The Atomic Bombing of Japan Was Unnecessary
Another of WWII’s persistent myths is the one positing that the atomic bombing of Japan was unnecessary because Japan was already reeling and on the verge of surrender. The Allies simply had to blockade Japan, goes the myth, and the Japanese government would have come to its senses sooner rather than later, and thrown in the towel. A variety of factors make that theory nonsensical.
The first is that the war when the atomic bombs were dropped was not limited to the Japanese home islands and the choice of whether to invade or simply blockade them. Japan in August of 1945 still occupied vast territories in Asia and the Pacific, and misgoverned hundreds of millions of conquered subjects who endured daily horrors from their Japanese overlords, from casual brutality to torture, rape, murder, and massacres. Their suffering would have continued every day the war dragged on.
Japan also had millions of soldiers stationed in her overseas empire, who were fighting millions of Allied opponents, producing thousands of casualties on both sides every day. Moreover, Japan held hundreds of thousands of Allied POWs, and subjected them to barbaric treatment every day, beating, starving, withholding medication from, or murdering them. Those casualties from continued fighting and from Japan’s atrocious treatment of POWs would have continued to mount every day the war continued.
The main reason, however, is that the alternative to the atomic bombings would have been a massive invasion of the Japanese home islands, which the Japanese government was determined to resist via national suicide. Japan’s leaders were morally bankrupt and cowardly, and refused to confront the fact that they had taken their country into an unwinnable war and lost. Ethical leaders would have shouldered the responsibility for getting their country into such a fix, but Japan’s leaders sought to escape their burden via histrionics, and determined to immolate themselves and their country with them.
So they sought to save face by training women to fight off heavily armed invaders with bamboo spears, and training little boys and girls to fight US Marines with pointy sticks. Rather than sacrifice themselves in order to spare their country, Japan’s leaders sought to sacrifice their country in order to spare their egos from the humiliation of surrender.
Such dishonorable notions of honor meant that the estimated cost of an invasion was upwards of a million Allied casualties, and tens of millions of Japanese, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Compared to that, the 200,000 casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings were an acceptable price. Morally speaking, there was nothing exceptional about the innocent victims of the atomic bombings that would have justified sparing them at the cost of the millions of other lives that would have been lost elsewhere had the war continued.