On this day in 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, Japan. Three days earlier, on the 6th of August, we had dropped one on Hiroshima. It seems that the bombing of Hiroshima has achieved a kind of priority in the popular imagination, perhaps for the same reason that Babe Ruth's 60-homer season in 1927 has: it would be done again, but not often, and that was the first time.
Efforts to defend the morality of these attacks have probably benefited from the primacy afforded the bombing of Hiroshima. If the preeminent attack was justified, then it may seem that the subordinate one must be granted the same certificate. When the two events are considered equally and separately, however, isn't the second attack, three days after the first, impossible to defend? The Hiroshima bomb instantly killed about 80,000 civilians when it exploded just above the city center during the morning rush hour. The destruction and horror were unimaginable. Japan's formal surrender occurred less than four weeks later, on September 2. I don't think anyone seriously believes that, but for the destruction of Nagasaki three days later, Japan would have fought on. It's high command had not yet been able to evaluate what had happened at Hiroshima when Nagasaki was incinerated. Japan's surrender was a foregone conclusion on August 6 if not before. Nevertheless around 40,000 civilians were killed in the moments after the US bombed Nagasaki on August 9.
It's natural to blame someone and the obvious candidate is Truman. "The buck stops here," the sign on his desk famously stated, and it did not hurt him politically to take responsibility for the atomic bombings. Since he accepted the credit from American voters, he took the arrows of the moral philosophers. When, for example, he was to receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford, one of its faculty, philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe, strenuously objected to honoring someone she regarded as a war criminal and mass murderer:
I have long been puzzled by the common cant about President Truman's courage. . . . Light has come to me lately: the term is an acknowledgment of the truth. Mr Truman was brave because, and only because, what he did was so bad. But I think the judgment unsound. Given the right circumstances (for example that no one whose opinion matters will disapprove), a quite mediocre person can do spectacularly wicked things without thereby becoming impressive.
To speak of Truman having done "spectacularly wicked things" is to make of him a bloodthirsty fiend, which seems somewhat at odds with the designation "quite mediocre person" in the same sentence. But having read today this article, augmented by this Twitter thread, both from the hand of Alex Wellerstein, I think the evident contradiction is apt. There was to the "decision" to use nuclear weapons against Japan a certain shocking casualness. Take the obscenely brief interval between the two attacks. The determining factor here seems to have been weather forecasts. The plan had been for there to be a week between the attacks, so that Japan could assess its hopeless situation. But the likelihood of overcast skies above the targeted cities caused the date of the first attack to be pushed back in time, and the date of the second attack to be moved forward, with the result that the interval was almost extinguished. It seems no one had the moral energy to point out that the strategy relating to the interval was far more important than the one pertaining to the weather forecast. In the event, it was cloudy on August 9. The targeted city was Kokura, but, arriving there midmorning, the crew could not visually see the city, a requirement stipulated in their order. They proceeded to Nagasaki, where it was also cloudy, but, on what was to have been the final pass before aborting the mission, the bombardier claimed to find a seam in the clouds through which he could see the intended target, the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works. The bomb was dropped but detonated about three-quarters of a mile from the munitions plant—close enough to destroy it, but also directly over what Wellerstein calls "a mostly civilian district." The US military compiled a list of buildings within 3000 feet of the detonation point. It included: Nagasaki prison, Mitsubishi Hospital, Nagasaki Medical College, Chinzei High School, Shiroyama School, Urakami Cathedral, Blind and Dumb School, Yamazato School, Nagasaki University Hospital, Mitsubishi Boys' School, Nagasaki Tuberculosis Clinic, and Keiho Boys' High School. "Ugh," comments Wellerstein.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the facts surrounding "the decision to drop" concerns Truman's position outside the chain of command and control. His policy was one of nonintervention with existing military plans. He was, however, shocked by the damage report from Hiroshima and seems also to have been taken by surprise when told that Nagasaki had been struck on August 9. It's not as if he had nothing else to worry about. The Potsdam Conference, for example, had concluded on August 2. When on August 10 he was informed by General Leslie Groves that another atomic bomb would be ready in about a week, Truman immediately ordered there would be no more nuclear attacks on Japanese targets without his "express authority." The picture that emerges is of the gravest "decisions" being accomplished only by a kind of bureaucratic momentum that no one, including the President, could or would stop until, as we say, "mistakes had been made." It wasn't very much different from what people who work for any large organization will recognize as a fact of life within a bureaucracy: if you have enough meetings about something, eventually it will happen, though it won't be clear who really decided and when. Truman took responsibility for decisions he didn't make—this was hardly "courageous," as he allowed it to be portrayed, since anything perceived as hastening victory was politically popular, and it would have been startling then, as it is now, to discover how little authority he exercised over the gravest of matters.
The article and Twitter thread hyperlinked above aren't very long, make for gripping reading, and are interesting for other reasons besides those discussed here. For example, why Nagasaki? No one really seems to understand why it was so high up the list of targets. After the war, the city's military and strategic importance was exaggerated by our military, perhaps out of embarrassment over how haphazard was the selection of targets. It was cloudy in Kokura.
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