Apparently, in the minds of most Americans America can do no wrong. An act that would be perceived as profoundly immoral if any other nation were behind it, is seen as being quite acceptable and even laudable when it is America that sits in the driver's seat. No matter how grossly immoral a particular action may be, when America is the actor that action is somehow magically transformed in light of America's perceived exceptional greatness into something good, wholesome, and even holy -- certainly nothing deserving of an apology.
I can think of no better example of this than America's 1945 atomic bombing of the two high-density civilian population centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Official Story
Sixty-seven years ago, August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb to ever be used in warfare on the civilian population of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later a second atomic bomb was dropped on the civilian population of Nagasaki, Japan. All toll, nearly a quarter of a million civilian men, woman, children, and babies lost their lives in those blasts. Of those who survived the blasts, many were maimed for life and many more would later die slow, painful deaths due to radiation poisoning and various forms of cancer.
In Hiroshima, a city with a population of 290,000, the initial death count by the end of August 1945 was estimated at 100,000. By the end of 1950 the estimated death toll had risen, according to some estimates, to 200,000. In Nagasaki, a city with a population of 240,000, including 400 prisoners of war , it's estimated that some 70,000 were killed by the initial blast, with 140,000 dead within the next five years.
The official story at the time was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets whose destruction was necessary to bring the war to an end. The American public was also told that leaflets were dropped warning the inhabitants of these cities of the impending destruction and that they should leave. The official story tells of President Truman's decision to go nuclear on Japan as a necessary last resort designed to hasten a Japanese surrender, thereby saving American soldiers the horrors of a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland. The claim is made that dropping the bombs saved the lives of many thousands of American soldiers which otherwise most certainly would have been lost. In October 1945, two months after the bombs were dropped, Truman wrote in his diary:
...it is certain that [using the bomb] hastened the end of the war. We know that in this way we saved the lives of several thousand American and allied soldiers who would certainly have perished if we had not used the bomb.
But, over time, it seems that Truman found moral justification for dropping the bombs increasingly hard to come by. Over time the retelling of the official story changed. As the blood on Truman's hands grew dry and crusty and increasingly difficult to remove, the number of American lives saved as a result of dropping the bombs took a sharp upward turn . Here is Truman again just two months later on December 15, 1945:
It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities...
In just a matter of months, the number of American soldiers whose lives were saved went from "several thousand" to a "quarter of a million." A year later, late 1946, the estimated number of American soldiers saved as a result of dropping the bombs increased by another quarter of a million:
A year less of war will mean life for three hundred thousand, maybe half a million, of America's finest youth.
Two years later, October 1948, Truman reveals that he was actually doing Japan a favor by dropping the bombs:
In the long run we could save a quarter of a million young Americans from being killed, and would save an equal number of Japanese young men from being killed.
Five years later, in January 1953, the number of American lives saved by dropping the bombs doubles yet again. Truman estimates the number of casualties that would have resulted from an invasion to be "as much as a million, on the American side alone, with an equal number of the enemy."
Finally, in 1959, still unable to assuage his blood-drenched conscience, he concludes that "the dropping of the bombs"saved millions of lives." Millions!
Regardless of the number of American lives Truman claims to have saved, the vast majority of Americans accept the official story as gospel. The indoctrinating media and sixty-seven years of propagandistic history texts from grammar school to high school did its job well. But, except for the fact of the bombs having been dropped, the official story is a lie. Not merely mistaken, but a lie.
In terms of moral justification, the official story no doubt provides a great deal of comfort to a great many Americans. Unfortunately, all indications are that this moral centerpiece of the official story just isn't true. The truth, as it turns out, is so barbaric that it's almost inconceivable.
Second Guessing Truman? Hardly
A common refrain of those finding rest for their moral souls in the official story is that we are not really in a position sixty-seven years later to be second-guessing a decision made under great pressure in the most horrendous of circumstances, and that, given this, we ought in all fairness to give Truman the benefit of the doubt. But, you see, in pointing to the inhumanity of this nuclear holocaust I am not second-guessing Truman sixty-seven years later. Rather, I'm listening to a diverse cadre of highly placed civil servants in the War Department, and highly honored members of the American military in command positions, who were right there in the thick of those horrendous, high-pressure circumstances, and who were largely free of the kind of vested interests that had Truman and some few others in his administration clinging to the official story. Also, many of those whose views I'll be visiting here knew far more about the situation on the ground than Truman did. Many of them were also far better informed than Truman about the Manhattan Project. When Truman took over the presidency in mid-April 1945 upon FDR's death he still didn't know that there even was a Manhattan Project. Just a few short months before the bombs were dropped, he was still completely out of the loop .
Those who out of a sense of patriotic duty may not want to second-guess Truman's decision sixty-seven years later should know that they are second-guessing nearly everyone else who was in a position to make an informed judgment. The overwhelming consensus of those in the know at the time tell us that neither the atomic bombing of Hiroshima nor the atomic bombing of Nagasaki were necessary to end the war. All of the following high-profile civil servants and military commanders have emphatically stated that for all intents and purposes the war in the pacific was over months before the bombs were ever dropped:
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