Hiroshima, Nagasaki atomic bombings cost lives and saved them

As anti-nuclear activists prepare to mark the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the fact is that the attack saved millions of lives on both sides.

A mushroom cloud billows into the sky about one hour after an atomic bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Picture: AP

While not having heard until recently of the ‘Hiroshima Committee’, I have no doubt the members of this activist group are well-meaning.

Their ambition is a world free of nuclear weapons, and to this effect they will rally at Sydney Town Hall Square this Saturday to mark the 80 years since the US detonated an atomic device over Hiroshima, Japan, in the final days of World War II.

The use of nuclear weapons, according to the committee, “is a crime against humanity”, and “so grossly out of proportion to a civilised nation’s values”. It maintains the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary.

I have heard many others make similar claims. In these debates, I have asked them what alternatives the Allies had to force an end to the Pacific War, specifically those that would have ensured a lower death toll than that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (210,000).

Their responses, which I have addressed individually, can be summarised as follows:

Japan had already offered to surrender before the bombing of Hiroshima.

Prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan never put formal surrender terms to the Allies. Instead, in July 1945 Japan’s foreign ministry put feelers out to its Soviet counterpart, seeking to gauge the possibility of Moscow “mediating” an end to hostilities.

Japan’s Supreme War Council did not sanction this tentative move. Nothing came of it because the Soviets, who unbeknownst to Tokyo were preparing to declare war on Japan, stonewalled.

Aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

There was no need to use atomic weapons as Japan had already been defeated.

Japan was losing the war, but it was far from defeated at the beginning of August 1945. Throughout April to June of that year, Allied and Japanese forces fought the Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest conflict of the Pacific War. Situated 640km south of the Japanese mainland, the island prefecture was coveted by the Allies as the staging point for the invasion of Kyushu.

The fanaticism and resolve of the Japanese shocked even hardened Allied veterans. Over 12,500 Americans and 110,000 Japanese soldiers died in that conflict. Around 150,000 Okinawans – about a quarter of the population – also lost their lives. Entire families, including women and children, leapt off cliffs, having been ordered to suicide by the Japanese military.

The actions of the defenders foreshadowed what became known as Operation Ketsu-Go, the Japanese plan for defending the home islands. The strategy was simple but compelling. Irrespective of how many Japanese would die in the invasion, the Allies could not sustain their own losses, and their will would give way to war fatigue, forcing the invaders to negotiate terms that did not involve an occupation of Japan (American planners had estimated Allied casualties could reach as high as one million in the invasion).

As author and historian John T. Correll noted in 2009:

“As late as August [1945], Japanese troops by the tens of thousands were pouring into defensive positions on Kyushu and Honshu. Old men, women, and children were trained with hand grenades, swords, and bamboo spears and were ready to strap explosives to their bodies and throw themselves under advancing tanks.”

Okinawa was but a smidgen of what the Allies could expect in a conventional invasion of Japan proper. Perverse as it may seem, the decision instead to use atomic weapons not only saved countless Allied lives, but also millions of Japanese.

Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped.

Instead of a land-based invasion of Japan or using atomic weapons, the Allies could have forced surrender through a naval blockade and targeted bombing.

There is no question the Allies had the resources to paralyse Japan through these means. However, doing so would have meant a slow death by starvation for millions of Japan’s inhabitants, beginning with 140,000 Allied prisoners-of-war and tens of thousands of foreign civilian internees.

As for maintaining on humanitarian grounds that conventional bombing was preferable to the use of atomic weapons, it is often forgotten the firebombing of Tokyo on 9-10 March 1945 by US Army Air Forces killed 100,000 civilians – far more than the number who died in the bombing of Nagasaki.

Tens of thousands of people were killed in Hiroshima upon detonation of the atomic bomb.

US president Harry S. Truman’s primary motive for using atomic weapons was a show of American power to stop the Soviets from occupying northern Japan.

If so, why did then US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill lobby Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, to join the war against Japan? At the time that agreement was secured, the Manhattan Project, which had been running for over three years, was only five months away from successfully detonating the first atomic bomb, in the desert of New Mexico.

In April 1945, following Roosevelt’s death, Truman became president. A former artillery officer who had served on the Western Front in World War I, he was closely attuned to developments in Okinawa, and the rate of Allied fatalities there horrified him.

The minutes of Truman’s conference with service chiefs on June 18, 1945 to discuss the planned invasion of Kyushu are revealing in this respect. As they note, the president asked whether this meant “practically creating another Okinawa closer to Japan”, and if the invasion of the homeland by “white men” would have the effect of “more closely uniting the Japanese”.

He received answers in the affirmative to both questions.

The bomb detonated over Nagasaki was known as Fatman. Picture: AP

The Americans should have held a test demonstration of the atomic weapon in a remote area of Japan and invited Japanese representatives to witness from afar the detonation, thus persuading Tokyo it was pointless to consider the war.

A noble sentiment, but Japan’s ruling militarists were contemptuous of an enemy – even one who had mastered atomics – who played by Queensberry rules. The Japanese, had they been notified of an impending detonation, would have redirected every fighter squadron they could muster to intercept the American plane carrying the bomb.

Alternatively, and worse still, there was the possibility of the weapon failing to detonate, in which case the technology would land in the lap of the only Axis power still fighting (Japan was at the time also working to develop nuclear fission for military use).

The Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan, not the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was the decisive factor in the Japanese emperor’s decision to surrender.

Moscow declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945, the day before the bombing of Nagasaki. At the time, the Soviet Union fielded the largest army in the world. Skilled as its forces were in continental warfare, it lacked the wherewithal for a major seaborne invasion. Unlike the Americans, the Soviets had little experience in amphibious assaults.

Colonel Paul Tibbets, right, in front of the Enola Gay he piloted to drop the first atomic bomb. Picture: Supplied

Japan’s Supreme War Council was well aware of its enemy’s limitations when it met on August 9. As General Yoshijiro Umezu (Chief of Staff of the Army) observed, the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, while “unfavourable”, did not invalidate Ketsu-Go. It was only during this meeting that the council learned of the Nagasaki bombing.

In Emperor Hirohito’s surrender address of August 15, 1945, he did not mention the Soviet Union’s declaration of war as a factor in his decision to capitulate. However, he expressly referred to the atomic weapons, saying “the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation.”

If Japan continued to fight, he said, it would “result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation”.

Hirohito’s reasoning was reinforced by Kantaro Suzuki, the Japanese prime minister at the time of his country’s surrender. Nagasaki, he told his American captors in December 1945, had demolished the hope that the Americans had no stockpile of atomic weapons. From the Japanese perspective, the Allies could now wipe out Japan with ease, thus rendering obsolete the strategy of Ketsu-Go.

The Allied demand of unconditional surrender unnecessarily prolonged the Pacific War.

The Potsdam Declaration, issued on July 26, 1945, was unequivocal. Japan’s government would order the unconditional surrender of its armed forces else the country would face “prompt and utter destruction”.

The mushroom cloud over Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped.

The Allied demand was grounded in bitter experience. Japan’s government was characterised by ultranationalism, militarism, expansionism, and barbarity. Because of its fanaticism, over 30 million died in the Pacific War.

Aside from destroying the country outright, there was no real alternative to an Allied occupation of Japan if lasting peace was to be achieved. Right up until Hirohito’s decision to surrender (a course of action which led to an attempted coup, albeit a failed one), half of Japan’s six-member Supreme War Council were holding out for favourable terms, including no occupation of Japan and no Allied prosecution of Japanese war criminals.

Under no circumstances could the Allies have agreed to this. Had they done so, it would have resulted in a temporary cessation of hostilities that would have allowed Japan to regroup and rearm, followed by another war within a generation.

In spite of this evidence, the critics persist. Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka told the ABC in 2015 the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was “criminal” and “morally … wrong” saying the US government had “to find some non-legal arguments to self-justify the conduct, that they annihilated 210,000 civilians”.

As for that accusation, I can think of no better response than the words of American historian Richard B. Frank.

“Bear in mind that for every Japanese non-combatant who died during the war, 17 or 18 [non-Japanese civilians] died across Asia-Pacific,” he wrote. “Yet you very seldom find references to this and virtually nothing that vivifies it in the way that the suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been.”

As former US secretary of war Henry L. Stimson observed, the decision to use atomic weapons was the “least abhorrent choice”.