Hiroshima

The book of WW2 journalism ends with John Hersey's short book, Hiroshima, which was first published as a single issue of The New Yorker. It is odd not to end the book with V-J day, which as it is gets very little mention in the book, unless the editor is making a moral comment on the Good War. Expecting moralizing and not really looking forward to it, I almost did not read it. Instead, it proves to be astounding, powerful and understated, honest and horrifying. Only an ignorant fool would conclude from it that the bombing was manifestly impermissible, yet equally only the most callous could be left with any pride in it. And at the time, there were a great many who were proud of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the one point where it is easiest to hate the U.S. for its decision is when as the wounded are still dying in the fires the U.S. propaganda broadcasts boast on and on about how only the U.S. could have organized so expensive and difficult a scientific and military invention. Hersey's understatement slightly falters there, saying the voices on the radio were "shouting," but you understand why he would lose control there.

It took me two days to read it, though it is hardly 80 pages (in this closely typeset edition), because very suddenly I would find I had taken on as much horror as I could stand; an almost physical sensation somewhat like the visual numbness produced by five or six hours in an art museum. It is beyond belief that people could live on with that in their past, and yet they did. Of the six survivors Hersey follows, none is wholly wrecked in the disaster. One young woman becomes a nun; she was crippled by a collapsing building, her leg badly twisted and shriveled, and abandoned by her fiance, a soldier who survived the war but never returned to her. Japanese Christians have always been rare; her conversion in the hospital and her discovery of a vocation are distressing indications of her desperation. Even so she turned her disaster to something brave and praiseworthy. The other five were less wounded, but the degree to which they lived full lives afterward is hard for me to comprehend.

Hersey does not hesitate to show how ruinous invading Japan was going to be--the hillsides around Hiroshima were being heavily dug in even as the bomb fell--and how to the bombed the atomic bomb did with horrible novelty what had been done to many other Japanese civilians by incendiaries and HE. Because the Japanese did not know how to interpret a daytime flight of just three bombers, and so gave the all-clear before the bomb fell, it is likely that the atomic bomb maimed and killed a great many people, especially children, who would have escaped a conventional bombing. On the other hand, it was widely thought that Hiroshima was coming due for a severe bombing, since it was the mainland military's headquarters and mostly untouched. The Japanese had already evacuated about a third of the city for that reason. The U.S. could have lessened some of the misery by warning more clearly beforehand and by broadcasting whatever was known about the risks of radiation afterward, but the one would risk a shoot-down or even a capture of the bomb and the other supposes more knowledge than the U.S. had.

In the end, the only two moral conclusions to be reached are still either grim relief that the atomic bombings prevented many hundreds of thousands of deaths in a longer war, or Richard Weaver's conclusion that the war should never have been pressed to that point. Perhaps the Japanese military would not have accepted terms that left the island and its closest possessions intact, but the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender made it certain that massive bombings and eventually a mainland invasion would be needed, in the absence of the atomic bomb. Unconditional surrender is a startling demand, and possibly, though I doubt it, one day it will be clear that it is always immoral, as the civilized world has come to accept that rape and pillage, once the natural prizes of victory, are always immoral.

I cannot really believe it made a difference in this case, however; it was not going to be politically, or indeed morally, possible to leave Japan with Manchuria, for instance, and they were at least as attached to it as Germany was to Alsace-Lorraine. Moreover in everyone's mind was Germany's surrender at its borders in 1918, and the disaster that followed. Twenty years after Armistice, Germany was again attacking the world, even more savagely than before; twenty years after Hiroshima, Japan was foremost among the peaceful nations, a bulwark against aggressive neighbors with global ambitions. Perhaps the Japanese military would have accepted defeat gracefully, surrendered Manchuria, and never again tried to build a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but it beggars belief. Would it really then be the moral choice, to prepare the ground for another terrible war? Even if it were to prove safe, could anyone at the time, as Europe still smoldered, believe that?

The bombings, atomic and conventional, were evil things; if they were not, it is hard to think what is. But so were the horrific landings at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and Peleliu; so were the Bataan Death March and the Rape of Nanking; so were the enslavement of Korea and the Philippines; and what good actions were there that would counter those evils and more like them? It is the end of morality, if evil is permitted against evil, but there is often no good, nor is it always possible even to know what is good or evil, and if it should happen to be known, still often the best path was lost long before the crisis, sometimes by men acting for the best. Weaver would unwind three or four generations to find the right path in 1945; but what use is so hypothetical a moral theory?