Roger’s Rules

August 7th, 2008 3:18 am

Remembering Hiroshima: Political wisdom from The Guardian

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It is not often that I agree with the politics espoused by The Guardian, England’s most left-wing serious newspaper. But an article by Oliver Kamm on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima last year won my wholehearted endorsement and it is worth reprising. Yesterday, August 6, was the anniversary of that fearsome event, and, as Mr. Kamm points out, that action, together with its successor at Nagasaki on August 9, ended World War II. It saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives. Were those bombings terrible? You betcha. But as Mr. Kamm notes, if they caused suffering, they saved much greater suffering that would have ensued had the United States invaded Japan. This was understood at the time. But in recent years a revisionist view has grown up, especially on the Left, which faults President Truman for his decision to drop the bombs. “This alternative history,” Mr. Kamm argues. “is devoid of merit.”

New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb. This conclusion may surprise Guardian readers. The so-called revisionist interpretation of the bomb made headway from the 1960s to the 1990s. It argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.

Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb. The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan’s military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.

It will be interesting to see what sort of response Mr. Kamm’s article elicits. I predict howls of rage and vituperation. But he is right:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire - and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

What is the essence, the core, of conservative wisdom? One part is that when it comes to the real-world, the choices we face are often not between good and bad but between bad and worse. This is particularly true in times of war. A difficult lesson. But crucial for those who wish to do good as well emit good-sounding slogans.

I do not wish to belabor the issue of whether saving millions of lives is a good thing. But since my colleague Andrew Cusack, responding to this line of reasoning, weighed in weighed in on the morality–or was it the theology?–of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I thought I would add a word or two from Paul Fussell, whose classic essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” really says all that needs to be said about the subject of whether using those fearsome engines of war was justified.

The future scholar-critic who writes The History of Canting the Twentieth Century will find much to study and interpret the utterances of those who dilate on the special wickedness of the A-bomb-droppers. He will realize that such utterance can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he was not socially so unfortunate as to find himself down there with the ground forces, where he might have had to compromise the purity and clarity of his moral system by the experience of weighing his own life against someone else’s. Down there, which is where the other people were, is the place where coarse self-interest is the rule. When the young soldier with the wild eyes comes at you, firing, do you shoot him in the foot, hoping he’ll be hurt badly enough to drop or misaim the gun with which he’s going to kill you, or do you shoot. him in the chest ( or, if you’re a prime shot, in the head) and make certain that you and not he will be the survivor of that mortal moment?

It would be not just stupid but would betray a lamentable want of human experience to expect soldiers to be very sensitive humanitarians. The Glenn Grays of this world need to have their attention directed to the testimony of those who know, like, say, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, who said, “Moderation in war is imbecility,” or Sir Arthur Harris, director of the admittedly wicked aerial-bombing campaign designed, as Churchill put it, to “de-house” the German civilian population}, who observed that “War is immoral,” or our own General W. T. Sherman: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Lord Louis Mountbatten, trying to say something sensible about the dropping of the A-bomb, came up only with “War is crazy.” Or rather, it requires choices among craziness’s. “It would seem even more crazy,” he went on, “if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. ” One of the unpleasant facts for anyone in the ground armies during the war was that you had to become pro tem a subordinate of the very uncivilian George S. Patton and respond somehow to his unremitting insistence that you embrace his view of things. But in one of his effusions he was right, and his observation tends to suggest the experiential dubiousness of the concept of “just wars. ” “War is not a contest with gloves,” he perceived. “It is resorted to only when laws, which are rules, have failed. ” Soldiers being like that, only the barest decencies should be expected of them. They did not start the war, except in the terrible sense hinted at in Frederic Manning’s observation based on his front-line experience in the Great War: “War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.” Knowing that unflattering truth by experience, soldiers have every motive for wanting a war stopped, by any means.

Andrew was deeply impressed by Elizabeth Anscombe’s contention that America’s insistence on unconditional surrender was “the root of all evil.” In fact, it was our failure to insist on this in 1918 that was the root not perhaps of all evil but that particularly toxic node that paved the way for World War II and the untold suffering it caused. Do the ends really justify the means? Alas, like so much about the real world, the melancholy–but also the moral–answer is, “Often, yes.”

13 Comments

1. Denis:

I’m reminded of a Buckley article where he pointed out that the ends DO justify the means. They do not justify ANY means. The debate is about “any.” Here the Guardian seems to get it right.

Aug 7, 2008 - 6:03 am 2. Polemicscat:

Fussell is poorly informed when he uses Sherman as a reason for dropping bombs. Standing face to face with the civilians you intend to kill is a different matter.
“Upon taking command in Memphis, Sherman described his ultimate purpose in the war to his wife: ‘extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people.’ His loving wife responded by expressing her sincerest wish that the war would be a war ‘of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like Swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing.’”
Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, pp. 182-3.

Aug 7, 2008 - 7:55 pm 3. Alo Kievalar:

Some damned fool European artist or architect memorably (and proudly) proclaimed 9/11 as the greatest work of art of the 20th century or some such.

If that’s true, then the explosions of the 2 nuclear bombs over Japan were the greatest works of art of the millennium.

Although way before my time, an uncle of mine was captured in the Philippines by Japanese forces and had the ignoble glory of being forced on the infamous “Long March”, I believe it was called.

He was lucky. Before the march, his entire company was executed – some by beheading – for no apparent reason except convenience. He was spared because he was an MD and his captors needed his skills for their own troops. He eventually survived the war and returned home.

Japanese brutality and viciousness were (are) legendary throughout Asia. In the realm of cruelty and inhumanity – of unspeakable monstrosity - , they are in a category all to themselves, leaving the Nazis light years behind.

Therefore, although I look at what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with horror, I nevertheless applaud President Truman for the action he took and the countless lives it saved and the suffering it prevented.

It was probably the most difficult decision an American president ever had to make – and I thank God he was in office at the time.

President Bush faced and still faces a similar situation following 9/11, although one less “artistic” in nature. That is to say, his response in Afghanistan, in Iraq, the passage of the Patriot Act and so forth - the bedrock of leftist froth against him - had to occur.

Not because Saddam “had to go” or because the “Taliban had to be gotten rid of “ or because “Al Qaeda was making inroads in Iraq” or because of the “enemy was amongst us”, but because America had to show the world that a direct terrorist attack against US territory would bring unimaginable, painful and lasting consequences to the attackers and their supporters.

And that’s exactly what’s taking place.

The entire Arab world stood in shock as the US invaded Iraq – something they thought couldn’t and wouldn’t take place. They were even more shocked when Saddam was found in a hole in the ground, and they gaped in disbelief as he was hanged.

Intelligent Arabs, regard the incremental dislocation, marginalization and eventual dismantling of their entire culture, and the deaths of tens of thousands of Moslems – perhaps hundreds of thousands – as a direct result of 9/11. They stand aghast at what’s happening, much as the Japanese did following the nuclear explosions over their homeland.

More than anything else, it is this Arab sense of outrage and desperation that has stopped Osama Bin Laden and Co. dead in its tracks – an unexpected and fatal miscalculation by the proponents of a world-wide Islamic Umma.

Neither the bombings of Japan nor the disarray and disintegration of Arab culture and institutions, is a pretty picture, to be sure. But sometimes, in the real world, the ends do justify the means.

Aug 7, 2008 - 10:45 pm 4. ic:

AK: It was the “Bataan Death March”, “Long March” was a Chinese communist march led by Mao, a mass murderer, to escape annihilation by the KMT.

Aug 7, 2008 - 11:53 pm 5. RiverC:

In the west, because of our particular religious language and its legalistic overtones, we take the word ‘justify’ in the wholly wrong sense, I think. War is immoral, but necessary. That is, whenever we talk about the morality of actions in war we are always speaking of relative levels of morality, and not justification before God. In a very peculiar sense, no killing is just before God. But when we get into politics, as most wise generals know, we wound ourselves so that others may be saved. We also in the west think of ’saved’ as meaning eternal salvation, but the plain fact is, most salvation we receive is that of the material type.

Therefore, I think the concept of Just War is bunk, especially if we want to say that our war was justified before God. If God loves all of his creation, then we can’t say he is happy when we go around destroying it. It is also a good point to note that God forgives, so even though we screwed ourselves up getting in the position where ‘laws failed’, and then did more evil - relatively - to get us out of that position, there is still forgiveness.

If there is any ‘just’ war it is that we believe - in the sense of the judgments made about this fallen existence - that we made the best choice we could.

Besides, if moralists argue that the ends never justify the means, then they surely can’t be Christian moralists. I would think that if they were in a legal battle with God himself, he would maintain quite firmly that some pretty extreme means are justified in light of the eternal salvation of man.

Denis is right, the argument really is ‘what means are justified’? When we speak of worldly, and thus to a degree relative things, we know from the beginning that ‘any’ means are not justified.

This is why even with the technocracy and science and all-what-have-you we still need men of wisdom.

Aug 8, 2008 - 6:52 am 6. John P. Owens:

Wonderful article and learned, thoughtful commentaries above. By chance, the 509th Air Group (they were hand picked to work on the delivery end of the Bomb) held their reunion at the hotel I was staying at last summer. It was my honor to meet a number of the men and their family members while I was there. To a man they were proud of their roles they played in war preparing for their missions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was no lack of clarity on their parts about the necessity of their missions. In our post modern world the presence and recognition of evil seems to be a quaint notion that only the lumpens believe anymore. Perhaps we have won the battle but lost the war if we have surrendered our ability to make difficult moral decisions and label evil for what it is. Say what you will about Bush but I don’t exactly see the Left in a frenzy about jailed homosexuals and the de facto enslavement of women in the Middle East. Ah, but bring that indelicate point up at the next cocktail party you attend and see the if “evil” is mentioned in that context or not. The fact that you can guess the answer with high probability should lead you to believe that we have abandoned the notion of evil as a society. Yet bring up the topic of “hope” in today’s politcal environment and you will be seen as a fellow elite of rarified moral character and charm.

Aug 8, 2008 - 11:35 am 7. 11B40:

Greetings:

A little bit of infantry folk-wisdom. Two young riflemen are discussing their targeting preferences. One prefers head-shots, the other center-mass (torso) shots. The head-shooter opines that if you hit him, he’s done; the torso shooter likes the larger target area. As the discussion goes back and forth, their sergeant comes by. Head-shooter asks: “Sarge, where do you like to shoot the bad guys?”
“In the back,” replies the sergeant.

If you don’t understand this, stay out of the infantry.

Aug 8, 2008 - 7:58 pm 8. Steven Earl Salmony:

Greetings to all:

We have a very serious problem concerning another kind of bomb, not an atomic bomb.

Denial of emergent and convergent global threats by informed leaders and delaying tactics by their many minions are threatening life as we know it and the integrity of Earth today.

We are not seeing colleagues speak out loudly, clearly and often to report that The Human Species’ Population Bomb is Exploding NOW, as I did in 2005.

http://www.fragilecologies.com/mar22_05.html

The deafening silence of too many reputable scientists and the shrill voices of many too many political hacks and ideologues are symptomatic of deeply distressing problems. Top rank scientists in many places are either being subjected to venal pressures and, in some cases, driven out of “politically incorrect” areas of research or else their positions and programs are cut out of the government’s budget. Low rank scientists, willing to subscribe to whatsoever is politically convenient and economically expedient, remain in place.

By recklessly funding such entities like the Department of Defense and related `defense’ activities for the sake of winning military battles in distant lands, we are losing “the war” against environmental degradation, biodiversity extirpation, and the preservation of Earth as a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.

How could my single, admittedly not-so-great generation of wrong-headed leading elders have become so terribly misdirected? These self-proclaimed “masters of the universe” have vanquished moral authority, but not the designated enemies. Perhaps wanton greed, acquisition of too much power, and idolatry of endless wealth accumulation and economic growth-mania of many too many leaders have something to do with my `religious’ generation’s adamant pursuit of so many unfortunate errands perpetrated by a confederacy of fools.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001

Aug 9, 2008 - 8:46 am 9. srlucado:

It’s also interesting to note what America did after the Japanese surrender. I highly recommend the book “Medic”, the memoir of Dr. Crawford Sams, US Army doctor in charge of healthcare in Japan after the war.

The US Army went to enormous lengths to save as many Japanese lives as possible, improving nutrition, health care, sanitation, and myriad other factors. (How many people know that the leading cause of death in Japan at that time was tuberculosis? Dr. Sams undertook a campaign that essentially eradicated tuberculosis from Japan.)

The dedication of this one man led to saving literally millions of lives after the war.

Were the atomic bombings terrible? No doubt, though the alternatives were far, far worse. Did the bombings reflect a genocidal American attitude toward the Japanese? Exactly the opposite, as Dr. Sams and his staff attest.

Scott

Aug 9, 2008 - 11:49 am 10. Jarhead:

I disagree that this was a difficult decision for the American President. We had already kolled hundreds of thousands by firebombing cities - the nuclear bombs just did the same thing more effeciently.

If Truman had decided to refrain from using the bombs, and invaded Japan instead, he would have been impeached the moment the truth came out. The families of three hundred thousand dead soldiers and Marines would not have forgiven him.

Aug 11, 2008 - 5:36 am 11. Polemicscat:

One of the major differences between the United States of 1945 and the United States of today is that, today, our citizens would not tolerate the kind of losses we were having during WWII. Today a complete victory would not have been possible because too many citizens would have wanted a settlement with Japan (and even with Germany)short of total surrender.

Aug 13, 2008 - 4:37 pm 12. Joseph Somsel:

Excellent posting and comments.

I’ve just read Sherman’s Memoirs and did not detect any such genocidal inclinations towards Southerners. Sherman had served in Florida, South Carolina, and, after resigning his commission, in Lousiana and had many friends throughout the South.

He fully intended to “make Georgia howl” as a matter of policy but was careful to minimize civilian distress so long as they did not interfer in his mission. The memoirs contain his general orders to his troops. He even publicly hanged one of his own men convicted of rape.

Aug 13, 2008 - 4:43 pm 13. WebElf Report News Blog-O-Rama « The WebElf Report:

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