(WARNING: There are some graphic descriptions of violence in this post.)
It’s not unusual for a comment thread to center on a minor point within a post. That happened here, when I made a parenthetical remark about Kevin Miller describing the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as immoral. “I am open to the argument,” I wrote, “but since the entire Japanese population was being mobilized for war, I tend to think it was legitimate.”
Most of the people who commented were Catholic Light regulars, and I have to say, I’m a little disappointed in you guys. Instead of responding to my invitation to discuss the matter, you were sarcastic, belittling, and one person even implied I am Protestant (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), or at least I think like one. Kevin was the only one who responded in a serious, reasonable manner. I deleted a couple of comments that I can only assume were written rashly.
Before I explain my opinion fully (and it is merely an opinion) about our nuclear strikes on those two cities, I will define my boundaries. I am not arguing for a blanket approval of all American military action, and I am quite capable of recognizing when our nation has not used force properly or with moral rectitude. Those occasions include the Mexican War, probably the Spanish-American War (though we were intervening to help freedom fighters), and just about every small intervention in the Western Hemisphere from 1900-1940, e.g. Nicaragua, Haiti, etc.
Still less do I want to defend the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign in World War II. In practical terms, bombing German cities to rubble did very little to end the war, as it intensified German resistance. It didn’t disrupt their war production as much as one might think, either. The Allies found the German war planning headquarters and obliterated it during one ferocious raid, but production soared after that. Production only slowed when the Allies started capturing German-held territory. In human terms, the campaign was an unmitigated disaster. While the motivation was understandable, given that thousands of innocent British subjects died in indiscriminate V-1 and V-2 bombings, the explosives dropped on the Nazi empire were often motivated by malice, not military necessity. Until the last few months of the war, RAF and U.S. Army Air Corps crews suffered casualty rates similar to the Marines and soldiers in the Pacific theater. This campaign was thus neither militarily nor morally justifiable.
In Catholic teaching, it can be licit, under certain very limited circumstances, to bring about the death of the innocent if their death is incidental to a morally good end. This is the “principle of double effect.” This does not always refer to accidental death: it is licit, for example, to administer painkillers to terminally ill patients that will certainly hasten death, if the willed end is to palliate the pain and not to kill.
The Catechism spells this out explicitly in the matter of lethal force:
(2263) The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. “The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor…. The one is intended, the other is not.”
(2264) Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:
If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful…. Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.
(2265) Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for another’s life. Preserving the common good requires rendering the unjust aggressor unable to inflict harm. To this end, those holding legitimate authority have the right to repel by armed force aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their charge.
The passage above in bold seems to be the crucial one, for it gives us the right way to frame this issue: was the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “more than necessary violence”? Let us state plainly what the bombings were — the use of massive, overwhelming force against two population centers, with the certainty that many innocent lives would be lost. The object was not merely to destroy military infrastructure, or to kill military personnel, but to show the necessity of immediate surrender. Something like 300,000 people were killed, including thousands who in no way could be considered legitimate targets.
Although these were the first times that atomic bombs were used in war, it was hardly the first time war caused mass death among the innocent. People seem to imagine that modern warfare was uniquely destructive, and in may ways it is; gunpowder and bullets are very efficient technologies for killing. Yet most armies in history, if they were campaigning more than a few score miles away from their garrisons, foraged for food in the countryside, devouring crops and livestock at will. The armies of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) knew that by emptying the granaries of German peasants, they were condemning multitudes of innocent people to slow, certain death.
To properly consider this question, it helps to consider some of the relevant facts:
1. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had legitimate military targets within them, and were central to what remained of the Japanese war effort.
2. As I mentioned, the Japanese warlords were training anyone who was capable of giving resistance to the American invaders. They accepted that they could not win the war, but they were prepared to let everyone in Imperial Japan die rather than surrender to the Americans.
3. The warlords could do this because Japanese society was a totalitarian society, probably more completely totalitarian than any other society before or since. Because of Japan’s geography and history, the Imperial government dictated practically every aspect of daily life. Fealty to the Emperor was total; no mortal was allowed to look at him, and he was revered as divine. A maximalist, fascist version of bushido, the ancient samurai’s code, placed an extreme emphasis on warfare, and every Japanese citizen was expected to support the military effort. This was not a temporary condition, as in the wartime mobilizations of Britain and the America. Unless this religious-military regime was utterly and completely crushed, it would almost certainly reassert itself — particularly if it suffered a humiliating but partial defeat.
4. This totalitarian mentality translated into a complete disregard for human life, and spawned the death-cult of the kamikaze. It meant that Japanese soldiers would not surrender even if they were surrounded by Marines and had no possible hope of escape. It meant that they would do practically anything to kill Americans, including feigning death and then attacking, or pretending to surrender and blowing themselves up when their enemy got too close. If you get a chance, read some of the first-hand accounts of the Pacific campaign. There’s one particularly graphic account in “Flags of Our Fathers” where one of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima finds the body of his friend, a fellow Navy corpsman, who was tortured to death by the Japanese. His corpse was almost unrecognizable, and his genitals were severed and stuffed into his lifeless mouth.
5. Speaking of war crimes, in “American Caesar,” his biography of General Macarthur, William Manchester describes the recapture of Manila, which included the deliberate destruction of Catholic churches and desecrations of the Eucharist (many Filipinos bravely tried to consume it before they were slaughtered.) Japanese soldiers gouged out babies’ eyes in front of their parents. This was entirely in keeping with Japanese ideology, which taught that they were a master race and all other peoples were more or less subhuman. There were many similar incidents in Manchuria, Korea, and much of the Pacific Rim, long before the Americans intervened.
6. Removing the Japanese from Okinawa took something like 180,000 American casualties. Even after four years of the bloodiest and most destructive war in human history, that total shocked the U.S. military and public. War planners began talking about a million casualties to capture the Japanese mainland, even a million dead. Japanese deaths would have been in the millions, if not the tens of millions.
Killing a third of a million people is an unimaginable horror, and one that could not be morally acceptable under almost any circumstance. That being said, given the likelihood that many more people would have died in a conventional attack, and that nothing less than a lethal blow against Imperial Japan would have destroyed the threat to world peace that it represented, I believe that the direct attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified as a proportional response to end a Japanese-instigated war and the murderous political theology that caused it.
ADDENDUM: Richard asks in another comment thread whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected for military reasons. Here is an explanation of the target selections, written soon after the war:
Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance. It contained the 2nd Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. To quote a Japanese report, “Probably more than a thousand times since the beginning of the war did the Hiroshima citizens see off with cries of ‘Banzai’ the troops leaving from the harbor”….
The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great war-time importance because of its many and varied industries, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The narrow long strip attacked was of particular importance because of its industries….
“Showing the necessity of immediate surrender” is a tricky point.
How does that work? What element of the attack was supposed to persuade the Japanese?
It would be wrong if the killing of civilians was supposed to add to the persuasive effect.
If an act has good and bad effects, and the good is obtained as a result of the bad effect, the moral criteria are not met.
What RC said.
To answer that question, you’d have to know what was happening in President Truman’s mind. I doubt he ever said anything such as, “One of my purposes in authorizing the atomic strikes was that it would kill the innocent.” The targets themselves were extensions of the Pacific bombing campaign. I don’t have a reference handy, but I would be completely shocked if we hadn’t already firebombed targets within Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The weapons were probably the only novel aspect of the attacks.
We had bombed those cities little if at all – they along with a few others were deliberately not (conventionally) bombed so that the effects of the a-bombs could be seen more clearly (i.e. so that we’d know that any destruction in the cities was from them).
Interestingly – Nagasaki was the tertiary target on 8/9. The primary and secondary targets were covered by clouds, and it was required that the bombings be visual, not by radar. But there was only a small break in the cloud cover over Nagasaki, and the AP the bombardier had to use was not the planned one – the part of the city destroyed was not exactly the planned part.
Anyway – I’m pretty sure that Truman was trying to show the need for immediate surrender precisely by showing that we could destroy Japan totally – including innocent civilians. You can’t do that. Nor does it make sense to me that killing basically all innocent civilians in huge areas of a city is proportionate to taking out an army HQ (Hiroshima) or industry (Nagasaki) – even taking into account that some of those civilians would have defended themselves with sharpened sticks in the event of an invasion.
It’s also potentially problematic that we were insisting on “unconditional” surrender – especially since, in the end, we accepted one condition, namely, allowing the emperor to stay on his thrown (albeit in the context of a very different kind of regime than the pre-war one). If the Potsdam declaration had made it clear we’d do that, Hirohito might have moved against military resistance to surrender more quickly. But we didn’t even try – we gave no indication we’d allow that till after the A-bombings.
Just one other thought – a critical point, I think.
If you use a bomb that’s roughly “calibrated” to take out a military installation or something along those lines, and (due to the “messiness” of a bomb) it takes out some civilians as well, that’s the sort of “collateral” damage that, assuming fulfillment of the other relevant conditions, can be justified by double-effect reasoning.
But that’s not what you’re doing with an atomic bomb. You’re not simply “accepting” that a few people living around Hiroshima castle or Mitsubishi in Nagasaki will be killed. You’re actually targeting the whole city. Thus, one of the main conditions for double-effect reasoning isn’t satisfied.
Well, not that I’m of any great consequence to the universe, but my dad was in paratrooper training for the putative invasion of the Japanese home islands, which everyone assumed was a given in June of 1945.
If he had gone, there’s a strong chance I would never have been born. And I also think that overall, it was an acceptable act to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, there were many civilians there, but the Japanese government had located a number of military targets there amongst the civilian populace. And all told, I have no doubt that many, many more people would have died (particularly half a million or more American men) if we had abjured The Bomb in favor of a good old-fashioned rape-n-pillage operation. Remember that, in Patton’s words, the object of war isn’t to die for your country — it’s to make the other poor bastard die for his.
And it’s good, in the long run, that Truman was not up to the perfumed moral calculus that would forbid this or any nation from defending itself against a determined foe. Sorry, but I will never be persuaded that dropping the bomb was wrong; it certainly wasn’t a “war crime,” as many people are eager to label it today.
The 1945 nuclear bombings of Japan were the best and quickest way to end the war that would have cost many more lives in a ground invasion of the Japanese homeland. Estimates, based on trends in the previous 3 1/2 years of Pacific fighting, were in excess of a million (1,000,000) U.S. casualties alone, and as many as 10 times that for the Japanese. “The good of the many outweighs the good of the few.” That may seem harsh in this context, but is the simplest statement of the moral equation.
By the way, before second-guessing the command decision to go to alternate targets on what became the Nagasaki mission of 09 Aug 45, understand the circumstances. The weather forecasting, navigation and aviation technologies in general of that era bear only slight resemblance to the reliability of what we have today. Those flight crews made do with what they had to carry out a mission under extremely difficult circumstances as flying jobs go. They made decision after decision on the spot, checked items off a list, completed their mission. The moral issues of using the new weapons and what’s on the target list were not theirs to answer. Those things had already been examined, decided and accepted by Pres. Truman, and passed down the military chain of command to the individual aircraft commanders. In that environment, you do your job and wrestle with your conscience later, if necessary. Do a Google search on the Enola Gay’s pilot-in-command, Paul Tibbets, and see what he thought about the subject if you are interested in the moral view from the cockpit. Like many of his generation he hasn’t lost a second’s sleep over it in 60 years. In fact last June he told a Japanese newspaper, “Ask me to do it again under the same circumstances, I wouldn’t hesitate,” he [Tibbets] said. “I think I did the right thing. I didn’t set out to kill a bunch of innocent people. I set out to kill people that were killing people. I wanted to stop the killing. That was my idea.”
During the Civil War, Pres. Lincoln was asked by a reporter from a Northern newspaper if he thought God was on the Union’s side. “That’s not the question,” Lincoln replied. “What we should ask is, ‘Are we on God’s side?’”
Eric’s original post makes this case so well, all I can say is if there’s something you don’t get, read it again, slowly, especially the quotes from the Catechism and how he relates them to this issue. He’s done an excellent job and it’s all there.
We’re discussing whether dropping the A-bombs was morally acceptable. Arguments based on the fact that Japan actually surrendered afterward just don’t answer that question.
An act is not justified by the consequences that result from it. Sometimes people commit bad acts that have some beneficial consequences, but those acts are still bad.
Part of Christian morality — explicit in St. Paul’s writings — is that we may not do bad acts in order to bring about good effects.
I’m not saying that there is no case to be made in favor of the A-bombings, but estimates about how long the war would have taken otherwise just don’t factor into it.
We have to look at the act itself as a military strike against a specific target, and judge whether the good effect (damage to the target, diminution of the Japanese military’s ability to fight) was proportionate to the bad effect (harm to civilians).
RC:
How is your last paragraph any the less consequentialist in its analysis than the thought process you denounce in your next-to-last one?
Or to put it more explicitly, the reason the effects you describe as good are good is BECAUSE they shorten the war.
The reason something like Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary was that the Japanese had not done the essential thing — had their *will* to fight crushed. It was reasonable to think, given what had already happened, that only something as extraordinary as this could achieve that end. (It did.)
Side note, but relevant here: It’s a paradox of war that it’s termination is in the hands of the loser — anyone can declare victory any time he wants but it’s only over when the loser accepts his defeat (case in point to the contrary: Iraq and Bush’s USS Abraham Lincoln declaration versus the jihadis continuation via other means). When his will to resist ends. All talk about proportionate destruction is essentially just utilitarian McNamara-isms, attempting to numericize and rationalize what is not a numerical or rational process.
I have nothing to add on the discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (it is well-informed and fair) but would like to make a side-note on the bombing campaign in Europe that Eric discussed.
First, one cannot, for the most part, roll together the British and US bombing campaigns. The British Bomber Command, after horrendous losses, understandably switched to carpet bombing at night. The idea was to bomb a whole district where are target was located in the hope of hitting that target along with everything else. This method saved the lives of many airmen but caused relatively little damage to the German war-fighting infrastucture and a great deal of collateral damage — and civilian deaths.
The US Army Air Force carried out daylight precision bombing, even when no fighter protection was available to the B-17s and B-24s that were sent out. This was highly dangerous: the Memphis Belle was famous because it actually made its 25 missions with the whole crew intact, or at least alive. The results were mixed: some targets (e.g. the sub pens) were too hardened for the bombing to do much good while other strikes (e.g. the oil fields at Ploesti) truly crippled the Nazis.
My point is not to condemn the British, as they were doing the best they could to take the war to the enemy with what they had a far earlier date than the US. Nor can I say every mission was 100% moral. The conventional bombing of Dresden was worse than what happended at Hiroshima.
What I think I can fairly say is:
1. We do not know what German industrial production would have been like without the bombing. One can make the case that it would have been even higher and that the production of advanced weapons like rockets and jets would have proceeded even faster. Furthermore, the quality of production would almost certainly have been higher as the bombing forced various kinds of improvisation.
2. We do know that the bombing campaign almost certainly broke the back of the Luftwaffe. Yes, they fought to the end. But the numbers of machines and trained pilots were terribly depleted by 1945, meaing that the benefits of air superiority were enjoyed by Allied forces. It is hard to imagine the invasion of Europe having succeeded without this.
Had we not used the Bomb, a land invasion of Japan was already planned, with the potential loss of life to either side (particularly the Japanese) far outweighing the result of the Bomb. The morality of using that weapon on Japan aside, it was known by the Allied powers at the time, that Japan was developing long-range bombers, and were prepared to launch an invasion of the West Coast; also that Germany was itself working with heavy-water experiments, in the hope of developing the Bomb before the Allies, and to be delivered by V-2 rockets.
P.S. I am also not sure that the bombing campaign “intensified German resistance.” True, the bombing of English cities caused the British to rally in a way that still inspires us today. But the UK was and is a democracy and the war aims to the leadership and the people were similar: defense of their freedom and way of life along with a need to face down an evil that had gripped the entire Continent. Nazi Germany was a totalitarian state and those who might benefit from the war (Nazi party idealogues and thugs, some amoral industrialists) were quite different from the ordinary people who, yes, had initially bought into Hitler’s nightmare some 10-12 years earlier but could be pried loose by being made to face the consequences of Hitler’s war. Bomber Command and the Eight Air Force certainly did that.
Just Ken:
Maybe not the bombing campaign exactly. And by 1945, after the Battle of the Bulge, it was plain to all (though it had earlier been plain to some such as the July 20 plotters) that it was a matter of “when” not “if.”
But there’s no doubt that Germans rallied behind the war effort as the country tried to mobilize in 1943-44 — the period of heaviest bombing. It probably had as much to do with the fact that in the early years of the war, Germany never fully mobilized — basically as a homefront-support “everything is normal” kind of measure. But at the start of that period — after El Alamein and Stalingrad — came Goebbels’ famous speech calling for total war (though that was in specific response to the “unconditional surrender” demand). Now called to rally at a time when the outcome at least seemed to hang in the balance, the Germans generally did rally behind the Fatherland (if not necessarily Nazism as such).
That said, Ken C. is essentially correct. Even though German war production rose during the time of the heaviest bombing (because of the aforementioned mobilization issue), that doesn’t tell us what their production would have been in the absence of bombings. It simply strains credulity to think that constantly having your factories and infrastructure bombed (however imperfectly by today’s Precision-Guided-Munition standards) won’t hurt production. And, as he noted, the campaign gave allied air forces a venue (a ring to fight in, so to speak) in which they could engage the Luftwaffe and essentially destroy it as an effective force. This achievement paid huge dividends later, in the invasion of Normandy, particularly the early stages and the attempt to break out of the peninsula at the Falaise Gap.
Some idiot wrote of air superiority won during the Allied bombing raids of Germany:
“This achievement paid huge dividends later, in the invasion of Normandy, particularly the early stages and the attempt to break out of the peninsula at the Falaise Gap.”
How could this dimbulb forget the Battle of the Bulge. This battle turned against the Germans at the precise point of and exactly because of the lifting of the fog and bad winter weather that had grounded Allied aircraft and allowed the Germans to give better than they took in the ground-only fight.
While I may (or may not) concede that a case might be made for bombing Hiroshima, given the result of that bombing I’ve never seen how one could then justify the destruction of Nagasaki.
Good question, Victor:
How is your last paragraph any the less consequentialist in its analysis than the thought process you denounce in your next-to-last one?
There is a place for including consequences in the analysis of proportionality, but it needs to be limited.
(1) Maybe I need to make this point explicit: we have to deal in foreseen and foreseeable consequences from the POV of the decision maker before the act. Instead, some of the arguments posted here seem to look at the consequences from the post-war POV. This is a mistake, because the facts about what actually happened after the act were not available to the decision-maker beforehand.
(2) Bad consequentialist arguments frequently violate the rule I mentioned above, that the good effect must not come about by means of the bad effect. (They argue as if the end justified the means.)
If one were to present “demoralization of the enemy resulting from massive civilian deaths” as part of the ‘good effect’, this would be unacceptable.
Legitimate “good effects” to be obtained in bombing Nagasaki were the destruction of its military industries, and the demoralization of enemy decision makers resulting from this destruction.
—
The harm to civilians at Nagasaki was direct and foreseeable, but the combatant status some participants here would have attributed to most of the population depends on an unproven speculation. Those people were civilians who might become combatants if US forces were to make a ground invasion in the vicinity of Nagasaki at some subsequent time.
Since three cities were chosen as targets on Aug 9, are we to say that the ground invasion was going to happen at all three sites? One would need some evidence to support that idea. What was the probability that the invasion would take place at Nagasaki? What was the probability (given that) that civilians would be called upon to resist US forces? What was the probably (given that) that they would indeed resist? What was the probability that stick fighters would be effective against US forces?
In order to eliminate, perhaps, a 2% threat, the bomb rendered those people 100% dead.
I do believe using nuclear bombs was necessary, should we have sacrificed more of our “grandfathers”, to achieve the same result. Anyways sister Lucia passed away on the 13th and i was wondering everyone’s thoughts.
I’ve been reading Keegan’s *The Second World War* recently. According to it, there was some moral issues with strategic bombing (at least in Britain). In private correspondence at the time, the Marquess of Salisbury noted that “of course the Germans began it, but we do not take the devil as our example.” Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris’s request for a campaign medal for Bomber Command was turned down.
On the other side, in the late 1990’s, there was a B-29 bomber that was at the Orlando Executive Airport (Florida) and was open for tours. I took my son there (probably six at the time). The owners of the aircraft refused the admission payment from the elderly gentleman and his family immediately in front of us. After that family and my son and I climbed up the ladder into the aircraft, I learned that the elderly gentleman was Tom Ferebee, the bombardier on the Enola Gay. He told us the story of the mission (there is something about first-hand history). He, too, has never lost any sleep over the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Sorry I don’t have time right now to read all the comments…someone probably already made this point….read the statement written by Pius XII on these bombings…
Eric,
I have not read the other posts either. I was 6 yoa when the bomb was dropped. I remember the picture on the front page of the Chicago Tribune and the joy in my family that our beloved relative who was in the Air Force would be coming home and it was over.
I really never will forget that.
Also, I want to thank you for your inciteful writing on the faith and society in general. Keep up the good work.
Got a link for that, Peter?