All war is a crime. There is no such thing as a “good war.” As the great Benjamin Franklin said, “there is no good war; and no bad peace.”
We are now in the midst of the annual debate over the atomic bombing of Japan by the United States. Seventy years ago this week, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing or injuring some 140,000 people. A few days later, a second atomic weapon was dropped on Nagasaki, causing 80,000 casualties. Most of the dead in both cities were civilians.
Passionate debate has raged ever since between those who condemn the nuclear bombing of almost defenseless Japan as a war crime, and those who insist the attacks spared the US and its allies having to invade fight-to-the-death Japan.
I don’t know the answer to this question.
In 1945, my late father, Henry Margolis, was serving in the Pacific with US Fifth Marine Amphibious Division. The Fifth was slated to lead the amphibious invasion of Japan. After witnessing the fanatical Japanese defense of Okinawa, it appeared that invading Japan’s mainland would be a very bloody affair. My father could have died on Japan’s beaches.
But what was left of Japan by August, 1945? By spring, 1944, almost all of its maritime commerce, and all of its oil and other strategic material, had been cut off by American submarine packs and intensive coastal mining. In effect, the US did to Japan what Germany had never been able to do to that other island realm, Britain.
Japan’s air force was grounded by lack of fuel (as was Germany’s), its fleet could not leave port because of oil scarcity, the nation’s factories were shut down due to lack of raw materials, and Japan’s people faced starvation.
In March, 1945, the US Army Air Force bomber command under Gen. Curtis LeMay began carpet bombing Japan’s cities from bases in the Mariana Islands. American war planners sought to destroy Japan’s industries and will to resist. It’s from this period that LeMay’s famous quote came: ‘We’ll bomb’em back to the Stone Age.”
Continue reading “Bombs Over Tokyo: The Night The US Air Force Incinerated 100,000 Civilians”
