Dropping of the Atomic Bomb
The United States concealed its project to develop an atomic bomb under the name "Manhattan Engineer District."
Popularly known as the Manhattan Project, it carried out the first successful atomic explosion on July 16, 1945, in a
deserted area called Jornada del Muerto ("Journey of the dead") near Alamagordo, New Mexico.
On August 6, at 2:45 A.M. local time, the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber loaded with an atomic bomb, took off from the US air
base on Tinian Island in the western Pacific. Six and a half hours later, at 8:15 A.M. Japan time, the bomb was dropped; it
exploded a minute later at an estimated altitude of 580 +- 20 meters over central Hiroshima.
The Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, killed 140,000 people, or roughly half the city. Three days later, a second
atomic bomb, nicknamed Fat Man, was detonated over Nagasaki, killing 70,000.
An atomic bomb discharges three deadly forces: heat, blast, and radiation. In the months after the bombings, survivors had
to deal not only with burns from the heat and wounds from the blast but also the effects of radiation exposure: general
malaise, fatigue, headaches, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, abnormally low white blood cell count,
bloody discharge, anemia, and loss of hair. Prolonged effects of exposure included keloids (massive scar tissue on burned
areas), cataracts, leukemia and other cancers.
There are three readings for this class: 1) an argument supporting the decision to drop the bomb; 2) an argument
criticizing the decision to drop the bomb; and 3) a description of how the bomb was experienced by civilians in Japan.
Come to class prepared to examine the following questions: What went into the decision to drop the atomic bombs? Was
the decision justified? What other options, if any, were available? What might have been the price of these options? Can
fair distinctions be made between soldiers and civilians? Can war and morality be pursued simultaneously?
Paul Fussell, “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb”
[Excerpted from Paul Fussell’s "Thank God for the Atom Bomb. Hiroshima: A Soldier's View," The New Republic (August
26 and 29, 1981), pp. 28-30.]
The dramatic postwar Japanese success at hustling and merchandising and tourism has (happily, in many ways) effaced for
most people important elements of the assault context in which [the dropping of the US atomic bomb on] Hiroshima should
be viewed. It is easy to forget what Japan was like before it was first destroyed and then humiliated, tamed, and
constitutionalized by the West. “Implacable, treacherous, barbaric” — those were Admiral Halsey's characterizations of the
enemy, and at the time few facing the Japanese would deny that they fit to a T. One remembers the captured American
airmen locked for years in packing crates, the prisoners decapitated, the gleeful use of bayonets on civilians. The degree to
which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of
information about the war.
And the savagery was not just on one side. There was much sadism and brutality — undeniably racist — on ours. No
Marine was fully persuaded of his manly adequacy who didn't have a well-washed Japanese skull to caress and who didn't
have a go at treating surrendering Japs as rifle targets. Herman Wouk remembers it correctly while analyzing Ensign Keith
in The Caine Mutiny: “Like most of the naval executioners of Kwajalein, he seemed to regard the enemy as a species of
animal pest.” And the enemy felt the same way about us: “From the grim and desperate taciturnity with which the Japanese
died, they seemed on their side to believe they were contending with an invasion of large armed ants.” Hiroshima seems to
follow in natural sequence: “This obliviousness on both sides to the fact that the opponents were human beings may perhaps
be cited as the key to the many massacres of the Pacific war.” Since the Japanese resisted so madly, let's pour gasoline into
their emplacements and light it and shoot the people afire who try to get out. Why not? Why not blow them all up? Why
not, indeed, drop a new kind of big bomb on them? Why allow one more American high school kid to see his intestines
blown out of his body and spread before him in the dirt while he screams when we can end the whole thing just like that?
When the bomb ended the war I was in the 45th Infantry Division, which had been through the European war to the degree
that it had needed to be reconstituted two or three times. We were in a staging area near Reims, ready to be shipped across
the United States for final preparation in the Philippines. My division was to take part in the invasion of Honshu in March
1946. (The earlier invasion of Kyushu was to be carried out by 700,000 infantry already in the Pacific.) I was a 21-year-old
second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon. Although still officially in one piece, in the German war I had already been
wounded in the leg and back severely enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my legs
buckled whenever I jumped out of the back of the truck, my condition was held to be satisfactory for whatever lay ahead.
When the bombs dropped and news began to circulate that “Operation Olympic” would not, after all, take place, that we
would not be obliged to run up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the fake
manliness of our facades we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after
all. When the Enola Gay dropped its package, “There were cheers,” says John Toland, "over the intercom; it meant the end
of the war.”
Those who cried and cheered are very different from high-minded, guilt-ridden GIs we're told about by the late J. Glenn
Gray in The Warriors (1959) . . . . [H]is meditation on modern soldiering, gives every sign of remoteness from experience.
Division headquarters is miles behind the places where the soldiers experience terror and madness and relieve these
pressures by sadism. “When the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came,” Gray asks us to believe,
“many an American soldier felt shocked and ashamed.” But why, we ask? Because we'd bombed civilians? We'd been
doing that for years and, besides the two bombs, wiped out 10,000 Japanese troops, not now often mentioned, John Hersey's
kindly physicians and Jesuit priests being more touching. Were Gray's soldiers shocked and ashamed because we'd
obliterated whole towns? We'd done that plenty of times. If at division headquarters some felt shocked and ashamed, down
in the rifle companies none did, although Gray says they did. . . .
. . . . To intensify the shame he insists we feel, Gray seems willing to fiddle the facts. The Hiroshima bomb, he says, was
dropped “without any warning.” But actually, two days before, 720,000 leaflets were dropped on the city urging everyone
to get out and indicating that the place was going to be obliterated. Of course few left.
Experience whispers that the pity is not that we used the bomb to end the Japanese war but that it wasn't ready earlier to end
the German one. If only it could have been rushed into production faster and dropped at the right moment on the Reich
chancellery or Berchtesgaden or Hitler's military headquarters in East Prussia or — Wagnerian coup de théâtre — at
Rommel's phony state funeral, most of the Nazi hierarchy could have been pulverized immediately, saving not just the
embarrassment of the Nuremburg trials but the lives of about four million Jews, Poles, Slavs, gypsies, and other
“subhumans,” not to mention the lives and limbs of millions of Allied and Axis soldiers. If the bomb could have been ready
even as late as July 1944, it could have reinforced the Von Stauffenberg plot and ended the war then and there. If the bomb
had only been ready in time, the men of my infantry platoon would not have been killed and maimed. . . .
The predictable stupidity, parochialism, and greed in the postwar international mismanagement of the whole nuclear
problem should not tempt us to mis-imagine the circumstances of the bomb's first “use.” Nor should our well-justified fears
and suspicions occasioned by the capture of the nuclear business by the mendacious classes (cf. Three Mile Island) tempt us
to infer retrospectively extraordinary corruption, cruelty, and swinishness in those who decided to drop the bomb. Times
change. Harry Truman was not a fascist, but a democrat. He was as close to a real egalitarian as we've seen in high office
for a very long time. He is the only president in my lifetime who ever had the experience of commanding a small unit of
ground troops obliged to kill people. He knew better than his subsequent critics what he was doing. The past, which as
always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned. Or even before they are
simplified.
