By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, April 21, 2016
The dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains the only wartime use of
nuclear weapons in history.
No one knows exactly how many Japanese citizens were
killed by the two American bombs. A macabre guess is around 140,000. The atomic
attacks finally shocked Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese militarists into
surrendering.
John Kerry recently visited Hiroshima. He became the
first secretary of state to do so — purportedly as a precursor to a planned
visit next month by President Obama, who is rumored to be considering an
apology to Japan for America’s dropping of the bombs 71 years ago.
The horrific bombings are inexplicable without examining
the context in which they occurred.
In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill insisted on the unconditional surrender of Axis
aggressors. The bomb was originally envisioned as a way to force the Axis
leader, Nazi Germany, to cease fighting. But the Third Reich had already
collapsed by July 1945 when the bomb was ready for use, leaving Imperial Japan
as the sole surviving Axis target.
Japan had just demonstrated with its nihilistic defense
of Okinawa — where more than 12,000 Americans died and more than 50,000 were
wounded, along with perhaps 200,000 Japanese military and civilian casualties —
that it could make the Americans pay so high a price for victory that they
might negotiate an armistice rather than demand surrender.
Tens of thousands of Americans had already died in taking
the Pacific islands as a way to get close enough to bomb Japan. On March 9-10,
1945, B-29 bombers dropped an estimated 1,665 tons of napalm on Tokyo, causing
at least as many deaths as later at Hiroshima.
Over the next three months, American attacks leveled huge
swaths of urban Japan. U.S. planes dropped about 60 million leaflets on
Japanese cities, telling citizens to evacuate and to call upon their leaders to
cease the war.
Japan still refused to surrender and upped its resistance
with thousands of Kamikaze airstrikes. By the time of the atomic bombings, the
U.S. Air Force was planning to transfer from Europe much of the idle British
and American bombing fleet to join the B-29s in the Pacific.
Perhaps 5,000 Allied bombers would have saturated Japan
with napalm. The atomic bombings prevented such a nightmarish incendiary storm.
The bombs also cut short plans for an invasion of Japan —
an operation that might well have cost 1 million Allied lives, and at least
three to four times that number of well-prepared, well-supplied Japanese
defenders.
There were also some 2 million Japanese soldiers fighting
throughout the Pacific, China, and Burma — and hundreds of thousands of Allied
prisoners and Asian civilians being held in Japanese prisoner-of-war and
slave-labor camps. Thousands of civilians were dying every day at the hands of
Japanese barbarism. The bombs stopped that carnage as well.
The Soviet Union, which signed a non-aggression pact with
Japan in 1941, had opportunistically attacked Japan on the very day of the
Nagasaki bombing.
By cutting short the Soviet invasion, the bombings saved
not only millions more lives, but kept the Soviets out of postwar Japan, which
otherwise might have experienced a catastrophe similar to the subsequent Korean
War.
World War II was the most deadly event in human history.
Some 60 million people perished in the six years between Germany’s surprise
invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the official Japanese surrender on
September 2, 1945. No natural disaster — neither the flu pandemic of 1918 nor
even the 14th-century bubonic plague that killed nearly two-thirds of Europe’s
population — came close to the death toll of World War II.
Perhaps 80 percent of the dead were civilians, mostly
Russians and Chinese who died at the hands of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Both aggressors deliberately executed and starved to death millions of
innocents.
World War II was also one of the few wars in history in
which the losers, Japan and Germany, lost far fewer lives than did the winners.
There were roughly five times as many deaths on the Allied side, both military
and civilian, as on the Axis side.
It is fine for Secretary of State Kerry and President
Obama to honor the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. But in a historical and
moral sense, any such commemoration must be offered in the context of Japanese
and German aggression.
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan started the respective
European and Pacific theaters of World War II with surprise attacks on neutral
nations. Their uniquely barbaric war-making led to the deaths of some 50
million Allied soldiers, civilians, and neutrals — a toll more than 500 times
as high as that of Hiroshima.
This spring we should also remember those 50 million —
and who was responsible for their deaths.
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