In his Memorial Day article, “Harry Truman’s A-Bombing of Japan Left Intact Ethics and Law,” which was in response to my article, “A-Bombings of Japan Were Acts of Cowardice and Criminality,” Col. Kevin Winters overlooks the importance of Roosevelt’s and Truman’s demand that the Japanese “unconditionally surrender” to Allied forces (https://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2001/052001/05282001/292660).
As Winters no doubt knows, U.S. intelligence had broken the Japanese diplomatic code even before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Therefore, before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. government officials were well aware that the Japanese government, knowing that the war could not be won, was putting out peace feelers through the Soviet Union. An important condition to a Japanese surrender would have been that no harm would befall their emperor, not exactly an unreasonable request, especially since U.S. forces inflicted no harm on him anyway.
But Truman chose to stick with the horribly destructive “unconditional surrender” demand that Roosevelt had announced at the 1943 Casablanca conference. That demand had already needlessly cost the lives of many U.S. servicemen in Europe by (1) discouraging anti-Hitler resistance within Germany, including those who were interested in ousting Hitler from power; and (2) causing more German soldiers to fight to the death than otherwise would have been the case.
Thus, when the time came to drop the A-bombs, the alternatives were not simply to invade Japan or drop the bombs. There was a third alternative — to negotiate a Japanese surrender, which could have avoided an invasion of Japan and also saved the lives of all the ordinary people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were nuked in the name of “unconditional surrender” and “shortening the war.”
In his article, Winters pointed to the many war crimes committed by the Japanese, but as far as I know, the United States has never considered war crimes committed by enemy forces to be a defense of war crimes committed by U.S. forces or a justification for having committed them.
Winters also suggests that the A-bombs were actually targeting military and industrial targets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that the deaths of all those civilians were simply “collateral damage.” Surely he isn’t being serious. The uncomfortable truth, which Winters obviously has difficulty accepting, is that the U.S. government targeted civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — including women and children — for the purpose of “shortening the war” through the Japan government’s “unconditional surrender” to Allied forces.
What Winters, as a deputy staff judge advocate to the commandant of the Marine Corps at the Pentagon, obviously also has difficulty accepting is that soldiers die in war — that’s the nature of the process. And as I stated in my original article, for a soldier to deliberately sacrifice women and children so that he may live a longer life is, well, yes, cowardice.
It is also disappointing that Winters refers to the 25,000 deaths from the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden as simply more “collateral damage.” Here is how a February 14, 1995, Wall Street Journal article, “Dresden: Time to Say We’re Sorry” by Simon Jenkins (reprinted at https://www.fff.org/freedom/0995f.asp), describes what happened at Dresden:
Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the head of Bomber Command, used incendiaries on Dresden to create a firestorm; in other cities he used high explosives. The city-center churches and palaces packed with refugees were targeted, rather than railways or barracks on the outskirts. The attack was morally identical to an infantry massacre of civilians on the ground…. Even Winston Churchill, who had ordered the raid to appease Stalin, referred to the bombings as “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.” The Americans likewise distanced themselves from avowedly “terrorist” air attacks, after their own planes had gunned down people fleeing the burning city the morning after the British raid.
War, of course, is horrible in terms of the death and destruction it wreaks, and World War II was certainly no exception. But when war becomes necessary, it is vitally important that a civilized nation do its best not to stoop to the level of the barbarians or war criminals that it is battling. And that includes avoiding the intentional killing of the enemy’s women and children in order to save the lives of its own soldiers.