Memorial Day

 

                        Memorial Day

War is man's most evil pursuit. Every single human motive morphs into something horrible and destructive; the most noble of man's qualities become misapplied. Somehow the diffident grasshopper becomes the predatory locust. 

Yet within the world of men, some things must be done. Individuals must live and act within the admitted abomination that is war. In the Second War the Germans and the Japanese were asked to fulfill their destiny, to complete history. This involved destroying or subjugating everyone who was not them. The Allies' children were asked to fight for their lives. Their behavior in this gargantuan struggle should always stand as a testament to man's higher elements in the midst of man's lowest. Yet questions always arise.

When Obama was in Japan and visiting Hiroshima, new discussion of the WWII atomic bombing began. An article in the LA Times asserted the bombing was cruel, gratuitous, and not a factor in the ending of the war. "Most Americans have been taught that using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was justified because the bombings ended the war in the Pacific, thereby averting a costly U.S. invasion of Japan. This erroneous contention finds its way into high school history texts still today," the article states. More, the cause of Japanese surrender was actually the Russian invasion of Manchuria. "It was not the atomic evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the Pacific war. Instead, it was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese colonies that began at midnight on Aug. 8, 1945 — between the two bombings." Indeed the sentiment at least seems to be in line with current thinking; the majority of Americans in polls think the bombs should not have been dropped.

Of course, people will differ in the assessment of history. Some assessments will be more accurate--sometimes more honest--than others. And many military men did not want to drop the weapons. But of all the wars in history, World War Two is the least ambiguous to analyze.

The History website has this summary:
Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device–a plutonium bomb–at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

By the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. In late July, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused. (Italics added)

General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already in effect and following up with a massive invasion, codenamed “Operation Downfall.” They advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. casualties of up to 1 million. In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided–over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists–to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. Proponents of the A-bomb–such as James Byrnes, Truman’s secretary of state–believed that its devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world. (italics added)

On August 6, 1945  an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.”

So the Emperor cites the bomb as a factor. And the alternative was an island-by-island attack on Japan that the experts accepted would cost one million--MILLION--American lives.

The LA Times article suggests the U.S. ignored a Japanese peace approach to the U.S. requesting only the Emperor survive. But that is not entirely true. Their proposal was to keep the Emperor and the current governing militaristic system intact, something the Allies thought nonnegotiable. Another element overlooked in the LA Times article is the continuity of events. Over 200,000 people were killed in the atomic attacks. Isolated, that is horrific. One wonders how the essayist saw those deaths in the context of the war itself. Or do they spare themselves the difficulty? China suffered between 15 and 17 million--MILLION--deaths directly related to combat--many described as "crimes against humanity." The Russians lost 25 to 27 million. MILLION. Certainly, we need kinder, gentler wars.

Nonetheless, the LA Times article was quite critical of American behavior and motives in one of the world's most easily evaluated conflicts, the American democracy vs. Nazis and Japanese imperialists. Applying morality to war is tricky and can be practiced only by our best and brightest. Fortunately, a look at the by-line has the reassuring information that the LA Times article was authored by none other than Oliver Stone, the esteemed and awarded movie director. He is certainly qualified. As a member of the exclusive self-absorbed entertainment cult and the reliable creator of the movie JFK, one of the cult's more astonishing productions of historical analysis, we can certainly rely upon his opinion.

And I'm sure he would have been willing to talk to the widows, the orphans, and the parents of those million Americans, explaining that those soldiers had to die assaulting the Japanese islands because we were true to our inner nature and did not drop the cruel bombs that could have ended the war. That was not who we are.