A Political and Economic History of China Addendum: Critics of the Atomic Bomb, Part 4 of 4

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Photo: Things have changed quite a bit since 1945.

7 MIN READ - The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs submits his final installment critiquing critics of the atomic bomb and finishes the discussion with the question of using nuclear weapons today.

So far we’ve countered some of the most popular criticisms of America’s use of the atomic bomb in 1945: that the Japanese “were just about to surrender,” that a conventional invasion of Japan wouldn’t have cost many lives, or that a blockade of Japan would have produced a quick surrender with very little loss of life.

All of these are demonstrably false, and today we address the last of the popular cases that the atomic bomb was unnecessary:

4) “Several Allied policymakers and generals were opposed to using the bomb and said it wasn't needed.”

Although this reasoning is just an argument from authority, it’s true that when news of Hiroshima’s destruction broke several high profile military officers publicly voiced their opposition. A common example comes from conservative commentator Candace Owens who posted a quote of Dwight Eisenhower stating “It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

(Owens’ post of Eisenhower’s quote also encouraged critical thinking and debate in about as civil and respectful a note as I’ve seen in a long time)

Eisenhower did write in his memoirs that when the bomb was dropped he had opposed its use. General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral William “Bull” Halsey also disagreed with the use of the bomb. So did Army Air Force generals Hap Arnold and Curtis LeMay, the latter of whom had been firebombing Japanese cities for months, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

On the surface it appears the military brass knew something the rest of the world didn’t and roundly opposed using the bomb.

But looking a little deeper there’s at least two problems with this line of reasoning.

First: the modern-day critics of the atomic bomb never mention the names of other generals and policymakers who supported its use.

Among those in the “for” camp were:

Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, who outranked every military officer mentioned in the “against” camp.

His boss, Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

Admiral Chester Nimitz was publicly silent on the bomb, but during invasion planning—when faced with the prospect of confronting 735,000 IJA soldiers in Kyushu and countless kamikaze strikes against his invasion fleet—he was enthusiastic about its use. Even after Nagasaki, Nimitz privately supported dropping a third atomic bomb if Japan refused to surrender.

World leaders like Winston Churchill supported the use of the bomb. But much more notably so did Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek whose fellow citizens, unlike Americans, were being killed by the IJA at a rate of roughly 100,000 a month until the bomb was dropped.

During his lengthy tenure Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew stated many times that as a young man in 1945 he supported the use of the atomic bomb as did most Singaporeans because it immediately stopped the death and suffering of occupied peoples at the hands of the IJA and secret police. The people of Vietnam and Indonesia, 3.5 to 4.5 million of whom died in the 1944-45 wartime famine, probably agreed too.

There's a second problem: Critics quote the names of many flag officers who were opposed only at the moment the bomb was dropped, but never follow up years later when the same men changed their minds.

At least three of the military names thrown around from the “against” camp later about-faced. Why? Because in August of 1945 most of the world outside Japan hadn’t yet learned the full potential for military and civilian bloodshed in a conventional invasion or blockade.

Operation Olympic planners saw intelligence reports of IJA strengths in Kyushu, but not everyone else did. Only after Japan’s surrender did the world learn the entire Japanese adult civilian population was mobilized to fight to the death in the “Glorious Death of One Hundred Million” campaign.

Only later did the world learn how far away the Tokyo government was from accepting an actual surrender, until two atomic bombs were dropped and the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands.

And only after Japan’s surrender did the world learn the staggering rate at which civilian populations were dying—half a million every month at least—in Japanese occupied China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, and Indonesia.

Years after Japan’s surrender General Curtis LeMay changed his mind and publicly supported the use of the bomb. In an interview General Omar Bradley stated the Allies would have lost a staggering number of men in a conventional invasion, the Japanese even moreso, and that the atomic bomb saved countless lives.

General Douglas MacArthur's attitude towards the use of the atomic bomb changed markedly only a few years later when he publicly and repeatedly called for its use against Communist China to end the Korean War.

So the argument that “General X and Y understood the war better than you and they were against the atomic bomb, therefore you should be too” is weak. Because it cherry picks only the names that agree with the critics while ignoring all the other military and political leaders who didn’t—many of whose own citizens were dying en masse at the hands of the Japanese. 

And the argument also counts opponents of the bomb only at a narrow, specific point in time when they were initially “against” its use, but ignores some of those same officers who, once cognizant of just how bloody a conventional invasion or blockade would have turned out, shifted later in life and supported the bomb’s use.

A FINAL WORD ABOUT TODAY

Lastly, the Economics Correspondent would like to offer an opinion on what all this means today by posing a simple question:

Q. If faced with the same circumstances in Japan in 2025, would the United States use the atomic bomb again?

The Correspondent can confidently answer “No, the USA would not use nuclear weapons again” and, despite all his criticism of the World War II bomb’s critics, the Correspondent would agree wholeheartedly with a “no first use” policy.

Most of the modern-day nuclear powers are guided by the same thinking. Even if facing millions of deaths to conduct an invasion or a blockade, the Economics Correspondent believes the United States, the UK, France, India, and probably Russia and China would all resist the temptation to wrap a conflict up quickly with a nuclear first strike.

In fact we’re seeing a fitting case right now with Vladimir Putin opting not to solve the conflict against a non-nuclear Ukraine with his nuclear arsenal.

Why the change of attitude?

The world of nuclear weapons has not only changed dramatically since 1945, but as early as the 1950’s the circumstances already bore no resemblance to 1945. Within a few short years of Hiroshima tens of thousands of nuclear weapons had been constructed, and newly developed thermonuclear (hydrogen/fusion) weapons possessed over 1,000 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks.

For reference: the “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” fission devices that were dropped on Japan yielded about 15 kilotons of destructive power. By 1954 the U.S. “Castle Bravo” hydrogen bomb test yielded 15 megatons (one megaton = 1,000 kilotons) and in 1961 the USSR tested the “Tsar Bomba” with a yield of 50 megatons, more than 3,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima.

In August 1945 only two atomic devices existed on earth and had to be delivered by slow, vulnerable propeller bomber aircraft. By the 1960’s there were 40,000 far more powerful nuclear warheads that could be delivered by intercontinental ballistic missile or submarine launched ballistic missile, both virtually indefensible at the time.

In other words the world quickly changed from one or two relatively small, novel weapons to the very real possibility of human civilization’s destruction in a matter of minutes.

For that reason most of the nuclear powers have been far more pensive about the implications of using nuclear weapons. In a world where unleashing a single nuke can trigger thousands of atomic reprisals within an hour and literally destroy civilization, it’s no wonder the major nuclear powers have adopted a “we will posses, but not use first” doctrine. To use nukes first would also give more irresponsible players like terrorist groups a rhetorical excuse to justify their own first use, i.e. “We could end the war on terror with the West quickly and save lives if we just take out a major city. After all [fill in nuclear power here] is already doing it.” 

Incidentally North Korea and Pakistan have not announced a “no first use” policy because they’re at odds with more conventionally powerful neighbors who they wish to deter from attack, but even the Kim dynasty has been extremely careful not to start even a small military conflict for fear it could escalate into a nuclear exchange.

Interestingly, the USA has not declared a “no first use” policy in favor of “strategic ambiguity” to keep anyone considering the use of chemical or biological weapons against population centers guessing, although for what little it’s worth the Correspondent will bet that the undisclosed policy really is “no first use.” 

But note that none of these players, whether democratic and authoritarian, ostensibly intelligent… or stoic, or senile, or blowhard… or crazy, has managed to start a war with another nuclear power. When it comes to the prospect of pressing the nuclear button and staring down the abyss, all of them have acted very rationally (except Iran... potentially).

In conclusion, it’s easy today to see the potential for worldwide destruction if the nuclear Pandora’s Box is opened by a first strike. Because we’ve had the luxury of being familiar for decades with the real potential for nuclear doomsday… knowledge that Allied war planners and their crystal ball didn’t have in August of 1945.

Therefore it’s a logical fallacy to judge Harry Truman by the standards of 2025, or even of 1955. Given what they knew at the time, the use of the bomb was justified. But first-use of nuclear weapons can’t be justified today, the major nuclear powers all know it, and so far eighty years removed from Hiroshima they’ve all abided by it.

A Political and Economic History of China Addendum: Critics of the Atomic Bomb, Part 3 of 4

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Photo: Millions dead and more dying from famine in Vietnam and Indonesia, c. August 1945.

6 MIN READ - The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs moves on with the deadliest of all alternatives to secure Japan’s surrender in 1945, which ironically critics of the atomic bomb considered the most merciful: naval blockade.

In the last two columns we dispelled myths cited by critics of the atomic bomb that:

1) “Japan was just about to surrender,” and

2) “A conventional invasion and occupation of Japan would have cost fewer lives.”

In this third installment we address what’s probably the most mathematically backwards claim of all made by critics of the atomic bomb:

3) “The use of the atomic bomb created needless death since a naval blockade of Japan would have ended the war in at most a year without bloodshed.”

This is a fantastic myth that alleges there was a painless, casualty-free way to make Japan accept surrender without an invasion or use of the atomic bomb.

The contention is that the U.S. Navy, which the bomb’s critics correctly note enjoyed virtual supremacy on the seas by mid-1945, had already choked oil and food imports from the Japanese home islands. A blockade, they say, would have starved Japan enough that after at most one year the imperial government would have succumbed to economic pressure and surrendered.

There are several reasons this is one of the more absurd claims of bomb critics.

By this point the most obvious problem should be self-evident: the Japanese war cabinet had already demonstrated it didn’t care about the deaths of Japanese civilians. 

We know the “Big Six” cabinet members were willing to sacrifice millions of their own people in a face-saving national martyrdom campaign against conventional Allied invasion. The mobilization of all able-bodied Japanese men, women, and students was named “The Glorious Hundred Million Deaths” campaign.

We know even after hundreds of thousands of Japanese died in the massive 1945 U.S. firebombing campaigns that the war cabinet was unmoved and didn’t consider anything resembling surrender.

We know that after Hiroshima the war cabinet rejected an internal proposal for surrender that wasn’t even really a surrender: allowing the military government to remain in place, keep its conquered territories, prohibit any war crimes trials or any Allied soldiers on Japanese soil, and refusing to allow the Allies to disarm the Japanese military.

In reality a blockade would have lasted several years and hundreds of thousands, more likely millions, of Japanese civilians would have slowly starved to death while the cabinet fretted inside the imperial palace about saving face.

The Japanese government would also have plenty of time to film propaganda footage of civilians reduced to skeletons, curled up in the streets while slowly dying from starvation—a far worse death than vaporizing under an atomic explosion—and today the same critics of the atomic bombings would be accusing Harry Truman of war crimes for “slowly murdering millions of Japanese civilians by famine when the atomic bomb could have ended the war instantly with minimal loss of life.”

The second reason the “blockade is better” argument is horrible is because it would have been the most deadly option globally.

While the allies waited years for a blockade to pressure the imperial government into surrendering, not only would hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of Japanese civilians starve to death, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) would continue killing even larger numbers of civilians in its occupied territories.

Years ago the Economics Correspondent’s back-of-the-napkin research yielded a 1945 estimate that over 100,000 people were dying each month at the hands of occupying Japanese forces, mostly in China. Waiting only a year for a blockade to work would have therefore resulted in about 1.2 million more dead outside of Japan versus ending the war quickly with 150,000 killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, Pacific War historian Jon Parshall has conducted a much more thorough review of Japanese occupied territories in 1945, one that includes other factors the Correspondent missed.

First, by mid-1945 there were already famines raging in Japanese occupied Vietnam and Indonesia. Even if the Allied nations tried to deliver food relief it would have been impossible given the disruptive IJA land presence. 

Japan’s sudden surrender stopped the famines, but not after 1-2 million had already starved to death in Vietnam and 2.5 million more in Indonesia.

Obviously waiting out a blockade would have permitted the famines to continue, killing millions more innocent people.

Also, during a blockade not only would Japanese civilians have starved, but the Allies would have continued their bombing and firebombing campaigns to pressure the Japanese government into giving in.

Parshall crunches the math in multiple war-ending scenarios starting with a baseline of the atomic bombings themselves. 

Atomic bomb: All-in-all, more than 150,000 Japanese died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, from both the initial explosions and lingering radiation effects including cancer. Then the war ended.

Blockade: The numbers balloon appallingly. Several hundred thousand more civilians would continue to die every month in the previously mentioned famines that were already raging in Vietnam and Indonesia.

Chinese civilians and a smaller number of soldiers would also continue dying at a rapid rate each month, plus smaller numbers in Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, parts of Burma, and extreme northern Philippines.

In total, adding Japanese, Allied, and neutral country deaths, Parshall calculates that somewhere between 500,000 to 700,000 people were dying in Asia every month before the atomic bomb was dropped.

Over the fantasy timeline of surrender after just one year, the cruel math works out to anywhere from 6 million to 7.2 million people dying while the world waited for Tokyo to give in. And since that’s based on the actual observed fatality rate in mid-1945, which doesn’t include Japanese starvation numbers under a blockade scenario, the real death toll would be even higher.

On a more realistic timeline, if the blockade took two or three years to produce a surrender, that works out to something between 15 million to 21 million more dead. Admittedly though, by that point there may not have been enough living civilians left in Vietnamese and Indonesian famine zones to starve at the previous rate.

So the bomb critics who advocate blockade should choose: 

A. 150,000 dead to end the war immediately.

B. 15 to 21 million dead “waiting it out.”

Of course even Parshall argues these are only best estimates based on the data we have, so a skeptic could assume the numbers are too high. But even if the death toll is a few million overstated, Allied planners would still be faced with an atomic bomb solution that kills 150,000 versus a blockade that kills, say… “only” 4 million to 15 million depending how long it lasts.

And if the Allies had elected blockade and millions more died, the Correspondent can guarantee the bomb critics would accuse Harry Truman of war crimes for “choosing to kill millions of civilians throughout Japanese-occupied Asia when he could have ended the war quickly with the atomic bomb.”

The blockade option is immoral for one more reason: the Economics Correspondent has long considered it a strange and even perverse morality that cares more about the deaths of 150,000 Japanese than the deaths of millions in her conquered territories.

The 150,000 victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 40,000 of whom were military, were citizens of the belligerent country that invaded its neighbors for years to satisfy imperial ambitions of colonialism and racial domination.

The latter 6 million to 21 million, who critics of the bomb choose to kill in order to spare 150,000 Japanese, were citizens of the “victim” countries that had done nothing to warrant unprovoked Japanese invasion and mass slaughter.

The final, inescapable, twisted logic is “millions of lives in the invaded countries are worth less than 150,000 in the invading one.” 

Parshall, being more generous and accusing bomb critics of being more ignorant than callous or ideological, argues “what they fail to realize is just the scale of human devastation in wider Asia.”

A Political and Economic History of China Addendum: Critics of the Atomic Bomb, Part 2 of 4

Click here to read the original Cautious Optimism Facebook post with comments

Photo: Japanese women train with spears to fight invading American GI's in the “Glorious Death of One Hundred Million” mobilization campaign.

6 MIN READ - The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs continues his mini-series on the atomic bomb, this time refuting the argument that fewer lives would have been lost by simply invading and occupying Japan without destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Originally the Correspondent thought it would take three columns to refute the most common arguments against using the atomic bomb in World War II, but the sheer amount of history he needs to document will require a fourth.

In this column we’ll address the second common criticism of the decision to use the bomb:

2) “Estimates of Allied casualties in a conventional invasion/occupation of the home islands were wildly overstated. A conventional military invasion of Japan would have been less deadly than using the atomic bomb.”

During the summer of 1945 Allied war planners forecasted unthinkable casualties if U.S. and supporting British/Australian/Canadian troops attempted to invade the Japanese home islands. Most postwar historians agree.

Although the numbers vary, most estimates for Allied casualties range from 250,000 to nearly one million (dead plus wounded). To put that in perspective the United States suffered one million casualties in all of World War II of which 291,000 were battle deaths.

In addition to Americans, estimates of Japanese casualties, military and civilian combined, numbered in the several millions.

Hence the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing upwards of 150,000 people. 

The civilian death count was still appalling although mitigated by two factors: First, U.S. bombing warning leaflets had been dropped over most Japanese cities urging citizens to evacuate including Hiroshima, reducing its population modestly before the attack...

(see "LeMay Leaflets")

https://ww2db.com/image.php?image_id=7350

And second, 40,000 of those living in Hiroshima were military, stationed at the Second Army General Headquarters which was responsible for the southern defense of Kyushu. The presence of the Army Command that would coordinate resistance against the Kyushu invasion was a major factor in the USA’s decision to select Hiroshima as a target.

But critics of the bombing still maintain Allied casualty estimates have been wildly overstated, both by the U.S. War Department and modern day historians, and that the Allies could have invaded and pacified Japan for far less than 150,000 deaths—Allied soldier, Japanese military, and Japanese civilian alike.

Using one customary example the late libertarian historian Ralph Raico, writing for the Ludwig von Mises Institute and making a case for trying Harry Truman as a war criminal, argued “the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.”

Raico’s source was Stanford historian Barton Bernstein whose research, also criticizing the unnecessary use of the bomb, calculated the same fatality estimate: only 46,000 Americans dead.

Some readers may find such a low forecast and others like it beyond belief, and for good reason. Simply applying lessons learned from past Pacific battles reveals the outlandishness of artificially depressing the numbers that low.

The U.S. suffered nearly 20,000 dead fighting for two rocks in the Pacific—Iwo Jima and Okinawa—with another 56,000 wounded

The Japanese suffered 115,000 dead on the same two islands and another 40,000-150,000 civilians died in Okinawa.

In both battles the USA enjoyed a 5-to-1 advantage in manpower.

Total casualties on both sides? 175,000-285,000 dead and at least 60,000 wounded.

And taking Japan itself would be a monumentally larger operation for which the Allies planned a two-invasion campaign. First would come beach landings on the home island of Kyushu (Operation Olympic), then clearing out and occupying the southern third of the island, an area of about 4,000 square miles.

Kyushu's ports and airfields would then be used to stage the second, larger invasion of Tokyo and the Kanto Plain—about 6,200 square miles—in March of 1946, dubbed Operation Coronet.

Thus the Allies aimed to invade and occupy 10,200 square miles of Japanese territory, more than 13 times larger than Okinawa and Iwo Jima combined. And unlike the latter two, which were surrounded by ocean in all directions, the occupied regions of Kyushu and Honshu would remain adjacent to Japanese controlled territory and thus subject to constant infiltration and counterattack.

In January 1945 the U.S. began making plans to invade Kyushu with 766,000 men, ten times the number of Americans at Normandy which to this day remains the largest amphibious invasion in history. According to intelligence reports there was only a single IJA division defending the island.

However after losing Okinawa Japanese strategists correctly anticipated Kyushu would be the Allies’ next objective, and by July 1945 the IJA had deployed 900,000 men and several tank brigades to defend the limited number of suitable landing grounds. 10,000 attack planes were also apportioned to Kyushu, most of which would be used in kamikaze attacks against offshore U.S. Navy ships.

Instead of a 5-to-1 advantage the Allies were now faced with parity which U.S. war planners were reluctant to accept.

Furthermore the Japanese government had mobilized every able-bodied adult—men, women, and students—to resist the invasion for the “Glorious Death of One Hundred Million” campaign. Footage of young Japanese women being trained with bamboo spears still exists in the archives today.

Had the Allied invasion proceeded then today we would undoubtedly have archival footage of spear-wielding Japanese women being machine-gunned or flame-thrown by U.S. Marines. And today’s A-bomb critics would instead be castigating “the brutal killing of Japanese women when the war could have been ended quickly with the atomic bomb."

To think that after fighting Japan for 770 square miles, with a 5-to-1 advantage and losing 20,000 dead, the U.S. would somehow only suffer 46,000 dead fighting at parity against 900,000 Japanese soldiers in Kyushu alone, 10,000 attack planes, and two million armed civilians over 4,000 square miles is pure fantasy resembling wartime propaganda.

And that's just Act One.

Remember more casualties were anticipated for 1946’s even larger Operation Coronet where Allied soldiers would invade the much larger, more heavily populated island of Honshu and engage in door-to-door urban fighting for Japan’s largest city and capital, although admittedly a great deal of Tokyo’s structures had been destroyed during the U.S. firebombing in March.

Moreover the USA lost nearly 20,000 dead over two rocks that most Japanese never considered part of the homeland. The level of fanatical resistance would have only increased when invading Kyushu and Honshu, the capital city of Tokyo, and the imperial palace.

Also keep in mind that Iwo Jima was devoid of civilians (already evacuated) and Okinawan civilians were not combatants, yet 40,000-150,000 of them died anyway. In Japan tens of millions of civilians were mobilized as militia to battle against Allied troops on the home islands. 

The painful process of neutralizing militarized civilian resistance may also have extended beyond just southern Kyushu and the Kanto Plain—to the entire country—if the emperor never gave the order to surrender or perished before he could issue such an order.

Disruption of what little economy Japan had left during the fighting would have also led to more deaths by starvation as hunger was already gripping Japan by mid-1945.

The estimates of many millions of Japanese dead are absolutely realistic.

And foreshadowing the subject of our next column, American and Japanese death counts would have to be doubled for those who remember the millions more victims who critics of the bomb callously disregard: the peoples of Japanese-occupied countries who were already dying in large numbers and would continue to die throughout Asia while the invasion dragged on. 

Assuming very optimistically that the invasion wrapped up by summer of 1946 an estimated 4 to 5.6 million more civilians—mostly in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam—would have perished while waiting for the Japanese surrender to finally come. 

More details on that macabre calculus in Part 3, but due to the atomic bomb those 4 to 5.6 million Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesians lived instead.

“Worst case only 46,000 American lives lost” is wishful thinking for the ideologically predisposed: critics who start from a premise that the Allies possessed a long list of peaceful, bloodless options to end the war, but that Harry Truman callously chose to ignore them all. 

Simple historical facts, like casualty figures from the Pacific battles of early 1945, dispel such fantasies.

The very ugly nature of the choices the Allies faced has been better summarized by knowledgeable historians: a list of exclusively horrible options for the Allies, the Japanese, and the people of Japanese-occupied Asia, with the atomic bomb being the least worst solution by far. Those critics who argue a full invasion of Japan or a blockade (coming in the next column) “wouldn’t have been that bad” enjoy the luxury of living in an alternate reality that American war planners and Harry Truman did not.