CORRESPONDENCE

To the Editor:

I’ve read most of your reviews on the books reexamining the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II (Book Review, Aug. 9). Each condemns the action without reservation as an insanely murderous choice. Several respected intellectuals are quoted, some no doubt qualified on the subject. It’s too bad none of them was there.

Ask anyone who served in the Pacific theater what he thinks about the atom bomb, especially those who endured the savage treatment of prisoners and civilians by the Japanese.

I was very lucky. The 11th Air Force was based in the Aleutians, where we flew rarely, and gradually realized that we were simply awaiting the transfer when Okinawa was taken to cover the landings on the main islands of Japan. I found out from the Department of Defense many years later that we were scheduled to move at the end of August 1945. The two-pronged invasion would take place the first of November. The estimated casualties were 2 million Japanese, 1 million Americans.

The atom bomb canceled all that, the war was over and all of us on both sides got to go home, except for the 210,000 killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb ended the war, and its nuclear successors won the Cold War without firing a shot, on either side. I call that a worthwhile achievement.

Charlton Heston, Beverly Hills

****

To the Editor:

The reviews in your issue on the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan demonstrated (in both the books and the reviews) that curious blindness that seems to strike people on this subject. Let me point out that we had, at the time of the atomic bombs, killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. Most of them were burned to death by low-level B-29 raids dropping napalm on Japan’s wood and paper cities. In a single raid on Tokyo, more people burned to death than were killed at Hiroshima.

Two peculiar points: First, historians seem indifferent to these deaths while being appalled by those caused by the A-bombs. Second, they seem unable to accept that in an emotional climate that allowed napalming of open cities, the A-bomb seemed simply a more powerful weapon to bludgeon our enemies.

W.M. Plachy, San Marcos

****

To the Editor:

There is no denying the tragedy of war, but the business of war is to kill enough of the enemy to make them give up. The Japanese were very good at it and though they didn’t have the bomb, their score was very high, as attested to by the Chinese, the Filipinos, our allies and ourselves.

As a gunner in the 7th Amphibious Force, I was witness to and part of actions from New Guinea, Dutch New Guinea and Biak to Leyte Gulf, Philippines. It was at Leyte that I saw the first kamikazes of the war blowing apart American ships, leaving the water full of dead, dying and burned men. I was not at Manila when the Japanese laid waste to the city, killing non-combatants as they retreated. It was a horrible episode, but they were doing what is usually done in war.

I have seen and heard other versions of Truman’s feelings concerning his decision to use the bomb. He regretted having to use the weapon, but he didn’t regret using it. Despite a swarm of politically slanted revisionists, the bomb saved lives by ending the war. As one who was involved in shooting down kamikazes, I can imagine what the reported 4,000 suicide planes Japan planned to send against an invading fleet would have done.

I suggest readers get a hold of “The Prisoner and the Bomb” by Laurens van der Post (William Morrow, 1971). The author was a prisoner in a Japanese camp in Java, and since we had a friend in another of their brutal camps in Java, we believe the bomb saved hundreds of thousands of prisoners from extinction. We feel sorry for all victims of war. I wish there would never be another, but meanwhile let’s not put the rap on the United States.

Charles Isaacs, Los Angeles

****

To the Editor:

I was only a junior officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II and had no idea of the order of battle as it applied to my ship. But as duty and fortune had it, I did wind up on a destroyer on picket station off Okinawa. So, since our ship was hit by six kamikazes with considerable loss of human life, I have kept my interest in the Japanese order of battle alive all these years.

I use the explanatory paragraph above because I have found that a number of writers like Gar Alperovitz (“The Truman Show”) have no understanding (or is it no desire to understand?) the meaning of an order of battle. Alperovitz’s assertion that “after 53 years, historians still do not know why the atomic bombs were used” is pure hogwash. Let me tell you why.

D. M. Giangreco, editor of the Military Review published by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., after considerable research, published an article, “The Truth About Kamikazes,” (Naval History, June 1997). In it, he deduced that “thousands were slated to attack U.S. vessels bringing forces ashore in the planned invasion of the Home Islands. Giangreco’s article covers six full pages, but here are some proven highlights:

* Japanese plans called for about 5,000 aircraft to be ready for an invasion of Kyushu in late ‘45: Operation Olympic.

* Another 5,500 were to be amassed for the later invasion of Honshu in the spring of 1946: Operation Coronet.

* Japanese had decided to expend the bulk of their aircraft as kamikazes during the critical first 10 days of each invasion.

The article also covers the Japanese plans to disperse their aircraft to ensure availability for use during Allied invasion.

I’m sure that President Truman had much of the above intelligence available to him when he made his fateful decision. And as a veteran of Okinawa and the kamikaze attacks, I’m sure the intended use by the Japanese of this diabolical weapon played a major role in this decision.

Lefteris Lavrakas, Costa Mesa

****

To the Editor:

Just as the movie “Saving Private Ryan” has galvanized the nation about the horrors of ground-level combat in World War II, so too must the unimaginable horrors of the nuclear bombs dropped on unsuspecting civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki be brought to the consciousness of all of us.

I wish Dan Dailey (“The Unthinkable for Kids”) had included “Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician’s Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands” (Duke University Press, 1995) by Dr. James N. Yamazaki. It is a moving memoir of a Nisei pediatrician who, after surviving the hellish combat duty in the European theater and enduring the inhumane treatment of his own family interned by the U.S. government, comes face to face with the survivors of the bombs and succeeds in cooperative efforts with native Japanese physicians to study the effects of the bomb.

Masato Takahashi, Granada Hills

****

To the Editor:

Greg Mitchell’s review of “Hiroshima’s Shadow” makes no moral distinction between atomic and conventional bombing. Apparently the issue is not the number of civilians killed, since the victims of the atomic bombing (about 210,000) are probably fewer than those of the incendiary bombing (about 500,000) of Japanese cities in March to July, 1945, which in turn are fewer than those killed by the bombings (about 900,000) of German cities during 1943 to 1945.

If the moral Rubicon was the bombing by a democratic nation of cities where military targets could not be pin-pointed, then it was crossed in September 1940, when Winston Churchill pressed the R.A.F. to retaliate for the Nazi raids on London. Really heavy bombings did not get underway for another three years. They greatly helped win the war, not by breaking the German will to fight and not by curtailing German war production--which peaked in February 1945--but rather by sucking a large fraction of German aircraft and artillery from support of the Wehrmacht to defense of the homeland: As much as one-third of German war production, according to Albert Speer.

To make a distinct issue of the decision to drop the atomic bomb is to ignore the mental conditioning and institutional inertias from the preceding years of war. As stated by Murray Sayle (the New Yorker, July 31, 1995), “No one ever made a positive decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, only a negative one not to interfere with a process that had begun years before, in very different circumstances.” The qualitative difference in effect of the atomic bomb, radiation sickness, was not realized at the time of the decision to bomb Hiroshima.

It is also surprising that no mention is made of Churchill as an influence on Truman. In “The Second World War,” Churchill states that he had several lengthy talks with Truman, some of them alone, at the Potsdam conference July 18 to 26, 1945, and supported Truman’s decision to bomb. Also no mention is made of the reprehensibility of Roosevelt in not informing Truman when the election was won in November 1944, to give him time to ponder its implications.

There also appears to be a failure to examine Japanese government records. In his New Yorker article Sayle states that as late as Aug. 9, after the bombings and the entry of the USSR into the war against Japan, the Japanese cabinet was divided: a civilian faction wanting to add only retention of the emperor as a condition for surrender and a military faction wanting to add three more conditions: 1) limitation of the area to be occupied, 2) war criminals to be tried by Japan, and 3) Japanese forces to disarm themselves. At midnight, the divided cabinet met with the emperor; it was not until 2 a.m. that Hirohito was asked his opinion; he opted for the one condition of retaining the emperor (his first decision as head-of-state in the war). Sayle also confirms, from many interviews, the impression conveyed by Masuji Ibuse’s novel “Black Rain” that the Japanese people would have done whatever their leaders asked: again, bombing had failed to break the will to fight.

The so-called unconditional surrender demand of the Allies, issued at the Potsdam conference and rejected by the Japanese almost immediately, actually had eight conditions, which in hindsight seems quite reasonable. They include freedom of religion, which implies retention of the emperor as the figurehead of Shintoism.

It is ironic that the greatest long-term effects of the two most conspicuous complex operations of the Western Allies in World War II--the Normandy landing and the atomic bomb development--were not to defeat the Axis but rather to check Soviet expansion. The Normandy landing and its following campaigns kept the Russians out of Western Europe, while the atomic bomb kept them out of Japan. The entry of the USSR in the war against Japan probably would have brought about its surrender within weeks, but weeks would have given Stalin & Co. a much greater role in the occupation of Japan.

William M. Kaula, Los Angeles