Threnody

US poster, public domain, 1945

But you must remember there was never a war when crimes weren't committed, and there never will be.
-Rochus Misch

All too often alternative history fiction revolves around the concept of the Axis forces winning the Second World War. Robert Harris' Fatherland used it as the setting for an Orwellian murder-mystery, yet it's largely a cliché of the genre. Likely because alternative history often hinges on decisive military actions, and the most over-used conflict in popular media is the centrepiece struggle of the 20th century against the unambiguously evil enemy in the form of the Nazis. Germany is made to bear the responsibility alone while the other axis members are often overlooked (especially any other than the following two); the armed forces of Fascist Italy are always seen as something of a joke, and Imperial Japan's conduct of the war was downplayed with the emergence of the Cold War and maintained with its rise as an economic superpower. Japan was, however, the scene of the spectacular conclusion of the conflict. You need only mention the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki - I don't even need to implicitly state what happened in 1945. As someone who has dabbled in alternative history, it's struck me for a number of years that far more interesting than a world in which the axis triumphed would be a history like our own where they were defeated, with the key exception that nuclear weapons were not available and the invasion of Japan was necessitated. The debate about the use of those weapons started before they were even dropped, and for me it's a subject that I've wished to write about since the very first post on this blog.

In 1939 with war in Europe on the imminent horizon, a letter was sent to US president Roosevelt, prominently signed by Einstein, that called for the United States to take steps that would ultimately result in the manufacture of a powerful new weapon. It concludes with an oblique threat that Germany may be undertaking such steps itself, and that it would then be prudent to meet that down the line with America's own armament. At this point in time, most of the major powers were working on nuclear research - the UK's effort was eventually subsumed or superseded by the Manhattan Project, the Germans were indeed working on their own foray, the Soviets were attempting the same experiments largely hampered by the war and later bolstered by espionage in the US, and the Japanese were lagging behind with their attempts. By 1942 and 1943, Germany and Japan, respectively, were on the road to defeat by conventional means. They reached out from Brittany to Stalingrad and Manchuria to New Guinea, then collapsed back in.

Japan had always punched above its weight in the early years of the war. By pursuing the Southern strategy, claiming East Asia and the Pacific islands as the Japanese sphere of influence would bring it into dispute with the United States. It was therefore a strategic necessity that the US be eliminated for the duration of Japanese expansion in the region, which was to be achieved through a devastating surprise attack on the US fleet's home port in Pearl Harbour. The Japanese raid failed to knock the US Navy out of action and, like Germany, now faced years of retreat back to the homeland. Once the Pacific War was ready to breach the Japanese coast it was justifiably feared allied forces would have to subdue a fanatical population ready to repel the invasion to the last man, woman, and child. After Victory in Europe the allied forces began mobilisation for Operation Downfall - the invasion of Japan scheduled for October 1945. This plan made no place for the atomic bombings as the Manhattan Project's purpose was absolutely top secret.

Despite the original impetus for the creation of a US atomic force surrendering in May 1945, the project continued unabated and conducted its first test (Trinity) in July that year. Only Japan remained in the game, broken and betting its continued existence on repelling the enemy on the beach with last-ditch waves of cannon fodder. The debate then begins as to the decisions that led to the use of the bomb against Japan. For General Eisenhower, "Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary". The final authority on their use rested with President Truman and the truths of war are plain to see. Allied casualties were projected to be as high as a million for a full-scale invasion lasting well into 1946. In fact, the armed forces pressed half a million Purple Heart awards in expectation which ended up being more than enough to last the following six decades of combat operations. It may be a cold fact that the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed for a million allied servicemen, but any commander that did not prioritise the lives of his own men would be mad. These were the unenviable decisions that had to be made, as the time to adhere to the chivalric principles of civilised warfare had gone out the window the previous decade. There were already expectations the Japanese might resort to chemical warfare, as they had during their war against China, so ending the war through the atom bomb could be considered to antedate the modern desire to avoid putting 'American boots on the ground'.

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.
-Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, CinC US Pacific Fleet

The allies offered, as with Germany, only unconditional surrender. Again the Japanese refused, or rather they didn't say anything which was interpreted as a refusal. The inflexibility of the army to even consider surrender forced the government to continue down the path toward the "prompt and utter destruction" that duly transpired. Behind the innate desire to save one's own troops there is also the fact that, as per agreement, the Soviets began moving troops to the Far East. The two had a neutrality pact after a few border skirmishes in 1939 - the Soviet victory there being the reason the IJN's southern strike strategy prevailed over the army's plans for Siberia. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria was well under way even though the bombing of Hiroshima occurred three days prior. To my mind, much of the time between the defeat of Germany and Japan was positioning in preparation for the cold war. Even before that Himmler could see the inevitability of Soviet domination and attempted to negotiate an alliance with the West. Japan, too, could see the coming struggle - Admiral Suzuki advising:

It should be clearly made known to Russia that she owes her victory over Germany to Japan, since we remained neutral, and that it would be to the advantage of the Soviets to help Japan maintain her international position, since they have the United States as an enemy in the future

Truman had quickly come to suspect Stalin in their meetings as Eastern Europe was already falling under Soviet hegemony when the agreed reinstatement of the pre-war governments in areas of Soviet control failed to occur. If conventional warfare were to continue in the Japanese home islands, the Soviets could have made gains in the north potentially capturing Hokkaido after retaking the lower part of Sakhalin. If that situation had been allowed to develop, it may have resulted in a parallel of the partition of Korea. We all know how that turned out. However, the continuation of the Manhattan Project itself after VE only to be used on an already broken enemy was another part of the lead-in to the cold war. The project had begun because it was recognised these new weapons would have further empowered Nazi Germany's military ambitions. The first state to militarise nuclear technology would rise above the other global powers to carry the biggest stick yet imaginable. This is exactly why the Soviets built their own nuclear program as quickly as they could - otherwise the balance of power would tip well toward the US. The use of the two bombs on civilian targets was as much a demonstration of force to the Japanese as it was to the Soviets. Its use on two cities left intact after conventional bombing raids was also a handy way of assessing the destructive power on urban environments.

That the USAAF was destroying entire cities was nothing new, the only difference was it now only took one bomber to do it. Arguably the final capitulation was brought about by the Soviet entry breaking the neutrality pact and with it the only vaguely promising avenue for a negotiated peace. The pretence that the bombings were the decisive factor in bringing about surrender is necessary to mask the fact that all sides were now waging total war. The democratic allies had distinguished themselves from the totalitarianism of both fascism and Stalinism (one and the same, in my opinion) in which there is no distinction between the individual and the state, and therefore either was a manifestation of the other. After mass strategic bombing became accepted, the West joined the rest in considering the population a component of the military and industrial basis of the enemy state's ability to wage war. This again presaged the cold war when ICBMs would be programmed with flightpaths terminating over major cities.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
-Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy

Almost exactly sixty eight years after the first use of nuclear weapons, some as yet undetermined party of the civil war in Syria deployed chemical weapons. I heard US Secretary of State John Kerry denounce this and was darkly amused by the terrible irony. He labelled it a "moral obscenity" and that they were "the world's most heinous weapons". Listening to the World Service report I said rhetorically: 'I thought that was nuclear weapons? And who was the first and only state to use those?' This is unfortunately an instance of tu quoque. Russia currently likes to defend its human rights record by pointing to mass invasion of privacy in the US, and long before that the Soviets repeatedly pointed out all was not well in the American South. So it may not be the best line of argument against intervention in Syria, but it does make it difficult to believe there is any true moral framework in which war is conducted. The Nuremberg Trials were explicitly about demonstrating the crimes of the Nazi state were a perversion of international norms, yet in the end it was victor's justice as always. After all, there was plenty about the allied conduct of the war that required legal investigation. What saved Admiral Dönitz from being prosecuted for unrestricted submarine warfare was the honesty of allied commanders admitting their forces were up to the exact same thing - in contravention of the laws of the sea.

It's therefore hard to believe that warfare has been civilised by gentleman's agreements. Industrialisation touched agriculture, production, and then war. While mutually assured destruction prevented the nukes from flying, it only ever kept a lid on conventional war. Plenty of people can still die from artillery and gunshots - what really makes using Sarin on a hundredth of the dead due to the latter a red line?

[1930 ; 5]