In little more than a month, Americans, joined by others around the world, will solemnly mark the first anniversary of one of the most vicious terrorist attacks in history.
On Sept. 11, 2001, a handful of fanatical killers, commandeering four airplanes, rained terror from our skies, smashing into our buildings, disemboweling our society, and indiscriminately slaughtering more than 3,000 innocent people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.
The individuals responsible for this ghastly criminal act were members of the organization know as al-Qaida. In the name of their peoples and their God, they exacted "righteous" revenge on Americans for what they saw as our long record of inhumanity against the inhabitants of their lands.
This week, Americans, joined by fellow inhabitants of the globe, will pause to silently remember other deliberate and horrendous terror attacks that occurred 57 years ago this week.
On Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, two small crews of fiercely dedicated, highly skilled executioners, piloting two planes, delivered mass death from high above the ground to more than 200,000 innocent civilian men, women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including 23 American aviators being held as prisoners of war in downtown Hiroshima.
The soldiers in this "holy" cause were members of an organization known as the United States Air Force. In the name of the God and country whom they, too, had sworn to serve, these men carried out acts of wanton destruction against a people who were targeted for a special brand of hellfire because of Japan's hideous inhumanities against our fighting forces.
But, in blurring the moral distinction between Japanese civilians and soldiers to "win the war" and "save lives," we became the very monster we sought to destroy.
Saving lives, one recalls, was exactly the justification Hitler gave for bombing Holland.
How to fry your enemy
Putting America's atomic atrocities in historical perspective, Gordon Prather, a former nuclear weapons physicist at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and New Mexico's Sandia National Laboratory, offers justifiers of genocide a basic course in how to win wars and incinerate people:
"You may suppose that last September the world saw the worst-ever act of terror. Wrong! . . . We dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima – also not a military target – in order to terrorize millions of Japanese. Because Hiroshima was largely constructed of rice-paper and bamboo, the firestorms – and the casualties – caused by one nuke were comparable to what it took almost a million incendiary bombs to accomplish at Dresden."
Exactly.
Hearing that Japanese cities had been nuked, war-weary Americans couldn't have been happier.
Leading a war of hate and revenge unrivaled in the annals of the American killing machine (against an admittedly brutal Asian foe who was much more easy to despise than the Germans because he looked different from "us") was Harry S. Truman, an admitted racist.
In a letter to his wife-to-be, Truman confessed that he did, in fact, "hate Chinese and Japs . . . It is race prejudice I guess," he wrote. "But I am strongly of the opinion that Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America."
The passing of time didn't seem to soften Truman's heart.
Dropping a 7,200-degree Fahrenheit uranium bomb on a non-military target was, after all, proper payback to those "Jap savages," as Truman called them, for what their military had done to our military on Dec. 7, 1941.
Nothing could contain Truman's joy when, receiving word of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima, he gleefully exclaimed, "This is the greatest thing in history!"
Members of the "Greatest Generation" high-fiving one of history's greatest abominations.
But not everyone agreed.
Murray Kempton, a young American infantryman stationed in the Philippines preparing for the scheduled final assault on the Japanese home islands, remembers recoiling in horror at the news:
"Children died in Hiroshima, and America did it. . . . We cannot deny the distinction between killing a solder in the field and bombing a baby in the crib and not forfeit most of our claims for differentiating men from jungle beasts."
BBC commentator Jim Holt would later put it a bit more bluntly:
"It is always wrong to boil a baby even if lives are saved thereby."
The vapors of summer
Meanwhile, back at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Japanese versions of New York City's Ground Zero, only much bigger – the atomic cauldron bubbled and churned. There, just like in lower Manhattan, it was not easy picking up the pieces when there were so few pieces to pick up.
Almost five square miles of Hiroshima had literally been erased, more than 90 percent of its structures either smashed or damaged by the blast and subsequent firestorm that had been carried to it in the arms of the cheerfully named "Little Boy" bomb.
In Nagasaki, much the same sickening story.
Nearly two square miles in the heart of the city flattened; 12,000 buildings destroyed or damaged. All by Little Boy's fiendish fraternal twin, "Fat Man."
Then there were the people – or what was left of them.
Incinerated, liquefied, vaporized.
Kind of like the 3,056 victims of Sept. 11.
And what did we call this strategy of terror? Ironically enough, the Manhattan Project.
Manhattan. Where terrorists struck us 57 years later.
For several months back in the 1970s, I lived and worked in Hiroshima.
I stood at the hypocenter of Hiroshima's blast zone, in its downtown Peace Park. The spot is marked by an "Atomic Clock" that rises into the sky on girders of twisted steel, sounding its wailing warning every morning precisely at 8:15: Zero Hour.
One of my language teachers, Kajiyama Sensei, was a 6-year-old boy sitting in a Hiroshima schoolroom that bright August day. He told of seeing "a great, huge light" and hearing "a tremendous explosion." His school building collapsed but he managed to escape – only to rush home to find he no longer had a home, or a mother and older brother.
In Peace Park, I passed by the mass grave of unknown thousands of civilians – full of mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters – their ashes buried beneath a soft, grassy mound.
I also lived in Okinawa, where for three months in 1945, U.S. troops fought a meat-grinding battle to the death against entrenched Japanese forces, fearful that more of the same lay in store for them in an anticipated mainland invasion of Japan.
On my return stateside, I visited the USS Arizona, its white sepulcher resting atop a pitted, rusting hull that juts out of the gray water of Pearl Harbor, serving as the final resting place for 2,000 American sailors who died in that treacherous attack on Dec. 7, 1941.
A tale of two targets
Since 9-11, many have turned our national sentiment toward comparing the al-Qaida bombings of lower Manhattan to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
However, Pearl Harbor was a military target during wartime. Instead, we should be comparing the al-Qaida bombing of New York and D.C. with the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both of which were cruel annihilation of innocent civilians.
As columnist Philip Nobile writes, "Veterans wear their trunks too high when they link their march across the Pacific with criminal decisions made in Washington. . . . [T]he . . . assumption . . . that you had to be there to understand the massacres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . is weak. Douglas MacArthur lived through the war, and he deplored the bomb."
Indeed, from a strictly military vantage point, the supreme Allied commander in the Pacific felt that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "completely unnecessary."
MacArthur wasn't the only high-ranking officer who, during the course of the war, felt that use of the atomic bomb against Japan was wrong – militarily, morally, or both.
The supreme Allied commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1945 shared his "grave misgivings" about "that awful thing" he called the atomic bomb with Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
He told Stimson "Japan was already defeated," and "seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face,' " that "dropping the atomic bomb was "completely unnecessary," and that "our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was . . . no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."
ïÝAdmiral William "Bull" Halsey publicly said in 1946:
"The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. Why reveal a weapon like that to the world when it wasn't necessary? . . . [The scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before."
ïÝ Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Henry H. Arnold, spoke out in his memoirs with no ifs, ands, or A-bombs:
"It always appeared to us [meaning himself and other top Air Force brass] that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse."
ïÝChairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, expressed his personal revulsion at the decision to deploy the atomic bomb against helpless civilians:
"It is my opinion," he wrote in his memoirs, "that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. . . .
"My own feeling was that in being the first to use it we have adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."
Waving the white flag
Then, in 1946, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey issued a final report that went directly to the point:
"Based upon a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
Harry gave 'em hell
So why did Truman decide to go ahead and drop the bombs anyway, especially when the following was already known?
1. Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki, as Truman well knew, were, at that late stage of the war, significant military bases or production hubs.
Pure and simple, they both were densely populated cities that had been temporarily spared – so that they could serve as psychologically shocking showcases for the destructive power of American atomic weaponry.
2. The Japanese, as MacArthur wrote Herbert Hoover in 1959, "were beaten and seeking peace long before the bombs were dropped."
As early as the fall and winter of 1944, a hopelessly situated Japan was sending out peace feelers through various channels, including to the Swedes, Chinese, Russians and even the Vatican.
In January 1945, it proposed surrender terms, relayed through Gen. MacArthur to the Roosevelt White House, which turned out to be virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by both sides on the deck of the USS Missouri on Aug. 15, 1945.
Like the settlement arrived at in August, the January initiative proposed surrender on the one condition that had been a major obstacle for months in reaching a peaceful settlement of the war – namely, allowing Japan to retain its emperor.
Had Truman agreed earlier to Japan's stipulation that the survival of the imperial throne be guaranteed instead of playing to political pressures to give no quarter in peace talks, Japan would have most certainly surrendered earlier, the war would have been brought to an end, and thousands of lives on both sides would have been saved.
3. An invasion of Japan was not necessary to force its capitulation through a costly land assault.
Three out of the four Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined by many other military leaders, and prior to the dropping of the A-bombs, had concluded that Japan was vanquished and, thus, an invasion was not required.
J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, wrote in the journal Diplomatic History: "The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short period of time.
"It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it."
Those alternatives included a negotiated conditional peace settlement with Japan, allowing for retention of its emperor; staging a warning demonstration of the bomb before deploying it in combat (an option strongly favored by several Manhattan Project scientists who had worked on the bomb); or, as Leahy and others suggested, waiting for Japan to yield under the crushing pressure of air and naval bombardment.
4. The dropping of the atomic bombs did not appreciably save American lives.
Truman, at various times and places, had a habit of offering conflicting casualty estimates – ranging from 250,000 up to 500,000 – which he said would be incurred by U.S. forces in the event of an invasion of Japan. The half-a-million figure is probably the most famous, which Truman insisted had been provided him by Chief of the Army Gen. George C. Marshall.
To the contrary, the actual estimates of U.S. casualties in a variety of invasion scenarios were presented to Truman at a June 1945 meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a report prepared by the Joint War Plans Committee. Figures that the Joint Chiefs regarded as reliable fell at least 454,000 casualties short of Marshall's mythical number of 500,000.
Marshall himself subsequently authorized a report repudiating the bogus 500,000 casualty figure as "entirely too high."
Creative mathematics
Why are these numbers important?
Because if claims for the need for an invasion can be shown to be bogus, then the need for an invasion itself is also a sham. If, in reality, a much lower number of casualties were expected, then questions can legitimately be raised about the need to drop the atomic bombs at all.
In the end, then, despite all the good reasons not to drop the atomic bomb, Truman, the "little man in the White House," as he had been referred to – who was always afraid, even in adulthood, of being known as the "sissy" he had been called growing up – went ahead with the decision to melt 200,000 noncombatants.
Why? The answers are as varied as the kaleidoscope of colors produced by a nuclear explosion.
According to Nobile, the explanation was as transparent as it was criminal:
"Despite the advice . . . to change the surrender terms and warn the Japanese about the bomb and/or demonstrate it first, [Truman] simply wanted to nuke the Japanese, and fast. Truman's motives were money and the Soviets. The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion, and he desired to impress the rapacious Stalin with a show of American might and end the war before he invaded Japan."
Others, like attorney and author Kenneth Glazier, claim that Truman (quoting the president's own words), "regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used."
A self-eulogizing act
Paul Fussell, a World War II platoon leader-turned English professor, in an essay titled, Thank God for the Atom Bomb, said the A-bomb was dropped because, even though it killed mostly civilians, that was fine by him, given that it also wiped out roughly 10,000 Japanese soldiers and brought the war to a speedy end.
The legacy of the bomb is not that it "brought the boys home," but that it might bring the end for all of us.
In our day when George W. Bush, in the morally corrupted post-Hiroshima world of nuclear terror, speaks chillingly of developing a so-called "pre-emptive" first-strike strategy using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against perceived enemies, it behooves the rational and compassionate to remember that whether or not the A-bomb ended World War II, it ushered in an era of American military domination, megadeath and global revenge.
In the face of such unilateral U.S. power, the only strategy of our "adversaries" is to turn it back against itself.
Thus, the terrorist bombings of Sept. 11 may be a sign that the Manhattan Project has come home to roost.
www.arizonarepublic.com/viewpoints/articles/0805benson0804.htmlE-mail this article