This Again? Revisionist Speak Out Against the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Next month will mark the 80th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. And just has happened ten years ago on the 70th Anniversary, there are those that will maintain that the bombings were unnecessary and cruel. One that I've already come across is a piece by Robert Billard at the Brownstone Institute entitled "Hiroshima at 80: Setting the Abhorrent Precedent," in which he concludes:

It is difficult to put into words the weight that atomic warfare brought to the conclusion of the Second World War. It served as a horrifying and needless bookend to the worst catastrophe in the history of mankind. Senior leaders of the day recognized that in the dying embers of WWII, such weaponry was reckless and not needed to secure victory. Japan no longer had a functional navy or air force. Its army was depleted and demoralized after over a decade of war. Many of its senior political leaders were ready to end the war, and only sought minimal face-saving measures to do so. When viewed through the lens of nearly a century of clarity, it is hard to come away from any conclusion other than that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were cruel signaling tools, with hundreds of thousands of innocent souls placed squarely in their experimental crosshairs. 

It is amazing that anyone still peddles these lies and half-truths, but here we are a decade on since the last set of this revisionist propaganda and the same tired arguments are still floating around like the little turd in a public toilet that refuses to be flushed down.  

    Billard begins his op-ed with the assertion that Truman's post-bombing justification that "Operation Downfall"--the invasion of Japan--would have cost over a million U.S. casualties was unsupported and that there was "no pre-Hiroshima literature can be found that would back up these claims." Perhaps the specific claim of 1,000,000 casualties was unsupported, but it was obvious that the U.S. expected substantial casualties prior to the bombing. For instance, Michael Barnes, in his paper "Arguments Supporting the Bomb" observes: "A sobering indicator of the government’s expectations is that 500,000 Purple Heart medals (awarded for combat-related wounds) were manufactured in preparation for Operation Downfall." And he also points to various pre-bombing studies predicting American casualties between 1 and 2 million, and deaths in the hundreds of thousands including "[o]ne by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 1945 resulted in an estimate of 1,200,000 casualties, with 267,000 fatalities." In "Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Correcting the Record" published at Real Clear Defense, the authors relate that "the Navy Department estimated America casualties at 1.7-4 million with 400,000-800,000 deaths." So while there may have been no estimates specifically saying there would be 1 million casualties, there were estimates that the number of casualties would be greater! 

    Billard next contends that senior military leadership, including luminaries such as General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz believed the bombing was unnecessary, including quotes or partial quotes from each. However, when going to his source ("The Atomic Bombings" by Ian W. Toll) Billard seems to have lost the nuance and otherwise obfuscated the issue of whether these generals and admirals were truly opposed to the bombing. Reading through the quotes more carefully, we see a couple leaders who believed it was unnecessary because, they incorrectly believed, the war in the Pacific had already been won (Leahy and Eisenhower), that the decision to drop the weapon was made by political leaders (Nimitz), or wary of the power of such weapons (MacArthur). One of the quotes, from John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, doesn't even argue against the bomb, but only that the U.S. should warn the Japanese about the weapon before using it. 

    Billard's final argument is that the Japanese were ready to surrender and just needed a face saving means to do so. This is not supported either by the resistance shown in the battles most recently fought before the bombings (e.g., the battle for Okinawa where both the Japanese military and civilians fought the Americans) or the internal records of deliberation among the Japanese leadership. As the Real Clear Defense article mentions:

 Revisionists also regularly take the communications from internal Japanese debates—late in the war—cherry pick a sentence or two and suggest that a final decision to surrender was made in months before the bombs were dropped. In fact, after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War had a majority of its members who favored continuing the fight. It was only after the bombing of Nagasaki that Emperor Hirohito made the decision to capitulate. Even then, young army officers tried to overthrow the government and continue fighting.  

Barnes also notes in his paper "even after the first two bombs were dropped, and the Russians had declared war, the Japanese still almost did not surrender." Barnes further contends that it was the bombings that gave the Japanese leadership the face saving means to surrender: 

In the end, the military leaders accepted surrender partly because of the Emperor’s intervention, and partly because the atomic bomb helped them “save face” by rationalizing that they had not been defeated by because of a lack of spiritual power or strategic decisions, but by science. In other words, the Japanese military hadn’t lost the war, Japanese science did. 

    But in considering Billard's arguments (and the similar arguments made by others) we should also consider the unstated proposition. Some of you may already be familiar with this concept from reading Mark Twain's story entitled "The War Prayer". In that story, on the eve a great war, a minister prays for the safety and success of the troops; and, after his prayer is concluded, a stranger approaches the pulpit and utters the heretofore unspoken prayer of death, destruction and misery upon the enemy. So too, we must recognize what is the unspoken argument advanced by Billard: that it would have been better to sacrifice millions of lives in bloody combat than to have used the atomic bombs. Paul Fussel points this out succinctly in his August 1981 essay in the New Republic entitled "Thank God for the Atom Bomb."

“What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?” The recruiting poster deserves ridicule and contempt, of course, but here its question is embarrassingly relevant, and the problem is one that touches on the dirty little secret of social class in America. Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was “wrong” seem to be implying “that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs.” People holding such views, he notes, “do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots.” And there’s an eloquence problem: most of those with firsthand experience of the war at its worst were not elaborately educated people. Relatively inarticulate, most have remained silent about what they know. That is, few of those destined to be blown to pieces if the main Japanese islands had been invaded went on to become our most effective men of letters or impressive ethical theorists or professors of contemporary history or of international law. ...

In other words, Billard's argument rests on a contempt for the common soldier, Marine, seaman, or airman--the people that would be doing the bleeding and dying--and, by extension, the common people. In the end, Billard is revealed as nothing more than an elitist prick. 

Prior posts: "70th Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima"