Was Hiroshima a war crime?

Strategic bombing is the use of bombs as a form of terror to force a population into submission or to force it into rising up against its leaders. It was used by the Japanese in China, in Shanghai and Chongqing. It was used during the Spanish Civil War by German bomber squadrons, in the bombings of Warsaw by the Germans, and then in Rotterdam to force the Dutch to capitulate. After that, the German Luftwaffe attacked British cities and, very soon after the war began, the British began to retaliate. The reason was not, in the beginning, just to terrorise the civilian population in the way Churchill and Harris had done in Mesopotamia. It was done because bombing military targets meant that you had to fly very low and it was too costly. It was easy to shoot bombers out of the sky and they were losing too many crew. So, Churchill thought – and this was quite early on in WWII, when Britain was still relatively weak – they had to do something to bolster the morale of the population, to show that they could hit back. That was long before the invasion of Europe, of course.

They decided, therefore, that the best way to do this was to start bombing cities from a very great height, where you would no longer be bombing military targets precisely and, instead, bombing civilians. The argument then was – and this goes directly back to Mesopotamia – that if you break the morale of the civilian population in the enemy country, they’ll lose their stomach to fight on and they’ll rise up against their leaders. Of course, this never happened, but the strategy was used all the way up to the Iraq war with shock and awe. The idea that if you bomb the hell out of people, they’ll give up easily, doesn’t usually work. In fact, the morale is actually raised and it pulls people behind their leaders, because they’re the only ones who can protect them.

Then there was the race to find the most devastating weapon: the atom bomb. The Germans were working on it; the Japanese were working on it; but the Americans got there first. It was devised, at first, to target Hitler’s Germany, but it was only ready after Germany had been defeated, so it was used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This followed a bombing campaign in 1944 and 1945 of Japanese cities, which left almost nothing standing in any Japanese city. Only Kyoto and Nada weren’t bombed to smithereens, and there are various stories of why they were saved.

It’s important to know that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened after the fire bombings of Tokyo, where hundreds of thousands of casualties were made in one night when wave after wave of B29 bombers hit the city, which had largely wooden houses, which went up like a torch. They also used napalm. As happened in other fire bombings, also in Germany, if you didn’t burn to death, you choked to death due to the oxygen being sucked out of the air. So, what was known as conventional bombing – strategic bombing – was an extremely cruel process, too. The question then is: Was the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki a war crime? If it wasn’t, were the bombings of Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, Warsaw, Rotterdam and Shanghai not war crimes either? It’s a very difficult question to answer.

Clearly, there was a big technological leap. The consequences of an atom bomb were of a different scale to conventional fire bombing, and the number of casualties made in a very short amount of time were far greater. Perhaps even more important, in moral terms, was the fact that it has longer term consequences. A firebombing can destroy a city and much of its population, but in the case of an atom bomb or a nuclear bomb, future generations may still suffer the consequences. Does that make an essential difference? I would argue that it would not, which is not to say that one should minimise the horror of such a weapon, which nowadays, with our more sophisticated nuclear arms, could destroy mankind. This is not something to be taken lightly. In moral terms, I believe the line was crossed when people started to use bombs as a form of terror and on civilians. And as far as that’s concerned, technology may not be the decisive issue.

The main argument used by the Americans at the time was that it was more humane to end the war sooner, to save large numbers of lives, because the Americans were very afraid that a military invasion of Japan would be tremendously costly, not only in American lives, but also Japanese civilian lives. The Japanese were told by their wartime government to fight to the death, and even schoolchildren were trained to use bamboo spears amongst other things, so the fear was not completely unjustified. Nonetheless, there’s still a lot of controversy about the question of whether these two atom bombs really did end the war sooner. We’ll never know the answer because it’ll remain fairly speculative, but it hinges on the demand of the allies that was made on the Japanese. It was the same demand that was made in Germany, which was that the allies would not accept anything short of complete surrender.

In the Japanese case, that also meant that the allies would not agree to the imperial system around which all the Japanese wartime propaganda and its institutions revolved. This is not to say that the emperor was necessarily all powerful. In fact, his power was quite limited, but everything was done in his name. The system was set up in such a way that the imperial throne was the centre of the Japanese wartime effort. The Japanese wartime cabinet, which met regularly to decide on the questions of war and peace, was presided over by the emperor, but he usually kept his mouth shut and the decision had to be unanimous.

One theory is that the atom bombs were so devastating – and this became the official line also confirmed by the wartime Emperor Hirohito himself, who stayed on his throne after the war – that the bomb was such a horrific weapon that the Japanese had no choice but to give up fighting the war. Others argue that it was the Soviet Union who, at the request of President Truman, had attacked Japan at the very last minute of the war and invaded Manchuria. The Japanese wanted to do everything to avoid being invaded by the Soviet Union, where at least part of Japan would have ended up like North Korea. That may have been decisive.

Another aspect is that the very nature of the atom bomb, the fact that it was such a different weapon technologically, that it was so devastating, was a sort of face-saving device for the diehards because they could then argue – to themselves more than to others – that they fought the conventional war. They were never defeated. They had done what they could, but the atomic bomb was like an act of God. There was nothing they could do about it, which gave them an out. It may be a combination of those various factors. Not only was the military establishment in Japan worried about an invasion by the Soviet Union but they were worried about a rebellion inside Japan by a population that was hungry, fed up and desperate, and that this rebellion would lead to a communist takeover. All these factors probably played a role, but an absolute answer to whether the bombs ended the war or whether even without the bombs the war would have ended, is unanswerable.

It’s always a mistake to say that there is one public opinion in any country. There is no Japanese view of the atom bombs or indeed on anything else, rather the main consequence of having dropped these bombs on Japan, in particular, but in a way on the rest of the world, too. In Japan, it strengthened the people who argued for a pacifist order, and when the United States administration that occupied Japan wrote a new post-war constitution for the Japanese, which had the famous Article Nine banning the use of military force in foreign policy and in effect military force altogether, it was supported by most Japanese because they were heartily sick of militarism and of the consequences of war. They’d been so badly punished themselves for what their leaders had done that there was very little resistance and, in fact, significant enthusiasm for a pacifist constitution. Ever since, the atom bombs have been used as the main argument to continue with the pacifist constitution. Naturally, public opinion has changed over time, and there are more people who now argue that this is out of date and they have to rewrite it, that Japan should also be able to take part in combat operations, if necessary. However, the link between the atom bombings and pacifism is very strong. That didn’t pacify the rest of the world, but you could argue that having seen the consequences of this weapon, people have been quite careful not to use anything like that again. Whether that will remain the case, we don’t know, but up until now, it hasn’t been used, which we can only thank God for, on our knees.