Thursday, August 6, 2020

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.


[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.

[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.

[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.


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