Paying for Past Sins
Posted By Gary Potter On August 1, 2012
Most readers of these lines will not have been around when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs first on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and then on Nagasaki three days later. I was myself only a kid, but clearly remember that although folks didn’t celebrate in the streets of my home town, San Francisco, as they soon would when Japan surrendered, bringing an end to World War II (the Germans had already stopped fighting), there was real rejoicing.
I don’t recall adult relatives, the parents of friends or anybody else saying, “This is terrific because it will end the war,” although I suppose that thought may have been on minds of some. What I remember is: “We wiped out an entire city with just one bomb!” and “The Japs deserved this. They attacked us first.” Of course “entire city” included the “Japs” — women, children and civilian men — who lived in it.
We are going to ignore it here that ground zero in Hiroshima was a Catholic church and that Nagasaki, a city founded by Portuguese, was the principal historical center of Christianity in Japan. There are other points to be made in the lines that follow and in another installment of this article that will be posted on the SBC website in a few weeks.
Friends of Saint Benedict Center will know from the writings of Sr. Catherine Goddard Clarke and my own After the Boston Heresy Case that jubilation over the nuclear obliteration of Japanese population centers was not universal among Americans. At the Center, then located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sr. Catherine, Fr. Feeney and the young men and women around them were aghast. So were some other U.S. Catholics, notably Dorothy Day and the men and women of the Catholic Worker movement, but they were doctrinaire pacifists opposed to war even in national self-defense. That was not the position of the Center. Some of its men had enlisted as soon as the U.S. went to war, not waiting to be drafted, and many veterans would enroll in its academic program after their discharge from the armed services. That non-combatants were the target of our nuclear bombs is what the men and women of the Center found to be morally abhorrent.
Why didn’t most Americans, including the great majority of U.S. Catholics, recoil in the same way? Why were so many positively elated?
The fact is the U.S., and before we joined the war our British allies, had been deliberately targeting civilian population centers, cities, in Japan, Germany and elsewhere for years, killing as many persons and destroying as much property as possible, but with “conventional” bombs. (For example, a single raid with incendiary bombs on Tokyo killed 84,000. In seven days, within nine square miles of Hamburg, Germany, 77 percent of that city of 1.8 million souls, were wiped out. The destruction of Dresden, crammed beyond capacity by refugees fleeing from the advance of the Red Army in the east, may have killed as many as a half million.)
As a people, we had not become simply inured to the deliberate killing of so many and destruction of so much. We expected it. Indeed, the significance of battlefield tactics as well as the larger strategic picture being beyond the grasp of average Americans, including most of the soldiers doing the fighting, success in the war came to be measured according to the number of Germans and Japanese killed and the extent to which their cities were destroyed.
What is vital for the reader to understand is that the killing and destruction were deliberate. As was explained at the time by Target: Germany, an official U.S. Army Air Force publication, at the Casablanca conference in January, 1943, U.S. and British air forces were directed by President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill to accomplish “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic systems and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened…. Bombs behind the fighting fronts may rob armies of their vital supplies and make war so terrible that civilian populations will refuse to support the armed forces in the field….”
In keeping with the Anglo-American policy of deliberately targeting civilians, every German city of any consequence was devastated by the end of the war. Yet, as would be learned, it did not “undermine the morale” of the German people or cause them to “refuse to support” their armed forces. On the contrary, it strengthened their will to resist. They said to themselves, “If the Americans and British will do this to us when they aren’t even here, the nightmare if their troops were on our soil is unimaginable.” Thus did the policy actually prolong the war.
It also violated the principles governing the conduct of warfare that Christians held from the days when St. Augustine first laid them out and all through the centuries when Christendom existed. After all, the Christian knight, the ideal warrior, was sworn specifically to defend the defenseless — women, children, the aged. Further, having abandoned those principles and come to accept the deliberate targeting of cities and the people in them first by “conventional” bombs and then nuclear ones, when World War II was followed by the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union, we made the targeting of Soviet population centers with nuclear missiles the cornerstone of U.S. national defense strategic policy.
In 1969 I wrote a series of articles on the immorality of that policy for Triumph magazine, at that time the country’s leading conservative Catholic periodical. A U.S. Air Force major named Robert Margetts and his conscientious objection to the policy figured in the articles. The next installment of the present article will deal with the policy and also a project on which Margetts recently embarked. This because we tend to forget, now that the U.S. and Russia are not targeting each other’s cities with their missiles, that the missiles can be retargeted in fifteen minutes; and 2) there is a current candidate for President who sounds as if he doesn’t believe the Cold War is really over (“Russia is our number-one geopolitical foe,” he has said).
For now, we conclude with a quote from Of Flight and Life, by Charles A. Lindbergh. One of the twentieth century’s most arresting American figures, Lindbergh was not a practicing Christian of any kind. However, by the time he wrote this particular book in 1948 he had lost his faith in the unlimited power and benefit of science and technology. He lost it in Germany in 1945 when he saw lying in ruin all the cities of a nation that cultivated science brilliantly. He wrote: “As the fallen walls of Coventry should have warned Germany of the fate of her own cities, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be a warning to America. Our atomic bombs return to haunt us, and in our science we foresee our doom.”
I see the doom — the price to be paid for what the nation did in World War II and intended to do all during the Cold War — as possibly upon us now. It simply isn’t taking the form Lindbergh envisioned.
(To be continued)
Footnote: A month ago this website posted an article by me, “What Does a Saint Look Like?” [1] that largely had to do with Eva Peron. On the sixtieth anniversary of her death, July 26, Argentina put into circulation a new 100-peso banknote [2]. It bears a portrait of Evita. Heretofore, Argentine currency, like that of the U.S., has mainly featured portraits of founders of the republic such as Jose de San Martin (their George Washington). That Evita is now included in the pantheon testifies to the place she continues to hold in the minds and hearts of her compatriots despite the efforts of detractors.
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Article printed from Catholicism.org: catholicism.org
URL to article: catholicism.org/paying-for-past-sins.html
URLs in this post:
[1] “What Does a Saint Look Like?”: catholicism.org/what-does-a-saint-look-like.html
[2] a new 100-peso banknote: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/26/eva-peron-evita-argentina-banknotes
The peacenik said, “This because we tend to forget, now that the U.S. and Russia are not targeting each other’s cities with their missiles, that the missiles can be retargeted in fifteen minutes; and 2) there is a current candidate for President who sounds as if he doesn’t believe the Cold War is really over (“Russia is our number-one geopolitical foe,” he has said).”
The peacenik failed to state: 3) the other current candidate for President (and current President) is a communist who wants to unilaterally disarm the US of its nuclear defense regardless of what Russia or Red China does.
Curtis LeMay is reported to have admitted that, had the US not prevailed, he and his colleagues, along with Harry Truman, would have been prosecuted for commiting war crimes.
He may have said that. And it might be an accurate surmise.
The other side of the argument, bearing in mind that a relative of mine served with great distinction as a general officer under Gen. LeMay’s command, is that the postwar Russians came to be terrified of LeMay. They actually thought him mad and their strategic outlook was predicated much upon the fear that he would actually do the unthinkable and annihilate them.
He wasn’t. But he knew the advantage of terrifying an enemy without having to even fly one mission over his territory.
Stepping back, it’s just plain easy for amateur military critics to gainsay wisdom born of the shock and horror of actual combat. And that is not to say that what the US did was not deliberate nor that I do not question its military justification.
I have argued for decades that a demonstration attack against a Japanese concentration of forces would likely have had as coercive an effect as Hiroshima.
Having listened to and read comments from Air Force ( at the time, US Army Air Corps ), Navy and Marine veterans who did the fighting, it does appear that the cult of emperor worship had a straglehold on all of Japanese society and that, as has been claimed since 1945, dropping the bombs may have acted to save millions of Japanese civilian lives in addition to saving hundreds of thousands of Americans who would have had to slog inland against, yet another massively reinforced, totally suicidal opposition – this time manned by hapless, starving civilians.
Anyway, the ultimate fault lies with FDR. He was approached time and again by the Japanese government, for at least a year prior to Peral Harbor, with overtures to prevent an armed conflict between the two nations. Each and every overture was stiffarmed by the Roosevelt Administration. Much the same can be said for certain political overtures from the Germans, as well, who indicated to Churchill that Hitler wanted to arrive at peace terms as quickly and dispassionately as could be arranged, long before D-Day.
( See Pat Buchanan’s best seller about Churchill and Hitler on this topic. )
Addenda: Lindbergh, in the spirit of Joseph Kennedy, Sr., was hardly anti-Hitler for some time in his public life. Moreover, while pacifists rail without making distinctions, it is much more accurate to state that, given the choices facing military commanders at the front ( especially loss ratios anticipated under the prospect of a final campaign that would last perhaps another year or two against fanatical opposition ) it is not so much the use of an atomic weapon as exactly WHERE it was used that should be dealt with.
Nevertheless, Dresden and its like were the end product of escalations which began with the fire bombing of London by the Luftwaffe; acts for which both sides bear total responsibility.
Thanks for this article. Of course it is wrong to target civilians.
Paying for Past Sins, Part II
Posted By Gary Potter On September 3, 2012
(Part I [1])
During World War II an untold number of non-combatant Germans, Japanese and others were killed when towns and cities in which they lived were leveled by American bombers under a policy set by U.S. President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill. The aim of the policy was to terrorize civilians in enemy countries into refusing to support the efforts of their nations’ armed forces. The intentional slaughter culminated on August 6 and 9, 1945, when nuclear bombs were dropped on the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Some days later, on August 21, the great Richard Weaver, author of Ideas Have Consequences and much else of importance, wrote in a letter to a friend: “The atomic bomb was a final blow to the code of humanity. I cannot help thinking that we will suffer retribution for this.”
Retribution? From whom? In what form?
Weaver, who died in 1963, lived into the era of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), the Cold War military doctrine under which the U.S. and USSR kept nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles trained around-the-clock on each other’s territories. Morally, the horror of it was that the U.S. government officially averred that this nation would never be the one to start a nuclear war. This meant that if our radars ever detected Soviet missiles coming over the northern horizon, it would make no sense to retaliate by hitting the bases from which they flew — the missiles were already in the air. So, before they reached our missiles in their silos, we would strike back by launching our nuclear weaponry against Soviet cities and the people in them. It was like a man saying, “If you attack me, I’ll shoot your wife and children.”
If Weaver ever wrote about MAD, I have not seen what he said, but am certain he would view this willingness to expunge human life on a near-astronomical scale as no less deserving of retribution as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sinful deed, after all, is willed before it is done, and when the “doing” is nuclear war, there would be nothing — no real length of time — between the willing (the command to launch) and the irretrievable missiles going airborne.
Whatever Weaver thought, considering who Americans were during World War II and still in the earlier years of MAD — a predominately white, mainly Protestant people — I believe the retribution for what was done, and also for what was intended, could now be upon the land. My notion of this is born of a religious truth obscured in our day: Hell is not a punishment inflicted on its inmates by God. The souls that go there choose it — choose to be separated from God for eternity.
They do it by choosing over Him something in this life when choice is still possible, so that’s what they get. To the drunkard, drink becomes so much more important than staying close to God, he can never quench his thirst in this life. He will be thirsty forever. The lecher will have his itch forever. The man who did nothing to control his temper will be angry forever (what a Hell that will be!). The eternal fate of these souls is their own doing. It is a just fate. Except that He is Justice Himself, God has nothing to do with it.
In much the same way, the mainly Protestant whites who dominated America politically and socially in 1945 and who saw too little value in the lives of German and Japanese civilians to spare them, went right on making war on life after 1945. Only, apart from the Soviet non-combatants they intended to kill, those targeted weren’t foreigners.
True, right after the war there was the evanescent phenomenon of the “baby boom,” but as soon as the first postwar suburban subdivisions were filled by the mainly Protestant whites who were the dominant element in U.S. society, the same majority began to “limit” the number of their children so they would have more money sooner to buy bigger houses in newer subdivisions, and two cars instead of one to park out front, and automatic washers and dryers when they came on the market, and then television sets, and on and on. At first this was done by simple techniques of life prevention (a.k.a. birth control), but in the sixties along came the Pill and the more widespread practice of abortion, which was inevitably legalized in 1973. The result: By 2030 the old white majority will be a minority everywhere in the country as they already are in California and elsewhere. Their number will just keep going down after that.
There is another way of putting this: Having seen fit to expunge the life of so many others in the past, the old majority are now drowning in their own blood — that of their offspring whose life they saw no more reason to spare, or allow to come into existence, than that of Germans, Japanese and Russians.
The old majority will take with them into oblivion their history. That is, America will not cease to exist. It will simply be another America. (This in somewhat the way the old majority’s America replaced the America of the Spanish and French who first began to settle the continent.) Plymouth Rock, “the shot heard around the world,” the Gold Rush, wagon trains, Antietam, San Juan Hill, “Over There,” Pearl Harbor — none of it will mean anything to the Mexicans, Guatemalans, Cambodians, Chinese, Indian Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, etc., etc., already replacing the remains of the old majority. If this is the retribution foreseen by Weaver, and as I’m suggesting it may well be, it will be as just as a lost soul finding in eternity whatever it was he wanted in this life more than God. And God will not be responsible for it. It will be done by Americans themselves, as Americans used to be known. They will deserve it.
What I’ve been talking about here is irreversible. The demographers all agree. If every non-Hispanic white married couple in the U.S. produced a child nine months from now and another a year later, which they won’t do, they would still be a minority within the lifetime of most persons reading these lines. However, that doesn’t mean all is necessarily lost. After all, God’s mercy, the name by which we have known His love ever since the Fall, is as perfect as His justice. The favor of it should be sought. For what? How?
First, it would be futile and not even fitting to hope the old majority will remain the majority. We’ve just said, that’s not going to happen. However, it is reasonable to hope that old moral, cultural and social standards could be left standing, standards that were European before they were American, and even that they can be raised higher than they have during the past seventy years. Of course, raising them higher — high enough for a new America to coalesce around them — requires holding and fortifying the ground in which they are planted: the One True Faith. I’m talking about evangelization — holding and then capturing ground beyond what is already held. Will God in His mercy grant that the men to do that will stand forth? Why not? In any event, it brings me to how.
As mentioned a few weeks ago in Part I [1] of this article, back in 1969, when I was an editor and writer for the conservative Catholic magazine Triumph, I wrote a series of articles for it on the immorality of Countervalue, as MAD was then known in national-defense literature. Figuring in the series was a U.S. Air Force major named Robert Margetts. He helped man a missile silo out west and had the job of turning the key (one of two that had to be turned; there is no “button”) that would send a missile streaking toward a city somewhere in the Soviet Union. The trouble was he was Catholic and took the teachings of the Faith seriously enough he came to realize he could not perform an action that would result in vaporizing thousands of human beings and incinerating many thousands more. He informed his superiors. There was a trial. He was discharged from the service. Margetts had sacrificed his career for the sake of what he believed.
On the other hand, he would never possibly have to plea, if only at Judgment, that he was “simply following orders.”
I am not writing here in more detail about his case because Margetts has now written a book of his own, Witness for Atonement. He is not a writer. The book is not a literary masterpiece. But he does write from the heart. More to the point, by his sacrifice Robert Margetts earned the right to give witness and to be heard.
He does more than give witness. His book includes an appendix, a form readers can fill out, thereby enrolling themselves as “witnesses for atonement” with no formal obligation except on every December 28, Feast of the Holy Innocents, “by prayer, fasting and Mass attendance we can make atonement to God for all the innocent people we have killed in recent wars and for the millions of children in the womb who have been aborted.” This could be likened to the annual March for Life, except “witnesses” and God are involved instead of marchers and politicians.
Such action, it seems to me, can be a step in obtaining from God’s mercy that there will be men who will ensure that as one nation disappears and another emerges, the newer will be marked not simply with the best and highest of the old, but more deeply infused with it.
Margetts has put up a website, www.witnessforatonement.com [2], where an extract of his book can be read, the book ordered or downloaded, and more information about “witnesses for atonement” obtained. You can also enroll as a “witness” online without buying Margetts’ book.
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Article printed from Catholicism.org: catholicism.org
URL to article: catholicism.org/paying-for-past-sins-part-ii.html
URLs in this post:
[1] Part I: catholicism.org/paying-for-past-sins.html
[2] www.witnessforatonement.com: www.witnessforatonement.com/
Testimony of US Leaders and Military Opposed to A-Bombing Japan
Posted By Brian Kelly On October 16, 2012
catholicism.org/testimony-of-us-leaders-and-military-opposed-to-a-bombing-japan.html
Saint Benedict Center was appalled when the news came of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and then, again, on Nagasaki three days after. Father Feeney and Sister Catherine Clarke and all the members of the Center, including those who had come back home from the war in Europe, voiced unanimous outrage that such a barbaric act of slaughter of innocent civilians by a “Christian” nation was a crime against God’s law and humanity. Just to put a image on the horror of 70,000 instantly killed in Hiroshima and 70,000 more dead within five years, here is an eyewitness description:
“The appearance of people was . . . well, they all had skin blackened by burns. . . . They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back. . . . They held their arms bent [forward] like this . . . and their skin – not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too – hung down. . . . If there had been only one or two such people . . . perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression. But wherever I walked I met these people. . . . Many of them died along the road – I can still picture them in my mind — like walking ghosts.” (Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima)
World Net Daily has provided ample testimony from military leaders, political leaders, and other experts, stating that it was militarily unnecessary to use an atomic bomb, morally reprehensible, a dangerous precedent, and that every indication showed that Japan was ready to surrender. The US wanted the unheard of humiliation of “unconditional” surrender. Japan would have accepted any terms except abolishing the largely symbolic, but, nevertheless, unifying tradition of the reign of the emperor, which the US insisted upon. In the end, when the Peace Treaty was finally signed in 1951 the emperor was allowed to reign anyway.
World Net Daily: The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, assigned by President Truman to study the air attacks on Japan, produced a report in July of 1946 that concluded (52-56):
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
Read the full article here [http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32743.htm and see key excerpt below]
Why Then Were Atom Bombs Dropped on Japan?
If dropping nuclear bombs was unnecessary to end the war or to save lives, why was the decision to drop them made? Especially over the objections of so many top military and political figures?
One theory is that scientists like to play with their toys:
On September 9, 1945, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was publicly quoted extensively as stating that the atomic bomb was used because the scientists had a “toy and they wanted to try it out . . . .” He further stated, “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment . . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it.”
However, most of the Manhattan Project scientists who developed the atom bomb were opposed to using it on Japan.
Albert Einstein – an important catalyst for the development of the atom bomb (but not directly connected with the Manhattan Project) – said differently:
“A great majority of scientists were opposed to the sudden employment of the atom bomb.” In Einstein’s judgment, the dropping of the bomb was a political – diplomatic decision rather than a military or scientific decision.
Indeed, some of the Manhattan Project scientists wrote directly to the secretary of defense in 1945 to try to dissuade him from dropping the bomb:
We believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.
Political and Social Problems, Manhattan Engineer District Records, Harrison-Bundy files, folder # 76, National Archives (also contained in: Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 1987 edition, pg. 323-333).
The scientists questioned the ability of destroying Japanese cities with atomic bombs to bring surrender when destroying Japanese cities with conventional bombs had not done so, and – like some of the military officers quoted above – recommended a demonstration of the atomic bomb for Japan in an unpopulated area.
The Real Explanation?
History.com notes:
In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.
New Scientist reported in 2005:
The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.
Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.
“He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species,” says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. “It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity.”
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[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.
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New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.
According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.
“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.
John Pilger points out:
The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.
We’ll give the last word to University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar Alperovitz:
Though most Americans are unaware of the fact, increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.
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Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.
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The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.
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Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.
Great posts, Tom. I don’t recall hearing the Soviet angle before. It wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out to be true. And how convenient for Truman to have a ready bunch of slant-eyed, yellow-skinned, inferior stock Catholics to vaporize.