Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 3, 1992 TAG: 9201130234
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: J. RONALD WILLOUGHBY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI
DURING the observance last month of the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, there emerged a debate over whether the United States and Japan should apologize to each other - they for Pearl Harbor, we for Hiroshima and Nagasaki - as if the United States were guilty of some offense.What, exactly, are we to feel guilty about? Killing Japanese civilians?
Apparently not, since no one suggests apologizing to Japan for Tokyo, which was firebombed in March 1945, causing 80,000 to 120,000 deaths in the single most destructive raid of World War II.
Nor does anyone suggest we apologize to Germany for firebombing Dresden in February 1945, causing an estimated 70,000 deaths. By comparison, about 80,000 people died at Hiroshima and about 40,000 at Nagasaki.
So what distinguishes Tokyo-Dresden from Hiroshima-Nagasaki? Since it is not the casualty count, it must be the type of weapon. By this shallow logic we are to apologize not for killing people, but for doing it with nuclear weapons.
Equally shallow is the simplistic link apologists make between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima-Nagasaki, as if they bombed us on Sunday, we bombed them on Monday and 44 months of bitter fighting in the Pacific never happened.
In fact, we arrived at Hiroshima and Nagasaki not in one great leap from Pearl Harbor, but in agonizing hops across stepping stones with names like Wake Island, Bataan, Corregidor, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Guam, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Each was slippery with the blood of American and Japanese soldiers. Japanese soldiers gave no quarter and asked none, repeatedly showing their willingness to fight far beyond the limits of what most soldiers would feel had satisfied the requirements of honor.
Few Japanese soldiers became prisoners of war, because they preferred death to capture or surrender. Nor was this view unique to soldiers. On Okinawa, Japanese civilians jumped - and threw their children - off the cliffs at the northern end of the island to avoid capture.
By the summer of 1945, with Germany defeated and Okinawa secure, the next step was the invasion of the home islands of Japan. It was a ghastly prospect. Three and one-half years of bloody island-hopping and jungle-fighting had left no illusions about what lay ahead. Allied casualty estimates ran into the hundreds of thousands for military personnel, and nearly a million for civilians.
By this time the atomic bomb, on which research had begun in 1939, had been successfully tested. It was too late for Germany, for whom it was first intended, but just in time for Japan. If it worked - and there were no guarantees - it could dramatically shorten the war and save hundreds of thousands of lives. What to do?
U.S. policy-makers briefly debated, and rejected, the possibility of a negotiated settlement. Allied policy since 1942 had been unconditional surrender, and it was politically impossible to abandon that position.
Some have called the demand for unconditional surrender a mistake. But it grew from the nightmare of a Germany, prostrate in 1918, recovering in only 21 years to plunge Europe and ultimately the world into another war. The Allied powers were determined that wouldn't happen again, and so the call for unconditional surrender.
The Japanese chose to keep fighting; they were, in fact, husbanding their resources in order to inflict maximum damage on an invasion force. The Allies' options, then, were a full-scale invasion or the atomic bomb.
We chose the course that promised - and delivered - a quick, decisive end to the war, a course that minimized casualties on both sides.
In the end, we pity all those who died, not because of how they died but that they died at all. Pity and guilt, however, are not the same, and we bear no special burden of guilt for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To claim otherwise is to simplify history beyond recognition.
We did not want to fight a war. But when it was forced on us we did what we had to do, with courage, vigor and resolve, and we won a decisive victory. Because of that, the world today, with all its faults, is a better place. That's something to be proud of, not to apologize for.
J. Ronald Willoughby teaches physics at Radford University.