It was the alternate plan.
Maybe you already know this, but when the Japanese battleship Yamato was sent on a one-way trip to Okinawa, your father’s ship was one of several sent to stop her. Had she not been sunk by carrier aircraft, it’s possible you wouldn’t exist, because Maryland was not well protected against 18” shells or Japanese torpedoes.
Yes, it does.
I would expect the military to look at all possibilities and contingencies.
However, in the end it was not their decision but Truman’s, based on his judgement and those of his staff. Politically speaking, despite any claims to there are always alternatives, an invasion was the only viable option.
The end of the war in Europe meant that a large sector of the population expected a return of soldiers that if not immediate at least would be greatly expedited, not a wholesale transfer of them to the Pacific Theater for a many-years long blockade or other non-aggressive approach.
Moreover, the entrance of the Russians into an active military operation against the Japanese would have felt intolerable to a public not seeing their own government taking aggressive action against the country that attacked Pearl Harbor.
I said earlier that nobody remembers what “total war” meant. Imagine the entire country being fed nothing but Fox News on steroids for four years and then having the President tell them that all their sacrifice - which of course felt extremely real to them even if minor compared to those whose countries suffered from active warfare - their soldiers were going to be kept on the sidelines to prolong the war.
That was never going to happen. Truman would have been impeached by the Democrats with all the Republicans gleefully extending a helpful noose. The bomb was a gift that obviated that self-destructive fiasco, but the fallback if it had failed could only have been an invasion or some other killing stroke.
From many years ago: Paul Fussell’s Thank God for the Atom Bomb
IMHO, the lesser of two evils shouldn’t allow us to deny that it’s still evil. On one hand, as Fussell writes: “The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.” On the other hand, there were so many points along the way when that war could have been avoided.
Yes, his ship was credited with firing on the Yamato, sunk two destroyers, shot down 18 planes, took two kamikazi hits and one torpedo to the bow. They sailed the ship backwards to San Francisco over 1500 miles because the damage to the bow would have sank the ship.
Dad had five battle stars and a purple heart and all his buddies and my uncles when I was young were battle hardened vets.
They all had strong opinions about the use of the Bomb. Japan was going to suffer greatly at their hands, the Bomb actually saved Japan from the immense hatred our country had for them. Its hard for some to conceive of a hatred so strong.
My father was on occupation duty in southern Germany the summer of 1945. He fully expected to be sent to Japan.
Various Air Forces have long claimed that they can bomb an enemy into submission. I don’t think this has ever happened. Not in England, not in Germany. I doubt it would happen in Japan.
See the book mentioned above for an argument that this had practically happened to Japan before the atomic bomb. If you’re interested in seeing the argument.
I have to say, however heartfelt, arguments of the “I might not be here today if not for the atom bomb that kept me or my father from invading Japan” type are more or less irrelevant to the moral argument of the bomb, and indeed the indiscriminate targeting of civilians by any means, from atomic bomb to naplam to high explosives to bats carrying incendiary devices.
After all, the notorious trolley hypothetical doesn’t say, “decide whether to throw the switch to kill yourself and save 5 other people.”
Or, more pertinently, "decide whether to throw the switch to save yourself and kill 5 other people.”
The doctrine of bombing the enemy into submission was certainly supported by both the conventional and atomic attacks on Japan. It promised victory on the cheap, with minimal risk to the attackers. It went back earlier than Bomber Harris or Curtis LeMay or even Billy Mitchell. The British and Australians bombed an Ottoman Column to smithereens in Palestine, and after the war the RAF bombed Iraqi villages if they wouldn’t pay their taxes.
Like a great new movie that inevitably is followed by useless sequels and knockoffs, the bombing of Germany and Japan was followed by the same doctrine without regard for reason. We think North Koreans hate us because Kim-Il-Whoverthesedays is a fat, selfish sadist who’s turned them into robots. But it started when we bombed the north relentlessly; leaving nothing standing and as few living as we could. People remember that sort of thing. In Vietnam, LeMay’s acolyte Robert McNamara stuck to the doctrine again, infamously dropping more bombs than on Germany and Japan combined, well after it was obviously useless
What ended the War with Japan was Hirohito’s realization that if either the bombing continued, or a blockade was imposed, or an invasion was landed; he and his family would be targeted one way or another. Millions of other lives including his own subjects hadn’t mattered until things came that close to home.
Indeed. Thus the “whether.”
Real life at the highest levels is a continuous series of trolley problems. In practice, all such decisions are subject to later moral qualms no matter what the decision is.
Philosophers have argued whether the greatest good for the greatest number is the soundest course ever since Bentham capsulized that notion 250 years ago. U.S. history is almost entirely based on such ultilitarianism, with the caveat that the greatest number has defaulted to the definition “straight white Christian men”. Many today insist that all of U.S. history is tainted by that caveat affecting millions while others insist that it resulted in a greatness that attracted millions of immigrants and made life better for millions. Which set of millions should have counted more?
I’m not about to wade in those waters; I just to point out that this is a non-resolvable argument because morality is not fixed, not at a given moment and certainly not over time and place. Context is everything, as it always is.
I’m comfortable with applying my understanding of the context to this issue. Your understanding may lead you elsewhere.
No, it is more like- save yourself and 100000 of your friends, plus 4 million civilians- or kill 100000+ civilians,
You’re certainly right as to the math. And if you look at post 2 of the thread I staked out my similar position in utterly unequivocal terms. But …
The issue on-point in this digression is the somehow privileged position taken upthread that “of course it’s the morally correct choice; it’s the only way I would’ve been born.”
As a joke it’s understandable and funny in a gallows humor sort of way. As a moral argument it’s repugnant regardless of the death toll anong your friends or your enemies.
It amounts to trump-ethics: I am the only human who matters. Maybe even the only real human; everybody else is a mere NPC unworthy of mention, much less consideration.
Not at all trying to be eristic or anything, but:
Eliminate Japanese militarism: good idea,
Encourage American militarism. Bad idea.
You couldn’t do the former without the latter, and people did put in the effort (Ike with the Military Industrial Complex and Cross of Iron speeches, not just pointy-headed liberals)
A WWII Army veteran I knew said he was stationed in the Philippines in 1945. He was a Sergeant. He said his unit was being prepared for an invasion of China, and the briefings the Non-Coms in his unit were getting about that invasion gave an estimate of ten years to get the Japanese out of China. I heard this in the 1980s. It could have been mis-remembered, it could have been barracks talk. But I’d never heard the man exaggerate in any way, and I’d known him for years at that point. Another anecdatum that the US would have used the A-bomb as long as it was ready in time.
That is a well thought out point.
Fair enough.
Except it doesn’t. Even if that’s all right and the US was about to abandon the invasion plan (they weren’t, but for the sake of argument let’s say they were) the alternatives (namely just relying on bombing and blockade) were far far worse, morally speaking. They may have killed fewer Americans but they’d have killed far more Japanese people (and other non-white people in the Japanese occupied regions of Asia).
So it only makes the moralizing far more easy: yes it was justified
I think a lot of it is due to the demonization of the enemy as weak, cowardly or whatever leading people to grossly err in predicting the behavior of that enemy. WWII itself is a great example of that, with all sides indiscriminately bombing their opponents under the theory that surely they will crumble and surrender under the assault, while at the same time responding to getting bombed themselves by getting more angry and determined to win no matter what.
It wouldn’t have taken any special genius or insight into the enemy to figure out the problem, just a willingness to ask themselves “Well, how are we acting in the same situation?” But the leadership on all sides was unwilling to do that, so they kept using the same bad tactics.