The birth of 'mere terror'

[Briar]

he birth of 'mere terror'

Hiroshima wasn't uniquely wicked. It was part of a policy for the mass killing of civilians

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

At the time, there was little immediate sense that something utterly extraordinary had happened, or that life had changed for ever. After August 6 1945, popular newspapers wrote half nervously and half exultantly about the coming of the "atomic age", but the most widespread reaction was mere thankfulness that the war was over.
It was argued then, and still sometimes is, that the bombing of Hiroshima 60 years ago tomorrow, and of Nagasaki three days later, was justified by the Japanese surrender, obviating the need for an invasion of Japan which would have meant huge casualties. That may not even be true, though the debate among military historians remains unresolved.

By the summer of 1945, Japan was already prostrate. Not only were Japanese armies being driven out of the Pacific islands and Burma, American bombers were wrecking the cities of Japan and, in one of the most successful campaigns of the whole war, submarines of the US navy had done to Japan what German U-boats had never managed to do to England, by completely destroying its shipping. Some American admirals believed then and ever after that surrender was a matter of time, and not much of it, and a strong suspicion persists of an ulterior motive by Washington, wanting to end the war with Japan quickly before Soviet Russia joined in.

In any case, that argument begs the profoundest questions of ends and means. In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, few people addressed them, or grasped the enormity of what had been done. Two who did were very remarkable men writing from entirely disparate perspectives: Dwight Macdonald, an American radical atheist, and Monsignor Ronald Knox, a conservative English Catholic.

Once an active Trotskyist, Macdonald was evolving from revolutionary socialism to pacifist anarchism, as reflected in Politics, the brilliant magazine he published from 1944 to 1949. His response to the news from Hiroshima was unequivocal. "This atrocious action places 'us', the defenders of civilisation, on a moral level with 'them', the beasts of Maidanek. And 'we', the American people, are just as much and as little responsible for this horror as 'they', the German people."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1542928,00.html

[Art_from_Ark]

1. The US did not "want to end the war with Japan quickly

before Soviet Russia joined in". In fact, Russia was invited to join in the war against Japan at Yalta, and was promised Japanese islands in return. A cynic might go so far as to say that the US wanted Russia to take the islands because it would create an immediate friction between Russia and Japan that would keep the Japan on the US side in the post-war era (and even today, the conflict over the islands has not been resolved and there is still no peace treaty between Japan and Russia).