Comparative Annihilation 101

[truepenny]

When I was a senior in high school, as part of the civic pageantry of Oak Ridge's 50th birthday, I had to go interview a man who'd worked as an engineer in the gaseous diffusion plant during World War II. He was a lovely man, very patient with his shy, gauche, and reluctant interviewer.

He still called the Japanese "Japs"--just casually, you know. Conversationally. And he gave me an anecdote.

Famously, the people working in Oak Ridge, as in the other "secret cities" of the Manhattan Project, had only the vaguest idea of what they were working on. But when America dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the people of Oak Ridge knew that it was their doing.

They celebrated. They danced on the tennis courts all night long.

They knew they'd done the morally right and heroic thing.

Comments

Another angle to go with that.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

George Macdonald Fraser, the guy who wrote Flashman, says in his WWII memoir Quartered Safe Out Here that he was nineteen years old, slogging through Burma one foot at a time seeing his friends killed around him in horrible ways and knowing how far it was to Japan, how many friends would die, that he would die, and that it was worth it, but it would be so nice to live, grow up, marry, have children, write books. When they dropped the Hiroshima bomb he and his friends were the most immediately reprieved, and he thinks they and those like them are worth a thought when considering the morality of the whole thing. He then goes on to say that you can't say that it was worse for the people of Hiroshima to die than for him to die. He can say it, but you can't, because it isn't morally your choice. However, he thinks that if the whole thing and all the implications had been carefully explained to him and his mates, they'd have sighed, picked up their packs and gone on slogging forward one foot at a time -- but even so, he can't forget the euphoria of the reprieve.

[karenmiller.livejournal.com]

While I can appreciate your sensitivity to the horror of the nuclear bombs (and nobody could argue they were, in and of themselves, a good thing), I'm at something of a loss to understand the purpose of your post. Are you seriously suggesting that we, as the beneficiaries of those who made such dreadful sacrifices and suffered so hideously at the hands of the aggressors in WW2, have the right to pass judgement on the people who were fighting for their lives in that conflict? Who fought to make sure we, their descendants, would not have to live in the hell they knew?

My country was at risk of invasion and brutalisation by the Imperial Japanese. I know people who fought in that war, who fought the Japanese, who are haunted today by the unspeakable cruelties they experienced personally, and witnessed. These people killed in the war. Are you suggesting they were somehow criminals for doing so? That anyone who fought the Nazis and the Japanese, either with a gun or by working on military projects, who were relieved when it was ended, who were overjoyed that we won, and they didn't, are you suggesting they should be ashamed? That we should be ashamed of them?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

If you think that's what I'm saying, you have misunderstood my point.

I'm not saying we should judge them. I'm saying we can't. And I'm saying in particular that Americans do not get to sit in judgment on the rest of the world--which has been an American failing for a good long while now.

[barriequark.livejournal.com]

I agree with you in that/ I think the biggest problem with America is how far removed we are from teh rest of the world. We are like the world's biggest island. You can drive across this country for days and hear only English. You can assume that most people you meet are some sort of Christian. You can get familiar foods anywhere you go. You very rarely have to interact with a new culture, new religion or different menu. It leads to the belief that we are all there is, that we are the majority - the moral majority, if you will. I have lived in other countries, I speak several differnt languages and eat weird things. :) This gives me a completely different bantage point than most Americans. We are an insular nation and that is what has gotten us into so much trouble in the world.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

The thing with "Japs" and casual comments, and dancing in the streets -- I grew up with a neighbor who had survived the Bataan Death March. My father-in-law served in WWII and had numerous relatives killed in the Nazi death camps.

Sometimes it isn't prejudice. It can be post-judice.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And that makes racism okay?

I'm sure that's not what you're saying, but I'm really having trouble understanding what you mean.

This small story isn't about people who fought in World War II, who had personal scarifying experiences with Japanese soldiers. It's expressly about people who didn't. And my point, as I said to karenmiller, isn't that we should judge. It's that we can't. And that that goes for all sides.

My moral comparativism does not extend to saying we cannot judge the Holocaust to be evil. It is perhaps as unambiguous an act of evil as I can think of. But putting it into the box marked EVIL and nailing it shut doesn't help us understand how and why it happened, or how to keep it from happening again.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

>And my point, as I said to [info]karenmiller, isn't that we should judge.

Your original post certainly could be interpreted as judging that Oak Ridge retiree as a racist.

My point? By the time of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs, we had ample evidence of the fanatical nature of Japanese resistance and had good reason to despise the Japanese soldier as a civilized foe. As others have posted, previous battles had already proved that we would be facing suicidal attacks and horrible levels of civilian casualties, including mass civilian suicide.

I think dancing in the streets represents an understandable response. Millions more were _not_ going to die. And _I_ am enough of a racist that I would prefer that a million of a sworn enemy die rather than a million of my own countrymen.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Actually, yes. The gentleman I interviewed was racist. Americans during World War II were incredibly racist. (Although it is not the primary point of the site, Superdickery (http://www.superdickery.com/) collects (http://www.superdickery.com/images/dick/97_4_0000058.jpg) some (http://www.superdickery.com/images/oneshot/21013acs.jpg) telling (http://www.superdickery.com/images/propaganda/249_4_014.jpg) images (http://www.superdickery.com/images/propaganda/exciting35.jpg).) Their racism is, unfortunately, an objective fact.

When I say I shouldn't judge them, I don't mean that we shouldn't face the truth: the Americans were racist. The Germans were racist. The Japanese were racist. What I'm saying is that taking that racism out of context--and I think I was exposed to that racism very out of context, in a private home in 1992--makes it impossible to understand, to do anything except judge.

The past is a foreign country. And I try to approach it as an anthropologist.

[storyjunkie.livejournal.com]

I remember being in elementary school and the decision to use the bombs being the first real example of choices having devastating consequences - no matter which choice you made - that I had ever been made to understand.

Every time the discussion of the choice has come up, the one that the group agreed was "right" has been a bit different, sometimes a lot different (hence the quotes).

Taken with your thought on Goldhagen's book this is a lot to think over, again.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

It may be that one reason the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings can look so very different today than they did in 1945 is that we've had quite a few years of living with the thought that this could be done to us, which makes the horrors of the weapon a lot more apparent than its advantages.

One of the things that struck me when I read George Feifer's book about the battle of Okinawa, Tennozan, was the high number of civilian casualties in that battle. Virtually then entire Okinawan infrastructure was destroyed during the fighting, and estimates of civilian deaths from all battle-related causes, including those directly killed, as well as those who died as the result of lack of food, medical care, shelter, and suicide range up to 150,000. The civilian deaths continued into the spring of 1946, because the devastation was so complete; I'm not sure what the final estimate is. I can't see how the civilian population of Japan could have avoided similar losses if a ground invasion had taken place.
They had already sustained a similar number of civilian deaths as the result of an air raid; the fire bombing of Tokyo in the March 9, 1945 raid had resulted in an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths, which is right up there with the figures from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, that raid was carried out by 334 B-29's, and not one plane with one bomb for each city.
Given the manner in which the Japanese government functioned, the only thing I can say about with any certainty is that more civilians would have died before the cabinet achieved the unanimity they required in order to make peace.

I can see how, from the old engineer's perspective, and certainly from that of the people who were there, working in Oak Ridge in 1945, the bombs looked like a good thing, compared to the number of Americans and their allies who could expect to die or be wounded if the fighting went on.
My father fought in Europe during World War II, and his commanding officer felt that he had to take advantage of an opportunity to keep the unit out of the proposed invasion of Japan, and so volunteered them for occupation duty in Germany. They were given the responsibility of managing Dachau as a displaced persons camp, and attempting to return the people there to their places of origin, if possible. I can't say that I ever heard him agree, flat-out, with George MacDonald Fraser, but he certainly, both as a veteran and as a radiochemist who spent several summers working at Oak Ridge in the 1950s, felt that bad as the bombs were, the other possibilities were also horrific.

The only judgment I can make with any honesty is that there are times when it seems there are no good choices available. It may be true we sometimes have other choices we don't know about or haven't seriously looked at because we're so busy telling ourselves we have no good choices available. Then again, it could be a matter of all the choices there are being choices that have Bad Stuff tied to them, each and every one, and all we can do is pick the Bad Stuff we can stand.

[barriequark.livejournal.com]

As horrific as Hiroshima and NAgasaki were, as terrible as it is that anyone could celebrate the death of another person, no matter what the cause. I am not really certain that what they did wasn't the least bad option left. Morally right? Heroic? No. Absolutely not. But, who the Japanese were at theat point in time, the way they had proved themselves capable of committing suicide to take out a few of us, even when they had to know that they were losing. The staggering losses that we were looking at in the Pacific from fighting them, the losses we could anticipate trying to take the country, I am not certain, that even knowing what I know now, I still would have been able to refrain from dropping it either. If anyone should receive our disgust though, it's the Russians, who refused to relay the Japanese surrender after Hiroshima, and allowed Nagasaki to happen. It was a dark moment in history, one I hope we never face again, because I don't think our current administration has the moral restraint to stop at two.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

My grandfather-in-law fought in the Pacific in WWII - he has a Purple Heart. he's only recently begun talking a little about the war - he told us about how they'd throw uncapped soda bottles out of airplans because apparently they make a loud and spooky noise when dropped, and would scare the bejeezus out of ground troops. And yes, he used the word "Japs", casually. And yes, I would consider him racist. But after all, they were shooting at him. (And I'm sure the Japanese were equally racist, but then, he was shooting at them.) I think I agree with you, though - not only can we not really judge him for that now, but between self-defense the need to dehumanize people to bring yourself to shoot them, I'm not sure that racism or similar othering is not inevitable in war. I don't know how you would avoid it, after deciding that the war is justified - which, presumably you have, if you're fighting in it.

[(Anonymous)]

An uncle, now in his high eighties, was at Iwo Jima.

He doesn't talk about it much. When family members say that the bomb saved lives, expecting reflexive support, he always corrects them: "American lives," he says. He doesn't celebrate anyone's death, even the death of his enemies. He was just glad when it was over, I think, just relieved that the killing would stop.

[libskrat]

From the Passover seder service, this:

The Midrash tells us that [after the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea] the angels in heaven joined in vicarious celebration, but God rebuked them, "My creatures are dying, and you sing praises?!"

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

(I'm taking this draining Holocaust lit course and now I cannot ESCAPE conversations about genocide and WWII in specific. It is EVERYWHERE. I already nearly emptied my checking account with a donation to the crisis in Darfur, during a spasm of guilt, and it's three weeks into the semester! I swear, next term it's going to be the Happy Fluffy Bunnies seminar, offered by the Department of Sweetness and Light.)