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REPLY TO “THE MAN WHO BOMBED HIROSHIMA” The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were plainly evil, but were they an unnecessary evil? Anthony Gregory, in his generally intelligent article [November 16, 2007], hasn’t made the case. As with most arguments against the bomb, Mr. Gregory’s hangs on the idea that the Japanese would have surrendered without being nuked. Perhaps. Certainly there is a case to be made. But if Japan had been on the brink of surrender, why did it not do so after Hiroshima was annihilated on Aug. 6, 1945? In the crucial days of Aug. 7, 8, and (the early morning of Aug.) 9, Japan appears to have taken very few, if any, steps to submit to the unconditional surrender rightly demanded by the Allies. Japan’s leaders apparently still hoped for a conditional surrender that called not merely for the preservation of the emperor, as Mr. Gregory states, but for the far more important terms of not being occupied by the Allies and permission to punish (or not) its own war criminals. For the Allies, this would have been a fool’s armistice. Even after the USSR made plain its intention to invade Japan–and did so on the very early morning of Aug. 9–Japan did not surrender. Instead, by several accounts, Japan’s leaders took steps to impose martial law to keep its citizens from weakening. Japan did not finally yield until after the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9. I claim no expertise on the A-bomb. I take my information from the Web and other secondhand sources. But had I been an Allied soldier poised in 1945 to invade the home islands of Japan with its kamikazes and legions of fanatical soldiers, I would not think myself immoral—even admitting that the bombs were meant in no small part to impress the USSR with America’s military might, etc.—for saying, as Paul Fussell did in his moving essay, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” I would not be able to claim, as did bombardier Paul Tibbets, that I slept easily every night after killing 150,000 or more people. But I do not believe my unease would lessen my conviction that the bombings were quite probably the right, if despicable, choice.Steve Hendricks
© 2009–2010 Steve Hendricks |
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