Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [104]
10. Why the bombs were dropped
How had it come to this? In the months and years after Hiroshima, historians and other commentators offered a variety of explanations for the US decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan. One of them, heard increasingly in recent years, is that white American racism caused, or at minimum enabled, the United States to use a devastating weapon on the Japanese, brown people whom they considered inferior to themselves, barbaric in their conduct of war, and finally subhuman—‘a beast’, as Truman put it. It is certainly true, as John Dower, Ronald Takaki, and others have demonstrated, that the Pacific War was fought with a savagery unfamiliar to those who had engaged each other in Europe, where enmities were bitter but vitiated by the fact that the adversaries were white. On the west coast of the United States, beginning in 1942, Japanese-Americans were rounded up and placed in internment camps. There was no means test given for loyalty: ‘a Jap is a Jap’, insisted General John L. DeWitt, head of the US Western Defense Command, and all ‘Japs’ were potentially treacherous. Or, as the Los Angeles Times had it: ‘A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched—so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese not an American.’ Home front officials and publications depictedJapanese andJapanese-Americans as insects, vermin, rodents, and apes, and in this way inspired exterminationist fantasies, for who could object to the eradication of lice, spiders, or rats? Marshall Fields department stores in Chicago bought a two-page newspaper ad depicting a simian-like Japanese soldier cringing beneath the shadow of a bomber; the caption asked, ‘Little men, what now?’ The Elks Lodge in Harrisburg, Illinois, promised ‘to knock out Hirohito but it won’t be easy... Rats are dangerous to the last corner.’ Even more sophisticated publications erased the distinction between soldiers and civilians in Japan. According to the New Republic: ‘The natural enemy of every American man, woman and child is the Japanese man, woman and child.’ It was race that mattered, blood that told; no Japanese, anywhere, could or should be spared.54
The Americans who fought Japanese in the Pacific theater were, if anything, even more scathing in their characterizations of them. Admiral William F. (‘Bull’) Halsey, commander of the US South Pacific Force, told reporters that ‘the only good Jap is aJap who’s been dead six months’. Not to be outdone, Halsey’s Atlantic counterpart, Admiral Jonas H. Ingram, explained that, ‘if it is necessary to win the war, we shall leave no man, woman, or child alive in Japan and shall erase that country from the map’. ‘When you see the little stinking rats with buck teeth and bowlegs dead alongside an American, you wonder why we have to fight them and who started this war,’ said Lieutenant General Holland M. (‘Howlin’ Mad’) Smith. ‘The Japanese smell,’ he added. ‘They don’t even bleed when they die.’ Soldiers took their cues from their officers, whose views in any case reinforced their own about the kind of enemy they were fighting. Robert Scott Jr., author of the bestseller God Is My Co-Pilot, relished combat in Southeast Asia. ‘Personally,’ he wrote, ‘every time I cut Japanese columns to pieces... strafed Japs swimming from boats we were sinking, or blew a Jap pilot to hell out of the sky, I just laughed in my heart and knew that I had stepped on another black-widow spider or scorpion.’ E. B. Sledge, island hopping with the marines in