CKNW Editorial
for August 7, 2001

56 years ago this week the United States dropped two atomic bombs – the first on August 6, 1945 on Hiroshima and the second, three days later on Nagasaki. Some 100,000 were killed outright with the first bomb, about 75,000 with the second and God only knows how many from the after effects. The controversy continues to this day. I don’t honestly know how I feel about it – I have wavered between the two extremes and almost every position in between.

President Harry Truman said that he never lost a moment’s sleep over the decision. In his mind the bombs brought about the Japanese surrender – which it undoubtedly did – and saved at least 100,000 American lives, it being estimated that this was the number of soldiers and Marines would have died in the struggle for Japan. This ignores the fact that Japan was, by August 1945, utterly beaten and would have had to give in soon. Virtually all her overseas possessions had been recaptured, the Russians were about to invade Manchuria under the terms of the Yaltga agreement, and the home island of Okinawa had been subdued. I suppose Okinawa, purists would argue, is not part of the Japanese archipelago but it was certainly part of Japan.

There are a number of very disturbing questions, not the least was race. Would the Allies have dropped such a bomb on a German city had the Germans not already surrendered? I think they would have under two circumstances only – first, if Germany had made its own bomb or, second, if the Allies had not been able to over-run the V2 missile sites and London would have been destroyed. But there is no doubt that hatred of the Japanese, in part rooted in racism, played its role. I say in part, because Japan had fought a particularly vicious and inhuman war from the Rape of Nanking to the Bataan death March to the use of Kamikaze pilots to destroy American ships. It must be pointed out, of course, that war is always hell and the atrocities were not all on one side. The holocaust alone demonstrates that.

It has been argued that Japan, as the aggressor nation, asked for whatever she got. I guess. But a Japanese diplomat, comparing his country to Britain, France, Germany and even the United States said that these countries played poker and once they had all the chips, namely huge empires, they declared the game illegal and took up contract bridge. In other words it was a matter of timing – in the 19^th century it was quite alright to grab up territories for their raw resources and source of cheap labour and expendable soldiers but by 1933, when Japan got its late start, it was no longer acceptable. It was hard for Japan to take the moralizing of the European powers seriously considering that not only had they all sat back and watched when Mussolini’s Italy savagely conquer Ethiopia in 1935, but that they often governed their colonies with particular brutality. It must be remembered that in many places Japan conquered they were greeted as liberators. It should also be remembered that the casus belli was the United States putting an oil embargo on Japan with Japan then deciding that what was then the Dutch East Indies must be conquered for its vast oil reserves. As with most wars, there was a strong economic motive involved.

It’s also argued that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were any worse than Hamburg or Dresden. And I suppose they weren’t although I’m not quite sure why that matters. Exploding an atom bomb was quite a different thing than tons of TNT – the atom bomb was like when the gun took over for the arrow.

I’ve visited Hiroshima and there are two things I’ll never forget. First there is the mass burial mound in the Peace Park said to contain 10,000 bodies. The other is the piece of granite, in the museum, that once was a step in front of a bank. Etched in that granite is the shadow of the man sitting on it when the blast occurred.

You also have to wonder why this non-military city was a target and why the attack came just after 8:00 in the morning, right in the middle of rush hour. And you have to ask why it was necessary to drop a second bomb on Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima.

Having said all that I understand that this was war and that war is about killing your enemy before he kills you. It can surely be argued that it matters little if at all how you get killed or in what numbers. I accept the fact that Harry Truman was the Commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States and as such was bound to consider the lives of his charges before he concerned himself about enemy lives, even civilian ones. It was a harsh call to make and I do not say that President Truman made the wrong decision.

I just think he should have lost a little sleep over it.