“War is hell,” William Tecumseh Sherman said. That’s why, 151 years ago, Sherman led his march to the Sea — because ending a war is a truly noble cause.
Ronald Reagan, on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day, echoed that truth. As he honored the “Boys of Pointe du Hoc,” he praised them as “the heroes who helped end a war.”
Like Gen. Sherman’s March in 1864 and Gen. Eisenhower’s Operation Overlord in 1944, President Truman’s decision to drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima 70 years ago today was aimed at the noble cause of ending a war.
Sherman’s defenders argue that his army’s “foraging” and property destruction was necessary to end the war, and thus justified — because it saved lives and abbreviated the sufferings of war.
Truman’s defenders make the same sort of argument: The Pacific theater in World War II was as hellish as war gets. Many U.S. sailors and soldiers who had survived until the summer of 1944 were pretty sure they were about to die in a protracted bloody invasion of mainland Japan.
On that score — on behalf of the possibly tens or hundreds of thousands of GIs who were spared death, dismemberment or further hell of war — most Americans believe it was right for the U.S. to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The strikes killed at least 129,000 Japanese, mostly civilians, including women and children.
The argument here has a general premise and specific premise. First, that killing innocent civilians is acceptable when necessary to end a war, and when it will save more lives than it costs. Second, that without the nuclear bombs, the war with Japan would have continued for a long time, with massive bloodshed.
The first claim amounts to this: Good ends can justify evil means. (Alternatively, it posits that Japanese civilians were not innocent.) This is troubling, but it would also be troubling for a commander in chief to consign so many of his own men to death in battles that could be avoided.
But the second claim is on shaky ground too. It’s not clear at all that the bomb was needed to end the war. “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,” wrote Adm. William Leahy, Truman’s chief military adviser. “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”
It should be noted here that our “bombing with conventional weapons,” in both Tokyo and Berlin, involved the deliberate targeting of civilian populations.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower agreed: “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
In his memoirs, Eisenhower wrote that he told War Secretary Henry Stimson that the bomb was “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.'”
A 1946 bombing survey ordered by President Truman concluded “certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped….”
If these opinions were correct, then dropping the bombs was simply murder. Other experts disagree, arguing that Japan would have fought to the last man — indeed to the last woman and child.
The future is not ours to predict, though. We don’t know what would have happened had we not dropped the bomb. We didn’t know back then exactly what would happen if we did.
To push the button — to murder tens of thousands, and leave countless others homeless, deformed, sick and orphaned — involves a pragmatic calculation that requires clairvoyance, which no human possesses.
In this fog of war, then, what can guide us? Moral principle. The rule — whether you hold it as absolute or not — that deliberately killing civilians is wrong, is at the center of Western ethics, even in times of war.
Harry Truman murdered, orphaned, displaced and dismembered hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese. He did so deliberately — they were not collateral damage. They were his targets. No form of accounting can weigh the lives of soldiers you put at risk against the lives of defenseless innocents you kill. That is not a calculus humans are fit to undertake.
Seventy years ago, Harry Truman and the men of the Enola Gay helped end World War II. Let us hope those bombings also mark the end of nuclear war.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
