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

[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.