75 Years after the Greatest Dilemma in History

One year ago today, August 6, 2019, my wife, Keira, and son, Stephen, got off our plane at Tokyo’s Narita Airport and were greeted by our daughter, Hannah, in the land of her calling, where she has

worked teaching English to Japanese people of all ages since graduating from Northwest University in 2013. This was our first chance to visit Japan, and I asked her to show us every place we could see that was special to her. The last few years she has lived and taught in Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city less than an hour from Tokyo. We spent two days there before travelling to her favorite getaway destinations of Kyoto and Osaka. We then headed to the first place Hannah taught and lived, a city whose name is infamous, especially today, 75 years after it was destroyed in an effort to end the most

destructive war in human history. Much has been said about how evil that decision was, and there is no doubt the results were truly tragic.

We were deeply moved as we spent several hours walking the Peace Memorial Park and Museum. It told a powerful story of the destruction. The museum showed the loss of life and the ongoing health effects on many residents of Hiroshima, but it also talked about the immediate American efforts to provide relief and help the nation rebuild. It did not condone the decision, but several displays sympathetically expressed the truly painful dilemma President Truman, Prime Minister Churchill, and key leaders in both governments faced when deciding whether or not to drop the bomb.

In preparation for the trip, I read Inventing Japan: 1853-1964, by Ian Buruma. It told a fair but enlightening backstory on how what had arguably been the most isolated nation in the world developed and tried to conquer the Asia-Pacific Region just eighty years after connecting with the rest of the world. Its story on the thinking inside the Japanese government as their hope of winning the war or even surviving diminished completely as the US and its allies conquered island after island and neared its homeland matched that presented in the Hiroshima museum. The Bushido Banzai ethic had taken hold: Suicide would always be chosen over surrender, even if it meant the suicide of an entire nation.

Once the United States forces conquered islands capable of holding airstrips within bombing range of Japan’s largest island, Honshu, the US began firebombing campaigns from its B-29 bombers. Even this decision was a huge ethical dilemma that was difficult to fully justify. Yet, the Japanese war industry was not primarily done in industrial parks away from the cities. Most weapons were made in residential neighborhoods. US leaders wanted to end Japan’s ability to arm itself. It also wanted to send a message on the futility of continuing the war. US leaders made the decision to firebomb the city of Tokyo in Operation Meetinghouse March 9-10. That operation has gone down in history as the single most destructive raid in human history.[1] Our family’s final hotel on last year’s trip is actually located on the sixteen square miles destroyed in Operation Meetinghouse.

The plan did not work. Japanese will seemed only to harden. In spite of regular overtures from US ambassadors asking for surrender and US bombers destroying city after city, the Japanese government rebuffed every request and continued to fight even after Germany’s surrender on May 8.

While gathering in Potsdam, Germany, from July 17-August 2, 1945, to come to terms for how to govern Germany and its former possessions, the new US President Harry Truman, the outgoing United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the soon-to-be-deposed Chairman Chiang Kai-shek of China drafted and signed what is known as the Potsdam Declaration, demanding Japan’s unconditional surrender. It was clear that the US and its allies did not want to rule Japan as a conquered territory, saying, “We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation.”  It demanded, “Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established.” There was even a promise for overseeing forces to leave as soon as a stable, freely elected Japanese government and industry was in place. “The occupying forces of the Allies shall be withdrawn from Japan as soon as these objectives have been accomplished and there has been established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people a peacefully inclined and responsible government.”

However, the threat was clear if Japan did not surrender: “The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”[2] In retrospect, these words seem to be a veiled threat of the just tested atomic bombs that would be dropped in less than two weeks.

The Potsdam Declaration was issued, broadcast, and printed on July 26, 1945. Three million leaflets containing the declaration were dropped over the nation of Japan.

Although some of Japan’s civilian government leaders wanted to accept the terms, the Supreme Council for the Direction of War rejected it. In response at a press conference, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki said, “The government of Japan does not consider it having any crucial value. We simply mokatsu siru (interpreted as ‘ignore it entirely’ at the time, but some now believe it have meant ‘keep silence’). The only alternative for us is to be determined to continue our fight to the end.”[3]

Some in the Japanese leadership hoped the, until then, neutral Soviet Union could mediate and clarify the terms, but, instead the Soviets saw an opportunity to expand their influence in the East. They declared war on Japan on August 9 and swiftly conquered what is today North Korea, setting the stage for a still unresolved conflict and much of the Cold War.

On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress named the Enola Gay and flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped a bomb named Little Boy on Hiroshima at 8:15 AM, killing between 70,000 and 80,000 people and injuring another 70,000.[4]

 

In his radio broadcast to the American people that day, President Truman said, “It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum.”

He went on to describe the development of the bomb in general terms and the resolve to continue such efforts if the Japanese government failed to surrender. President Truman closed his address with these words: “I shall give further consideration and make further recommendations to the Congress as to how atomic power can become a powerful and forceful influence towards the maintenance of world peace.”[5]

As we look back seventy-five years later, it is easy to judge the decision to drop the atomic bomb as unethical and immoral. Less than half of the lives lost that day were soldiers. Some estimate 20,000 of those who died were Korean slaves working for the Japanese government. Every life lost that day was precious to God. Every death was a tragedy. I am sure the vast majority of the Allied leaders wished the Japanese government that provoked us to enter that war on December 7, 1941, would have seen the futility of continuing and accepted the Potsdam Declaration. Better yet, we all wish they saw the inevitable end in defeat before the horrors of the Battle of Iwo Jima and made an earlier surrender that would have spared the lives lost in firebombing raids over Tokyo and other Japanese cities. We cannot justify death on that scale, but it seems they saw no other alternative. We may think it easy to look back and see better options, and we do want to believe there had to be some. Of course, we wished the Japanese government did not make the militaristic shift it did in the 1930’s. Of course, we wish Hitler and the Nazis never came to power, but they did.[6] Those Allied leaders faced a horrible dilemma with no clear way out without a massive loss of life. They saw the alternative as a land invasion of Honshu and the other core Japanese islands that would have been unimaginably costly in lives on both sides, orders of magnitude greater than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even in his last days in office President Truman reiterated this conviction in a letter, “Dropping the bombs ended the war, saved lives, and gave the free nations a chance to face the facts.”[7]

As horrible and devastating as that choice was, Japan finally offered to surrender to the US on August 10. The US forces, under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, helped rebuild Japan and its economy and ensure a stable democratic government was in place by the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951. The rebuilding was far more successful than anyone could have imagined, as Japan hosted the Olympic Games in 1964 and has been the leading force of economic growth and stability in a very volatile region for the last seventy five years.

Those raised since 1990 may find it difficult to imagine what it meant to live in a world continuously polarized with a constant, real threat of possible destruction. In some eerie way, President Truman’s words about nuclear power enabling the maintenance of world peace in his August 6, 1945, announcement came true to some extent. Thank God that in spite of forty year-long Cold War, atomic weapons have not been used in warfare since the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. I pray our world never has to face a dilemma like that again.

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[1] For an interesting background on the development of firebombing and the decision by USAAF General Curtis Lemay to launch these raids, listen to Malcom Gladwell’s “Revisionist History Podcast” four episode series running July 9-August 1, 2020.

[2] https://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html.

[3] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945Berlinv02/d1258

[4] Last month on TCM, Keira and I watched Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima, a film depicting the bombing and its aftermath that was made in 1953 and used many Hiroshima citizens. Although it, understandably, had an agenda, it was amazingly well made so soon after the events.

[5] https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/august-6-1945-statement-president-announcing-use-bomb

[6] To get an idea of how close Europe was to sliding completely under their power, read Erik Lawson’s blockbuster, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance during the Blitz, and the much earlier The Partnership that Saved the West: Roosevelt and Churchill 1939-1941, by Joseph P. Lash.

[7] Harry S. Truman, “Letter to Professor James L. Cate, January 12, 1953.” https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/hiroshima-nagasaki/truman.html.

Pandemic Audio Reading Reflections

As our world started to enter the worst pandemic in over a century, my mind kept wondering how this would compare to other worldwide disease outbreaks, specifically the worst two pandemics in history. I listened through two outstanding works on the so-called Spanish Flu (that most certainly did not start in Spain) of 1918 and the Great Courses lectures on the fourteenth century bubonic plague better known as the Black Death. All three were fascinating and, actually, gave more hope than fear, but certainly a strong warning, in our current COVID-19 Pandemic.

Jeremy Brown is an emergency room doctor and published his well-researched Influenza less than a year before COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, China. It is a prophetic warning but predicted an influenza pandemic rather than the coronavirus pandemic that has infected the whole world. It is shorter and easier to read than Barry’s epic, and it looks more at how influenza works in our world today while providing a briefer overview of the 1918 epidemic.

John Barry’s The Great Influenza was released in 2005 but has climbed back up the charts in the coronavirus pandemic. It provides a detailed look at the 1918 influenza epidemic, including the fullest history of the development of American medical research I have ever read. It was shocking to discover how limited medical research was before the 1870s but how far it had developed before the influenza was discovered in Kansas in early 1918. Medical researchers were actually not caught off guard and suggested immediate quarantine action that would have curtailed its spread, but President Woodrow Wilson and others in leadership had fought hard against their isolationist opposition to get America into World War I, and the US war machine was hard at work to get as many soldiers and weapons to Europe as possible. After an astute doctor in Haskell County, Kansas, first recognized the risk, it appeared a few hundred miles away a Camp Funston, near Fort Riley, then spread to Army bases across the country and to Europe, hopping on troop ships, then later spreading around the world, killing more than 50 million people, most between the months of September and November 1918. Although over 500 pages long, Barry’s account is breathtaking in its research and detail, although some epidemiologists now question the certainty of some of his claims.

I have enjoyed listening to Great Courses for over fifteen years. Dorsey Armstrong’s account of the Black Death quotes hundreds of sources from every facet of European life and paints as clear a picture as we can gather 650 years after the worst pandemic in human history. Although most experts believe more people died in the 1918 flu pandemic, the Black Death killed a much higher percentage of the population of Europe – at least a third. Armstrong considers the evidence for its cause and spread and spends more time reflecting on its impact on culture, the arts, commerce, religion, and government.

Audio reading all three in the midst of what may be the third worst pandemic in history brought several thoughts:

1. We should have seen this coming – We certainly cannot blame the people of the thirteenth century for not expecting a pandemic, but even their societies quickly recognized the severity of the danger they faced. Yet the world of 2020 did not do much better than the world of 1918 in spite of all we have learned in the last century. Brown points out how many experts have been expecting something of the magnitude of the coronavirus, even if much of the preparation was not well thought through – like storing millions of doses of perishable treatment for a specific virus when there are hundreds of forms a viral epidemic can take. We have faced several might-have-been pandemics in the last twenty years: SARS (2002), the H1N1 Swine Flu (2009), MERS (2012), and Ebola (2013-16), among others. Decisive, immediate action likely spared the world an earlier global outbreak, and hundreds of thousands of lives could have been spared had the Chinese listened to the earliest voices of doctors who saw the risk of COVID-19.
2. Our pandemic is not nearly as lethal as the other two – Although this season is unlike any I have ever seen and every life lost is a tragedy, we can be grateful the COVID-19 mortality rate is a fraction of the Spanish Flu and the Black Death. Much higher than expected positive antibody test results show that many people have had the virus without symptoms. This has led some experts to predict mortality rates (the percentage of people with the virus who die) as low as 0.3%, while the UK has seen nearly 14% of its confirmed cases end in death. Even the worst of these is much less than the estimated 40% morality of the other two outbreaks.
3. Though it is happening much more slowly than we hoped, things are getting better – Yes, we have seen a rise of cases recently. This is troubling and certainly due to more social gatherings without protection. However, the hospitalization rates have not increased and deaths have continued to decrease. (Let’s pray this remains the case.) We can attribute this to the drop in the average age of those infected. Younger adults have gathered and shared the virus with one another. They get sick, but most do not die. This is one big difference from the 1918 Spanish Flu where the death rate was much higher for those aged 18-40 than older adults. Certainly World War I had a huge impact on this, but even young adult civilians at home were more likely to die than their parents. That influenza was a very different virus from COVID-19. Hospitals across the country have open rooms and ventilators. At its worst in April, approximately one-third of all deaths in the US could possibly attributed to the coronavirus. The last week of June 2020, in the midst of a fresh spike of new infections, the CDC reports only 157 deaths out of the total 11,351 across the entire nation were attributed to COVID-19. That means only 1.5% of all people who died last week did so because of the coronavirus.
4. Keep social distancing and remain quarantined, if possible, if you are in a high risk group – The spike should warn us, though, that this is not over. If you don’t have to leave home, don’t. If you do, wear a mask. If you are over 65 or have a compromised immune system, have someone else go for you while you stay quarantined. (75% of all who have died from the coronavirus in the US were over 65.) I have friends suffering now who probably did not choose to follow all those cumbersome rules. I know it is a pain, but this will pass eventually. We should take heed of what happened in New York and New Jersey in March and April. Our medical professionals are much better prepared now, but the risk of overflowing intensive care units remains.
5. Get vaccinated when you can – I know that many well-meaning Christians have bought into the vaccine-conspiracy theory, but Barry’s book tells the miracle stories of vaccines that have saved the lives of millions who likely would have died from yellow fever, diphtheria, tetanus, polio, and many other diseases that were huge causes of death in the nineteenth century. No, they are not perfect, but I think effective vaccine development is a great example of humankind carrying out our first mandate to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Increasing numbers of parents not vaccinating their children is opening the door for reemergence of some dreaded diseases. Several promising COVID-19 vaccines are in the final stages of testing. Unless the virus mutates itself to impotency and/or humanity achieves herd immunity (as a combination seemed to happen with the Spanish Flu seemed to in 1919), the risk of more outbreaks remains until enough of humanity has either had the disease or been vaccinated so the virus has no safe place to land.  

Yes, this is the most challenging season in my lifetime, but “this, too, shall pass.” Let’s make it to the other side together.

Let’s Find a Better Way Forward Than Defunding the Police

Our entire nation has been grieving for more than two weeks over the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a uniformed officer of the law. We know he is not alone as a victim of a wrongful death at the hands of law enforcement. We also know many of those killings over the years have been racially motivated. This kind of behavior cannot be tolerated and changes need to be made so that police unions cannot block removal of officers with repeated offenses like this. The outcry from all parts of the country in this unprecedented season should motivate all police departments to scrutinize their systems and practices to ensure they truly deal justice.

However, the vast majority of law enforcement officials do what they do because they want to see justice and liberty for all people. They work hard and put themselves in crime’s way every day at a fraction of the pay they deserve so we can all have the best lives possible. Seasons like this call to attention the need to make changes that will ensure all people – regardless of race – and all neighborhoods – regardless of social status – enjoy the same peace, freedom from violence, and freedom of opportunity

The recent calls to “defund the police” will not accomplish this desired future. We do not want to return to the violent streets of the 1970s and 1980s. Yes, change needs to continue to be made, but let’s not forget the officers who gave everything to bring about the incredible drop in crime since those days.  

It would be wonderful if everyone would just get along and be nice to one another, but until Jesus returns, sin will be a part of the human experience. As the apostle Paul points out in Romans 13:1-5, God's plan includes government and law enforcement. “The one in authority is God’s servant for your good.” (Romans 13:4, NIV) We just need to find a way to ensure those with that authority and power use it justly, fairly, and for the good of all.

Keira and I loved the multi-church, multi-racial prayer gathering we joined at Faith Celebration Church on Saturday. Three hours of prayer for justice, peace, and reconciliation was culminated by a time of seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Several different African American church leaders in the room sensed the Spirit calling them to host a family dinner for Lakeland police officers and African American church leaders to sit down at the table together and build understanding and relationships. This kind of unity and understanding is the key. YES, we need justice and equality, but, YES, we also need men and women of good character willing to enforce the law with fairness and equity to enable all to have justice. Let’s all work together to make this a reality.

The Neuroscience of Prejudice

Imagine a new chain restaurant comes to your town. You have heard about it but never eaten at one of its establishments. You are curious and decide to give it a try. You and your spouse wait in line on opening weekend expecting excellent food and service, but you are sorely disappointed. Your overwhelmed server is slow and rude. Your chef is a rookie and overcooks your food and forgets a special request you make. You can barely choke down the meal and almost choke again when your server rudely drops the bill at your table. If you are like most people, you and your spouse make the vow, “We are never eating here again.” Even if a future road trip takes you by another in the chain in a different city right at meal time, the impression from your first visit leads you to drive right by. One meal at one restaurant – really just one chef and one server – has defined every restaurant in that entire chain for the rest of your life.

Research that led to my book, How to Make Big Decisions Wisely, and my doctoral dissertation dove into the fields of neuroscience, persuasion psychology, and decision science. In depth scientific research in all of these fields demonstrates that most people make most decisions intuitively. As the renowned, Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Daniel Kahneman labeled his best-known book on the subject, Thinking Fast and Slow, we too often use this fast thinking, impulsive, and intuitive thinking to make major decisions. In part, we do this because of the extra time and mental energy it takes to intentionally make a decision. Rather than taking into account all the data that would help us make the best decisions, we look for cues, what persuasion psychologists call heuristics. We use one small piece to make a judgement about the whole. We use one chat with a former customer to decide if we will shop at a store. We use the words we heard from our parents growing up to determine if a person’s skin color will determine their value and trustworthiness.

I believe God created us with the ability to think fast and make quick decisions because most of our decisions are routine and do not require contemplation. Should I take the next breath? Yes, if I want to stay alive. Which pedal do I push to make my car go? After thousands of car trips, I do not have to consciously remember the accelerator is on the right. The majority of the millions of decisions we make every day are best made impulsively, but, as Kahneman points out in his book, we can make some horrible decisions if we trust fast thinking too often.

Most of us do not recognize the heuristics we use or the problems they cause. So much of racial prejudice is inherited from our parents and other influential voices as we formed the metaphorical lenses we use to quickly interpret situations in our lives. Some of these lenses were formed so early and are held so deeply, we will not accept any evidence they may be in error. It is like the lenses have filters that only allow evidence that reinforces what we thought in the past it to pass through in confirmation. An individual raised to think one race was inferior to another will use a rare negative experience with someone of that race to “prove” that view was right all along even if thirty positive experiences with people of that same race happened in the same time period.

We also tend to use heuristics to lump things together to ease our evaluation and decision-making. Like the litmus paper my mother used to see if her home-canned pickles were safe to eat, we assume everything is either good or bad and one single cue in a complex situation can tell us which it is. Although this saves decision making time and effort, it is incredibly risky and fuels the prejudice that has divided humankind for generations. I cannot assume everyone in a particular career field, school, political party, nationality, or race holds all the perspectives of everyone else in the group. I also cannot assume everyone is either good or bad. Every human in history has been made in the image of God yet has also done many wrongs. (Genesis 1:26; Romans 3:23)

The problems with fast thinking and looking for embedded cues are magnified in times of unexpected, urgent stress produced by fear. Our intentionally processing prefrontal cortex shuts down in what Daniel Goleman calls an amygdala hijacking and puts us into a state of hypervigilance. The amygdala is the fastest thinking part of our brains and responds quickly in self-defense but does not process rationally. It can only draw from our embedded preconceptions and habits.

Although my hometown had few African American residents, words from my parents, my friends, and even television programs shaped my lenses and put me in a state of fear whenever I was in a neighboring city and passed a group of black men. I did not base my fear on knowing each of them as individuals. Like avoiding every restaurant in the chain after one bad experience, I used hearsay from my upbringing to judge them before I ever got to know them and the hypervigilance those preconceptions produced meant that would never happen as I tried to get away as soon as possible.

I thank God my story does not end there. At age 18 Jesus transformed me and enabled me to experience what Paul describes in I Corinthians 5:17 (NAS): “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” This new life can produce in us the change he describes in the verse before: “Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh.”

I would love to say this automatically happens, but this same apostle writes in his letter to the Romans, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2, NAS) The renewal of our minds requires our intentional effort in partnership with God’s work in us.

In my first Air Force assignment I was assigned an African American sergeant. Rather than leaning on the old prejudging lenses formed in my childhood, I intentionally sought to get to know him as a fellow human being. In fact, I learned to greatly respect him. His 16 years of active duty gave him a lot of wisdom this fresh second lieutenant was lacking. I saw his insightful hard work and dedication bear real fruit. The false cues I may have used in past years fell away.

Since then I have been privileged to get to know and love hundreds of African Americans. Each is a unique individual with unique abilities and gifts. Certainly, there are distinct elements of African American culture, but most of these can and should be celebrated. Nearly every one of the church tours I take students on features a predominantly African American congregation and that pastor is usually voted the favorite preacher of the whole trip by my students.

We are in a season in which more people than ever are willing to rethink the preconceptions they have carried. I will not allow one negative experience to serve as the judgement of all. I pray God helps us all renew our minds.