As a Catholic, What do you think about Hiroshima?

[patrick457]

It always has interested me that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the two centers of Christianity in Japan - Hiroshima, Protestant, and Nagasaki, Catholic. I’m sure that selecting them as A-bomb targets was unrelated to that fact.

The original plan of the Target Committee at Los Alamos was to drop the A-bomb on the ancient capital of Kyoto (along with a few other cities such as Yokohama, Niigata, and Kokura - Hiroshima was a candidate all along), but the plan drop the bomb on it was eventually scrapped thanks to Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War at the time, who had known and admired Kyoto ever since his honeymoon there several decades ago.

The targets were subject to the following criteria:

• The target was larger than three miles (5 km) in diameter and was an important target in a large urban area.
• The blast would create effective damage.
• The target was unlikely to be attacked by August 1945. “Any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.”

That being said, one also needs to take into account the long-term effects of the A-bomb’s radiation.

 

[patrick457]

Extreme loss of life is not necessary with a show of force as huge as the first two A-Bombs. This is going into speculative history, but I think that Japan would have surrendered, regardless of where the A-Bombs were dropped, but I may be wrong on that.

That’s what I heard as well: by the end of July 1945, the Imperial Navy was incapable of conducting operations due to extreme losses and an Allied invasion of Japan was imminent. While in public, the higher-ups were going on and on about fighting to the end, in private they were actually making entreaties to the neutral Soviet Union, to mediate peace on terms favorable to the Japanese. The Soviets, meanwhile, were preparing to attack the Japanese, in fulfillment of their promises to the Americans and the British made at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences. There was actually some division within the leadership about whether to continue the war or not.

 

[patrick457]

And don’t forget the countless thousands of Japanese civilians who marched to commit “honorable” mass suicide wherever American troops landed. Yeah, I’m sure it would have worked out really great for everyone concerned if we had had to send a half-million troops to conquer the home islands.

Ｔhe whole concept of suicide in Japanese culture is related to the concepts of honor and shame. Shame is a highly disgraceful thing - it tarnishes one’s honor and leads to one’s ostracism from the group. If you cast shame on say, yourself or your group, or if someone casts shame on you, then that’s pretty much the end.

In this - the high emphases on honor and shame and the group mentality - I think Japanese culture is actually quite similar to Biblical culture (except for the suicide part*)!

• Albeit you do have Ahitophel as a notable exception (2 Samuel 17:1-23).

 

[Ghosty]

This is a legend that has never, as far as I know, been born out by facts. It is an invention of those Japanese who to this day refuse to recognize that their crushing defeat and horrendous air bombardment (both atomic and conventional which was actually worse!) was the result of their own atrocious behavior.

Even after TWO atomic attacks there were elements of the Japanese War Cabinet who were actively planning a coup d’etat against the Emperor in order to stop the surrender.

It’s not a legend. I provided the declassified U.S. document proving it in my post. The documents have been out in public for quite some time now, in fact. There might have been a military coup against the Emperor if such a move was made, but we’ll never know because the surrender attempts were rebuffed. And if there had been a coup it would have just been a change in government in a completely isolated island chain.

Catmando:

I’m a little skeptical of this claim. Consider the reaction of the German people as the Russians barreled into Berlin. Throwing rocks out of the windows of their homes, young boys running into the street to fight hardened soldiers, etc. They were desperate even on the verge of destruction.

On the other hand, Japan’s people were just as nationalistic but didn’t suffer quite as much as the Germans already had. They would’ve been capable of fighting back quite a bit during the invasion. My speculation is that it would’ve turned into something of guerilla warfare.

This assumes that an invasion would be necessary, and my entire point is that it wasn’t. I have no doubt that there would have been fighting to the death had there been an invasion (and perhaps slaughter of civilians by the Japanese government if they refused to fight), but that’s entirely beside the point.

Germany had to be invaded because it could not be contained, being attached by land to other countries and having its own natural resources. Japan was an island chain with no oil reserves, no major deposits of metals necessary for building massive weaponry, and no navy left to get them supplies from the outside. An invasion would have been complete overkill.

Peace and God bless!

 

[YankeeRC]

I don’t think anyone dgoes out of his way to justify it as morally right any more than fighting a World War is morally right.
Japan German and just about everyone else was working on a nuclear bomb program.
We could have waited for them to bomb us first, but we didn’t. You and I are alive today because of that.

 

[patrick457]

Germany had to be invaded because it could not be contained, being attached by land to other countries and having its own natural resources. Japan was an island chain with no oil reserves, no major deposits of metals necessary for building massive weaponry, and no navy left to get them supplies from the outside. An invasion would have been complete overkill.

Peace and God bless!

No major oil reserves, at least. There are a few small oil fields in some places, but those are hardly enough.

At the beginning of the 20th century, with increasing oil consumption, oil management became a problem. America was actually the main importer of oil at the time. From the Japanese perspective, the Pacific War was actually fought largely over oil!

When Japan occupied southern French Indochina in July of 1941, Western powers including Australia, the United States, Britain, and the Dutch government in exile, which controlled the petroleum-rich Dutch East Indies, responded by stopping the selling of iron ore, steel and oil to Japan, denying it the raw materials needed to continue its activities. In Japan, the government and nationalists viewed these embargos as acts of aggression; imported oil made up about 80% of domestic consumption, without which Japan’s economy, let alone its military, would grind to a halt. The Japanese media, influenced by military propagandists, began to refer to the embargoes as the “ABCD (“American-British-Chinese-Dutch”) encirclement” or “ABCD line”.

Japan then responded with the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Singapore, and then seized the rich oil fields of the Netherlands East Indies and Borneo. These fields produced 65 million barrels of oil in 1940, a rate which should have been adequate for Japan’s needs.

 

[BillP]

It’s not a legend. I provided the declassified U.S. document proving it in my post. The documents have been out in public for quite some time now, in fact. There might have been a military coup against the Emperor if such a move was made, but we’ll never know because the surrender attempts were rebuffed. And if there had been a coup it would have just been a change in government in a completely isolated island chain.

Poppycock. Your linked document is an intercept saying the Japanese government was considering ending the war, and exploring the possibilities of using the Soviets as intermediaries. The only negotiating point mentioned in the document was:

“We consider the the maintenance of peace in East Asia to be one aspect of world peace. Accordingly, Japan – as a proposal for ending the war and because of her concern for the establishment and maintenance of world peace – has absolutely no idea of annexing or the territories which she occupied during the war.”

That is a durn far cry from

Japan’s one “non-negotiable” was the status of the Emperor

Furthermore, the intercept mentioned sounding out the Soviets and provides no indication whatever that the Japanese ever made any overtures whatever to the American (or other Allied) government(s)

So, no. In my opinion your link didn’t prove your assertion and, again in my opinion, it remains a legend that the “Lost Causers” in Japan use to cast Japan as the “victim” of the US and thus avoid responsibility for their utterly reprehensible and uncivilized behavior between 1937 and 1945.

 

[BillP]

\America was actually the main importer of oil at the time.

I don’t think this is correct. I believe the US was a net exporter of oil throughout WWII.

From the Japanese perspective, the Pacific War was actually fought largely over oil!

…

Japan then responded with the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Singapore, and then seized the rich oil fields of the Netherlands East Indies and Borneo. These fields produced 65 million barrels of oil in 1940, a rate which should have been adequate for Japan’s needs.

While this is true, the Dutch largely wrecked the oil fields before the Japanese captured them. To add to the problems the ship carrying virtually all of Japans top oil field engineers was sunk on the way to the DEI where the engineers were going to repair the damage.

At the end of the day, by the time the Japanese got an appreciable number of the well back into production, the American submarines had sunk most of the tankers needed to carry the crude oil back to Japanese refineries.

 

[Roy5]

The Japanese government was militaristic and aggressive, true. They conducted a vile sneak attack upon Pearl Harbor. So we fought back.

 However, the western powers were far from innocent. Nearly all the nations of the Far East, with the exception of China, were occupied by European powers. English control of India, Burma, etc. French control of Indo-China. Dutch control of the Dutch East Indies. US control of the Phillipines. Western powers also had pressured China into granting them special privileges in certain areas of that nation as well. 

 I always thought it was interesting that the only 'free' country in southeast Asia, Thailand, was aligned with Japan during World War II. Japan's slogan, of course, was "Asia for the Asians'.

 There also is evidence that the US had provoked Japan in a variety of ways. It imposed an embargo on trade in some critical areas. There also was a written demand that Japan leave China, etc., which Japan was not going to do. 

 Oh, and by the way, the US had okayed Japan's earlier seizure of power in Korea some years earlier. 

  None of this is to defend Japanese policy. It simply demonstrates how confusing things can be and how there are two sides in most wars. I recall the shock I experienced when I first learned that many Ukrainians welcomed the Germans and even joined Hitler's army. Many Armenians prayed for a German victory to get a free Armenia. There even were Irish who were so anti-British that they quietly hoped for a British defeat. 

 So much depends upon where one sits. I recall how my Dad opposed getting into WWII until Pearl Harbor. Etc. He despised Hitler but had no admiration for the British Empire. When Hitler invaded Russia his wish was that they would wear one another out, bringing on the fall both of Nazism and Communism. The fact that Dad had French-Canadian background probably played a role in his lack of sympathy for England at that time. 

 War always are evil and modern warfare is beyond evil. As I may have mentioned already, I have had increased sympathy over the years with Mennonites, Quakers and others who take Jesus seriously enough ("Love your enemies" etc) that they refuse to kill others.

"Blessed are the peacemakers...."

 

[Will_S]

The difference (and to my mind it is HUGE difference) is that while we were fighting a “just” war of self defense, the Japanese were prosecuting an aggressive war that they launched against us because we brought diplomatic and economic pressure on them to try to curb their prosecution of yet another aggressive war against China.

Not at all the same thing.

Your post is like saying that a person who kills an assailant in self defense is no different from the assailant.

Once we got to the point of invading the Japanese homeland, our war was no longer a war of self-defense. At that point it was the Japanese who had every right to defend their country.

Dropping the atom bombs was a crime, but it was certainly not the only crime committed against the Japanese people, nor even the most egregious. The firebombing of Tokyo was an even greater crime.

More broadly, total war is a crime and requiring unconditional surrender is a crime.

 

[starshiptrooper]

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church #2314: “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation. A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons - to commit such crimes.”

Written after the fact and therefore completely irrelevant to whether or not it was moral to drop the A-bomb on Hiroshima.

For the record, I believe dropping the bomb was the right thing to do. Hiroshima and the surrounding area were important to the Japanese military.

 

[estesbob]

Difficult question
My father was on a ship off the coast of Japan waiting to take part in the invasion when the bombs were dropped. Although my father was always very, very liberal he always bristled when people suggested that the bombs should not have been dropped. I think from the distance of time it is easier take a dispassionate view and condemn the bombings. However, I will not condemn those who had to make tough decisions based on what they knew at the time.

 

[PJM]

=followingtheway;8027503]What is your opinion on the matter?

WAR is HELL!

I regret that it happened BUT wonder HOW many other lives its effects saved?

God Bless,
Pat

 

[TimothyH]

There is a Catholic connection to the atomic bombs, and to our Blessed Mother as well.

**The Catholic Holocaust of Nagasaki—“Why, Lord?”
**

The witness of the Catholics of Nagasaki shows God’s providence in the darkest of times.
By Brother Anthony Josemaria

On August 9, 1945, God’s inscrutable providence allowed an atomic bomb named “Fat Man” to be dropped from a B-29 into the heavily populated city of Nagasaki. The epicenter of the blast was the Urakami district, the heart and soul of Catholicism in Japan since the sixteenth century. My purpose in this article is to share an insight into God’s purpose in allowing this horrible event

This is an amazing article. Read more here.

-Tim-

 

[Warrior1979]

There is no good answer to the question.

Plenty of family members fought in that war. One of the things about the Japanese military was that they would fight until every last one was dead. Doing anything else would bring dishonor to the themselves, their family (current and ancestors), and their country. One of the dramatic things that the bomb did is that it effectively rendered their efforts meaningless. With the bomb, they would never get to face the enemy in the first place, nor even get a chance to fight. Plus it had the potential of wiping any memory of themselves, their family, and their ancestors from the face of the earth…that is about the most dishonorable thing one could do. It basically destroyed the will of the country to fight.

Interestingly enough, the conventional bombings over Tokyo were equally destructive in terms of death, but that didn’t dissuade the Japanese from continuing.

Without that A bomb, fighting would have continued, and the death of innocents and non-innocent alike would have continued. It was the choice between two evils. Innocents, and lots of them, die in either scenario.

 

[patrick457]

I don’t think this is correct. I believe the US was a net exporter of oil throughout WWII.

Ah, that’s word I was looking for: exporter. Sorry, got 'em mixed up.

 

[patrick457]

There is a Catholic connection to the atomic bombs, and to our Blessed Mother as well.

**The Catholic Holocaust of Nagasaki—“Why, Lord?”
**

The witness of the Catholics of Nagasaki shows God’s providence in the darkest of times.
By Brother Anthony Josemaria

On August 9, 1945, God’s inscrutable providence allowed an atomic bomb named “Fat Man” to be dropped from a B-29 into the heavily populated city of Nagasaki. The epicenter of the blast was the Urakami district, the heart and soul of Catholicism in Japan since the sixteenth century. My purpose in this article is to share an insight into God’s purpose in allowing this horrible event

This is an amazing article. Read more here.

-Tim-

I actually referred to that a while back. The A-Bomb dropped just 500 meters away from Urakami Cathedral, as a matter of fact.

http://home.comcast.net/~japanpow/Recovery/Banks03.jpg

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

As I’ve mentioned, the Nagasaki city government post-WWII was planning to keep the site as it was - a pile of ruins - as a national heritage and offered another location for a new church, but the Catholics of Urakami protested against this since the site where the cathedral stands is of prime importance to their history: it was once the land of the village chief where the annual fumi-e interrogations had taken place for two centuries. In 1865, a French priest named Bernard Petitjean discovered that almost all the Urakami villagers were Christian. Between 1869 and 1873, over 3600 villagers were banished into exile. After 1873, the Christians slowly returned to their home village and decided to build their own church, purchasing the village chief’s land for it.

Eventually the locals won and the new church was built on the same location in 1959, with the edifice being remodeled in 1980 to more closely resemble the original French style.

 

[utah_rose]

Written after the fact and therefore completely irrelevant to whether or not it was moral to drop the A-bomb on Hiroshima.

For the record, I believe dropping the bomb was the right thing to do. Hiroshima and the surrounding area were important to the Japanese military.

Unless you know someone who was there, fighting in World War II you have to consider the alternatives. Many more of our boys would have died because Japan had no desire to surrender! Plus, the horrible way they treated POW’s (which didn’t surface until the end of the war).

Both my uncle and deceased father-in-law fought and they were lucky to survive. I hope that this horror never happens again, but as was said at a post this was not a purely civilian thing, but both of these were Japanese military targets.

I only wish that we had also bombed (not with the A bomb) the crematoriums and military concentration camps. That could have saved lives, and I doubt that anyone could argue with that concept.

It’s very easy to look back at something like this and say it was evil because of the devastation and death it caused, never mind the radiation, but I also think a lesson was learned as it was never used again and now people would be extremely hesitant to use a nuclear bomb after seeing the lives lost when the A bomb was launched.

 

[patrick457]

 I always thought it was interesting that the only 'free' country in southeast Asia, Thailand, was aligned with Japan during World War II. Japan's slogan, of course, was "Asia for the Asians'.

Oh, not the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The original idea was very much an idealistic wish to free Asia from colonizing powers (which is what made it so attractive) with Japan at the helm, but underneath all this, nationalists saw it as being also a way to gain resources to keep Japan a modern power, and militarists saw the same resources as raw materials for war.

Personally, I kind of see the slogan as being no different from the one that was bandied about when the US controlled the Philippines: ‘the Philippines for the Filipinos’. All this of course while the English language and American culture was imposed upon Filipinos (with those who kept the battle against America being labeled as being no better than common thugs), at least during the early phases of colonial rule. Yeah, the whole benevolent assimilation thing.

Because of all these examples (and more), I kind of get suspicious if someone uses: “…for the…” formula.

Oh, and Japan actually demanded the right to move troops across Thailand to the Malayan frontier, resulting in an invasion which lasted for only a few hours before Prime Minister Plaek Pibulsonggram ordered an armistice. Shortly thereafter Japan was granted free passage, and on December 21, the two countries signed a military alliance with a secret protocol wherein Tokyo agreed to help Thailand regain territories lost to the British and French. Subsequently, Thailand undertook to ‘assist’ Japan in its war against the Allies, while at the same time maintaining an active anti-Japanese resistance movement known as the Seri Thai, aka the Free Thai Movement.

 There also is evidence that the US had provoked Japan in a variety of ways. It imposed an embargo on trade in some critical areas. There also was a written demand that Japan leave China, etc., which Japan was not going to do.

As I mentioned, it had to do during the Sino-Japanese War and with Japan’s occupation of southern French Indochina in 1941. As a protest to this, some Western countries (the US included) imposed an oil embargo against Japan, which imported most its oil.

Faced with a choice between economic collapse and withdrawal from its recent conquests (with its attendant loss of face), the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters began planning for a war with the western powers in April or May 1941

 

[Ghosty]

Poppycock. Your linked document is an intercept saying the Japanese government was considering ending the war, and exploring the possibilities of using the Soviets as intermediaries. The only negotiating point mentioned in the document was:

“We consider the the maintenance of peace in East Asia to be one aspect of world peace. Accordingly, Japan – as a proposal for ending the war and because of her concern for the establishment and maintenance of world peace – has absolutely no idea of annexing or the territories which she occupied during the war.”

That was the only point I was trying to prove with my link; the demands for the retention of the Emperor come from other documents that I can’t link to for first hand viewing, so I didn’t include them.

Japan was reaching out, and was not attempting to retain any of the conquered territories. The U.S. absolutely knew about these gestures by the Japanese far in advance of dropping the atomic bombs, but never made any attempt to pursue that avenue of ending the war. This shows that the atom bomb was not a weapon of last resort, since the U.S. and Great Britain had a potential diplomatic means at their disposal.

Furthermore, the intercept mentioned sounding out the Soviets and provides no indication whatever that the Japanese ever made any overtures whatever to the American (or other Allied) government(s)

Russia was an Allied nation, so I don’t understand how you can say they never made overtures to the Allies. Japan was well aware of the U.S. and Great Britain’s demands for unconditional surrender, and they were not yet at war with Russia, so they sought the clearest prospects for mediation in ending the war. Note that the diplomatic cables do not say that they were merely seeking to keep Russia out of the war, but rather were attempting to end the war all together; It is not at all uncommon for belligerents to seek neutral mediation in ending conflicts, rather than first directly approaching the enemy, especially to save face.

So, no. In my opinion your link didn’t prove your assertion and, again in my opinion, it remains a legend that the “Lost Causers” in Japan use to cast Japan as the “victim” of the US and thus avoid responsibility for their utterly reprehensible and uncivilized behavior between 1937 and 1945.

This has nothing to do with anything people in Japan are saying, nor does it have anything to do with the vile atrocities of Imperial Japan. It is simply a matter of historical fact that the U.S. knew that Japan was seeking an end to the war before the dropping of the bombs, and the U.S. did absolutely nothing to pursue such a diplomatic resolution. That, along with the fact that the Japanese were completely isolated and their navy destroyed, shows that atomic bombs were not the “only alternative to invasion”.

One final note, this assessment is backed up by the statements of leading military figures of the time, such as Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Leahy, hardly figures supportive of Japanese revisionism.

Peace and God bless!