With the talk about Obama’s recent visit to Hiroshima, I thought I’d mention a related topic, one that’s been discussed elsewhere on the SDMB before:
From initial glance, there’s remarkable similarity between the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Operation Meetinghouse, the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo: In all instances, 70,000 to 120,000 Japanese dead, in all instances, the result of American bombing, in all instances, justified by its supporters on the basis of (1) “The Japanese deserved it - they hit Pearl Harbor first” and (2) “It hastened the end of the war.”
Yet I cannot recall the firebombing of Tokyo being debated on its moral merits and demerits anywhere near as much as the A-bombs. And it seems the firebombing of Tokyo doesn’t get 1/10 or 1/100 the attention, movies, books or media coverage as the A-bombs. Again, the firebombing killed over a hundred thousand.
What makes this odder yet is that the firebombings arguably caused more pain and suffering than the A-bombs, at least in the short term. Yes, the inferno didn’t cause radiological effects, but being burned alive is about the worst and most painful way possible to die, whereas many of the A-bomb victims perished instantly.
As far as I can see, the only real difference is the method: One was simply incendiary bombs whereas the other was a new and novel form of technology.
What moral arguments can be made in favor of, or against, the A-bombs, that don’t apply to the firebombing of Tokyo as well?
There are no moral arguments that can be made against either the A-bombs or the firebombing of Tokyo as long as your moral frame of reference is congruent to the one that existed during WWII.
So it’s okay to commit any warcrime and wash the conscience in saying that “Well, apparently, that was the moral frame of reference that was congruent to the time.”
Does Guantanomo actually have to be closed or can we use this excuse already?
“At the time”, bombing of civilians was certainly a crime. It is rather today that we don’t really view it as such, but that is because it was us doing it.
The entire of idea of “war crimes” stands on rather shaky arguments. On moral grounds, any war is a crime, though one can always come up with mitigating circumstances when trying to justify one’s actions. On legal grounds, war is almost by definition a breakdown in legal order and any “crimes” are constructed after the fact by the winner.
We firebombed more than just Tokyo. In fact, we destroyed the vast majority of Japanese cities and deliberately averred from destructively firebombing Hiroshima, and limited the bombing of Nagasaki to port regions specifically to make them good targets for demonstrating the singular destructiveness of atomic weapons. Qualitatively, there is little difference between firebombing of, say, Tokyo, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima–dead is dead, and being in the middle of an incendiary firestorm being roasted alive while the breath is sucked from your lungs is no better than the thermal pulse and radiation of a nuclear weapon–but from a strategic standpoint, being able to launch a single weapon that can immolate an entire city (versus flying an entire wing of bombers) is a new magnitude of warmaking capability, and one that dramatically influenced strategic planning and militarization in peacetime for the next fifty years, e.g. the construction of ICBMs, the fleet ballistic missile program, and the general assumptions into strategic deterrence that themselves rest on a somewhat shaky foundation.
“War crimes” may be in the eye of the victorious beholder, but an objective review of the situation is that by the late spring of 1945, and especially after the bloody US invasion of Okinawa, the Japanese military had lost so much military power that they were no longer an effective threat beyond occasional harassment by submarines, and were logistically so constrained that the war could have been “won” just by starving out the population with a blockade. By June 1945, the IJN no longer even had the means or capability to effect a forward air defense, and cities on the Home Islands were so defenseless that the bombings and overflights were regarded as almost milk runs, especially compared to the brutal losses suffered over Germany and France earlier in the war. At that point, the attacks were kind of just sticking a mortally wounded pig over and over. Although the Operation Olympic invasion was contemplated as threatening high losses to invaders, it was never seriously planned. The larger looming concern is that Japan might surrender to and be occupied by the Soviets who the Allied leadership were already viewing (correctly) as a post-war opponent and likely influenced the decision to end the war decisively with an exclusive US and British presence in Japan to avoid the clustefuck that became the Iron Curtain in central Europe. General LeMay as much as admitted (albeit boastfully) that if the US had lost the war, he and his command would be tried and convicted of committing war crimes.
Starving civilians is OK? What if it killed even more than bombs?
Starvation was attempted, in Europe, by both sides. It isn’t today considered a great humanitarian disaster because it didn’t succeed well enough to kill large enough numbers of civilians, at least outside camps.
Re the “objective review of the situation,” did it include how many were dying every week in fighting, between Chinese and Japanese, in China?
Re the firebombing, during World War II, there was reason to believe that conventional bombing of civilians would bring an enemy to its knees. Maybe by 1945 it should have been clear that it wouldn’t work, but, in the midst of battle, people, to say the least, miss a lot.
However, by the 1950’s, we should have known better. My candidate for the worst military atrocity perpetrated by the United States is the carpet bombing of North Korea:
With regards to firebombings, I find Tokyo significantly less objectionable than Dresden - Tokyo, at the very least, had some semblance of justification given that industrial and military facilities were generally (insofar as is my understanding) interspersed with civilian dwellings, and as such other than precision bombing any attempt at destroying military and industrial infrastructure was bound to bring with it significant collateral damage. Firebombing Tokyo was the most expedient way of crippling its infrastructure; the fact that said firebombing killed in the realm of 100000 civilians was simply an unfortunate byproduct and not the directly intended objective of the bombing campaign.
Dresden, on the other hand, had little strategic value, and what strategic value it had was largely confined to its suburbs. Rather than hit the industrial facilities located on the outskirts of the city, however, the raid targeted the city centre and as such more-or-less butchered civilians, particularly refugees, for negligible strategic gain. It is in my mind a far greater atrocity than Tokyo despite inflicting only roughly a quarter of the losses for the simple reason that Bomber Command seems to have wantonly and deliberately attacked the German civilian population with no other object truly in mind.
Well, there was significant dissent over the policy of “area bombing” (direct aerial attak on civilian populations) as carried out in both the European and Pacific theaters. Many people, including well-regarded academics and clergy, spoke out passionately against the practice.
Is that the frame of reference to which you refer?
I read Harrison Salisbury’s book on this in the 1970’s, so I should have worked Leningrad into my idea that starvation isn’t better than bombing.
Of course, in #7, Stranger On A Train wasn’t trying to pick a crueler way to defeat Japan. Just the opposite. The problem is that obtaining decisive military results against an adversary that won’t give up, even though it is objectively beaten, involves terrible choices, none humane. This is one reason why you shouldn’t start fighting a war if you can avoid it.
Of course, the Americans and British said they were going against specific military targets. Usually, it was tried, but bomber crews couldn’t bomb accurately enough.
The Geneva convention specifically forbade targeting civilians *qua *civilians. You may well deem it absurd in the course of prosecuting a war, but all of the Allies along with Germany signed it and thus were bound by it. Only the Japanese weren’t.
The razing of many German cities and the firebombing of Tokyo would have been condemned on those grounds, had the other side won. In practice the perpetrators hid behind the shield of “we were going after military targets, but bombs are innacurate” - which was bullshit when Bomber Harris specifically stated his goal of “dehousing Germans” on many occasions. And of course, going after industrial or military targets with firebombs would have been ludicrous to begin with - the obvious goal was to destroy civilian housing and their wood/paper structures, not factories and similar structures made out of concrete. If anything the A-bombs were cleaner in that regard, if less discriminate, because Nagasaki was a major military port and the bomb was dropped square on the harbour.
In practice only the winners get to hold war crime tribunals. That doesn’t make their actions free of blame or guilt.
[QUOTE=PhillyGuy]
The problem is that obtaining decisive military results against an adversary that won’t give up, even though it is objectively beaten, involves terrible choices, none humane. This is one reason why you shouldn’t start fighting a war if you can avoid it.
[/QUOTE]
But then you have to establish that the Japanese wouldn’t have given up ever, when that is very doubtful. There are some well-backed academic arguments that the American government & high-command rushed the drop of the A-bomb, not as a tool to hasten the surrender of Japan which was a matter of days anyway (especially after the Russians finally declared on them), but as a warning to the Russians as well as a way to get better terms of surrender compared to the Russians.