Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [369]
Yet this represents the knowledge of hindsight, which makes possible a judgement wholly unattainable by Allied warlords in 1944–45. It would have been politically as well as militarily unthinkable for large American and British forces to stand idle in the Pacific and South-East Asia, waiting upon the impact of hypothetical scientific, strategic and economic developments. The loss of the Philippines and Burma played at least a marginal part in persuading Hirohito and those around him that their nation was doomed. Consider the implications if Slim’s army had not crossed the Chindwin, if MacArthur had not established himself in the Philippines. Had large Allied armies merely lingered passive after the fall of the Marianas, waiting for blockade and bombardment to force Japan’s capitulation, the military leadership in Tokyo would certainly have interpreted this as infirmity of will. The material and moral cost to the United States of LeMay’s campaign outweighed its substantive achievement. Yet it would be foolish to doubt that even the most fanatical Japanese were deeply shaken by the destruction of their cities, the loss of between one-quarter and one-third of their national wealth to the B-29s.
At the very least, the 1945 air and land campaigns emphasised the Allies’ implacable resolution. Even the war party in Tokyo could not convincingly argue that American commitment, indeed ruthlessness, was inferior to that of samurai, when they beheld Japan’s ruined cities, the slaughter of its people in hundreds of thousands, the dogged erosion of its armies. Japan’s leaders started the war supposing that their nation’s spirit could compensate for its relative material weakness. By August 1945, this proposition was decisively discredited.
Of the atomic bombs, a modern American historian has written: “If the bombing of Hiroshima966 and Nagasaki was the apogee of the nation-state—for what other political entity could possibly have financed and manned such an undertaking as the Manhattan Project…then that moment was also the birth of the universal vulnerability of the nation-state.” Not only does the use of the atomic bombs seem to have been justified in the circumstances prevailing in August 1945, but I am among those convinced that the demonstration of nuclear horror, and the global revulsion which it provoked, has contributed decisively towards preserving the world since. If the effects of nuclear attack had not been demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is overwhelmingly likely that in the Cold War era, an American or Russian leader would have convinced himself that the use of atomic weapons could be justified. Korea in 1950 offers an obvious example, when some U.S. generals, above all MacArthur, favoured exploiting against China the advantages supposedly conferred by America’s nuclear arsenal. Such a point is irrelevant to the debate about whether the original decision in 1945 was valid, but is surely worthy of consideration more than six decades later.
For all the absurdity of Britain’s hopes of restoring its eastern hegemony in 1945, many of Slim’s soldiers of Fourteenth Army retained sentimental memories of the Japanese war as the last gathering of the British Empire in arms. “Dear Sir,” wrote Garba Yola967, a Nigerian of 82nd West African Division, to his former commander Maj.-Gen. Sir Hugh Stockwell in 1946. “Of course it is a very long time ago since I come back home to my native land, and I hope that these few lines will meet you in an excellent condition. I arrived home safely and found all my people all right, nothing strange to be reported in respect of my present health, only that I always remember you in any circumstances of the day. I have seen the letter you sent me, and I am very glad to see that it comes from you. Give my special compliments to my ‘mother’ your