Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [324]
Most of those involved in the atomic decision recognised war, the homicidal clash of belligerents, as the root evil from which mankind should spare itself. After living for years with the bloody consequences of global conflict, they were less sensitive than modern civilians to specific refinements of killing. Many people whose deaths are described in this book would have found nothing uniquely pitiable about the manner in which Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s inhabitants perished, even if they might have been appalled by the scale.
From the inception of the Manhattan Project, it was assumed by all but a few scientists that if the device was successful, it would be used. Some people today, especially Asians, believe that the Allies found it acceptable to kill 100,000 Japanese in this way, as it would not have been acceptable to do the same to Germans, white people. Such speculation is not susceptible to proof. But given Allied perceptions that if Hitler and his immediate following could be removed, Germany would quickly surrender, it is overwhelmingly likely that if an atomic bomb had been available a year earlier, it would have been dropped on Berlin. It would have seemed ridiculous to draw a moral distinction between massed attacks on German centres of population by the RAF and USAAF with conventional weapons, and the use of a single more ambitious device to terminate Europe’s agony.
Curtis LeMay regarded the Hiroshima and Nagasaki raids merely as an addition—a redundant and unwelcome addition—to a campaign which his B-29s had already won. LeMay had not the slightest moral qualms about the atomic attacks, but was chagrined that they diminished the credit given to his conventional bomber force for destroying Japan. In late June, he predicted that the Twentieth Air Force would render the enemy incapable of continuing the war after 1 October 1945. “In order to do this,” said Arnold, “he had to take care of some 30 to 60 large and small cities.” LeMay had accounted for fifty-eight when events rendered it unnecessary to test his prophecy to fulfilment. In the minds of those conducting the war against Japan, the mission of the Enola Gay represented only a huge technological leap forward in the campaign already waged for months by the fire-raisers.
One further military point should be made. From August 1945 onwards Truman and other contemporary apologists for the bomb advanced the simple argument, readily understood by the wartime generation of Americans, that it rendered redundant an invasion of Japan. It is now widely acknowledged that Olympic would almost certainly have been unnecessary. Japan was tottering and would soon have starved. Richard Frank, author of an outstanding modern study of the fall of the Japanese empire, goes further. He finds it unthinkable that the United States would have accepted the blood-cost of invading Kyushu, in light of radio intelligence about Japanese strength.
Like any “counter-factual,” it is hard to accept this proposition as an absolute. The prospect of the Kyushu landings was wholly unwelcome to America’s military and political leadership. Yet in the summer of 1945 Marshall, for one, was committed to keeping open an invasion option—possibly of northern Honshu—partly because he questioned whether the bomb’s impact would be conclusive. The U.S. chief of staff recognised the wisdom of Churchill’s view that “all things are always846 on the move simultaneously…One has to do the best one can, but he is an unwise man who thinks there