The first and still the best account of the bombing is John Hersey's non-fiction account that took up practically the entire August 30, 1946 edition of the "The New Yorker." Published later that year as a book, Hiroshima is a journalist's account of what he saw when he arrived shortly after the war ended, with extensive interviews with six survivors of the bombing. In clear, dispassionate tones Hersey describes the effects of the atomic blast. The details are grim, like something out of a horror film. One might be tempted to accuse him of being gratuitous but for the simple fact is this is what the witnesses experienced, in their own words. He makes no judgments, he follows no grand narrative. He lets the facts wash over the reader, leading his or her conscience to struggle with the outcome.
The justification for using the Bomb boiled down to expediency - ending an already long and bloody war quickly, with as few additional U.S. casualties as possible. The thinking was that the Japanese would defend their home islands to the last person. The citizenry were taught by their militaristic, fascist government that there was no difference between civilians and military: all were soldiers charged with repelling the foreign invaders. In a way, even though the Bomb would be used on civilian targets, more Japanese lives would be saved as a result of avoiding an invasion, or so the reasoning went. Without the Bomb, it has been argued, the war might have dragged on into 1947, costing an untold number of more lives on both sides.
There are questions as to whether the U.S. would have actually tried an invasion, especially when taking the southern island Okinawa between April and June of 1945 was so costly for both sides. When the American generals saw that the Japanese were willing to lose as many as 100,000 men on what was a relative backwater, they asked to what extremes would they go to defend their main island? It's possible the U.S. could have established air bases on Okinawa and continued to rain incendiary bombs on Tokyo and other industrial centers, hoping that the constant bombardment, along with a naval blockade, would wear down their resolve. But, again, how many hundreds of thousands of more lives would be lost?
The morality of the the Bomb can't be justified by saying that it was the lesser of several evils. It is quite possible that the atomic bombings ironically saved Japanese as well as American lives in the long run. There is something about the horrific nature of atomic weapons, though, that rightly petrifies us like no other implement of war. Victims close to the blast site were vaporized, sometimes only leaving a shadow to mark where they were when their lives literally disintegrated into thin air. Those who were not killed immediately suffered both the short term and long term effects of radiation poisoning. People's eyeballs melted from their sockets, and skin pealed off extremities. Along with the severe burns came cancers that showed up years later. There was the social stigma that accompanied the presumed radiation poisoning attached to those who had been exposed to Black Rain (a mixture of precipitation, debris and radiation fall out that fell shortly after the bombings), a story told in a 1989 Japanese film. That the people interviewed by Hersey blamed the Japanese government more than the United States for letting the war proceed when victory was impossible, or that former government officials said flat out that they would have used the Bomb if they had had it first also doesn't constitute grounds for justification or absolution.
For decades after the dropping of the Bomb its use was usually defended in the U.S. for the reasons I mentioned above. There were always voices like Dorothy Day and Fulton Sheen who condemned the use of such a weapon on civilian populations. Day, a pacifist, indignant at the joy expressed by President Truman and others in the press after the bombing, referred to the men who developed, financed and authorized the weapon's use as murderers in her September 1945 "Catholic Worker" editorial. Sheen, while not a pacifist, saw the bombing as destroying the boundaries between combatant and non-combatant that was the first step in the destruction of other social boundaries leading up to the turmoil of the 1960's. They were minority voices, to say the least.
Normally I would go back in the editing process and remove most of the context I just wrote, assuming that it is boring for the reader, and in fairness, is often beside the point I want to make. But I'm keeping it here because context does matter when judging history. Context is all we have really, and when we get the background wrong we are going to get the lessons wrong.
I could go even deeper into the context surrounding World War II in general and the decision to drop the Bomb in particular. I will hold back. Nonetheless it is a continuing frustration that it has become the default stance in the last thirty years or so for Americans to condemn the bombings in moralistic tones. It's usually done by people born well after 1945 who have no idea of the context that World War II was fought in, or think themselves morally superior because they never had to make a life and death decision under impossible circumstances. I don't have a lot of patience with people brave enough to condemn an action they or possibly even their grandparents weren't alive for, making like they would have been the one to put a halt to the madness, or that they would have been the brave one to speak out in 1945 to criticize Harry Truman for giving the go order.
The use of the atomic bomb was an atrocity, a crime against humanity that should never be repeated. But it is naive to think that not dropping it would have saved lives or led to a more humane ending of the war. Before we can grapple with the morality of the Bomb we have to deal with the problem of the war itself, which indeed blurred the lines between combatant and civilian. In fact, civilian fatalities in World War II doubled military deaths. The United States mainland was mostly untouched by the war, but not because the Axis were restrained. The simple fact was that neither Germany or Japan had the long distance bombers, or bases close enough to launch them from, to hit the coasts let alone the interior manufacturing centers in the Mid-West. The Germans didn't have the capability to invade England, let alone the east coast of the United States. The vast majority of civilian casualties occurred in Russia and China at the hands of Nazi and Imperial Japanese forces respectively. I have known Koreans who still hold animosity toward Japan for their conduct of the War in their homeland.
This is not to say that the Japanese "had it coming." It is to say that this was a long, bloody and complicated war. We need to put ourselves in the times themselves. What if I was in a position of authority, be it political or military, during the War? We've been at war almost four years. We've lost over 400,000 soldiers. Our allies, who have been fighting for six years, count their dead in the tens of millions, along with damage to their homelands we have been spared from up to now. Our lone remaining enemy is determined to keep fighting, even though the cause is lost. To continue would mean up to another eighteen months of combat, with as many as a million or more deaths - with most of those millions being civilians living in your enemy's country. Or you could end the war immediately with one or two bombs incurring 70,000 to 100,000 deaths. What would you do? There is no third option. The cost of ending the war is not zero under any realistic scenario. There is no time machine to go back into to avoid the conflict to begin with. What would you do? And if you chose the more difficult route, what would you say to the families of the soldiers who died in the ensuing combat, knowing you had a weapon that could have spared them, along with uncounted millions of "enemy" lives, and you chose not to use it?
Expressing moral indignation at the use of atomic weapons 75 years later is cowardly. It is because it makes the claim that we would have done or felt differently in 1945. It's nothing more than virtue signaling. Dorothy Day was not idly rattling her rosaries from an armchair when she called the American leaders who dropped the Bomb murderers. It was an unpopular opinion at the time, to put it mildly. She was consistently and relentlessly a pacifist. She went to jail protesting the draft during World War I, and would go to jail protesting nuclear proliferation later. The only reason she didn't act sooner what that the nuclear program was so secret it's questionable how much the president even knew about it. Unless you have that moral courage about things happening here and now, you need to be a little humble when condemning sins of the past. I'm not saying you can't have an opinion, just that our humility needs to be as strong as our convictions.
