NUKING JAPAN, PART II

: One of the saddest aspects of American culture is our tendency to destroy the heroes and deeds of the past. It's the spirit that condemns George Washington and Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves, though they laid the groundwork that eventually begat emancipation. It's the same spirit that condems Abraham Lincoln for an unfortunate comment while missing the larger good work that he did. And it's the same spirit that condemns American use of The Bomb to force Japan's surrender in 1945.

It's a spirit that says "Though I wasn't in the position to have made the call, and though I have little understanding of the context in which it was made, I will nevertheless condemn it." It's arrogance--the arrogance of looking at the past as though all the rules and knowledge of today apply to it.

Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed a lot of people. We all know that. It killed indiscriminately; we all know that too. And it killed people not connected at all to Japan's war machine. Again, no surprise there. So on the face of, if that's all you know, it looks like Harry Truman did a terrible, evil thing.

But of course, that's not all we know. Collectively, the bombs killed about 100,000 people. Prior to that act, America and Japan had fought a bloody, savage war across a string of largely useless Pacific islands. Casualties on both sides had been appauling--during the battle for perhaps the most useless island in the Pacific, Iwo Jima, America lost 7,000 sons while Japan lost over 20,000. For a piece of volcanic dirt about 7 miles long and 2 miles wide that stinks of sulphur, two powerful nations poured out the blood of their children. The casualty tolls were similar if not worse on Guam, and Saipan, and elsewhere. But Okinawa offered a new form of hell.

Okinawa was a heavily populated island whose residents had been fed a steady diet of propaganda before and during the war. They were told Americans were cannibals, that our soldiers particularly liked to eat children, and would rape the mothers after having thus feasted. So as American troops advanced across the island, the people did what they thought they had to to keep their children from being devoured--they threw them off cliffs, and the women often jumped after them. Thousands died in this way, never knowing that their government had fed them a lie.

So once the conquest of Okinawa was complete, the American leadership faced a dilemma: what to do about Japan's home islands? The home islands--Shikoku, Kyushu, Honshu and Hokkaido--are far larger than Okinawa, mountainous, and difficult to assault by conventional means. And the people on those islands had been fed the same ghastly propaganda. The fates of 1 million American men, and as many millionsJapanese citizens, were in the hands of Harry Truman. And Japan was facing a famine--the war had brought on food shortages that threatened starvation whether America attacked or not.

Truman already knew that bombing Japan into submission via conventional means wouldn't work. He'd been bombing Japan since 1942, and Japan had kept fighting on. Our troops had destroyed Japan's formiddable navy, and taken away its imperial possessions, and Japan had just kept fighting on. In fact, Japan had only gotten more aggressive, dropping experimental balloon bombs on random spots on the continental US, killing very few but trying to kill and terrorize as many as possible. One such bomb killed a family on a picnic. Killing American civilians was the ballon bombs' intended goal.

Truman knew what an invasion would look like. He'd ordered several invasions of small islands already, and while America had won all those battles, the price had been steep for both sides. Invading the comparatively larger home islands would be far costlier. The Japanese government was prepared, it said, to sacrifice 20 million civilians to keep the Americans out.

This was intolerable. Germany had surrendered; Italy had been out of the war for a while already. Japan was the lone Axis power left, and it was the most stubborn. Japan was guided by its nativistic Shinto religion, which considered any form of surrender unacceptable, and suicide preferrable to defeat. Truman knew that, short of some incredible event, Japan simply wouldn't surrender until American troops had fought their way up and down the length of the home islands. Such a campaign could take two years or more. America and the world were weary of war. Truman needed a way to prevent an invasion, and he had one--the atomic bomb.

So Truman made a calculation--hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the most fearsome weapon ever made, destroying a major industrial hub and a major port, and also hopefully demonstrating to Japan the futility of protracted conflict. So he atom bombed both cities, killing thousands but saving millions, and ended the war.

It wasn't an act of evil--it was an act of humanity.

Morality always exists with a context. That's not moral relativism; it's just common sense. Killing is never condemned as always and in all situations evil, even in the Bible. Killing in self-defense is allowed, as is killing in war. Ecclestiases 3 makes a point of this, arguing that there are seasons in which a given act is moral and seasons in which its opposite is moral, killing and healing being among the opposites specifically addressed. In the case of the atom bomb, swiftly ending the war saved millions of Japanese civilians as well as a quarter million or more Americans. It was the moral thing to do.

So why am I going on at length about this? Because of ill-informed screeds like this. It's important that we examine the past, not just from our own vantage of decades gone by and from today's circumstances, but from the circumstances and times in which living, breathing humans acted and reacted. To do otherwise is to fail to understand reality, and it is to treat our forebears with unbecoming arrogance.