No Moral Certainties

The first atomic bomb was a 9,700-pound distillation of the Second World War.

Little Boy: An inert atomic bomb of the type that destroyed Hiroshima, on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, Dayton, Ohio

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On 29 April 1945, US troops of the 45th Infantry Division, XV Corps, US Seventh Army, liberated the Dachau concentration camp. More than 200,000 persons had been incarcerated in the Dachau camp complex since its establishment in 1933, of whom an estimated 45,000 perished. On 27 April, as American forces drew near, some 7,000 Jewish inmates of Dachau were sent on a death march to the south, and the next day the camp commandant and most of his men fled. Approaching the camp, soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment discovered boxcars on a railway siding filled with bodies in various stages of decomposition. After a brief battle with the handful of remaining SS guards, the US troops then entered the camp. There they found many more bodies and some 30,000 surviving inmates, many of them severely malnourished and ravaged by disease.

In the chaos and delirium of the first hours after liberation, a number of captured SS men were summarily executed by American soldiers. Many others, along with known collaborators and informers, were done to death by liberated inmates bent on revenge. A subsequent investigation concluded that perhaps 50 German guards had been shot by US troops. But a recommendation that the American battalion commander and other soldiers be court martialed for the shootings was quashed by General George S. Patton, who had been appointed Military Governor of Bavaria after Germany’s surrender.

To its credit the War Department did not let the matter rest there. A second investigation concluded that there was probable cause to believe that US troops had committed violations of international law at Dachau on 29 April 1945. But the investigating officer recommended that no charges be brought, citing the exceptional stress and horror of the situation.

This disturbing incident illustrates the importance of context in any evaluation of wartime decisions and actions. Viewed in isolation, the actions of American soldiers appear as violations of the laws of war, indeed as war crimes. But in the context of Dachau, of the Final Solution, of National Socialism, and of the Second World War as a whole, what happened that day admits of no neat and tidy moral judgement. The War Department was undoubtedly correct on both practical and moral grounds to forego prosecution of the American soldiers whose shock, horror and anger led them to murder 50 agents of Nazi genocide.

The decision to use atomic bombs against Japan must also be viewed in context. In a previous article, I laid out the practical pros and cons of that decision, concluding that on balance President Truman made the right call. But critics might argue that practicalities are beside the point. It might have been true that an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would cause even more death and destruction than two atomic bombs. It might have been true that without the atomic bombings, the Japanese Army would have prevented Japan’s surrender, thus making an invasion of the Home Islands necessary. But then again, these things might not have been true. Historical counterfactuals such as those that I detailed in my previous article are unprovable. At best, they’re an expression of probabilities.

What is provable is what actually happened: Two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, destroying two cities and killing 150,000-200,000 people. And this, the critics argue, was an atrocity, period.

Viewed in isolation, of course, the atomic bombings were an atrocity. Viewed in context, however, that judgement is simplistic if not complacent. The entire Second World War, from first to last, was an atrocity—an orgy of destruction on a scale that staggers the imagination. Between 70 million and 85 million people were killed between 1939 and 1945. Cities were leveled. The stored-up wealth of generations was consumed. Whole nations were impoverished. Of the major belligerents, only America had the good fortune to be physically untouched by the war.

In April 1945 George Orwell visited Germany as a correspondent on assignment for a British newspaper, The Observer. He wrote of the devastation he found:

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is not only Germany that has been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at any rate in considerable patches, all the way from Brussels to Stalingrad. And where there has been ground fighting, the destruction is even more thorough. In the 300 miles or so between the Marne and the Rhine there is not such a thing as a bridge or a viaduct that has not been blown up.

Ever the contrarian, Orwell went on to observe that “bombing is not especially inhumane.” He meant that other forms of modern warfare were just as destructive, if not more so. Stalingrad was reduced to rubble only partly by bombing. Even more destructive were the weeks of vicious street fighting that razed the city, one block at a time. And as we know now, the 400,000 German civilians who were killed by the Allied strategic bombing offensive came nowhere near balancing the enormous toll of civilians killed by the German armed forces in Russia and elsewhere.

There was, indeed, a logic to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which traces back to the dawn of the aviation age. It wasn’t long after the Wright brothers made their first successful flight that the military potential of the airplane came into focus. The First World War gave a tremendous boost to the development of military aviation, including what came to be called strategic airpower. In Europe and America, proponents of strategic bombing asserted that the airplanes had rendered conventional military forces more or less obsolete. In any future war, the air force would strike directly at the enemy’s heartland, destroying his industrial infrastructure and sowing chaos in his cities.

This theory was put into practice during the Second World War. The chiefs of the British and American air forces were true believers in strategic airpower. On the American side, where the air force was still a branch of the Army, airmen sought to secure their service’s future independence by proving that strategic bombing, in and of itself, could win the war. The result was the destruction to which George Orwell bore witness. But in the end, it took D-Day, the Battle of Normandy and bitter ground campaigns in northwest and eastern Europe to bring Germany down.

The atomic bomb had been developed with a view to using it against Germany—as undoubtedly it would have been, had not VE day arrived before atomic bombs became available. When they appeared, however, the Pacific War was still going on, with Operation DOWNFALL on the agenda and a singularly destructive strategic air offensive against Japan in progress. President Truman can hardly be criticized for seizing upon this new weapon. It followed the logic of everything that the Allies had been doing since the beginning of the war. In 1945, one could hardly argue that there was something unprecedented about the destruction of enemy cities and the massacre of their populations. The atomic bomb did just the same thing, only much more efficiently than conventional high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Here, finally, was the weapon that validated the doctrine of strategic airpower.

 The first atomic bomb was, so to speak, a 9,700-pound distillation of the Second World War, a terrible summing up. Reviewing the history that led to its detonation 2,000 feet over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, I find it difficult to envision an alternate history in which something different happened.