgical strike that would avoid hitting Hirohito’s palace. Consider that in the March 1945 raids, over 50% of Tokyo was consumed by a firestorm. My mother’s house avoided destruction by the narrowest of margins, by a favorable shift of winds. Hirohito’s palace survived by luck and isolation, not by the grace of the Allies.

As to the rest of the conventional narrative, what it leaves out — as usual — is the context of magnitudes. By August 1945, we had already killed something like 500,000 Japanese (mostly civilians) in that year’s firebombings. Dropping the atomic bomb made the process somewhat more efficient — we killed another 220,000 or so in those two days. So excuse me if I don’t award Harry Truman the Nobel Peace Prize for saving a million lives – that’s like Barack Obama saving jobs.

The other aspect that the Western narrative always leaves out is the role of the Soviet Union. The late entry of Stalin into the Asian theater changed the moral calculus for both sides. Truman knew he no longer had the luxury of waiting for a November invasion — delay would likely mean a Japan half-occupied by Soviets, like Europe. Hirohito knew that Communist control of any part of Japan would bring unspeakable suffering. The atomic bombing was a means to an end for both sides. It gave Truman a shot at reducing Allied losses, while avoiding a repetition of the agonizing schism that was later to become known as the Iron Curtain. It gave Hirohito leverage over his dissatisfied general staff and allowed him to save some Japanese lives, too.

I think on balance things worked out much better than they might have. I think I would have voted to acquit Truman in his war crimes trial

BBB

May 1, 2009 - 7:33 am 21. cirby:

Don’t forget the “waterboarding” comparison that Stewart (and much of the Left) is using.

He’s saying that “the US killed Japanese soldiers for waterboarding after WWII.”

Except, of course, that we didn’t. We executed Japanese soldiers for actual torture and murder of our troops. Included (at the bottom end of a long list that included beheading and various other forms of maiming) was their version of water torture, which was “pour gallons of contaminated water down someone’s throat with a tube or funnel until their stomach distended, then jump on the stomach.”

May 1, 2009 - 7:39 am 22. jim2:

bbb -

Hmmm, risible, eh?

You may be conflating target selection and technical accuracy limitations. My point was that the Allies deliberately did not select the palace as a target, when many called for them to do just that. It’s been decades since I read the various sources, but I do recall my surprise when I read in them that the Allies had declined to target Hirohito for just the reason I listed. Lawson (of 30 Seconds Over Tokyo fame) may even have written it.

I have never seen any contemporary sources that credibly claimed that Hirohito or Truman feared Soviet occupation participation and made that a factor in the timing of a surrender decision or nuke drops.

Mac would later throw the Soviets out of his office when they surfaced a demand to share in the occupation of Japan, as was then the situation in Germany.

The Japanese killed ~300,000 civilians in Nanking alone and my personal opinion is that the life loss delta between the two nukes and the invasion/starvation/disease non-surrendered occupation is probably closer to 10 million than to 1 million.

Truman would have deserved it a heck of a lot more than most who have received it. For that matter, it would have been stupendous irony for Truman to get nobel’s dynamite-generated prize money for being the first to use the next generation of explosive.

May 1, 2009 - 8:10 am 23. GBD:

The interesting thing that Stewart says is that Truman should have dropped one off shore and threatened the Japanese with the next one is on one of your cities. Drop one before the demonstration and threat = war crime, with presumably drop one after demo and threat not being war crime. So if we waterbroad someone = war crime, if we threaten waterboard and then if he doesn’t talk do it, its not a war crime. Of course, Stewart ignores that we did threaten first, the Japanese just didn’t believe us.

May 1, 2009 - 9:44 am 24. Ride Fast:

[...] American war crimes [...]

How is that any different than destroying entire cities with conventional munitions? Tokyo was no less destroyed than Hiroshima or Nagasaki when America burned it to the ground over five days of near constant air bombardment with incendiaries. Allied air strikes flattened many German towns and cities. Was that a war crime?

May 1, 2009 - 10:59 am 25. SteveM:

“He does not equate bombing with the Axis slaughter of civilians.”

Then he is rather dishonest.

“Allied air strikes flattened many German towns and cities. Was that a war crime?”

Well, strictly speaking, yes.

May 1, 2009 - 11:11 am 26. jim2:

SteveM -

I’m not extolling a position here, but what does one do when one’s enemy puts its war support facilities amidst the civilian population? This problem is hardly new in Gaza with Hamas and Israel, as Allied planners faced that exact problem in Germany 65 years ago.

Does a nation have a right to expect immunity in its war production if it builds its factories amidst civilians? Does a nation have the right to attempt to destroy another nation’s war facilities where-ever they may be found, taking the best precautions practicable to avoid/limit innocent loss of life? (And this doe not even address the question is the civilian worker making the bullets that will be shot at your child truly innocent?)

The Germans may have had larger facilities, but the Allies had only 1940-ish tech with which to attack them. The US made the effort within the limits of the tech of the day to target German war supporting factories, like ball bearings, aircraft plants, etc. (Dresden was an exception, in my view, and it has always troubled me.)

(The British did less in that respect, as they bombed mostly at night and the tech for that forced them to target whole cities. OTOH, the Germans had done the same thing to them first.)

May 1, 2009 - 11:37 am 27. Ed Driscoll » This Just In:

[...] follow up on our post yesterday, it’s true: in the future, everyone will be a war criminal for 15 minutes –or in this [...]

May 1, 2009 - 12:45 pm 28. Frank Martin:

1. 140,000 Okinawan civilians were killed during the invasion of Okinawa. The horrid experience of the Americans in fighting the Japanese on what was considered sovereign Japanese territory was one of many factors involved with the decision to drop the bombs.

2. During 1945, The US Navy argued from a complete embargo of the Japanese Home Islands, which most conservative estimates show would have resulted in the deaths of millions of Japanese civilians due to famine and pestilence caused by the widespread destruction that would result from the embargo. It was rejected for two reasons, most importantly it would not end the war and it was considered inhumane to simply leave the Japanese in that condition.

3. Conventional bombing of Japan during 1945 was so severe that 10 cities had to be removed from targeting so as to preserve them for the demonstration of the Atomic bomb, if it became available. Please note that I said “Cities” not factories, or facilities. We bombed cities and their inhabitants in all theatres of the war. Civilians working in war plants in support of the war effort were the primary target for most bombing efforts. In essence, but the time the atomic bombs were dropped in August, we had nearly run out of targets ( that would be cities, filled with civilians) to bomb. Curtis Lemay would one day be known for the phrase “Bomb them back to the stone age” but it should be remembered that it wasnt an idle boast, he had demonstrated that exact process on the people of japan. At the end of the war,not one city had been spared the full effects of the war.

4. It should be noted that conventional bombing continued after the dropping of the Atomic bombing on Hiroshima. Our preferred method was the use of incendiary bombs.

5. Japanese atomic experts visited Hiroshima shortly after the bombing and correctly determined both the yield of the weapon and the type of explosive used – it was a Uranium bomb. Because they had also correctly determined that uranium bombs would be difficult to build ‘en masse’, they incorrectly determined that there couldn’t be more bombs in our inventory. The analysis done on the Nagasaki site proved that not only did we have more bombs, but that we had solved the problems with the creation of plutonium. Japanese atomic scientists correctly determined that our supply of atomic bombs was far larger than they could ever hope to defend against and gave that information to the Emperor. In truth, we had only 7 more bombs but it should be noted that we were more than prepared to use them to bring and end to the war and specifically bring and end that would ensure that there would never be another war with Japan. It should be noted that both a third and fourth atomic bombing mission was scheduled for the following week, but was canceled due to the forthcoming unconditional surrender of Japan. A surrender that was met in the halls of power in Tokyo with an attempted coup against the emperor. As late as the last week of August, it was still far from a forgone conclusion that the Imperial Army would actually lay down its arms and stop fighting.

6. Check the photos of the surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri, you will see US Naval officers wearing shoulder harnesses for .45 caliber pistols. At the time, many US officers were convinced that the Japanese would attempt an attack during the ceremony. Whenever you think of the end of the war, remember that the peace we live with today was far from guaranteed at the time the treaty was signed.

Wherever you wonder about the justification of the atomic bombing of hiroshima and Nagasaki against that of all the other bombings, ask yourself if your misgivings are due to the yield of the weapon or the method of death. Since 1939, civilian deaths were part and parcel for the practice of that war, as such, the Second World War was the first war of terror. Guernica, Coventry, London, Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Vienna, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Nanking, Tokyo all experienced destruction of civilians on a massive scale.

Mr. Stewart and the rest of this generations ‘lotus eaters’ should consider that in the context of the time, the use of bomb was considered by all to be a humane solution to ending the war. Argue about it all you want, the dropping of the bomb ended the war with the least loss of life on both sides. The bomb guaranteed that another war by the Japanese would be considered impossible and the result of that action is that over the generations Japan has become a pacifist nation. The true cost of war was brought home to the civilians who benefited from it.

This was a war that killed 52 million people world wide. We have nothing in our time to compare it to. A war that was started in the 1930’s by tyrants intent on the enslavement of all mankind and it was also started by well meaning and learned men who believed that the tyrants could be reasoned with and war could be avoided in favor of ‘ink on paper’. The crime of World War II, isn’t in how it was finally ended, but how it was started and by whom it was abetted.

What I am most appalled with in with this generation isnt just their lack of understanding as to the nature of the horrors of that war, but that in their ignorance to understand it, they virtually guarantee that we will all be forced to face that nightmare again.

May 1, 2009 - 2:14 pm 29. mark l.:

I guess stewart’s ‘outrage meter’ must be calibrated for each individual.
Funny how his calibration for Truman was quickly corrected, definitely not an immutable sentiment.

I’m still trying to understand how fdr-civilian bombings/internment camps makes him immune from Stewart’s outrage, while he finds bush’s action criminal. FDR was free to act as a head of state, while bush is made out to be a frat boy.

In a vacuum, I’d rather have bush’s crimes/victories on my record than fdr’s.

May 1, 2009 - 4:00 pm 30. jr565:

In addition to interning the japanese lets not forget (and lets not let the lefty blowhards forget either) that FDR also caught german saboteurs (who hadn’t yet sabotaged anything) setup up hasty show trials before a military commission for them and then had them executed by electric chair.And the decision was upheld by the Supreme Court.

May 1, 2009 - 4:40 pm 31. » Herman Kahn Mammals of the Indiana Dunes:

[...] Ed Driscoll » “In The Future, Everyone Will Be A War Criminal For … [...]

May 4, 2009 - 4:32 am 32. Ed Driscoll » The Grovelling History Tour:

[...] ask Jon Stewart and Pat Buchanan. Meanwhile, as Ace notes: There’s no doubt the Germans have increasingly cast themselves as [...]

May 10, 2009 - 7:09 pm

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