Japan, Firebombing, and Nuclear Warfare

Reading Retribution: The Battle for Japan has given me a lot of food for thought, and a lot of things to go on diatribes about to my patient parents on walks. :-) It's a fascinating book to read, though much of what it chronicles is brutal, horrifying, and regrettable. I didn't realize before, for instance, that the battle for Manilla cost the lives of 100,000 Filipino citizens.

A very interesting subject which the author has just been raising is that of the bombing of Japan. As I understand from the cover flap, the author defends the atomic bombings. I can't describe or answer his arguments, yet, because I haven't come to that part of the book yet, but I think he believes that they reduced the potential cost of an amphibious invasion of Japan. Given the massive human cost already incurred by the Pacific war and the legendary fanaticism of the Japanese army, that was probably quite true. Reading this book, however, though I can agree on principle that the nuclear bombing probably reduced the potential casualties that would have resulted from the U.S. strategy, I'm not convinced that the conditions wherein a nuclear bombing is the only answer to 'reducing casualties' are conditions into which we should have entered. That's a roundabout way of saying that we had such an economic stranglehold on Japan, such military supremacy, that we should never have obliterated so much of their civilian population. I'm not a seasoned historian and I'm not thoroughly familiar with every aspect of that theater of war, but to me the immense moral problem of, for instance, torching 100,000 civilians of Tokyo with napalm, leaving a million homeless, and obliterating 10,000 acres of buildings more than balances out the satisfaction of coercing a nation into signing formal surrender documents--particularly a nation which had already effectively lost the war.

Yes, more kamikaze missions might have threatened American ships and sailors, for a while. That's not a good thing. But Japan was running critically low on fuel, aircraft, and trained pilots (and willing suicide pilots). They were low on food, pitiful in industrial capacity, and completely outclassed militarily. Our extremely successful submarine blockade would probably have reduced them to desperation before long, though mass starvation would not be an appealing eventuality either.

Until late 1942/early 1943, I can understand a certain prevailing fierceness about our war effort: until then it was by no means clear that the Allies were going to win the conflict, and so some nations, primarily Britain and Russia, were actually fighting for survival. I'm sure countless atrocities occurred among the Allies that never should have, particularly in Russia, but I can understand why the Allies wanted to take the war to the enemy, and do it fast. After 1943, though, when industrial might, technological superiority and military initiative were almost entirely on our side, we continued grinding down the Axis through total war in our eagerness for the conflict to end sooner. Granted, we had suffered much, but that is no good excuse for inflicting the same suffering on the enemy--and the U.S. suffered negligibly compared to, for instance, the Soviet Union, which blasted, butchered, and raped its way through Eastern Europe to Berlin in 1944-45 in revenge for the 20 million civilians and probably more than 5 million soldiers who had already perished since Operation Barbarossa.

The Japanese treated POWs and civilians brutally in many, many cases. They were a rapacious militaristic empire with domineering ambitions. Such unbridled aggression and flouting of human rights required a reckoning as much as Germany's perverse ethnic cleansing and dreams of world domination did. But the B-29 pilots and commanders seemed, on the whole, remarkably callous about the manifold terrors, torments, and deaths that their incendiary bombs were inflicting on hundreds of thousands of people who had little to do with the militaristic governments that had launched them into the war.

Curtis LeMay, commander of the XXI Bomber Command responsible for bombing Japan, for instance. He claims there was "no point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter." Yes, but... "All you had to do was visit one of those targets after we'd roasted it, and see the ruins of a multitude of tiny houses, with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage...The entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war...men, women, and children. We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done" (qtd. in Hastings, Retribution 309).

That is a paltry defense at best, especially when Japan's inferior aircraft had almost been cleared off the sky at this point, so much so that the triumphant Hellcats and Corsairs were running out of targets to shoot down, and the Japanese navy could be bombed and torpedoed with increasing ease. The very B-29s involved in this operation met negligible fighter resistance: of the 414 aircraft downed over a five-month period, only 148 were due to enemy action, which includes anti-aircraft fire as well as fighter activity. 151 were lost because they failed to operate properly in flight (Hastings 314).

Here is the defense offered by the official USAAF post-war history of this bomber group, which probably gives the strongest argument in favor of incinerating civilians:

In its climactic five months of jellied fire attacks, the vaunted Twentieth killed outright 310,000 Japanese, injured 412,000 more, and rendered 9,200,000 homeless...The 1945 application of American Air Power, so destructive and concentrated as to cremate 65 Japanese cities in five months, forced an enemy's surrender without land invasion for the first time....no U.S. soldier, sailor or Marine had to land on bloody beachheads or fight through strongly-prepared ground defense to ensure victory in the Japanese home islands." (qtd. 317)

Yes, true--but my question is, should it have been our purpose to inflict unconditional, prostrate surrender on an already crumbling nation, no matter what the cost to the civilian population? Were our only options Invade or Torch? Could we actually say it was in defense of our nation to obliterate most of Tokyo and 64 other Japanese urban centers, to torch infants off their very mothers' backs as they fled from walls of flame and turn whole families to ash inside their bomb shelters? Will those responsible for such actions be able to successfully defend them when they are judged?

I can't say that there are easy answers to those questions, nor can I give answers for most of them. Perhaps some of this post will have to be amended once I read more of the book. So far, though, I think that those who condemn the decision to drop the nuclear bombs should be more concerned with condemning American Pacific Theater war policy in 1944-45. Was it a brutally necessary strategy for saving American lives--which aren't intrinsically more precious than Japanese lives--or was it just a gross excess of slaughter that should have been avoided at all costs? A lot of soldiers, politicans, and historians might opt for the former, but if someone told me that the key to saving a few of my buddies was to murder three mothers and their young children, I don't believe I would take that path. In any case, it seems to me that we could have kept Japan subjugate and incapable of significant resistance without an outright invasion. Sooner or later they would have been forced to surrender.

Thoughts?

New Kinds of Evil

In my Shakespeare class this summer, many of the plays that we're reading are scraping the bottom of the Stratfordian barrel, more or less. Some are speculated to be unfinished, or collaborative efforts. Some are early plays and betray a lack of authorial assurance, or major character problems. With the help of our tutor and mutual discussion, however, we typically find much more to even these least read, least regarded plays. One theme that has recurrently come up in our discussions is the preservation of some good (purity, honesty, faithfulness) in the face of often very strong evil. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for instance, Julia's sworn betrothed Proteus abandons her for another woman on first sight, then angles to get his own best friend banished in order to have a crack at his new love. In spite of all this treachery and callousness, however, Julia remains stubbornly faithful. This kind of enduring goodness pops up all over Shakespeare.

It is fascinating to trace, study, and ponder these themes that so much creative work across so many cultures shares. It's also interesting to look at works of art that play around with these themes, maybe not denying them but challenging them. No Country For Old Men is a fairly good example. There is not much "redemptive" about the story, as folks like to say. The good characters, those that survive, are bewildered and helpless before the immensely powerful evil characters, who come off with even more destruction and less liability than the Dark Knight's almost unstoppable Joker. The main villain isn't immolated or shot by a hero rising from the mud for the last time--his worst injury, in fact, comes from a freak car accident, which has more in common with the random violence that he unleashes than with the Sheriff's old-fashioned sense of morality and justice.

The result is a rather depressing novel, but a thought-provoking one. It doesn't deny the good, and in fact the good does survive, though it's kind of cowering under the table by the end. What emerges as a key question is good's power to prevail against a "new" kind of evil. It's really, again, not far removed from some of the themes raised in the Dark Knight--anarchic depravity that doesn't fight like a gentleman. I suspect it is too early to really analyze such things, but many people like to point to this as an evidence of new questions coming to light after the Twin Towers terrorist attacks and the Iraq War. Terrorism is dirty fighting, and it doesn't fit in smoothly with even World War II standards of combat. Millions of private citizens died in the Second World War, but most of these deaths were either organized genocide, collateral damage from bombing and shelling, or post-conquest violence (as in the siege of Berlin). Terrorism, where a small band outside normal government boundaries intentionally targets civilians in order to create fear and satisfy vendettas or religious imperatives, is relatively new, at least to the experience of the average American.

It is not very surprising, then, that many people are pondering the implications of how people can or should adjust to a different manifestation of violence and evil. Nor is it surprising that some people question the ability of goodness to actually survive evil, though men have been doing that since long before September 11, 2001. Many works of art where the end is depressing do not necessarily indicate an author who firmly believes in the ultimate triumph of evil--evil does win many battles, and it would be a poor imitation of reality to perpetually invent fictional scenarios where everything turns out exactly as hoped, and all live happily ever after (not a bad thing of itself, necessarily, but sometimes a hallmark of poor writing or film-making, when forced upon the plot).

I suspect that there are some people, however, who do have a depressing outlook on the war between good and evil. (There are even those who deny its existence, which is absurd.) The answer to this sort of worldview can be found in yet another theme of Shakespeare's which our tutor has mentioned several times: the relevance and vital importance of the afterlife. It is easy to look upon the success of evil with dismay if one does not recognize anything beyond life on earth. It is not only easy, in fact, but logically it is inescapable. If self-sacrifice, courage, and purity carry nothing over after death, then tragedy on earth becomes permanent tragedy. Nothing will make it right again, and the book that leaves you with a host of characters dead at the end (Hamlet, say) leaves you hopeless.

We need not fear each new manifestation of evil if our eyes have been opened to look beyond this life. If one limited his scope to merely earthly concerns, certainly things would look bleak. What does Darfur mean, what do the 9/11 attacks mean, if each casualty simply molders in the grave without a shred of consciousness that lives on? But if we understand that any stand against evil, even the most cruelly unsuccessful of stands, has transcendent meaning, then we have grasped a very wonderful truth. Though the times for mourning may sometimes seem to brutally outnumber the times for rejoicing, they do not give us cause for despair.

Art should absolutely tackle evil. It is an integral part of life until the Second Coming and a confusing, terrible, but somehow necessary part of God's redemptive plan, and to ignore it would be to ignore what makes story Story: conflict. Nevertheless, art which embraces hopelessness is also ignoring a huge part of reality, to its peril. Weeping endures for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

Interesting Quote

"We honestly believed that America, a nation of storekeepers, would not not persist with a loss-making war, whereas Japan could sustain a protracted campaign against the Anglo-Saxons.”
Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, quoted in Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45, page 6.

It seems the opinion of us hasn't changed much in 67 years.

Concerning Aragorn, the Dead, and Oaths

In The Lord of the Rings, we learn that Isildur placed a curse on the race of men that broke their pact with him, thenceforth condemning them to walk as the living dead. Aragorn, being the rightful heir of Isildur, could break the curse by allowing them to fulfill their oath. As I recall, he was the only one who could do so.

Although it is quite possible that Tolkien simply found this useful to get the good guys out of their scrape--he did stack the odds rather high--I think one is reminded of something important here. In Tolkien's world, breaking an oath is an organic sin. The men who lived on that mountain were cursed because their oath was taken with reference to a higher power or standard, and violating it was an offense to the higher power as well as the other party in the oath. Breaking an oath is not simply bad form. It is contrary to nature.

Perhaps, if sin had never come into the world, we would not require oaths and pledges. Certainly most oaths, such as the well-known Hippocratic Oath or the oaths of citizenship most or all countries require, were devised to help ensure compliance to certain rules or laws--taking an oath adds solemnity to an occasion and also allows one to be easily prosecuted for breaking his word. Presumably one of the reasons that God seals His covenants with promises is because He knows our hunger for something in which to trust. Unlike God, men sometimes break their promises, of course. Either they repent of what they promised, or they never meant to keep their word in the first place and only used it to attain a certain position or gain a person's trust.

Though one may escape human punishment by breaking an oath, however, it will not escape the notice of God. The Bible warns us not to make oaths lightly, and says that a righteous man "sweareth to his own hurt." Even if a promise turns out to be to our disadvantage, or an annoyance, we cannot simply cancel the promise on those grounds. (Obviously, if one promised something sinful, that would cancel the obligation.) One of greatest uses man makes of his creative abilities for sinful purposes is the twisting or negation of truth and sincerity, and it is the duty of every follower of Christ to ensure that his life is not marked by such tendencies. We know the great comfort of God's faithfulness, and of him to whom much is given, much is required: would not those who enjoy God's complete trustworthiness be ungrateful servants to make it hard for others to trust them in turn?

Breaking a promise is not just unfair, or harmful, though it is both. It is also a violation of our natures. There may be times when misleading someone is not a sin (the Egyptian midwives, for instance, or Rahab), but those times are rare and, I think, fairly easy to discern. When telling the truth would result in the deaths of innocent people, then I think one is called upon to mislead or even to lie if necessary. But breaking any promise whose keeping does not lead to evil is serious business. This is one of the many things that should set the children of God apart from the world: they can be taken at their word. Isildur's punishment may have been harsh, but Tolkien recognized that the failure to keep an oath was not just an unfortunate business. It is a grievous and unnatural transgression. And just as only Aragorn, the Numenorean king, could release the dead from their oath, so can only God forgive us when we break our promises to others or, worse, to Him--which, alas, is not a rare thing. Is is not a comfort to know that He never breaks His word?