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Thank God for the Atom Bomb (Again)
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11964461
Ricochetti are no doubt familiar with Paul Fussell’s magnificent essay Thank God for the Atom Bomb, which is available as a top-shelf audiobook with several other essays. The narration is great, the material is timeless (Kipling would cheer), the price is right, and the criticism of our sorry culture (“Sorry!”) is as it should be. Last year, Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal penned an important op-ed echoing Fussell‘s sentiment explicitly, while illuminating it in the context of his own trip to Hiroshima during the run-up to the 70th anniversary of VJ day (which does not stand for “Shame on America” day). Trenchant quote [lightly edited to shorten]:
Modern Hiroshima is a testament to an America which understood that moral certainty and even a thirst for revenge were not obstacles to magnanimity. In some ways they are the precondition for it.
I would like to see this thread about preconditions for magnanimity more fully developed.
Published in General
Sounds interesting.
BDB,
Anyone that is a real student of history and not a phony ideologue knows that Harry Truman could do no other than to drop the bomb. The bomb turned out to be merciful. Easily 1 million Americans and 2 million Japanese could have died in a war that could have gone on for another 2 years.
The stupidity of this final Obama apology tour makes it all the more clear how totally disconnected too many people are from the reality of America’s role in the world. Not to be flippant on Memorial Day but I think this gentle British comedy from the 1950s expresses in humor what the rest of the world really felt about America and its role in the war.
The Americans are a very strange people. The Americans forgive everything. There is no greater benefit for a country than to surrender to the Americans.
Would somebody give Obama a really good swift kick.
Regards,
Jim
William Styron gives a powerful, poetic defense of the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. The whole clip is worth watching, but the defense begins at 4:00 minutes. Styron’s remarks even moved Kurt Vonnegut, who was on the same panel.
Styron was a Marine training for the invasion of Japan when the bomb was dropped.
William Styron’s defense of the bomb
Didn’t Key West declare independence, declare war on the US, declare peace, and then ask for aide several years back? It might have been another Florida town.
Oh, yes. Here we are.
I think this is their National Anthem.
Regards,
Jim
Poindexter,
Styron is tremendous. This speech should be required viewing for every high school student.
Regards,
Jim
Styron is not only “tremendous” in justifying Truman’s use of The Bomb, his discussion of the Enola Gay exhibit controversy is most interesting. He raises the point of whether the use of The Bomb on Japan was in part a warning to Stalin. One wonders if a third Bomb trained on Moscow might have prevented the Cold War.
The Amazon link to the Fussell essay doesn’t appear to work (at least for me). Here’s a link to it on Audible.
One of the best and most cogent arguments for the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is presented by Bill Whittle and is available on YouTube.
I was born just before the end of the war. I had relatives and friends of my family, teachers, and others I grew up knowing who had fought in the Pacific. I have read numerous books, including most recently Ian Toll’s first two books on the war in the Pacific Pacific Crucible and the Conquering Tide. I am looking forward to his final book on the subject.
There is no question that the Japanese was defeated before they finally quit. They just weren’t ready to admit it. Arguments to the contrary are stupid. The Japanese civilians had been fed a massive amount of propaganda about what would follow an American invasion, and they bought it. What would have happened would have been a massacre of incredible proportions with more than 1,000,000 deaths before it was over, many of those American boys who had fought in both theaters of the war.
The willingness of the Japanese to fight to the end was proven over and over again during the Pacific campaign. Iwo Jima and Okinawa were simply a foretaste of what would happen on the Japanese mainland. The 108,000 who died as a result of the Atomic bombs being dropped was just a tiny fraction of what it might have been. Thank God for the bomb!
One of my issues with how history is taught and/or discussed is that controversial subjects too frequently seem to be an “either-or” proposition.
In the case of the atom bomb, it’s too often framed like “did Japan surrender because of the atom bomb or because of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria?”
Why can’t it be both? Why can’t the answer be that the Japanese looked at what happened to Germany and realized they couldn’t fight a two-front war, but they might have tried holding on if they were only being attacked from one side or the other?
After all, it’s not like the Soviets unilaterally decided to invade Manchuria. By my understanding, the invasion of Manchuria was a part of the overall Allied strategy, launched with the full support (or even at the request) of Britain and the USA. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.)
It’s sorta kinda like arguing that the Allies should have invaded Normandy or Italy, but not both.
Regardless, it seems obvious to me that the atom bombs caused way less destruction to Japan than the preceding conventional bombings, and therefore were clearly a lesser evil. They were really the WWII equivalent of a smart bomb.
What makes the atom bomb really scary was how quickly the yields increased after the war. Only then did it become a true “weapon of mass destruction.”
War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
-William Tecumseh Sherman
That feels like an argument against dropping the atom bombs, since the conventional bombings caused more destruction. Better to firebomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki over a series of days, doling out the pain and suffering over a longer period, than to whack ’em with a single antiseptic weapon and getting it over with.
If cruelty is the goal, you don’t use a guillotine. You burn ’em at the stake instead.
You are choosing one word to misapply the sentiment. It is clear that what he meant was “Don’t hold back and fight to win”. At least that is how I have always seen it interpreted.
Aside: The Mouse That Roared is currently being staged as a play in Ottawa.
At first I found that extremely surprising, considering how sympathetic it is to Pax Americana. Theatregoers in this town really don’t like dem Yankees.
Then I found out that the play replaces the US with “a Western superpower”, and it made more sense.
That’s why I used the word “feels”. I choose my words carefully, yo.
:-)
You are you are correct. In fact the invasion was being pleaded for by the allies . Stalin stalled it for his own reasons.
Ok, here’s a couple questions that add more uncertainty to the necessity or superfluity of the atom bomb:
1) Did the USA know that the Soviets were going to invade Manchuria, or did the USA think that it’s pleadings for Russia to invade had fallen on deaf ears?
2) If the USA knew that the Soviets were going to invade Manchuria, did it know when then Russian invasion was scheduled to take place?
If the USA knew in advance about the Soviet invasion, then the atom bombs could seem unnecessary. If the USA knew the date of the invasion, then the timing of the drop on Nagasaki could seem really cynical.
After all, if the USA knew about the Soviet invasion in advance, wouldn’t it be better to wait for Japan’s reaction before dropping the bombs?
If creating a second front against Japan resulted in surrender, there would be no need for the bombs. If, however, the second front didn’t result in surrender the bombs would still have been available.
The “fallacy of omniscience” is what makes horror movies so silly. Similarly, you could do this kind of analysis all day and never arrive at anything but more questions. Neither side knew every possible decision or outcome. It’s so much more convenient to look backward at history and wonder what was and wasn’t known, or second-guess some decision.
They decided to drop the bomb twice and the war ended. That fact overrides all others, and I’m glad for it. My grandfather fought in WWII and brought home parts of a grenade in his back. In one sense, the bomb allowed him to come home before something worse happened.
I don’t think I’m succumbing to that fallacy. I’ve already made my position clear that according to the known facts the bombs were a net positive. I don’t think that prohibits asking questions about who knew what and when. Revisionism is bad if it’s based on baseless speculation, but revisionism based on genuine facts is simply a normal part of studying history.
Fussel’s book is a favorite of mine. Thank you for a great post!
A friend of mine recently related that a Japanese exchange student she was housing said to her, about WWII, “I bear no malice.”
Me? I’da said,” Get a clue, Yum-Yum!!! ”
Japan attacked us and invaded our territory. They were famously far more brutal with POWs even than Germany. As someone recently recounted in these pages,they had armed every man, woman and child with bayoneted rifles and/or sharp sticks, and instructed their civilians to go to their deaths impaling Allied soldiers. Yet this little maid from school seems to feel her country was the victim of a war of aggression.
‘Course, she’s in good company: didn’t Tom Hanks say something like, we just attacked them because they are yellow?
That Prez Omega would choose to stand on their soil on Memorial Day…….well, it kinda says it all.
Posted without comment or endorsement:
http://rare.us/story/conservatives-used-to-criticize-the-hiroshima-bombing-far-worse-than-obama-did
Thank you for sharing this. It belongs on the sane shelf with Democrats’ history as the pro-slavery party, and John McCain’s war-hero status being impugned by Republicans during the 2008 primaries. Now, Dems call GOP the racist party of old white men–and both parties excoriated Trump for saying the same thing Gop said about McCain back then.
It’s a funny old world, and no mistake!
I find that very interesting. It’s completely new information to me and I’m going to take a while to process it.
Regarding the Russian intervention – at Yalta, Stalin promised Soviet entry into the war would take place three months after the end of the war in Europe, which turned out to be May 9. The U.S. and Britain were never informed of the specifics of what that entry would entail nor on the details of the timing of the Soviet attack.
There is some evidence that while the Soviets were nearly ready to launch their assault in mid-August, the news of the Hiroshima bombing caused them to accelerate the date by a few days.
What we did not know until the 1990s, when the Soviet files became (temporarily) available, was that Stalin had also planned to invade the northernmost Japan home island of Hokkaido in mid-September, which would have resulted in a Japan divided like Korea and Germany.
There were some revisionist historians in the 60s and 70s who attempted to prove that the reason for America dropping the bomb was heavily driven by a geopolitical strategy to intimidate the Soviets. However, the “evidence” was cherry-picked points of information and truncated quotes derived of context. I don’t think there is any credible contemporary evidence that the Soviet angle was a driver for any of the decision makers.
I wrote about this, as well as a possible alternative scenario for the ending of the war in this Ricochet post last year.
I got some for you:
What if we had had ten bombs — would we then have had the confidence to only drop one, or to demonstrate offshore?
What if the Soviets were waiting for us to attack , delaying until they could simply swoop in announced but unmolested? If we had waited, would the entire Soviet Army have perished in the snow waiting for us to attack and thereby saving us from the Cold War?
What if D-O-G spelled “cat”, man? Whoa.
One can argue for the use of the bomb without using the ugly phrase of thanking God for the bomb – I find that extremely distasteful.
Food for thought from the other side:
In the essay, Fussell also writes:
He tells us he deliberately uses that phrase to illustrate “the importance of experience sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one’s views about that use of the atom bomb“, And Fussell’s was that of an infantryman unlikely to survive the planned invasion.
A good book for those interested in pursuing the Hiroshima question is: Hiroshima in History – The Myths of Revisionism edited by Robert James Maddox. The collected essays confront and refute the main revisionist writers and convincingly establish (at least to me) that the US decision to drop the two atomic bombs was not only right, but completely justifiable even in retrospect. Additionally, anyone who is unfamiliar with how the Japanese military (in general) treated American POWs should read the book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (the movie adaptation, while good, does not fully explore the unbelievably horrific treatment visited by the Japanese military on the soldiers it captured). Of course, their treatment of the Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos was generally even worse. And while we debate whether we should have fire-bombed Tokyo, or dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they do not admit or even acknowledge the atrocities routinely committed by their troops, or the fact that they started the war (and had already started and been fully at war for years in China).
Thank God in Heaven that the United States of America, the new Shining City on a Hill, developed the Atom Bomb before anyone else and was willing to use it to end the war faster. Thank God for the Bomb and God Bless America,
Japan started it, and refused to surrender. Oh, sure, they wanted some sort of conditional surrender. Not acceptable. If attacked in a foul, evil sneak attack, with no warning, America should respond with all its might, to destroy its enemies with all it has.
God was on our side in WWII. The Japanese were and still are a racist culture. In WWII they did horrible, horrible things to the other Asians they defeated. They had a choice to surrender to 100% of our terms, or face our terrible fury. They had a choice, and choose not to give up after the first bomb, but waited until we dropped a second.
Not only was it necessary to save lives, it was the Right thing to do.
Again, Thank God for the Atom Bomb, Thank God for the men who created it. Thank God for the crew that flew the two missions to use them. Thank God for Truman willing to use it.
God Bless this nation, and may she always be willing to do what is necessary to defeat her enemies when it truly matters.