Atom Bombings--a Matter of Perspective

This week marks the 44th anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and--three days later--on Nagasaki. There have been and will be retrospectives in the newspapers and on TV, and those of us who happen to see them will think briefly about the portent of that week in 1945--and then go back to Indiana Jones or Tom Clancy or Roger Rabbit.

But I can’t kiss off this anniversary that easily because it sets in motion a whole series of memories and speculations and musings that relate to what I was doing when those two devastating bombs were dropped on the direct orders of Harry S. Truman, President of the United States.

I was then a pilot in the Naval Air Transport Service. We island-hopped the Pacific, carrying wounded out and supplies and replacements in. The week Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, I was stuck on the island of Manus in the Philippines. Some repair work had to be done on my plane, and I was at loose ends. (When this happened to me on Guam, Marines stationed there would take pilots--for a fee--out in Jeeps to flush out Japanese soldiers still holed up on the island. Not me.)

So two days after the bombing of Hiroshima--of which we had fitful news--I commandeered a Jeep and wandered around Manus. Until that day, the most awesome sight I’d ever seen was the U.S. fleet standing off Okinawa to back up our invasion troops there. But Manus was even more awesome. For here had been stockpiled the material for the next--and final--step of our Pacific campaign: the invasion of Japan. Mile after mile of the weapons and support machinery of war. Here was the totality of the massive production effort to which the United States had geared up after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it was mind-boggling.

But it was also sobering. For the first time, I had a sense of the carnage that would follow an invasion of the Japanese homeland. The fanatical dedication with which the Japanese had fought on every island bastion in the Pacific would be doubled and redoubled when they were fighting on their own soil. The weapons I saw were inert, waiting--almost ominously. But it was easy to project them into combat and to picture the hundreds of thousands of casualties among the soldiers who would man them. It was the first time that the full impact of that war hit me, along with an awareness of the masses of human beings yet to die before it could be brought to a conclusion.

And so when I drank at the Officer’s Club that night, I joined the toast to the atomic bomb that wrought such fearful carnage on Hiroshima. I wasn’t thinking then about the morality of the act. About the thousands of people incinerated there. About this dreadful new force in the hands of flawed human beings. I was thinking only about my friends who would be killed if that invasion took place. And about my own life and how badly I wanted this war over so I could go home.

My reaction was no different when we got news of the Nagasaki bombing. We spent very little time wondering if the second bomb had been necessary, if all those additional lives had to be wasted before finding out if the Hiroshima bomb would bring the Japanese Empire to its knees.

I’ve gone through many evolutions of thought since that week 44 years ago. I’ve questioned decisions it never occurred to me to question then. And I’ve arrived at some conclusions that would have been impossible for me to reach in the immediacy of that upcoming invasion of Japan. I’ve also come to realize that both perspectives--mine on that island in the Pacific, and the commander-in-chief’s, far from the scene of battle--should be considered in making cataclysmic decisions like the dropping of an atomic bomb. But in the final analysis, the only really valid perspective is provided by distance. It’s impossible to see over horizons when you’re standing hip-deep in the problem.

This thought has come to me so often during the recurring crises with the hostages in Lebanon. It also came to me when we were being exhorted by the freedom fighters in Cuba and Hungary to take unilateral military action. We can be deeply moved by the plight of these people and their families, but to set national policy on the basis of those feelings would be as great a mistake as turning over to a battlefield commander the decision on whether to drop an atomic bomb.

No one is more limited in grasping the big picture nor more likely to be betrayed by his or her feelings than the individual at the vortex of a problem. That is why that person shouldn’t be allowed to make--or even influence too deeply--decisions with earth-shaking repercussions.

I recall sometime during the early years of World War II, a large American fleet was under way to get into tactical position for a Japanese attack. A Navy plane went down from Adm. William Halsey’s flagship, but the pilot was able to get free of the plane and into a life raft. My recollection--whether the story is apocryphal or not--is that Adm. Halsey held up the movement of that fleet for precious minutes while the pilot was rescued.

Now to a pilot, that was the ultimate act of courage and humanity on Halsey’s part, a resounding tribute to the value in which Americans hold individual life. But was the decision wise? How many dozens of ships and thousands of lives were put at risk to perform this one humanitarian act?

And how many hundreds of thousands more lives would have been at risk had not the decision been made to drop the atomic bomb? It brought an end to World War II within a few weeks at a terrible toll to Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Many of the men who created those bombs and had a part in delivering them have suffered ever since. Many of us who hailed this act when it took place have nurtured growing doubts in the hindsight of time and distance. Wasn’t there some other way it might have been done--a demonstration, perhaps? And was the Nagasaki bomb really necessary to end the war?

These are tough, agonizing decisions that need to be made from the longest perspective and the widest possible range of vision--because we have to live or die with them for a very long time.