Commemorating Hiroshima — Was it a War Crime?

Saturday was the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Tens of thousands of Japanese thronged Peace Park in downtown Hiroshima to commemorate the attack, which killed nearly 140,000 people. From all accounts, the ceremony was deeply moving, a tribute to the need to abolish nuclear weapons once and for all:

During the ceremony, children dressed in black and white, the colours of mourning, laid wreathes of flowers at a simple, arch-shaped memorial.

Ladles of water were also offered for those who suffered the atomic heat. As dusk fell, paper lanterns were floated down a river by the park to represent the souls of the dead.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said that, after the bomb, the city had relentlessly pursued peace.

“The citizens of Hiroshima are the witnesses of global peace, we hope that Hiroshima will continue to be the symbol of global peace,” he said.

[snip]

Hiroshima‘s mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba, led the crowd in a minute of silence, 60 years on from the instant the blast struck the city.

A huge metal bell tolled in memory of the victims.

Mr Akiba warned nuclear powers that they were “jeopardising human survival” by clinging on to their arsenals.

“We have to pay due tribute to all the souls claimed by the atomic bomb,” he said. “We will not make the same mistake again.”

As the BBC story notes, there is still considerable controversy over whether Truman’s decision to drop “Little Boy” on Hiroshima was a war crime. Indeed, a mock tribunal held last month concluded that it was:

Japanese and South Korean atomic-bomb survivors were invited to the two-day tribunal at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum building to tell about their sufferings.

Three law experts from the United States, Costa Rica and Japan posing as judges recommended the United States apologize to atomic-bomb survivors, pay damages to them and promise never to use nuclear weapons again.

Japanese and South Korean lawyers who played the role of public prosecutors indicted 15 people who were involved in the bombings, including then Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Robert Oppenheimer, a U.S. scientist who has been credited with developing atomic bombs.

Accepting the prosecutors’ claims, Lennox Hinds, a U.S. professor specializing in international law who acted as a judge, said the bombings were the act of “an indiscriminate extermination of all forms of life” and that the targeted cities were like “guinea pigs” used in an experiment to measure the impact of atomic bombing.

Hinds also maintained that “the defendants knew or should have known of the destructive impact of this weapon” but still decided to use it.

Historians have also debated whether the attack was justified on the History News Network, a fascinating blog run by George Mason. Here is a snippet from Philip Nobile’s opening argument for the “prosecution”:

I accuse President Harry S Truman of war crimes under Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter outlawing “the wanton destruction of cities, towns, and villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”

Specifically, I accuse President Truman of ordering the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki via an experimental terror weapon resulting in the massacre and maiming of some 200,000 Japanese women, children and old people.

[snip]

Although the Nuremberg Charter improvised on crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, the war crimes provisions were hardly novel. International law was clear about the limits of warfare. According to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and the Paris Peace Pact of 1928, civilian slaughters were considered criminal. Consequently, Article 6 Paragraph b of the Charter did not break new ground in its definition of war crimes:

(b) WAR CRIMES: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoner of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

Note well two points: (1) “Military necessity” refers to emergency battle conditions during which armies and navies are permitted wider latitude under international law. The term does not apply to massacres planned in advance thousands of miles from the front. Accordingly, Truman never argued that destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a “military necessity.” (2) While international law did not positively outlaw the aerial bombardment of cities during World War II, thus opening a small technical loophole at Nuremberg for Reich air minister Hermann Goring, the universal prohibition against civilian massacres surely extended to rational atrocities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially by the flexible judicial standards in play at Nuremberg. Would the notorious slaughter of 660 French villagers in Oradour in June 1944 have been less criminal if it had been carried out by the Luftwaffe rather than the 2nd SS Panzer Division?

And here’s a snippet from Ronald Radosh’s opening argument, for the “defense”:

The essence of Nobile’s case is based on a highly legalistic and a-historical citation of Article 6 of The Nuremburg Charter. Nobile takes it further, by extending the description of war criminal to Truman’s entire atomic cabinet, his chain of command, the pilots on the Enola Gay, and all those politicians who through the years have praised what he calls “the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” His cast of characters is thoroughly bipartisan, exempting no one except Mr. Nobile himself—and we are never sure that as an American citizen, whether or not he is also guilty. Certainly, those historians who reach a judgment different than the one he reaches are also included—his list includes such scholars of distinction as Stephen Ambrose, Iris Chang, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., etc. etc. etc. I now give Mr. Nobile permission in advance to include my name among the above. I would welcome being among such august company—and no, I do not believe that anyone on his list is guilty of covering up actual crimes of war.

Rather than follow the technique used by Mr. Nobile, I would like to attempt to deal with the questions he raises in another way. To be guilty of a war crime, President Truman and his associates would indeed, as Nobile writes, have had to conspire “to commit two of the most fiendish slaughters in the annals of war.” The purpose, in other words, would have had to be a desire to use the A-bomb in order to produce precisely such an end–“fiendish slaughter”–and not to force the Japanese military to make peace or save even more American and Japanese lives than died as a result of the bombing.

[snip]

Let us first take up the question of whether or not using the A-bomb on Japan was militarily necessary. Was Japan a besieged nation yearning for peace, lying prostrate at the feet of the United States? From reading Nobile and the revisionist historians, one certainly gets this impression that the answer to the first is no, and the second yes. There are two related questions to consider in order to actually answer the question. The first is what actual amount of casualties did Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff believe would occur if the A-bomb was not used. The second is whether the Japanese government would have agreed to end the war if the A-bomb had not been dropped.

On both of these fundamental questions, the evidence indicates that Nobile and the revisionists have not made a strong case. Indeed, the very latest scholarship has all but demolished the revisionist accounts on which Nobile depends. Writing in the Pacific Historical Review in November 1998, Sadao Asada offered his own thoroughly researched answer in his seminal article, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan‘s Decision to Surrender–A Reconsideration.” His article reveals that the bomb and only the bomb galvanized Japan‘s peace party to take actions necessary to terminate the Pacific War. What he accomplishes in a virtual tour de force is to correlate the day by day decisions of the Japanese government from August 6th through the 14th in the context of how the use of the A-bomb worked to produce acceptance of the Potsdam terms of surrender. His criticism, that to the Japanese historians, “the sense of victimization takes precedence over historical analysis,” may be extended as well to Mr. Nobile, for whom the desire to brand those who saw a need to use the bomb as a group of war criminals equally takes precedence over the task of the historian.

The case — which became very heated, as you can see — was submitted to a jury of ten historians. The verdict: 2 guilty, 7 not guilty, 1 undecided.

Readers?