Herbert W Armstrong

This past week newspapers, newsmagazines and TV documentaries have had extensive coverage of the historic events of 40 years ago, specifically the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which hastened the end of the war in the Pacific. There was even live coverage of a memorial service in Hiroshima at the exact 8:16 a.m. time of the blast.

The news media has been full of what is known in America as "Monday morning quarterbacking" — a hindsight from 40 years. Should the U.S. have dropped the two bombs or not? Should there have been only a demonstration explosion? The nuclear-free(ze) community says (and so did Soviet party chief Mikhail Gorbachev) that the U.S. committed an act of barbarism in dropping the bombs.

Not a few experts, however, have said that trying to make judgments four decades down the road is bound to be faulty; that one can only understand what happened on August 6 and 9, 1945, by having lived through the war — with all of its barbarity (including Pearl Harbor, the Bataan death march and other Japanese acts) — in other words, knowing the true temper of the times.

The noted author William Manchester, injured in the fierce fighting on Okinawa, believes the atomic bomb saved his life, and the lives of millions of American troops, Japanese defenders and much of the Japanese civilian population, by making an invasion of the Japanese home islands unnecessary. In the following account (partly an interview of Manchester) written by Cathryn Donohue of THE WASHINGTON TIMES (August 7), many die-hard Japanese military officers were prepared to fight on — and sacrifice the entire nation if necessary — even after the second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. A "demonstration bomb," an idea advocated by some second-guessers, would not have convinced them at all.

Okinawa was three months of the bloodiest island battles of the Pacific, and that stood to reason: The closer the Allies got to Japan, the more suicidal the defense. Okinawa was what led Mr. Manchester, in "Goodbye, Darkness," his personal memoir of the war, to write: "You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan's home islands — a staggering number of American lives but millions more of Japanese — and you thank God for the atomic bomb." "One is aghast," wrote a reviewer of "Goodbye, Darkness" in 1979. But Mr. Manchester repeats the heresy today: "Thank God for the atomic bomb."

He is 63 now.... Today Mr. Manchester is an adjunct professor of history at Middletown's Wesleyan University and the celebrated biographer of H.L. Mencken, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Rockefellers and the family Krupp, arms makers to the Third Reich.... The latest Manchester work [is] his biography of Winston Churchill, "The Last Lion."...

Mr. Manchester was in a receiving hospital in San Francisco when he heard the news of Hiroshima.... He thinks the bomb spared his life. At the time, 650,000 U.S. ground troops were massing to land on Kyushu in November 1945, in the first of two invasions of Japan. Several Marine divisions were to land abreast in the first wave, Mr. Manchester says, and they were looking for a few good veterans.

"Most civilians don't realize the difference between green troops and veterans," he says with the swagger of a man who has seen combat. Green troops take enormous casualties, he says; they simply don't know what to look for. "It takes about 72 hours of action before a man begins to sort out the sound of shells overhead, for example. So a veteran is worth a great deal, whether he's crippled or not.... As they patched me together they would have sent me back, because I was a veteran."...

"It may seem that my views are self-serving...but the fact is that every scholar, the Japanese scholars, say the Japanese would never have surrendered without the bomb."...

The background may be even more startling. In anticipation of an American invasion, the Japanese had hidden 5,000 kamikaze (suicide) planes in underground hangars on the home islands. The human bombs, whose slogan was "one plane, one warship," had accounted for 400 ships and 9,724 U.S. sailors since the battle for Leyte Gulf.

Two million Japanese troops were stationed around the islands, with tons of ammunition stowed in underground caves:-another 3 million were being called back from China for a last-ditch defense. The soldiers themselves were-to carry explosive charges strapped to their backs. Every one of Japan's 10 million able bodied civilian men and women was asked to sacrifice his or her life in suicide attacks. On Kyushu alone 14 Japanese divisions and five independent brigades, almost the equal of the entire American invasion force, lay waiting to fight to the last man from fortified caves and tunnels — the type of combat the Japanese had made into an art form on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

And this force was what the Japanese military leadership had in mind on Aug. 9. Fully aware of the second atomic attack on Nagasaki, the petitioned the Emperor Hirohito to allow them to lure the Americans ashore and annihilate them. National honor, they said, required one last battle on Japanese soil.

"If the people of Japan approach the decisive battle for our homeland with determination to show their full measure of patriotism, and to fight until none of us survives, then, Your Majesty, I am convinced that Japan can overcome the crisis facing her," Japan's war minister, Gen. Korechika Anami, told the emperor that night. "Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like beautiful flower?" the war minister asked.

Americans were not privy to the wrangling in the Japanese cabinet that night of Nagasaki. But they knew about Bushido, the code of the samurai warrior to which Gen. Anami appealed.... During the entire war, not a single Japanese unit surrendered. And on Saipan, which had come under Japanese rule in 1919, thousands of Japanese civilians threw themselves off cliffs rather than accept American control. Those experiences led Gen. MacArthur to project 1 million American casualties in the invasion. Estimates of Japanese killed and wounded ran from 1 million to 10 million. "We were terrified" at the thought of invading Japan, Mr. Manchester says. "If you're fighting with man who relishes the prospect of death, it puts you at certain disadvantage."

Unknown to the Americans at the time, a group of dissident Japanese Army officers began conspiring to overthrow the government to thwart its surrender plans. And not until Aug. 28, when the emperor's younger brother had to stop kamikaze pilots from dive­bombing the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, did the plotting stop.

Mr. Manchester uses these events to buttress his point that Japan would not have given up were it not for the atomic bomb. "The fact is, of course, we all wish there were no bomb," he says, but Japanese scientists were working as hard on it as the Germans and Americans; the Americans simply got there first. Science was moving inexorably toward atomic power and would have found it even if there had been no World War II, he thinks....

The defense of history's most terrible weapon comes strangely from a man who gets depressed to see boys playing war with toy pistols.... At heart he is pacific. Military glory is a monstrous deception, Mr. Manchester recalls telling a buddy on Guadalcanal. Ban medals and you'll eliminate all war.... "It wasn't until my son had passed the age of military service that I told the members of my own family that I had been awarded the Navy Cross and the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts."

While much is correctly made of the awesome destruction and loss of life wrought by two powerful (yet puny by today's standards) weapons, too little is drawn to the far greater loss of life and suffering that could have been brought about by conventional warfare on Japanese home soil. The very future of the Japanese race was at stake.

How would today's reporters and TV "anchorpeople" have covered World War II? Dorothy Rabinowitz, a nationally syndicated columnist, and oftimes media critic, thinks she knows. In her column in the August 5 WASHINGTON TIMES, she wrote:

We can easily enough imagine how our reporters [of today] might have covered the [second world] war.... We would first and foremost have had, of course, the interviews:

"ABC (or NBC or CBS) takes you now to the bunker of Mr. Adolf Hitler, where our correspondent has succeeded in obtaining an exclusive interview. First of all Charles,...I wonder if you can find out...Mr. Hitler's feelings concerning the way this war has been reported so far? Has the press been fair, in his opinion?

"No? I can't quite understand that, Charles.... We try to present both sides of this war as fairly and accurately as possible, without prejudice toward either side....

"Very well, thank you, Charles — and thank Mr. Hitler.... Back to our veteran correspondent, who has followed the American troops since D-Day and the advance into the German heartland. Give us an update, can you, Don, on how this advance has gone since yesterday? It has, we understand, been very rough."

"Oh, it has indeed — but not, I'm afraid, only for the men in uniform. Yesterday the American combat unit with which I'm traveling hurled grenades into a house where civilians were living. When I asked the officer in charge the reason, he said that German sniper and bazooka fire had come from that very house.

"Now, we have heard this excuse very often before and I don't want to question the motives of our officers. But the fact is, the American army has left a trail of destruction behind it and shelled houses indiscriminately merely because they housed snipers firing on them. And this morning, Ted, I visited with a young German woman whose 12-year-old child looked at me with large fearful eyes.

"'Why have your soldiers come to do this to us?' she asked me, pointing to her son. I had no answers for her, Ted. And neither does any U.S. reporter. It's a question we Americans are going to have to ask ourselves for a long time to come."...

"In our last few moments we go back for a wrapup to our correspondent in Berlin, who has succeeded in obtaining an interview with Mr. Hitler and his colleagues again. Before we get into that, I'm sure our viewers would like to know, Charles, what it is that enabled you to get these busy men to grant interviews?"

"There is a simple answer to that, Ted. We have, over time, developed a good working relationship with the Nazi high command. They know, if they want to get their message across to the United States, they have to turn to us. Trust and reciprocity — those are the bottom lines here, Ted."

"And did Mr. Hitler happen to have any message to get across today, Charles?" "He did indeed, Ted. Some of our colleagues and I were invited to lunch at the bunker today. There he told me — and I relay it to you now — that he speaks for his colleagues in Tokyo, as well as himself, in saying that there is no enmity in the heart of any citizen of their lands toward the people of the United States; that he and his people are prepared to wage glorious war to the death only against the evil and ruthless policies of the United States government."

"There you have it: a personal message from Adolf Hitler to the people of the United States. I know every American will want to come to his own conclusions about its meaning, and to tussle with it in his own way."

In a far more serious vein, the editors of the BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS devoted its entire August issue to an analysis of the 40 years of the nuclear weapons age. The editor-in-chief of the BULLETIN (the magazine with the famous "atomic clock" on the cover — now standing at three minutes to midnight) is Harrison Brown. Dr. Brown is a veteran of the $2 billion Manhattan Project which produced the 1945 bombs, initially as a crash program to beat Hitler's scientists to the punch. He and other great figures of the project have since become crusaders for international control of atomic and thermonuclear weapons. In his editorial titled "Linking Past and Future," Dr. Brown wrote:

There are more than 50,000 nuclear weapons — representing a total yield of about 13,000 megatons — deployed by the United States and the Soviet Union. Remembering that the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima was but 0.01 megaton, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the over kill potential in the hands of the super­powers. [One new Trident submarine, it is estimated, will carry as much destructive power as 25 World War IIs!]

Were one of these nations to launch a preemptive strike against the other, we might expect that the combination of all warheads used might amount to perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 megatons. A 1983 study by the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that about a billion persons would be killed outright, while an additional billion would suffer injuries from blast, fire, and radiation and could die because most medical personnel would be killed or incapacitated.

These estimates are based upon the conventional theoretical knowledge of the detonation effects of large numbers of megaton sized nuclear explosives. New calculations suggest, however, that several other effects could increase these numbers substantially. The earlier calculations did not take into account the results of the considerable disruption of the infrastructure, including communications, or the depletion of the ozone layer. But far more important is the recent estimate that nuclear explosions on the scale visualized would have a profound effect upon the opacity of the atmosphere.

Surface explosions would push large quantities of dust into the atmosphere and to this would be added smoke from forest fires and urban conflagrations. The dust and smoke would greatly decrease the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, where presumably most of the explosions would take place. This would produce dramatic reductions in land-surface temperatures, including the possibility of rapid freezing of those areas under transient patches of smoke [the so­ called "nuclear winter" effect]. The noncombatant part of the world would face enormous, if not insurmountable, difficulties in maintaining a viable agriculture.

Were the devastation confined to the Northern Hemisphere, the death toll might well approach four billion persons — or about 90 percent of the human population (look at a world map or globe — even India is in the Northern Hemisphere] — but it is by no means clear that it would be so confined. Quite possibly, considerable quantities of dust would be transported across the equator, which we have conventionally considered relatively impenetrable, because of the unusual atmospheric circulation patterns in the region....

Not only would technological civilization be obliterated; the lives of most people in the developing world would be at stake as well. There would be little hope of rebuilding a new civilization from the ashes of the old, particularly if the 10 percent of humanity living in the Southern Hemisphere were also seriously affected.

The likely effects of a major nuclear war...suggest that no group of humans would be so foolhardy as to initiate the first attack, and that mutually assured destruction will remain an effective deterrent for at least another several decades. Yet the historical record should not make us feel overly confident. Let us look back to the 50 million dead of World War II, to the German extermination camps, to [the conventional fire-bombings of] Dresden and Hamburg, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moving forward in time let us look at the rise of terrorism, at the frequent use of torture, at the widespread application of technological knowledge to sabotage. Let us look at Lebanon, where a highly cultured society has been reduced to rubble and savagery by ordinary weapons coupled with fanaticism, hatred, and greed.... In short, human beings have shown that they are willing to see everything destroyed if they cannot have their own way.

The elimination of nuclear confrontation should have, without question, the highest priority on any agenda aimed at saving our civilization. At the same time we must recognize that the arms race has become such an integral part of our lives — politically, economically, and socially — that it will be extremely difficult to stop, and even more difficult to reverse.... Even with all goodwill it will take a long time — perhaps two or three decades — to reach the level of nuclear disarmament necessary to provide nations with a reasonable degree of security.... In the meantime, we must hope that during a serious period of nuclear build-down the threat of massive retaliation will continue to deter the massive use of nuclear weapons.

A nuclear build-down, however, can only be a start, paving the way for bring in kind of order out of the international anarchy from which the whole world suffers. Clearly, nuclear force would be replaced by substantial conventional military might, and we know from World War II how non-nuclear armed forces can be used to kill and destroy on a vast scale. Therefore we must learn how to contain and eventually eliminate conventional as well as nuclear wars. To this end we must develop a long-term, two-prong approach: first, the creation of truly effective peace­ keeping machinery; and second, the gradual elimination of many basic causes of war as possible — from access to resources and markets, to territorial ambition, to ideological fanaticism....

What kind of peace-keeping machinery can be made to work? For this purpose the United Nations as presently constituted is ineffective, as are regional structures such as the Organization of American States. Clearly, we have reached the point in the political evolution of our world where international disputes, together with war like actions such as international terrorism, must be handled through a global legal code backed up by the legal, military, and economic machinery needed to take firm enforcement measures when required. Although I am not so naïve as to suppose that full-fledged world government can be created in the near future, it should nevertheless be possible for the nations of the world to agree upon a legal code covering the more critical elements of war and peace and to establish the necessary enforcement machinery.

"A global legal code" capable of being enforced by "legal, military and economic machinery" — how better to describe, in secular terms, the Law of God being enforced by the government of God in the World Tomorrow?

General Carlos P. Romulo of the Philippines recently echoed some of the same conclusions reached by Dr. Brown. General Romulo was one of the original signers of the United Nations Charter. He was invited, as a special honored guest, to the recent U.N. review conference in San Francisco. He gave a short discourse preceeding the main luncheon address on June 26 in which he said that "we have yet to accept the challenge to deal with the basic causes of war." The peoples of the world, he added, have been unable to cross "the great bridge from unfettered national sovereignty to a workable world order."

Still lacking, General Romulo said, is the means to bring "the rule of law to bear on nations themselves. The absence of law by definition is anarchy." The most urgent need now, he continued, is for a world organization capable of "defining and enforcing acceptable standards of human behavior [and] capable of defining and enforcing peace in the common interest."

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau