There is a new book about the U.S. fire bombing and nuclear attacks on Japan, leading to Japan’s ultimate surrender in 1945. I haven’t read the book, just listened to the FreshAir interviewed with the author linked to here. A book I have read, and which influenced me profoundly, was Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. This new book (based on the interview confirms a few things I understood from that earlier book.

1. In terms of suffering and loss of life in a short time, the U.S. fire bombings of Tokyo are one of history’s greatest war crimes. This new book says however that the U.S. was aiming for military targets and the bombing technology of the time was not that precise. On the other hand, the military apparently realized pretty quickly how awful it was and kept doing it anyway. For those who don’t know, a hundred thousand people or more were basically cooked.
2. The Japanese military was just not going to surrender. Their plan was civilians to fight to the death to the last man, woman, and child, with sticks and stones if necessary.
3. Japanese civilians were largely on board with this plan. The U.S. island hopping campaign and invasion of Okinawa were horrible, and any invasion of the Japanese mainland would have been another level of horror, human death and suffering beyond that. You could argue that the lives of U.S. soldiers, who had just been through hell in Europe (although U.S. casualties of course paled in comparison to British, European, and Russian casualties, and there were virtually no U.S. civilian casualties) were valued more than the lives of Japanese civilians.
4. The emperor was in favor of surrender for months leading up to the bombing, but the military was largely in control of the emperor. Even after the atomic bombing, the military was still split and the emperor basically went against them to publicly surrender.
5. Truman was kind of a bastard. I stand by this. Had FDR lived, I of course can’t say whether anything would have turned out differently, but I like to think it might have.
6. One argument I hadn’t heard was that the Japanese occupation of China and Southeast Asia was killing as many as 250,000 civilians a month (!), and by cutting that short the American atomic bombing saved more civilians than it killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe, but I still think there is a moral difference between deciding to kill directly and indecision which allows others to continue killing.

Are there lessons for today’s urban warfare and civilians who are willing to fight (real or perceived) enemies to the death. I won’t go there at the moment, but at least the number of zeros on today’s death and suffering is far fewer than the 1940s. Of course, one nuclear detonation could change that in mere moments.