Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and Yesterday’s Megadeathaversary
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944).
I highly recommend you see this WWII movie about striking back at Japan after Pearl Harbor. What was amazing to me watching this movie, made and released during the war, was how concerned everyone was about civilian deaths. Officers firmly instructed the pilots and crews that, if they missed their assigned targets, they were not permitted to bomb any other location. It was pointed out that only military targets could be ethically attacked.
More than once, pilots and crewmen were told they could opt out of the campaign because the fact that civilians would almost certainly be killed at those military targets might lead some to believe the operations were murder. They were assured there would be no reprisals of any kind if they wished to be exempt from the attacks.
Only a year later we killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in one fireball [edit: 80,000 plus 100,000 from radiation poisoning later], and then another three days later.
I take this as a demonstration that people’s principles are quite malleable. If respected leaders change their behavior then the public will alter their values in order to be able to continue to respect their leaders.
Here’s a typical example of what passes for morality now.
A few things off the top of my head:
- One way to justify weapons of mass death is to point out that, without them, mass death will result for others. A typical antiwar libertarian claim is to point out that if police opened fire on a crowd of innocents to kill a criminal, they would be prosecuted (probably not true anymore, but I read this in a book from the seventies). But that illustration doesn’t grapple with what the police would need to do if the bad guy had a nuke he was about to set off. That may or may not justify or ameliorate the situation of our nukes pointing at other countries with nukes pointing at us. I’m not bringing all this up to deal with that issue. I’m mentioning it to point out that Japan wasn’t even a threat to the United States any more. Period. But we killed babies and children and wives who had zero input into Japanes foreign policy anyway.
- Of course, if we had invaded with our soldiers, we might have lost casualties. Killing their children was “necessary” to keep our soldiers from being killed when they invaded in a protracted war. But what gets left out of this was that we had decided on “unconditional” surrender. If we had offered terms, including the ending of the Japanese imperial troops in Asia that the WSJ editorial points to, we could have had it.
- And lets not forget, we had already decimated Japan. The blood for blood rule for Pearl Harbor (for all its barbarism, much more of a military target than what we nuked) as well as for our Pacific soldiers was more than balanced. Not that targeting their civilians to repay for ours could ever be right.
- The claim that Japan was never going to surrender was, if it matters, contested by Truman’s own generals.
- But why should it matter? We have the right to mass murder people who have never done anything to us because their leaders might, guessing about the course of months of warfare in the future, massively resist an invasion? Who gives anyone the right to make that kind of decision on that kind of basis? The whole rationale is itself a horror. We just killed all those people to be on the safe side.
- Finally, maybe the civilization that has followed is better than it would be with a less-damaged Japan. I don’t think this is true, but even if it were, it would not mean that the decision to drop the bomb is ethical. God has permitted good to come from all kinds of evil. But we should know better than to say “let us do evil that good may result.” We’re not God and the atomic bomb is not our personal Providence.
- And we never got our unconditional surrender. Truman accepted a conditional surrender anyway. So what was the point?
I remind the reader, that I believe that war, fighting, and killing, are necessary things that may be done and must be done when required. But “just war theory” is a misnomer for the casual justifications that are passed in it’s name for bombing civilians. There is no Christian just bombing tradition that anyone can appeal to. We just made it up on the spur of the moment.
RSS
