Hiroshima

The old and difficult debate will evolve, but not end

From Dan Gardner:

Following this piece from July 26th, this is another guest post by British historian of Japan Christopher Harding. Be sure to check out his introduction to the fascinating history of a fascinating country, A History of Modern Japan. And subscribe to his Substack newsletter about Japanese history and all things Japan.

Eighty years ago today, at around 8.15 in the morning, a woman named Shinayo Dōbara was sitting on the tatami-mat floor of her home, breast-feeding her baby girl, Nobuko. Suddenly, everything around her was drenched in white light. What felt like an earthquake took hold of her house and shook it violently.

Shinayo ran out into her garden and looked across the city of Hiroshima lying just to her south:

There was blood-coloured smoke — looking just like a ball of fire — rising up and billowing out towards [me].

Neighbours soon set off for the city, to see what had happened. Shinayo stayed put, worrying about what might have become of her elder child Hiroshi, ten years of age, who had gone with his auntie to a clinic in the city.

Just after 11am, Hiroshi stumbled into the house, bleeding profusely from his head. He had been inside the clinic when what everyone assumed was an enormous bomb had fallen on the city. The clinic collapsed around him. He might have died, had his auntie not dragged him free of the debris. Hiroshi’s father, Tatsunobu, was nowhere to be seen.

Those of Shinayo’s neighbours who decided to head south into the centre of Hiroshima were met by scenes that reminded many who witnessed them of a vision of Buddhist hell.

People staggered along flaming streets, vomiting, as buildings ignited all around them and trees crashed to the ground. Flesh dripped off bodies and fell into bubbling asphalt. Thousands of blistered and bloated figures lay on the ground, some crying out for water and others unable to speak through mouths filling up with maggots and flies.

Many pushed carts in front of them as they walked, hoping to find husbands, wives, sons or daughters who might yet — somehow — be alive and in need of an improvised lift home.

Most of the city’s buildings had already ceased to exist: some 70,000 were destroyed by the blast and the fires that followed. Some of those still standing featured human silhouettes imprinted onto their walls.

One person spotted a pink cavalry horse standing in the street: its hide had been entirely torn away.

Theories and rumours began to do the rounds about precisely what kind of destruction had just been visited on Hiroshima. Perhaps a batch of oil drums had exploded all at once? Maybe, given the white flash, this was a magnesium weapon?

Within two days, the Japanese government knew the truth. They had sent a renowned physicist, Yoshino Nishina, to investigate the site.

In happier times, Nishina had studied at the Cavendish Laboratory with Ernest Rutherford — the founding father of nuclear physics — and later in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr. Now he was tasked with testing human bones in Hiroshima for evidence of what he most feared: the Americans had beaten Japan to the Bomb.

Japan was nowhere near acquiring atomic weapons by the end of the war, but the concept was familiar to physicists around the world.

Remarkably, Nishina’s grim confirmation of the scientific and technological leap made by the USA had little effect at first on the way that Japan conducted its war. Emperor Hirohito came out more strongly than before in favour of ending the war, but the hope remained strong amongst some of Japan’s leaders that Stalin might be willing to serve as an intermediary between Japan and the other Allies.

That hope died on 8th August when Japan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Satō Naotake, finally got the meeting he had been asking for with Stalin’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov.

Satō was getting ready to make his pitch for Soviet help in talking to America when instead Molotov shushed him, sat him down and read out the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan. Within hours, Soviet troops were pouring over the border into Japanese-occupied Manchuria.

Even when, on 9th August, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki there were those in the upper echelons of Japan’s armed forces who were determined to fight on. Most of Japan’s cities had been devastated by American firebombing in recent months. The country — so ran the argument — could and must survive these atomic bombings, too.

This extraordinary willingness of Japan’s top brass to sacrifice as many civilian lives as it might take ended up becoming one of the strongest arguments for the use of atomic weapons against Japan.

Japan was taking — as well as inflicting — enormous military casualties around the Asia-Pacific and being steadily beaten back towards its own home islands. The population was on its knees, sick and starving. And yet still the small coterie of individuals in Tokyo with the power to end the war refused to do so.

That meant that the Allies, and principally the USA, might have to launch an invasion of Japan’s home islands — code-named “Operation Downfall.” Given how vigorously small Pacific islands had been defended, the likely intensity of fighting on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu and then its main island of Honshu was truly terrible to contemplate.

American estimates of likely Allied casualties varied between 250,000 and over a million. In truth, it was impossible to know at the time — or in retrospect — how fiercely Japanese soldiers and civilians might resist or what sort of weaponry they had left to fight with. It was certainly reasonable for American planners to expect heavy casualties on both the American and the Japanese sides.

With this in mind, dealing an already weakened Japan a profound psychological blow via the use of an atomic weapon — underscoring the Potsdam Declaration’s threat of “prompt and utter destruction” — might tip the country’s leaders over into surrendering and thereby save enormous numbers of lives — in a war that Japan had already clearly lost.

A second reason to drop the bomb was to give America leverage in its postwar relationship with the Soviet Union.

Both President Truman and his Secretary of State James Byrnes believed that there was some advantage here — though it’s wrong to imagine that the Nagasaki bomb was a response to the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan. The timing fits, but the decision to use that second weapon had already been taken. The schedule was dictated by operational conditions rather than diplomatic necessity.

There are at least four important counter-arguments here: two strong ones and two — in my opinion — not so strong.

First, the Allies were aware that Japan was nearing the end of its resources. There was no need to try to conclude the war in some great cataclysmic moment, whether that be an invasion of the home islands or the dropping of an atomic bomb. A naval blockade plus assurances about the future of the Emperor might, in time, have been enough.

Second, “prompt and utter destruction” could have been advertised to Japan’s leaders via a demonstration test of an atomic weapon, perhaps out in the Pacific. Critics of this course of action worried that a failed test would ruin the credibility of America’s threat. Still, it was an option.

A third counter-argument focuses on the enormous number of innocent people killed — many tens of thousands. But this ignores the huge toll in lives being taken by American use of napalm against cities like Tokyo. 100,000 people were killed in a single night back in March 1945, by the use of incendiaries against Japan’s capital. That doesn’t make Hiroshima and Nagasaki any less terrible, but it puts the atom bomb in context.

The other weaker argument is that the use of these weapons set a dangerous precedent. But it’s possible to think about this the other way around: the grim reality of atomic weapons, widely reported on in the months and years after the war, added to people’s determination around the world not to allow conflicts of the future to go nuclear.

The question of whether it was ‘right’ or not to use atomic weapons against Japan, in order to bring WWII to a close, will likely never be finally settled. Instead, it will probably shift depending on how nuclear weapons end up shaping our world in the decades to come. In the light of those events, whatever they may be, Hiroshima and Nagasaki will no doubt come to look different.

Meanwhile in Japan, the generation whose bodies still bear the scars of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is steadily dying out. Those left were the same ages as Shinayo Dōbara’s children — baby Nobuko, her 5-year old sister Hatsuyo and 10-year old Hiroshi — when the bombs were dropped.

All three of Shinayo’s children survived. She became a grandmother and lived until the age of 96.

Her husband Tatsunobu was not so lucky.

Tatsunobu had been working, that morning of 6th August, just one kilometre from the hypocentre — the ground above which the bomb detonated. The blast wave threw him into the air and he lost consciousness. He eventually made it back to his family, but with a large hole in his head and half of his body turned purple.

Sad and increasingly hopeless days followed, as Shinayo wiped the pus from her husband’s wound while he lay still on the tatami. When he died, on 19^th August, his family took his body down to the river and cremated it.