Richard Overy questions the morality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber called Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. The thermal radiation from the atom bomb was 900 times more searing than the sun. An estimated 118,661 civilians died, horribly. Survivors staggered about with their skin in shreds, their intestines hanging out and their blacked and bleeding faces grotesquely disfigured.

Upon hearing the news, President Harry Truman called the bombing “the greatest thing in history.” Why the US unleashed the terrible bombs over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, has been much debated ever since. In his excellent short book on the subject, Richard Overy writes:

The question asked is usually “Was it necessary?” The question, however, should really be “Why was it thought to be necessary at the time?”

Moralizing or justifying in hindsight is too easy. The Americans desperately wanted the war with Japan to end as swiftly as possible, thereby avoiding a bloody invasion. They believed the Japanese would fight to the last man and woman. Truman thought he had no choice. Few people then would have disagreed with him.

But dropping an atom bomb on a densely populated city was not entirely uncontested at the time. Most of the scientists involved in the nuclear project thought a demonstration away from a city would suffice. And many still believe that killing people with such a horrendous weapon crossed a clear boundary. War is terrible. But what happened in Hiroshima was utterly immoral.

Overy questions whether there was even a clear moral distinction between the atomic bomb attacks and “strategic” or “saturation” bombing with more conventional arms. These were the incendiary and cluster bombs filled with napalm which destroyed almost every major Japanese city by creating uncontrollable firestorms that killed more than 100,000 people in one night in Tokyo alone. In the words of General Curtis “Old Iron Pants” LeMay, the citizens of Tokyo were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.”

LeMay liked to take credit for this strategy of destroying entire cities. In fact, it had already been tried in Hamburg, Berlin, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and Coventry. (The Germans had a nice phrase for this: Coventriseren, “to Coventry.”) Whether it was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, LeMay or Hermann Goering, the general idea was that saturation bombing would demoralize the population so much that they would revolt against their leaders. This didn’t happen in Berlin, London, Tokyo or Hiroshima — or indeed in Hanoi, Kyiv or Gaza.

The bombing strategy had various reasons. Attempting to hit only military or industrial targets was difficult and costly in planes and air crews. In military turf battles, generals in charge of bombers wanted to demonstrate that their outfits could be more effective than other armed forces. And memories of the carnage in the trenches of the first world war made bombing seem like a better option.

But Overy is right. If a moral line was crossed, it started not with Little Boy but with the decision to boil and choke massive numbers of civilians to death. This is not a judgment in hindsight. In 1937, the US State Department asserted:

Any general bombing of an extensive area wherein resides a large population engaged in peaceful pursuits is unwarranted and contrary to the principles of law and humanity.

This does not answer the question of whether Truman, Churchill and their advisers were right to believe that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to bring the war to a speedier end. The problem, as Overy correctly observes, is that the Japanese had no experience of surrender, and their military leaders wouldn’t countenance it. Only a unanimous decision of the Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War could end the conflict. And as long as the Allies demanded unconditional surrender, this was almost impossible to achieve.

One of the sticking points was the future role, if any, of the Japanese emperor. Unlike Hitler, Hirohito was not a dictator; his powers were very limited. The unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany was essential. The emperor could have been left on his throne as a constitutional monarch — which is what eventually happened.

Even so, there was a “peace faction” in the Japanese elite, including some members of the Supreme Council. Their view that Japan had no choice but to surrender, which was endorsed by the emperor himself, was probably not much affected by the bombing of Hiroshima, and even less by the attack on Nagasaki. What allowed the emperor to force the hands of the military diehards by making a “sacred decision” to “suffer the insufferable” and terminate the war was the fear of a Soviet invasion. The prospect of a revolution in Japan, which was never very likely, scared them too.

Instead of mediating with the western Allies to achieve a peaceful solution on Japanese terms, which Japan had hoped for, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan three days after the bombing of Hiroshima. The prospect of a Soviet invasion was so terrifying to the Japanese leaders that they decided a surrender to the western powers would be preferable.

So, did the bombs make no difference at all? We will never know for sure. Overy reminds us that the Japanese prime minister, Suzuki Kantaro, recalled after the war that the bomb was “an additional reason” to accept defeat. But this may have been even more true for the diehards than for members of the peace faction. Hiroshima and Nagasaki allowed them to claim force majeure. Japan had not been defeated by conventional means but by what the emperor in his broadcast speech called a “most cruel bomb.” This might have saved the face of a sacred warrior nation, at least in the minds of its military leaders. If so, it was exceptional.

What Rain of Ruin makes clear is that the strategy of mass murder by bombs — atomic, hydrogen, napalm or incendiary — is not just immoral but hardly ever effective. That it is still employed in war is a terrible stain on humanity.