Earlier this year I read the book, Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan, by the historian Richard Overy, who has written prolifically on the Second World War. It is a fine, short study.
In understanding the road to the events of 1945, attention needs to be paid to the fact that, well before the events of Pearl Harbour, - indeed since the 1920 - the American military had been planning for the possibility of war with Japan. They had planned that they would fight across the islands of the Central Pacific until they got near the Japanese home islands, when they would then bomb Japan and thereby avert an invasion. This is what basically happened after Pearl Harbour.
A central argument made by Overy is the “incremental radicalisation,” as the war goes on. In March 1945, US incendiary bombs were dropped on Tokyo (‘firebombing’). The results were devastating: “In the intense heat, sparks filled the air, setting fire to people’s clothing and hair until they became another combustible object.” One survivor recalled, “without sin and regardless of age or sex” people became “blackened clumps of charcoal.” The point is that the atomic bombing did not emerge out of nowhere. This was despite the fact that many Americans had earlier questioned the morality of British area bombing in Germany. The ruthless bombing of Japanese cities, well before the dropping of of atomic bombs, done without much moral inhibition, points to a cumulative radicalisation where an enormous number of civilian casualties were seen as an acceptable price to pay.
For General Curtis LeMay, responsible for planning and executing the bombing strategy, there were no pangs of regret over the killing over 80,000 people - mainly civilians - in a single night during the firebombing, when he later noted in his memoirs: “Enemy cities were pulverized and fried to a crisp. It was something they asked for and something they got." He showed no concerns for the people "we scorched, and boiled and baked to death."
Such attitudes were enabled by desire for revenge (for the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 and the Bataan Death March in 1942) and by racial prejudice. “Even Truman could note in his diary on July 25 that ‘The Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic’.” Japanese people were dehumanised, considered “low order of humanity.”
It was also enabled by euphemism and “the tranquillising effect of the military language.” “Military targets” were emphasised in the language deployed by the Americans, though it does not take much for the imagination to realise how deceptive such designations were when targets could be as big as towns. Overy notes that bombing also created “a psychological distance,” making it “possible to see the areas below as targets on a map, defined in strategic terms, but not as human spaces filled with people.” It enabled bombing to be seen in more abstract terms.
Another interesting angle that Overy provides, is that many scientists involved in the engineering of the bomb were determined to see it used. “For those who built the bomb, there was an irresistible scientific curiosity about whether it would work and with what results.” Caught up in the moment, many scientists became less attentive to the catastrophic human consequences that would flow from the dropping of an atomic bomb.
The fierce and determined resistance of the Japanese in the Pacific and South East Asia certainly worried the Americans. They feared that they would face the same sort of ‘fanatical’ resistance should they invade Japan and that the Japanese would refuse an unconditional surrender. There was, therefore, a genuine belief that the dropping of the atomic bombs would save lives in the long run and shorten the war.
In Overy’s own judgment, the equation that atomic bombing equalled surrender, is too simplistic. Instead there was a “cocktail of existing pressures on Japanese leadership.” Indeed, Overy suggests that more important was the news on 8th of August that the Russians were going to declare war on Japan. The following morning: “The unexpected mobility and firepower of the Red Army produced an East Asian version of Blitzkrieg. Within hours the Japanese defensive lines were pierced, bypassed, and overrun…The Soviet Union was overnight transformed from potential arbiter to a menacing threat to the future of the empire.”
In this slim book, Overy combines careful research with judicious judgement. As he writes in his preface, “The object in this book is not to judge the past but to try to understand it better in its own terms, as all good history should.”
