The Nuking Of Japan Was A Tactical And Moral Imperative

MARIANAS ISLAND -- Boeing B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay" landing after the atomic bombing mission on Hiroshima, Japan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Monday, August 6, will mark one of the United States’ most important but unheralded anniversaries.  It is remarkable not only for what happened on this day in 1945 but for what did not happen subsequently.

What did happen was that the “Enola Gay,” an American B-29 bomber from the obscure 509th Composite Group (a U.S. Army Air Force unit tasked with deploying nuclear weapons), dropped a uranium-based atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  It hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week after the August 9 detonation of a plutonium-based bomb over Nagasaki.  Approximately 66,000 died in Hiroshima from the acute effects of the “Little Boy” bomb and about 35,000 more in Nagasaki from the “Fat Man” device.  (The subsequent, short-term death toll rose significantly due to the effects of radiation and wounds.)

About a year after the war ended, the “was it necessary?” Monday-morning quarterbacks began to question the military necessity and morality of the use of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities.  Since then, there have been periodic eruptions of revisionism, uninformed speculation and political correctness on this subject, perhaps the most offensive of which was the Smithsonian Institution’s plan for an exhibition of the Enola Gay for the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.  In a particularly repugnant exercise of political correctness, the exhibit was to emphasize the “victimization” of the Japanese, mentioning the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor only as the motivation for the “vengeance” sought by the United States.  (The exhibit as originally conceived was eventually canceled.)

The historical context and military realities of 1945 are often lost in judging whether it was “necessary” for the United States to use nuclear weapons.  The Japanese had been the aggressors, launching the war with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and subsequently systematically and flagrantly violating various international agreements and norms by employing biological and chemical warfare, torturing and murdering prisoners of war, and brutalizing civilians and forcing them to perform slave labor.

What did not happen as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was “Operation Downfall,” a massive Allied (largely American) invasion of the Japanese home islands that was being actively planned.  As Allied forces closed in on the home islands, the intentions of Japan’s senior military leaders ranged from “fighting to the last man” to inflicting sufficiently heavy losses on invading American ground forces that the United States would agree to a conditional peace.  As U.S. strategists knew from having broken the Japanese military and diplomatic codes, there was virtually no inclination toward an unconditional surrender.

Finally, because the Allied military planners assumed “that operations in this area will be opposed not only by the available organized military forces of the Empire [of Japan], but also by a fanatically hostile population,” astronomical casualties were thought to be inevitable.  The losses between February and June 1945 just from the Allied invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were staggering: 18,000 dead and 78,000 wounded.

The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that an invasion of Japan’s home islands would result in approximately 1.2 million American casualties, with 267,000 deaths.  A study performed by physicist William Shockley for the staff of Secretary of War Henry Stimson estimated that the invasion of Japan would cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000-800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese deaths.  These fatality estimates were of course, in addition to those who had already perished during four long years of war; American deaths were already about 292,000.  In other words, the invasion of Japan could have resulted in the death of twice as many Americans as had already been killed in the European, North African and Pacific theaters!

A critical element of Shockley’s analysis was the assumption of large-scale participation by civilians in repelling invading forces.  This assumption is supported by the research described in, “The Most Controversial Decision,” by the Rev. Wilson Miscamble, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, who blames “the twisted neo-samurai who led the Japanese military geared up with true banzai spirit to engage the whole population in a kind of kamikaze campaign.”  He added, “Their stupidity and perfidy in perpetuating and prolonging the struggle should not be ignored.”

Much has been made of the moral line that supposedly was crossed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, but far more significant in that regard were the decisions earlier in the war to adopt widespread bombing of civilians – initially by Hitler in attacking English cities and later by the Allied devastation of, for example, Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo.

Historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson has called attention to two factors that for both tactical and ethical reasons argued for the use of America’s nuclear weapons against Japan.  First, “thousands of Asians and allied prisoners were dying daily throughout the still-occupied Japanese Empire, and would do so as long as Japan was able to pursue the war. (Gideon Rose, the editor of the journal Foreign Affairs, has estimated that during every month of 1945 in which the war continued, Japanese forces were causing the deaths of between 100,000 and 250,000 noncombatants.)

Second, according to Hanson, “Major General Curtis LeMay planned to move forces from the Marianas to newly conquered and much closer Okinawa, and the B-29 bombers, likely augmented by European bomber transfers after V-E Day, would have created a gargantuan fire-bombing air force that, with short-distance missions, would have done far more damage than the two nuclear bombs.”

The nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945, was, in fact, the most destructive bombing raid of the war.  In a three-hour period, the main bombing force dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs which caused a firestorm that killed some 100,000 civilians, destroyed a quarter of a million buildings and incinerated 16 square miles of the city.

Kori Schake, professor of international security studies at the United States Military Academy, summarized the ethical dilemma succinctly, “It seems to me morally significant that we were already engaged in fire-bombing cities; the use of a more efficient weapon to do so was therefore an even smaller jump.’

During World War I, Europe lost most of a generation of young men.  Combatant fatalities alone were approximately 13 million.  Memories of that era were still fresh three decades later.  In 1945, Allied military planners and political leaders were correct, both tactically and morally, in not wanting to repeat history.  They understood the need to consider the costs and benefits for the American people, present and future.  Had they been less wise or less courageous, the American post-war “baby boomer” generation would have been much smaller.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  He was a U.S. government official from 1977 to 1994.