History 280D: The Bomb, the Bombers, and the Bombed

Professor Diane Clemens

Hiroshima: A Critical Reconstruction

Michael Hurt

May 15, 1997

Flashpoint

Hiroshima was incinerated by a nuclear fireball on August 6, 1945 at 8:16 am Hiroshima time. The explosion came from a uranium fission gun type bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” with a yield of 12,500 tons of TNT.[1] Official sources like the 1946 Strategic Bombing Survey estimate between seventy and eighty thousand people were killed instantly.[2] Sources in Japan place the death toll around 100,000, with 140,000 dead by the end of 1945. In comparison, for those killed in the Nagasaki blast range around the number 35,000.

To the present day popular misconceptions surrounding the dropping of the atomic bomb abound. The 1946 Strategic Bombing Survey concluded:

It cannot be said...that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace of the necessity of surrender. The decision to seek ways and means to terminate the war, influenced in part by knowledge of the low sate of popular morale, had taken place in May 1945 by the Supreme War Guidance Council.[3]

Military leaders at the time questioned not only the necessity of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, but its moral implications as well. Significantly, the commanders of the Army Air Force, the Navy, and the Army felt the dropping of the bomb immoral in light of the fact that the Japanese were already defeated, and had been clearly making overtures towards surrender for months before August. The combined Joint Chiefs of Staff, both British and American, urged a clarification of surrender terms that the Japanese (indeed, the Emperor himself) had stated they would require in order to lay down their arms, a clarification to which no one was opposed, in principle. Indeed, this guarantee was offered when the Japanese actually did finally surrender. Even the most die-hard of the hawks, Major General Curtis Lemay (who was characterized by fellow commander Brigadier General Bonner Fellers as the perpetrator of “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings on non-combatants in all history” for his firebombings of Tokyo) minced no words about what he thought of the atomic bomb’s role in bringing the war to a close: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.”[4] Indeed, Russian entry and postwar diplomacy diplomatic relations were central issues, looming large in the minds of Truman and his hawkish, calculating closest advisor, James Byrnes, as the day of Russian entry drew closer. However, to military leaders like Dwight Eisenhower (who expressed that he “disliked seeing the United States take the lead in introducing something into war something as horrible and destructive as this new weapon was described to be...”[5]), the bomb was akin to chemical and biological weapons, and these were men who had been trained according to more traditional standards of warfare. The killing of non-combatants, if anything, was unprofessional and dishonorable. Former President Richard Nixon, recalling a conversation with General Douglas MacArthur, made this clear: “MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off, which I think speaks well of him.”[6]

Popular conceptions of the military overlook the fact that “military culture” is often far less hawkish than the civilian leaders who control them, these civilian leaders often having little understanding of professional codes of conduct governing what is considered acceptable methods of waging war, while lacking the exposure to harsh reality that death and mass killing that military leaders possess. Even Hitler is theorized to have abhorred the use of gas in military operations because of a bad mustard gas experience in World War I. Obviously, this did not deter him from using Zyklon B gas to exterminate the Jews; although not informed by moral qualms per se, his strategic decisions seem to have been influenced by personal experience. Navy Admiral Leahy’s objections, however, were much more firmly based in a code of professional moral conduct: “I was not taught to make war in that fashion...and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”[7] More than an indictment of the military, the use of the atomic bomb on civilian populations is damning of the values which everyday citizens possess, who have no real idea of what it means to kill, and even less what it means to kill on a grand scale:

...the culture which set the terms of reference for Harry Truman - and especially James Byrnes - obviously did not include ethical constraints sufficient to give serious pause to their decision-making. They drew their ideas and vision - good and bad - from the culture, ethics, morality we all imbibe.[8]

With this, it is important to understand the nature of “bureaucratic and organizational dynamics” when considering any theories that the bomb was the mere natural extension of a hungry military power structure. This is true in the present as well. Before the Gulf War, President Bush and a small group of advisors pushed through the decision to go to war against the counsel of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, and the Defense Department.[9] Indeed, General Colin Powell’s refusal to “complete his mission” and attempt to kill Saddam Hussein was a source of surprise and scandal for the American media and public. It did not fit the popular image of the warrior-general. It did not fit into the set of standards possessed by the public, and the collective surprise comes from the sudden realization of this fact.

This is the reason many Americans cannot deal with the bomb, besides the fact that what most Americans understand about the atomic bomb - on both sides of the morality issue - is deeply based on myth and distorted fact. The ethical questions which we, as Americans, must ask of ourselves are too difficult, but at least there is an explanation, even if there is no true justification. The motivation for American engagement with the enemy, indeed even the construction of an enemy in the first place, came from a Japanese attack, and much of the anger in which American excesses occurred was largely a reaction to not only Japan’s perceived “treachery,” but actual extreme and excessive brutality.

For the Japanese, however, wartime actions took place in the context of a feeling of justification for rule over Asia, as the inherent right and destiny of a superior race and culture. There can be no equivocation of this with the motivations of the United States, no matter what occasional instances of brutality took place. During “heat of battle,” as goes the common cliché, excesses are inevitable. This is a reasonable expectation, as the greater process in which war crimes take place is one of organized death and destruction. This is the argument used by the Japanese to explain the Rape of Nanjing - the Imperial Army, after weeks of prolonged and bloody fighting, were venting their frustrations - regrettable, but understandable. However, the critical item left out of this historical construction is the fact that ideals of inherent racial superiority were taught to the Japanese from youth, the brutality they displayed was purposely cultivated and instilled in the soldiers as a desirable trait, and all of the actions committed by the Kwantung Army took place with the implicit, and often explicit approval of military leaders in Tokyo. That is the difference. Even the German military was not renowned for its brutality on the battlefield - most of Nazi Germany’s infamy stems from the actions undertaken by a relative few, even if it was tacitly (alas, some would now say actively) approved by the majority. Examples used in arguments which try to equivocate all military training by stating that military establishments want to create the same type of soldiers, and implicitly condone the same means and methods towards winning the war oversimplify the issues. Events such as My Lai are often cited to point out the United States’ own inherent capacity to brutalize, but the equivocation is a false one. The crucial distinction is one of ideology. What Lt. Calley represented to the American people was an aberration against most people’s (including some of the soldiers with the Lieutenant) set of moral standards. Most telling is the fact that the rape and killing in the village of My Lai were stopped by a helicopter gunner who leveled his weapon at a superior officer and ordered him to “cease and desist.” This is quite a distinction from the Japanese military structure, which not only tolerated cruel acts of torture, rape, and murder from its soldiers, but actively condoned it. Such behavior was not an departure from commonly-held values, but rather it was standard, accepted practice; it was the norm, and not an aberration. The “three alls” slogan which guided the actions of Japanese soldiers in Nanjing is but one example of this: “kill all, burn all, destroy all” was more than just an empty battle cry; it was standard procedure.[10]

But it is not just war crimes as such that are the focus of this paper. It is the conflict between what such cruel acts represent to most countries in the Pacific Rim, versus how they are represented in Japan itself. What is missing from the Japanese end is a critical exploration of what made these barbarous acts of ritualized violence possible in the first place. The tenets of Japanese wartime ideology remain largely unexamined, and the rest of Asia still fears a resurgence. If Japan cannot deal with its past, what will happen to its future? This is the question the world asks about Germany, but there has been so much symbolic atonement that the question has lost its urgency. However, in the case of Japan, the question remains: Is Japanese wartime ideology really dead, or is it just lying dormant? Related to this question is the fact that many in Asia look at the history of Japan as one of a people congenitally predisposed to expansion and invasion. Countries like China, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and many Pacific Island nations quite understandably do not trust present-day Japan. Linking Japan’s flawed historical representations of itself in WWII with a disturbing increase in the amount of recent nationalistic posturing and symbolic reassertion of pre-war land claims, Asia is understandably more angry, as well as more nervous.

For Japan, August 6, 1945 has become the day when it became a martyr, sacrificed in the flames of a nuclear pyre, quite literally a burnt offering in the name of world peace. It stands as a symbol to the rest of the world of the nuclear horror which awaits us all. While this construction of history is valid and desirable on some levels, one problem remains: Japan has constructed its dominant historical discourse in such a way that does not hold itself accountable for its actions during the Pacific War. In fact, the reconstruction of a history placing Hiroshima at the literal and figurative epicenter of World War II creates a discourse that cannot include any in-depth discussion of the Pacific War, as this decenters the issue uncomfortably for the Japanese people. This is similar to the United States’ inability to reconstruct the Hiroshima narrative after the war, even in light of ample historical evidence that would suggest that American common conceptions of the war are founded on a shaky bed of myths. But equating the two cases of historical amnesia distorts the crucial difference. Japan, an imperialist state with delusions of grandeur arguably far bigger than Nazi Germany’s, justified by ideologies of inherent racial and cultural superiority, began the war of aggression that necessitated the entry of the United States. The fact that America’s use of the atomic bomb on Japan was unequivocally unjustified is, in a crucial way, besides the point - a separate issue. An exchange of apologies for actions taken in the war should not take place on a quid pro quo basis. Rather, it should take place as the result of a sincere, critical rethinking of the histories that presently legitimates each country’s existence as a nation, although this seems unlikely in the near future. What the present analysis will hopefully make clear is that the divergent historical discourses surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima converge in such a way as to make Hiroshima inordinately the focus of the Pacific War, obfuscating the fact that Japan committed a litany of war crimes and atrocities on an horrible scale, in an unprovoked war of domination that was responsible for the deaths of millions of non-combatants on an unprecedented scale, even in comparison to the Nazi Holocaust. This obfuscation allows the belief that Japan should be viewed as a victim in the Pacific War in a general sense (as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima), rather than in a more appropriate limited sense that would allow, or even force Japan to claim the full gamut of responsibility for its actions in World War II, even as it fully acknowledges the human tragedy of mass civilian bombing and its effects on the Japanese people.

As the temporal distance between then and now increases, so does the malleability of the historical discourses about the meaning of Hiroshima and the atomic bomb. Interestingly, moral indignation over the bombing of Hiroshima overshadows Nagasaki, which is arguably more of a “war crime” than is Hiroshima. Even historians who would attempt to justify the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima would be hard-pressed to offer a convincing justification for the second atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Even with an explanation that the atomic bomb was significant because it was a “first,” the fact that the civilian bombing of Tokyo (which may seem to hold a more important position as a “first” - the first mass bombing aimed at the civilian population ) is left almost entirely out of the discourse again points the fact that a great deal is being ignored by a discourse ostensibly having to do with the unethical nature of bombing civilian populations. However, why is “The Night Tokyo Burned,”[11] when a number of civilians comparable to the number initially killed in Hiroshima lost their loves to the bombs of the B-29s, generally left out of this type of discourse? What is significant is that the Tokyo bombing marks a change in United States strategy from a policy of “precision” tactical bombing to one making civilians themselves the target. The Americans were frustrated with the results of high altitude bombings runs that never seemed to destroy their targets; indeed, out of twenty-two raids on Japanese industrial targets, only one factory had been destroyed, with a loss of over 102 B-29s.[12] General Curtis Lemay was responsible for the revamping of targeting policy, but he still met with a significant amount of objection to bombing civilian populations. Many people were rightly resisting the moral shift that must occur with the decision to commit acts of immorality on the magnitude then being contemplated. However, the justification to the XXI Bomber Command neatly reconstructed the Japanese citizen as fair game:

“These operations are not conducted as terror raids against the civilian population. The Japanese economy depends heavily on home industries carried on in its cities close to major factory areas. By destroying these feeder industries, the flow of vital parts could be curtailed and war production disorganized.”[13]

With the redefinition of the Japanese civilian as a legitimate military target, almost any action was justifiable on these grounds. Indeed, in making the decision for using the weapon against Japan, the Interim Committee - set up to make recommendations to the president on the atomic issue - consciously made the decision to target civilians even as they claimed that they were limiting themselves to military targets. The redefinition of “civilian” as “military” was clear in their guidelines for a selecting targets. It would be a “vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.”[14] Targeting planners now could have some justification for the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations with the explicit intent of destroying it - people were no more than cogs in the war machine, and a legitimate target for obliteration. That is, anything and everything became an object worth destroying in the name of winning the war.

What occurred was a significant moral shift, an ethical slide so slight that the policymakers barely felt it. The Interim Committee, in laying out the guidelines for the selection of the atomic bomb by the Targeting Committee, stated that the purpose of an atomic bomb drop on a civilian population would be “...to make a profound psychological impression on as many inhabitants as possible.”[15] This moral shift occurred well before the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima on August 9th; there had been precedent. Hiroshima did not seem to mark a “first” in terms of a moral/ethical question, and it was not really even a matter of scale, as some estimates of the total death toll from the Tokyo firebombings claimed that between 84,000 and 124,000 civilians died in those two long nights,[16] in comparison to estimates between 80,000 and 100,000 for the Hiroshima bombing, and between 35,000 and 60,000 in Nagasaki.[17] The Tokyo firebombings cannot seem to compete with the “specialness” of Hiroshima.

Might it have something to do with the fact that the sensibilities of the nuclear age have affected the way all of us looks back on Hiroshima and its historical meaning? It is significant that in present-day terminology, the Tokyo firebombings are considered “conventional.” It reflects something about warfare that has subtly altered the meaning of warfare forever. It reflects the fact that mass death and civilian body counts have become an integral part of warfare, something that cannot be avoided, and that has to be factored into a concept of “acceptable losses.” When Japan bombed Shanghai in 1937, the world was outraged. The image of a half-burned baby crying among the ruins of a bombed train station shocked the world.

[18] The reactions to this was indicative of the fact that civilian bombing as wartime policy, as begun by Japan with the bombing of Chinese cities in 1937, was condemned as a moral aberration, a reprehensible act. The critical process was the gradual slide into the “barbarism” for which the Allies had previously condemned Germany and Japan. In June 1938, the Senate denounced the Japan’s “inhuman bombing of civilian populations” because it was a “crime against humanity.” Similar statements came out of the League of Nations and Great Britain. However, this would all change when Germany began the incendiary bombing of Germany in 1942. By 1945, the Americans had changed policy as well, finally giving up on “precision” bombing.[19] They started it, but we finished it - with a vengeance.

Hiroshima is the mental marker for the world’s baptism by fire into a new paradigm of fear. This is why the historical moment cum monument that is Hiroshima is so significant in the eyes of the world. Although no more than a shift in method of killing, it was a marked difference in scale. Not in absolute terms, however, for neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were all that unusual for the scale of killing happening “conventionally” at the time. However, the sheer amount of destructive power which human beings had to wield against others had increased to an unimaginable scale. The real moral slide was not as sudden as popular memory would have us believe. Escalation in the scale of killing had been occurring gradually throughout the war, as the “rise of American air power” increased at what seemed like an exponential rate. Many histories of the Pacific War have tended to create Hiroshima as a climactic final act in a drama of tragedy (or triumph, depending on one’s point of view), and have given Hiroshima too much specific meaning in their historical narratives.

For the United States, it was a calculated decision made for the sake of both America and Japan - it saved “a million lives.” We needed to justify the dropping of the bomb to ourselves, as well as to the world. At the same time, the special status of the bomb as a new, atomic weapon separates it from the relatively “conventional” events surrounding it. Especially as the historical moment recedes further into the mists of time and memory, it is harder to contextualize events such as Hiroshima. Preserving a sense of historical context around an event is much more difficult to do than it is to simply present the event itself. In the United States, the dropping of the bomb is simply the event which ended the war. There is no other context - or if one is offered, it is simply dismissed as “revisionist.” This was the objection many in the conservative power structure had to a fully contextualized exhibit of the Enola Gay. A political cartoon succinctly summed up the conservative political zeitgeist: As a small child and her mother look up at the Enola Gay in the Smithsonian’s toned-down exhibit, the child asks, “Who, what, when, where, & why?” The mother admonishes her, “Please! It’s just something to look at.”[20] Newt Gingrich, expressing a slightly more intricate - but equally dubious - objection to the “revisionists”, explained in a speech to the National Governors’ Association that “The Enola Gay fight was a fight, in effect, over the reassertion by most Americans that they’re sick and tired of being told by some cultural elite that they ought to be ashamed of their country.”[21] Ironically such objections are no different from Japan’s own, and reflect both country’s shared unwillingness to allow Hiroshima to be contextualized by “revisionist” historians. Such reworkings of the past are crucial towards preserving a sense of moral righteousness and national pride in the present. Such reworkings of history are viewed as harmful to the nation and to the people, and the element of truth becomes a secondary issue. The history is never judged on its own terms, but rather on its potential deleterious effects. The United States has a deep interest in believing that the use of the atom bomb on Hiroshima was not only strategically sound, but morally justifiable. To that limited extent, we do answer the “how” and “why” of the bomb question - if perhaps a bit too patly, and with little regard for even the most reasoned historical arguments that happen to fly in the face of popular belief. But the Japanese have the same malady affecting their willingness to critically assess the meaning of the bomb in history.

Despite the fact that Hiroshima and the bomb occupy such a large space in the collective mind of the Japanese people, they themselves rarely consider the question - “Why?” when looking back upon why the bomb was dropped on them. What historical factors could explain what led up to August 6, 1945? Hiroshima is considered only in terms of the event itself, devoid of meaningful historical context. The rest of the world is guilty of the same crime, and the variety of different and specific historiographies about Hiroshima all suffer from the same affliction: Hiroshima is not considered in terms of the history that brought about the event, but instead, of the world that the event engendered. This is not the way we think about Auschwitz, nor the Warsaw Ghetto, nor even the internment of the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast during the War. However, in the process of using Hiroshima as a historical parable with which to warn the world about “things to come,” Japan has used the perpetration of an inhumane act upon itself as a cover with which to obscure its own inhumane deeds. In the same way, the continued justifying and rationalizing elements inherent in America’s discourse about the decision to drop the bomb is the salve, the medicine that keeps our gorge down - and keeps us sane. However, for Japan, the country on the other end of the fission gun, Hiroshima is the shield behind which historical denial and forgetting can and must take place. Japan’s role as the first in Asia to practice civilian bombing (Shanghai, 1937), its actions in the Rape of Nanking, or the forced sexual enslavement of thousands of women are historical elements which deeply threaten Japan’s understanding of itself as a nation and as a “civilized” people. This is the spiritual struggle which Germany was forced to endure, and a journey the Japanese have yet to begin.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Metaphor and Allegory

Why is it that a critical look at Japan’s history in the Pacific War remains outside the realm of possibility for most? This is not to say that there is not a sizable portion of Japanese who do not look upon their past as critically as most other Asian nations do, but the differences between official Japanese histories of the war continues to raise the figurative hackles of almost all the nations in Asia that are not Japan. The fact that it is even a historical debate whether Japan even started the war, or that use of the term “aggression” is a source of controversy among those who write Japanese textbooks points to a fundamental problem in Japan’s representation of itself to itself. While the more sweeping the generalization about the percentage of a group who subscribe to a certain point of view, the less veritable the claim, it is reasonable to assert that the majority of people in Japan do not assess Japan’s role in the Second World War critically. This does not even speak to a large number of highly vocal, visible, and influential leaders who actively deny that Japan had any fault in the war, and continue to use their power to perpetuate the imperialist, racist ideologies that were taught to them. These are the ideologies that not only justified the war, but helped bring it about in the first place. They are, to the people who still subscribe to them, articles of faith that, if