In the absence of much information about this afternoon's terrorist attacks in London, I'll do what most appeals to me: abusing the peace movement. Kate Hudson, the chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, has this letter in The Guardian today:
The myth that the US had to drop nuclear weapons on Japan to end the second world war and thus save lives is still prevalent. Winston Churchill later asserted: "It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the bomb fell." The US had two main goals. One was to dominate the Far East after the war. The other was to gain advantage over the Soviet Union in the post-war settlement. This was a criminal act and a massive human catastrophe which must never be forgotten - and never repeated.
The Churchill quotation is a peculiarly offensive touch. By taking it out of context, Mrs Hudson illegitimately runs together the notions of certain Japanese defeat and imminent Japanese surrender. These were not at all the same thing in the context of the war, and in the planning of the allied war leaders.
The quotation is staple of peace movement propaganda, and we can reasonably infer that Kate Hudson has picked it up from a secondary source rather than from Churchill’s own writings. It comes from his history The Second World War, Volume 6: Triumph and Tragedy (1953), p. 559. The full quotation reads:
It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the bomb fell, and was brought about by overwhelming maritime power. This alone had made it possible to seize ocean bases from which to launch the final attack and force her metropolitan Army to capitulate without striking a blow.
The entire passage is about the importance of sea power in wartime. It is intended to establish Churchill’s point that control of the sea is essential for an island nation; he concludes:
We, an island Power, equally dependent on the sea, can read the lesson and understand our own fate had we failed to master the U-boats.
None of this is relevant to the question of whether the atomic bomb was necessary to force Japanese surrender. On this point, Churchill has already stated his judgement earlier in the same chapter (p. 552) when describing his response to the news of a successful American bomb test:
Up to this moment we had shaped our ideas towards an assault upon the homeland of Japan by terrific air bombing and by the invasion of very large armies. We had contemplated the desperate resistance of the Japanese fighting to the death with Samurai devotion, not only in pitched battles, but in every cave and dug-out. I had in my mind the spectacle of Okinawa island, where many thousands of Japanese, rather than surrender, had drawn up in line and destroyed themselves by hand-grenades after their leaders had solemnly performed the rite of hara-kiri. To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number of British – or more if we could get them there: for we were resolved to share the agony. Now all this nightmare picture had vanished.
It is dishonest of CND to cite Churchill without putting his remarks in the context of this passage. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a gratuitous act perpetrated against a defeated nation. Churchill believed that the atomic bomb would avoid combined American and British combat deaths of well into seven figures. We know for a fact, from recent historical research, that that was not an ex post rationalisation by Churchill writing some years after the event. It was the working assumption of the US administration for many months previously. D. M. Giangreco, of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College analysed the contemporary documentation and published his findings in an important article, "Casualty Projections for the US Invasions of Japan, 1945-1946: Planning and Policy Implications", in the Journal of Military History in July 1997. He concluded (emphasis added):
What can be stated as fact, is that the estimate that American casualties could surpass the million mark was set in the summer of 1944 and was never changed. In the spring of 1945 various planners and senior officers quibbled over the estimate, or facets of it relating to specific operations, but the statistical possibility of a million casualties, combined with the experience of combat attrition of line infantry units in both Europe and the Pacific, had already prompted the Army and War Department manpower policy for 1945, and thus, the pace for the big jump in Selective Service inductions and expansion of the training base in the U.S. even as the war in Europe was winding down. Japan had lost its navy, and its cities were being essentially destroyed by U.S. airpower, but this was largely irrelevant to their ability to inflict casualties on American forces with the aim of forcing the U.S. into a negotiated peace.
We also know, from recent Japanese research, that US forebodings were well-grounded. Sadao Asada, in a study entitled "The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan's Decision to Surrender - A Reconsideration", in Pacific Historical Review, November 1998, assessed newly-released documents about the surrender. He demonstrated that the dropping of the atomic bomb was crucial in giving leverage to those within the Japanese government who wished to sue for peace. Indeed both atomic bombs were necessary: Nagasaki demonstrated that the bombing of Hiroshima was not an isolated capability, and that America would be able to destroy Japanese society should the war continue. Only after Nagasaki were the bellicose forces within the Japanese government – the War Minister, Korechika Anami, and the Navy Chief of Staff, Soemu Toyoda – overruled and the Potsdam surrender terms accepted.
The notion that the atomic bombs were dropped for cynical reasons of US realpolitik is ahistorical. These undeniably terrible acts of warfare were undertaken for the humanitarian reason of avoiding the certainty of far greater casualties on all sides. Kate Hudson is right to describe them as a massive human catastrophe; she is grossly mistaken on every other point, particularly her casual invocation of the word "crime". If you want an indication of why I am disturbed by this, see the ease with which other peace-movement polemicists level the charge of criminality against Churchill, using the same out-of-context quotation, and where they end up.
You would expect the far-Left webzine Counterpunch (publisher of the antisemitic activist Gilad Atzmon) to be in on this. Its contributor here ("a member of the Delhi Science Forum, an anti-nuclear weapons group") clearly hasn't gone back to the primary sources either, because he gives a false page reference to the Churchill quotation, which he misconstrues as the words of “a willing accomplice to the crime, [who] has nevertheless made a frank admission". But even Counterpunch is a model of propriety compared with this case. The author ("chairperson, Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Commission", which apparently resides - where else? - in California) at least cites the single secondary source from which all but one of the numerous quotations in his article are drawn. And then he gives a set of four web links. Two of those links don’t work, and I am thus unable to assess their content. One is a book review from the web site of Lord Garden, Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, who is obviously an entirely reputable source. The remaining one (it's the first on the list) is a review of the same book (the one from which the author's quotations are filched), extracted from The Nation magazine - and posted on a notorious Holocaust-denial site. (The site is that of an organisation called CODOH, which stands for - forgive the blasphemy; I am merely reporting it - the 'Committee for Open Debate of the Holocaust'.)
I think it likely that the author and activist who has assembled those links is a naïf rather than a knave, but that scarcely alters my charge against this type of peace-movement propaganda. The movement’s denunciations of Churchill and Truman are not "revisionist history"; they read like history as it might have been written if the wrong side had won the war. I grant that the author of The Nation piece will have had no control over the use to which his words were put by a pro-Nazi organisation, but there is no excuse for a peace activist wishing to cite that material to do it by linking to such a site. That peace activists can’t tell genuine historical iconoclasm from an organised campaign of lies in the service of bigotry is disturbing indeed, and a phenomenon I shall be watching for.
