Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are approaching, and with them the annual debate of President Truman's motives and the legitimacy of the bombings. Austin Bay has a good post on the subject.

Why are we so fascinated by these two bombings in particular? These were not the first cities razed to the ground by American bombs during that war. When I lived in Germany, I visited the Museum of the History of the Federal Republic in Bonn. It documents the history of post-war West Germany, now just Germany. With such a focus, the history starts with the end of the war. The first exhibit you see walking in is a looping video showing the major, and many lesser, cities of Germany as they were in summer, 1945. Every city in the country was a smoking pile of rubble infested with rotting corpses of the unburied dead. I imagine the same was true of Japanese cities. So, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are merely the last two entries in the long list of destroyed Axis cities.

These were not the first bombings with mind-boggling death tolls. When whole cities are being destroyed in a single night, e.g. Dresden in Germany, death tolls will be high. In bombings of German cities, tens of thousands were killed all the time. Dresden had something like 50,000 killed. The point is this happened all the time, so Hiroshima and Nagasaki are merely additional examples of what was fairly common at that time. (Yes, Hiroshima was more deadly than any other single bombing during the war, but not by some dramatic factor.)

I think it was in Sum of All Fears, the book not the movie supposedly based on it, where Clancy has a character marvel at the almost mystical attributes we instinctively give nuclear weapons. In the end, the atomic bomb was just a really powerful bomb. One atomic bomb could do what would take thousands of conventional bombs to do. But conventional bombs could do the same thing, as was shown repeatedly during the war. So, to focus on the atomic bombs, questioning if they should have been used, but excluding similar questions about the numerous conventional bombings with similar impact seems strange.

Anyway, Truman's critics argue three basic points:

1. Japan was in a hopeless situation in August, 1945,
2. Japanese leadership recognized this and was preparing to surrender, and
3. Truman knew they were going to surrender and bombed anyway.

The first point is obvious, from our point of view. But, as the German war showed, those on the other side might not be to ready to see the truth. The second claim has just never made sense to me. Let's play this out. Hirohito knows Japan has lost and faces devastation, so he wants to surrender. But he makes no move to do so. The US warns that they have a terrible new weapon that they will unleash on Japan if they don't surrender, but the Japanese still keep quiet about their decision to surrender. August 6 comes and Hiroshima disappears. Surely now Hirohito will immediately surrender, given that he already has decided to? Nope. Two days later, still nothing so Nagasaki disappears. Only now, after two terrifying atomic bombings, do the Japanese give up. If they really had made the decision to surrender, why not announce it earlier, certainly after Hiroshima? No, the Japanese were going to continue the fight, expecting a conventional invasion of the home islands followed by conventional ground warfare.

The Weekly Standard has a lot more on how the decision to drop the bombs was made. Plunge Pontificates has a detailed account of what went on in the Japanese government, as well as a detailed analysis of the options available to Truman and how he made the decision to drop the bomb.