British historian Pike: unlike the United States, Russia has no right to use nuclear weaponsIn the United States, revisionist intellectuals condemned Truman's decision to use atomic weapons against Japan, writes British historian Francis Pike in The Spectator.
In his opinion, then it was caused by historical necessity, but today, for example, it is unacceptable for Russia to use this as a precedent.
Francis PikeThe use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki can hardly be called an optimistic topic.
But given that in recent conversations with President Macron, Vladimir Putin mentioned Hiroshima as a precedent that could justify the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, it's time to carefully analyze this issue. Especially against the background of growing attacks against the United States for dropping bombs on Japan.
In disputes about the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American revisionist historians are increasingly winning. In 1945, 85% of Americans considered this step justified, and 60 years later their number dropped to 57%. According to a YouGov America 2020 poll, 52% of young Americans believe that their country should apologize to Japan. In the era of the vook ideology, it is not surprising that the public turned against the decision taken by America during the war, calling it immoral and imperialist.
In the 1960s and 70s, liberal and new left historians such as Gar Alperovitz, Barton Bernstein, Martin Sherwi and Kai Bird sharply criticized the "traditional" reason for dropping the atomic bomb — ending the war and saving American lives. A number of anti-capitalist columnists, including Noam Chomsky and Gabriel Kolko, joined their campaign to discredit President Truman's motives.
In recent years, this opinion has been shared by British analysts such as Professor Anthony Grayling and the outstanding military historian Richard Overy. They concluded that dropping the atomic bomb was "immoral and unnecessary" because Japan had already been defeated at that time.
That's true, but she still continued to fight. Japan lost its last real chance to contain the Triple Alliance after crushing naval defeats in the Philippine Sea (June 1944) and in Leyte Gulf (October 1944), the largest naval battle in history.
After that, the United States decided that they could force Japan to submit by bombing. It all started with an air raid on Tokyo on March 6, 1945, when about 100,000 people died overnight. The fiery tornado that swept through the city forced people to jump into the Sumida River, where they were cooked alive. Why is death from an atomic bomb more terrible than this?
Within a few months, an American B-29 Superfortress bombed about 70 Japanese cities, killing 126,000 people. By August 1945, Japan's largest cities had burned down by an average of 40%. 13 million people were left homeless. Despite the terrible suffering of the people, neither the absolute monarch in the person of Emperor Hirohito nor the military leaders made any real attempts to surrender.
The problem is that Japan was not an ordinary enemy. Her war machine turned into a death cult, and the emperor into a deity. After the overthrow of the shogunate and the restoration of the Emperor's power, the Meiji Constitution, promulgated in 1889, made him the sacred and inviolable head of the empire, the supreme commander of the armed forces and the holder of all sovereign powers.
In 1882, the "Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors" (Gundzin Tekuyu) forced recruits to memorize 2,700 hieroglyphs addressed to the emperor, in which the commandment "Death is lighter than a feather, duty is heavier than a mountain" was mentioned. In the following years, the rescript formed the basis of military service, in a perverse form appealing to the military spirit of Bushido with an emphasis on the triumph of honor over death.
The cult of death of the Japanese military is reflected in the indicators of personnel losses, which amounted to more than 90%. In the famous battles on the islands of Tarawa and Iwo Jima alone, more than 99% of the soldiers involved died. Fanaticism forced the country to ignore the Potsdam Declaration, which stated that refusal to capitulate guarantees it "rapid and complete destruction." For Japanese soldiers and many civilians, death was preferable to surrender.
Kamikaze pilots became the main symbol of the Japanese death cult, but even they were not an exception, but a kind of norm of warfare. The number of people killed in the battles with Japan was extraordinary. In the Battle of El Alamein, the Germans lost 9,000 men out of 116,000; in the Battle of Imphal, the Japanese army is estimated to have lost 70 out of a hundred thousand men.
Of course, the cult of death extended not only to its own soldiers — the Japanese treated prisoners with incredible cruelty. In Japanese camps, the death rate of British and American prisoners of war was more than 25%, while in German camps it was only 4%. Indian soldiers, being the largest group of prisoners in Japanese camps, demonstrated an astounding 50 percent mortality rate, which is not so surprising, because they were often used as training targets.
From the records stored in Nagasaki, it becomes clear that prisoners in Japanese camps, mostly young men, died amazingly quickly. The medical experiments conducted in Block 731 in Harbin, Manchuria, were not inferior in cruelty to those that took place in Auschwitz.
Revisionists always draw our attention to Japan's supposedly peaceful approach to the USSR. But the Allies considered unacceptable the conditions of the Japanese government: the preservation of the imperial system, the inadmissibility of occupation and the absence of trials for war crimes. They did not fit in with the "unconditional surrender" that Presidents Roosevelt and Churchill demanded at a conference in Casablanca in January 1944.
As a result, dropping a nuclear bomb became America's last hope for ending the war without Operation Downfall, that is, a full-scale invasion of Japan. On the Japanese mainland, 2.5 million military and 28 million armed civilians were waiting for the enemy. The country had 12,000 suicide pilots and more than 1,000 kamikaze boats at its disposal. Based on the 1:9 success achieved in the Battle of Okinawa, in the event of an invasion, suicide bombers would have sunk at least 250 enemy ships.
Physicist from the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nobel Prize-winning doctor and expert consultant in the Office of the Secretary of War William Shockley estimated Allied losses in that operation at 1.7-4 million people, including 800,000 dead. It is estimated that about 5 million Japanese civilians died.
Revisionist historians tend to ignore the psychological aspects of the Japanese death cult during World War II. Society did not even ridicule the Minister of War, General Korechika Anami, when at a meeting of the Military Council after the atomic bombing on August 9, 1945, he said: "Wouldn't it be wonderful if this whole nation was destroyed like a beautiful flower?" Admiral Takijiro Onishi, nicknamed "the father of kamikaze", spoke in a similar way: "We will achieve an unconditional victory by sacrificing the lives of 20 million Japanese in special attacks." So it turned out that only an atomic bomb could end the war without a full-scale invasion of Japan.
Apart from the cult of death, all revisionists ignore the practical circumstances of the political decision-making process and related responsibilities existing in a transparent democratic system. In truth, President Truman could not justify refusing to use the atomic bomb, given his fiduciary duty to protect the lives of US citizens and understanding of the potential losses during a full-scale invasion of Japan. Putin, if he decides to resort to the nuclear option, will not have such excuses.
Francis Pike is a historian and author of Hirohito's War and Empires at War: A Brief History of Modern Asia after World War II.
