WW II bombings must be placed in context
By Victor Davis Hanson
The dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in history.
No one knows exactly how many Japanese citizens were killed by the two American bombs. A guess is around 140,000. The atomic attacks finally shocked Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese militarists into surrendering.
John Kerry recently visited Hiroshima. He was the first secretary of state to do so — purportedly as a precursor to a visit next month by President Obama, who is rumored to be considering an apology to Japan for America’s dropping of the bombs.
The horrific bombings are inexplicable without examining the context in which they occurred.
In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted on the unconditional surrender of Axis aggressors. The bomb was originally envisioned as a way to force the Axis leader, Nazi Germany, to cease fighting. But the Third Reich had already collapsed by July 1945 when the bomb was ready for use, leaving Imperial Japan as the sole surviving Axis target.
Japan had just demonstrated with its defense of Okinawa — where more than 12,000 Americans died and more than 50,000 were wounded, along with perhaps 200,000 Japanese military and civilian casualties — that it could make the U.S. pay so high a price for victory that it might negotiate an armistice rather than demand surrender. Thousands of Americans had already died in taking the Pacific islands as a way to get close enough to bomb Japan. In March 1945, B-29 bombers dropped napalm on Tokyo.
Over the next three months, American attacks leveled huge swaths of urban Japan. Japan still refused to surrender and upped its resistance with thousands of kamikaze airstrikes. By the time of the atomic bombings, the U.S. was planning to transfer from Europe much of the idle British and American bombing fleet to join the B-29s in the Pacific.
Perhaps 5,000 Allied bombers would have saturated Japan with napalm. The atomic bombings prevented such a nightmarish incendiary storm. The bombs also cut short plans for an invasion of Japan.
There were also some 2 million Japanese soldiers fighting throughout the Pacific, China and Burma and hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners and Asian civilians being held by the Japanese. Thousands of civilians were dying every day at the hands of Japanese barbarism. The bombs stopped that carnage too. World War II was the most deadly event in human history. Some 60 million people perished in the six years between Germany’s surprise invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and the official Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945. Perhaps 80 percent of the dead were civilians, mostly Russians and Chinese who died at the hands of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Both aggressors deliberately executed and starved to death millions of innocents. It is fine for Kerry and Obama to honor the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. But any commemoration must be offered in the context of Japanese and German aggression. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan started the respective European and Pacific theaters of World War II with surprise attacks on neutral nations. Their barbaric war-making led to the deaths of some 50 million Allied soldiers, civilians and neutrals. This spring we should also remember those 50 million — and who was responsible for their deaths.