Ahead of the planned invasion of Japan, the Pentagon ordered thousands of Purple Hearts, a stockpile for the survivors of a battle expected to claim upwards of a million American sailors, soldiers, and marines. Were Matthew Walther in charge, he at least would have put those medals to prompt use.
The conservative writer condemns the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima that mooted the mainland invasion. “Indiscriminate targeting of civilians in warfare,” he concludes in his essay, “is always wrong.” That’s a fair point, except the bombings weren’t indiscriminate and the Japanese population wasn’t civilian.
While it’s good that our society now agonizes almost a century later over the possibility of blithely going nuclear again, it’s equally wrong to ignore the history of their first use. Besides one or two theocrats seeking Armageddon and chubby despots dreaming of incinerating an entire people, no sane person loves the bomb. Context, then, is key.
Any discussion of President Truman’s decision to drop the bombs always begins with a bloody and unpleasant arithmetic. By killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese from the air, America saved as many or more of soldiers on the ground and kept those Purple Hearts in storage. That’s not amateur speculation, it’s history.
The dead were still rotting in the jungle heat of Okinawa when the bombs dropped. After that 82-day battle, as Victor Davis Hanson notes, America buried 12,000 dead and tended to nearly 50,000 wounded. By comparison, the nihilistic Japanese lost more than 100,000 soldiers and almost 150,000 Okinawan dead.
As assault on the mainland would certainly eclipse that death toll. Ironically Japanese militarism guaranteed it wouldn’t just be a military engagement. Across the entire Kamikaze nation, American GIs would inevitably gun down a conscripted militia of old men with bamboo spears and young children with high explosive.
Though more terrible in the moment, the nuclear option was at least limited and avoided a street massacre of conscripted civilians. Certainly razing two cities is more humane than bleeding out the whole Land of the Rising Sun.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both heavy military manufacturing areas. With all of Japan’s wheels of industry turning for total war, it’s almost impossible to distinguish between civilians making the bullets and the soldiers firing them. Only in retrospect and on paper is it possible to separate the two groups on the densely populated island nation.
None of this should distract from the terror of splitting atoms. Burning children alive is never good. Poisoning the survivors with radiation sickness is never beautiful. But when a civilian population becomes fanatical like the Japanese, when they won’t completely surrender, what other choice to achieve peace exists?
Like a lot of things, a world without nuclear weapons sounds wonderful. Easy to imagine, it’s impossible to achieve. Because military technology is progressive and human nature is constant, no nation will ever voluntarily surrender an advantage. Confronted with threats like North Korea, hemming and hawing about civilian-military distinctions that didn’t exist, or were purposely blurred by the Japanese regime, seems ill advised.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
