“Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?” So asked Winston Churchill in September 1924. Twenty-one years later he got something of an answer, as the U.S. bombed Japan, instantly killing as many as 70,000 people in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and 40,000 in Nagasaki three days
“Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?” So asked Winston Churchill in September 1924. Twenty-one years later he got something of an answer, as the U.S. bombed Japan, instantly killing as many as 70,000 people in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and 40,000 in Nagasaki three days later.
In the 80 years since, the world has debated whether President Harry Truman and Prime Minister Churchill were morally right to use the weapons against civilians, even if the direct result was to end the most terrible war in human history. The two men are regularly accused of being war criminals.
They certainly had no qualms. As Churchill recalled in the sixth volume of his World War II memoirs, “Triumph and Tragedy” (1953), the decision “was never even an issue.” “There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.”
It is remarkable, moreover, how little Christian morality and the concept of a just war were invoked on either side of the debate. Such issues seem not to have entered the conscious thinking of the major Allied participants. The reason, it’s easy to assume, is that they were so thoroughly Christianized that they hardly needed to invoke Augustine and Aquinas in their deliberations. A similar grouping in a pagan society wouldn’t have bothered asking about civilian casualties at all—as for example Iran’s leaders, intent on destroying Israel, don’t bother to do today.
In the postwar world, however, some have argued that Japan was about to surrender and that it was therefore morally wrong to deploy this most destructive of weapons.
Yet Japan was preparing for a fanatical defense of its home islands once its empire was conquered. In his own memoirs, “Year of Decisions,” Truman wrote that he believed an invasion of Japan would have cost half a million American lives. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of State James Byrnes judged that to be conservative, with both estimating the total casualties at one million. Such figures are supported by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose August 1944 study reported that it would “cost half a million American lives and many more that number in wounded.” Even as late as July 1945, the Allies were suffering 7,000 casualties a week fighting the Japanese.
In addition to kamikaze pilots, the Japanese were planning to use flying bombs, suicide attack boats, midget suicide submarines and navy swimmers trained to be human mines, all of which had been used in battle at Okinawa and the Philippines. The U.S. 10th Army had taken nearly three months to capture Okinawa, and it cost the American ground forces 7,343 lives. Another 31,807 had been wounded and 239 were missing. Further, 36 ships were sunk and 368 were damaged, 763 aircraft were lost, 4,907 seamen were killed and another 4,824 were wounded. The Japanese meanwhile lost some 110,000.
With U.S. attrition rates that high for an outlying island, it is safe to assume that the invasion of the sacred Japanese mainland would have been far heavier. The assault on Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands had killed nearly 7,000 U.S. Marines and wounded 20,000. On June 8, 1945, the Japanese government had pledged to Emperor Hirohito that “the nation would fight to the bitter end,” and Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki supported the army’s plan to carry this out, calling it “the way of the warrior and the path of the patriot.”
Even after several square miles of central Nagasaki were destroyed by the second bomb, army chief Yoshijiro Umezu concluded that Japan still had the “ability to deal a smashing blow to the enemy” and that “it would be inexcusable to surrender unconditionally.” The chief of the naval staff wrote: “We do not believe it possible that we will be defeated.” It took the emperor to state, in his Imperial Rescript on Aug. 14, that “the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives.”
Some critics have argued that the U.S. should have demonstrated the awesome power of the weapons in some uninhabited region of the world. Yet the Allies only had two bombs, with several months before the next ones came into production. No number of scientists and other observers would have persuaded the hard men of the Japanese general staff, either. It took both devastated cities to convince the politicians and emperor.
Since Japan also had plans to kill Allied prisoners of war as the fighting approached the camps where they were being held, its swift surrender saved tens of thousands of American and British lives, military and civilian. Crucially, the bombs also saved hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives, because even more Japanese had died in the bombing of Tokyo than in the blast at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The Allied navies would have continued their blockade too, leading to mass starvation.
It took a brave former president of the Japanese Medical Association to state that “when one considers the possibility that the Japanese military would have sacrificed the entire nation if it were not for the atomic bomb attack, then this bomb might be described as having saved Japan.”
Mr. Roberts, a member of the House of Lords, is author of “Churchill: Walking With Destiny.”
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