The reason the U.S. ambassador to Japan attended Friday’s memorial ceremony at Hiroshima was, the embassy said, to pay respect to “all the victims of World War II.”
“For the sake of future generations,” declared Ambassador John V. Roos, “we must continue to work together to realize a world without nuclear weapons.”
How about a world in which memory of a decisive conflict of the 20th century is not reduced to a parable of moral equivalence, as too many Japanese still seem eager to insist?
“Japan and the United States are not so far apart,” Professor Kazumi Mizumoto of Hiroshima City University told The New York Times this week. “Maybe they should offer a joint apology of all the terrible things that happened in that war.”
Maybe not. While the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were undoubtedly among the “terrible things” that happen in war, that doesn’t mean they were wrong or didn’t save lives. Yet most of those in attendance Friday seemed to consider those bombings not only wrong but grotesquely immoral.
Does Ambassador Roos? President Obama? If not, why did Roos break tradition and attend?
For that matter, do our leaders really wish to reinforce the idea that the defining horror of the war in the Pacific was the bombing of Hiroshima, just as the Holocaust has become — properly so — the defining horror of the war in Europe?
One of the best explanations for the decision to drop the bomb remains a book published in 1995, “Code-Name Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan — And Why Truman Dropped the Bomb,” by Thomas Allen and Norman Polmar. When I spoke to Polmar some years ago, he reminded me that the U.S. strategy “was that we would invade Japan in November, on the southernmost island, Kyushu, and if they didn’t surrender we would continue our heavy bombardment. About April 1, 1946, we would invade Honshu, the main island, and fight a ground campaign until the Japanese gave up.”
Not that giving up was something Americans had come to expect of the Japanese. In fact, no Japanese in any organized unit had ever surrendered to Americans as of August 1945 (although a group of 50 Japanese did surrender to Australian forces on New Guinea). Hence the horrendous U.S. casualties on islands such as Okinawa where the Japanese fought, Polmar notes, “with no air support and no hope of relief and reinforcements.”
Casualty estimates for a U.S. invasion of Kyushu and Honshu were staggering — upwards of 100,000 at a bare minimum and very likely many more. Not only were such estimates entirely reasonable, they could not have been massaged to justify use of the bomb since those providing them usually had no idea the weapon existed.
If anything, Allen and Polmar argue, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s estimates were deliberately low-balled so that President Truman wouldn’t balk at going forward.
Revisionists often argue that Truman viewed the bomb as a means of keeping the Russians out of the war, as Secretary of State James Byrnes certainly hoped. But Truman’s generals had no similar issue with Soviet assistance. They just wanted to win.
“The Japanese didn’t even come around after the second bomb was dropped,” Polmar explained, and not “until the emperor sat in on the meeting of the Big Six, the six men who ran the government.” Not only was the emperor’s intervention unprecedented, it provoked an attempted putsch by Army diehards.
Every day the war dragged on, thousands of innocents across occupied Asia — in China, Korea, Burma and elsewhere — died at Japanese hands. Emperor Hirohito certainly understood what stopped the slaughter. As he told his subjects in his surrender broadcast, “The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable.”
We don’t know lives were saved by the firestorm at Hiroshima, but it’s a very good bet they were. And we shouldn’t give aid and comfort to those who insist the opposite is true.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
