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On August 6, 1945, a B29 bomber named Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian and dropped a warhead made of uranium-235 on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, another B29 dropped a plutonium implosion bomb on Nagasaki. Over the following 12 months, some 290,000 people died.
Eighty years on, these appalling tragedies demonstrate how nations that begin conflicts as champions of the rules of war can, without intending to do so, end up justifying the mass killing of innocent civilians. In that, they offer unheeded lessons about the geopolitical violence raging today.
A view of the devastation after the atom bomb was dropped, in Hiroshima in 1945. Source: AP Credit: nna\KCampbell
Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain a tragic story for our times. The commonly understood justification for dropping the atom bombs was that they ended World War II and saved countless Allied lives by negating the need to invade the Japanese home islands.
Given the Japanese surrendered on 15 August – just nine days after the Hiroshima attack – it’s easy to claim the bombs worked. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after the fact, therefore caused by the fact). But it wasn’t quite that simple.
At that point in the war, Japan was already effectively beaten. It was strangled by a naval blockade, its navy and air force had been annihilated, its industries were without raw materials, its soldiers and civilians were starving, and its cities were being burnt to the ground one by one.
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From late in 1944 onwards, American B29 bombers began pounding Japan. The original intention was to use precision bombing to attack military and industrial targets only, but sundry unforeseen difficulties made this impractical. The proponents of more brutal means, who were determined for revenge on the Pearl Harbour attack, won out; it was decided to burn Japan’s highly flammable wooden cities to the ground by dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs – essentially huge canisters of napalm.
One by one, 60 of Japan’s largely undefended cities were torched. The worst raid, in Tokyo on March 8, 1945, saw between 80,000 and 104,500 people burn to death. Across the country, 267,000 people were killed in the firebombing campaign.
The immediate post-war bombing surveys concluded that while the atom bombs sped up Japan’s surrender, a surrender was inevitable without them. Most present day historians agree.
Another crucial – and highly relevant – lesson from this time involves how the fire bombings and atomic attacks came to be justified by those who ordered them.
Historian Richard Overy argues in his new book, Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, that political and military leaders in 1945 understood full well that the indiscriminate bombing of Japanese cities was morally unjustifiable and politically unsustainable, so developed a work-around through a determined and consistent public relations campaign.
The nuclear blast over Nagasaki in Japan in 1945.Credit: Getty
Redefining civilian targets as military ones, it was emphasised to the public that every targeted Japanese city had an army, air force or naval base nearby, and that backstreets were full of small-scale industrial workshops. By this sloppy and dishonest process, streets densely packed with non-combatant civilians were transformed into legitimate aiming points whose destruction was crucial for winning the war.
Almost unbelievably, the use of the atomic bombs was justified by telling the public atomic weapons could be more precisely targeted than the firestorms unleashed by incendiary weapons.
While it was true that little was initially understood about the immediate and long-term effects of blast radiation, rebranding atomic bombs as precision weapons demonstrates the utter self-delusion of which humans are capable. It is this final point that we are seeing play out again; now with the daily destruction of Ukraine, Palestine, and the recent bombardments of Israel.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin makes little pretence that his nightly attacks on Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities are anything other than terror bombing, and therefore war crimes. But what about the flattening of Gaza, which today uncannily resembles the ghostly bombed cities of 1945?
One can despise Hamas, be a supporter of Israel and still see the attacks on Gaza’s densely populated urban areas as having the same moral and intellectual dubiousness as the area bombing of European and Japanese cities in the Second World War.
The justifications offered by the Israeli government and Israeli Defence Force – that the presence of Hamas fighters makes Gaza’s schools, hospitals and streets legitimate military targets – has a logic that sounds all too familiar. Despite their lesser lethality, the same arguments apply to the Hamas and Iranian rockets fired at Israel.
Just as the suburbs, streets and homes of London, Warsaw, Berlin, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were cynically redefined as military targets in the 1940s, so are the cities of Ukraine and the Middle East today.
In built-up areas, there is no such thing as a precision bomb or missile. And even where revenge can sometimes seem justified to victims of the most vicious surprise attacks, the concept of proportionality must apply. As always, we learn from history or repeat it.
Dennis Glover is a speechwriter, novelist and author of Repeat: A Warning from History.
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