Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Sammons’ argument might have merit if it had at a little intellectual honesty and moral coherence. But since it has neither…
Great reply, Donald.
The entire “just war” theory needs revision in light of the realities of large scale war in the 20th Century and beyond.
Sometimes a verbal parry can be as breathtaking as the real thing.
Frank:
I don’t see that the first set of principles (jus ad bellum) needs to change, but we may need to look at the second set (jus in bello). Ancient conquerors, after initial pillaging, often left local life alone. The new tyrants aim at genocide (Nazis) or forced conversion (Communists and Islamists). Surrender once meant servitude, but now means annihilation, physical or cultural.
The other issue ignored by those that sign on to Sammon’s thinking is the fact that even with the large loss of civilian life that occurred as a result of the atomic bombings, an argument could be made that the losses would have been even greater with a routine invasion. All one needs to do is look at what happened with Okinawa and other late War invasions, including mass suicide of Japanese civilians. Certainly United States losses would have been greater, but I think it’s also true that Japanese civilian losses could have been greater given the fanatical way that the Japanese military had acted up to that point.
Today we know a lot more about nuclear weapons than we did when the a bombs were dropped on Japan. The time interval between the stateside Trinity test and the a bombing of Nagasaki was less than one month. The Nagasaki drop was the third detonation of an atomic weapon. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki a bombs were based on different designs and were the first use of each type under combat conditions. A lot of the a bomb motion picture footage that we have comes from post war a bomb tests.
A great, if long, video about this is on the Military History Visualized YouTube Channel. “D.M. Giangreco on the Invasion of Japan, Lend Lease & much more”
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It has timestamps for those who want to jump around between topics. He points out that much of the history of WWII is told from a Eurocentric point of view and that the Japanese military did not take a Eurocentric view of the war. They had a totally different mindset that used the civilian population more like hostages to be used to advance the military war objectives.
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He said that after the war that the UN estimated that about 400,000 Asians were dying per month for every year the war went on. He said that the Pacific deaths were astounding in magnitude. He also said that it was difficult to apportion casualty counts in Okinawa because a little over half of the military were conscripted Okinawans. From documentaries that I’ve seen the Japanese military had both the will and the armaments to have made a land invasion costly. The Japanese military wanted a land invasion bloodbath. The occupation after the war was a tense period at first. The Japanese had a large number of troops posted off the mainland that had to be demobilized and transported back to Japan after the war. Hirohito had to send personal envoys to insure that the military complied with the surrender. That entire video is a real eyeopener.