Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Road to Moral Relativism

Tomorrow, we celebrate VJ 75 Day - the 75th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan. It will be celebrated in Britain, all Commonwealth countries, all the lands occupied by the Japanese in WW2 and the USA. This month has also seen the anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the 6th and 9th of August.
From 1945 onwards, the decision to drop the bombs has been controversial. The controversy continues to today, with more and more people in the former Allied countries coming to the view that the bombings were unnecessary. Criticism in the UK is spearheaded by CND, who regard the bombings as needless atrocities. Dr Kate Hudson, CND General Secretary has written:
"By the time the bomb was ready for use, Japan was ready to surrender. As General Dwight Eisenhower said, ‘Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of face. It was not necessary to hit them with that awful thing.’ So if Japan was ready to surrender, why were atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? A significant factor in the decision to bomb was the US’s desire to establish its dominance in the region after the war."

I support many of the present-day aims of CND, but am not happy with Dr Hudson's view - though I do not doubt her sincerity - and that of many similarly-minded authors. Almost without exception, I find their writings coloured by selectivity, anachronism and reductionism. In the short extract given above, Dr Hudson presents her case as if it portrays the absolute truth. But it does not. The claim that Japan was ready to surrender is disputed by Max Hastings, among others, who assert that while some elements in the Japanese government were willing to capitulate, many others, especially in the military, were not. I am not taking sides here, but Dr Hudson's refusal to mention that her view is disputed, renders her piece into nothing more than well-researched propaganda.

Dr Hudson's claim of the US desire of dominance in the Far East is a classic case of anachronism. The fact that the USA became so dominant is undeniable, but the Hudson/CND view ignores the fact that the USA and her allies were involved in a war against a ruthless enemy who needed to be subjugated. If we focus on what happened after the bombings and the surrender, we leave out the reasons for the war and the way people thought and felt at the time. The road to moral relativism starts here.

Starting down this road, we focus solely upon the bombs and their admittedly horrible after-effects. The BBC, like Dr Hudson, details the horrific death toll at Hiroshima:

"The recorded death tolls are estimates, but it is thought that about 140,000 of Hiroshima's 350,000 population were killed in the blast, and that at least 74,000 people died in Nagasaki."

And it gets worse:

"The nuclear radiation released by the bombs caused thousands more people to die from radiation sickness in the weeks, months and years that followed."

There are thousands of heart breaking accounts from survivors. This is just one. Hideo Kimura, 12 years old, was on the Nishi-Ohashi Bridge, 2,150M from the explosion at 8:15 – 8:30 am on August 6, 1945. The image above is taken from an online gallery devoted to the bombing, as is this account:

  “My classmates were screaming. Burned on their faces, arms, feet, legs, and backs. Trapped under heavy gates and houses, they screamed for help. Some were crying for help from the river, holding onto the stone embankment against the pull of the rising tide.”

These are terrible events, but when taken out of their historical context, they lead to the relativist view that the Allies were "as bad as" the Japanese. This is complete rubbish, and is not difficult to refute.  Let's just remind ourselves of how the Atom bombings came to happen. It starts, not at Pearl Harbour in 1941, but in China, exploding into full-scale war in 1937 and lasting until 1945. It is thought to have taken the lives of  20 million Chinese. It was a brutal campaign by the Japanese that saw some horrific massacres, carried out with small arms and knives. Just one of these was the Nanking Massacre, December, 1937 in which, as "History Today" says:

"Chinese soldiers were hunted down and killed by the thousands, and left in mass graves. Entire families were massacred, and even the elderly and infants were targeted for execution, while tens of thousands of women were raped. Bodies littered the streets for months after the attack"

Up to 300, 000 Chinese people are said to have died in the most gruesome circumstances.

The atrocities committed against Allied prisoners of war, such as that seen in the photo above, are well enough known, but need to to be mentioned here. There was the infamous Burma Railway, where:

" During the construction of the Burma Railway, which was a vital Japanese supply route at the time, 80,000-100,000 of the local Malayan population and more than 13,000 of Allied POWs (British, Dutch, Australian and American) lost their lives in a year-long period from 1943 to 1944.
The workers were molested, malnourished, refused medical care and executed in the most brutal ways."

And there are many, many other accounts of atrocities from all Japanese-occupied territories in WW2. There are a number of websites dealing with this subject that should be consulted when Hiroshima and Nagasaki are discussed. The point I am trying to make is that Allied combatants were well aware of the nature of their enemy and recognised that they had to be dealt with ruthlessly. Whether Dr Hudson and CND like it or not, there was a moral difference between the Axis and the Allies; only a doctrinaire humbug, a neo-Nazi or a Japanese revisionist could disagree.

I accept that CND and others are campaigning to end the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but historical events cannot be evaluated out of context. I wonder - will any CND members celebrate VJ-Day?

Japanese soldiers go berserk in Nanking, China, 1937. Unlike Hiroshima, where people perished quickly, here, Chinese civilians perished by rifle, bayonet or burial alive over a period of several weeks.