08/07/15 – Christian Appy – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today is Christian Appy.
He is the author of this new book that came out, I think, just earlier this year or late last year, American Reckoning, The Vietnam War, and Our National Identity.
And now this piece that he wrote for Tom Dispatch that ran on antiwar.com is along those same lines, only about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But what it means to us, the article is America's Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years later.
Welcome back to the show.
Christian, how are you?
I'm just doing great.
Thanks, Scott, for having me on.
Very happy to have you here and to read what you wrote.
So, yeah, and in fact I was reading this right when I was arguing on Twitter with, you know, ridiculous right-wing nationalists about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the important points dodged by him, which, to be fair, is probably because he'd never been confronted with any of them before.
Like, who said unconditional surrender was wholly writ and absolutely non-negotiable?
Why did it have to be that way?
And even if we did accept the premise of unconditional surrender, why did we have to invade the place?
Why couldn't we do like the Brits and just lay siege forever?
You know, these kinds of things.
Forget all that.
Just whatever.
It ended the war, and the war was ended, and so we won.
And what else do you need to know, really, Christian?
Yeah, you know, the justifications for the atomic bombing of Japan, I think, remain one of the most deeply embedded, what I would call, legitimizing narratives of American policy in our history.
It's amazing how long it lasts.
And as based as it is on many distortions, omissions, and flat-out fabrications, you know, the thing that I find more troubling is the idea that not only did it end the war in a way that made it absolutely necessary, is this idea that it was somehow merciful, a kind of mercy killing, because the assumption is that had we not done it, we inevitably would have had to attack and invade the home islands at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.
And indeed, you know, that number keeps trickling upward over the 70 years since then.
And now you even hear, at one point in 1991, President George H.W. Bush claimed that it spared millions of lives.
And this, of course, is untestable.
We can't replay history, right?
So we don't know if there ever would have been a land invasion or how many people might have died.
But the numbers that Truman was actually getting while he was president from a military panel of experts was around 40,000 American dead, assuming that we had to invade.
It was scheduled for November 1st, you know, three months after the war ended.
And then the second invasion was scheduled for March of the next year.
And by that point, most top American military commanders believed that the Japanese were already effectively defeated.
I'm talking about six of the seven five-star American generals and admirals all agreed that the war was effectively over.
And again, we don't know whether they would have surrendered on different terms, but that's certainly an alternative that could have been pursued, as you mentioned.
Why not change the demand for unconditional surrender and allow the emperor to stay on the throne, which is in fact exactly the concession that Truman offered after killing more than 250,000 civilians with those atomic bombs?
And it was clear, wasn't it, before then that that was their only condition?
Yeah, I mean, listen, there were debates within government.
But I think if we had cracked the code so we knew they were talking to Russia and other people about the possibility of unconditional surrender, it is at least something worth exploring.
And Truman himself, interestingly enough, seemed open to the idea of it as late as June of that summer.
Of conditional surrender, you mean?
Yeah, well, of conditional, of allowing the emperor to stay on.
And Joseph Grew, who was then the Secretary of State, was pushing it.
And Truman, he, Grew writes, was considering it.
And then once the Trinity test, that is to say, the first successful experiment, you know, the dropping of the bomb out in the desert of New Mexico, once that proved successful, from that point on, Truman seems like locked in on his determination to use those bombs, despite the fact that his own Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, was also pressing him right up to the last minute to drop the insistence on unconditional surrender.
And now Stimson was, I think, the one or the highest member of the cabinet to agree with Truman on using the nukes, right?
Well, he backed in.
Yeah, he, at the end, came on board and then even wrote a very influential article a couple of years later defending the decision.
So he was one of these classic team players.
But he had his own reservations about that.
And then, you know, a more important advisor to Truman was this conservative South Carolina, James Burns, who then became his Secretary of State, who was whispering, more than whispering, saying, you know, Mr. President, not only will we end the war by dropping these weapons and therefore, quote unquote, save lives, he was really saying we can make the Soviet Union more manageable in Europe by demonstrating this colossal power because we're the only country to have it.
And it would also, by the way, prevent the Soviet Union from making a greater claim on territory in the Far East because Stalin had pledged to come into the war against Japan back in the spring.
He said, I will come into the war against Japan within 90 days after the end of the war in Europe.
And he was good on that.
He actually did enter the war on August 8th, two days after the bombing of Hiroshima and was racing across Manchuria at great loss of life to the Japanese so that some historians, this one particular historian in Japan, is now arguing that the Japanese actually were as induced to surrender because of the Soviet entrance into the war as they were from the nuclear weapons.
So it's not even clear that actually it was the nuclear weapons that really was most important in ending the war.
Yeah.
All right, now, if you could, could you go back to the, not just the list, and I'd like to hear the list, but the context.
Paint a picture, then, of just who all in the military chain of command in, you know, I guess they didn't have the National Security Council then, but I know that Admiral Leahy was the chief of staff.
Yeah, he was the one.
So that was a pretty damn important position there.
Absolutely.
So there was a real, like, let the audience understand who in D.C. or who in the War Department really thought it needed to be used or opposed it and how much and that kind of thing, because I think this part of the story is what's really impressive, the thing that they never mentioned to us in fifth grade when they teach it the first time.
Yeah.
I would say the one person that did support Truman in using it was George Marshall.
He's obviously a very famous general from the period, and, you know, the Marshall Plan is named after him and so forth.
But beyond that, what's extraordinary, you know, Doug MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur, who is now, you know, he certainly, as it turned out, was not shy about advocating nuclear bombing during the Korean War.
He wanted to nuke China.
But at the time, in 1945, he actually believed that it was completely unnecessary.
He didn't have moral objections to it, he really thought that American forces, those brave American sailors and soldiers had really already effectively defeated Japan.
So, too, did Dwight David Eisenhower.
And he, like Admiral Leahy, who you mentioned, not only did the two of them think it was militarily unnecessary, those two actually had moral objections as well.
Leahy described it as an act of barbarism and, you know, against all the sort of Christian ethics that he believed in and laws of war.
And Eisenhower himself wished that we hadn't used it.
And, you know, by the way, just before World War II, in America, many people thought the bombing of urban populations, civilian populations, was the utter act of inhumanity.
And Franklin Roosevelt, actually, on the first day of the war, September 1, 1939, gave an eloquent speech attacking the barbarism and wishing that no one would use it.
Now, once it started happening, World War II, we quickly joined in on it and became the biggest bomber of civilian populations by the end.
Not just the atomic bombs, but we need to remember that we firebombed 67 Japanese cities.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Christian Appy on nuking Hiroshima and what it means to Americans today.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Christian Appy.
He is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts and is the author of three books about Vietnam, including the most recent, American Reckoning, The Vietnam War, and Our National Identity.
We're talking about nuke in Hiroshima.
And, well, we're really supposed to be talking about what all it means to Americans.
And so we've been talking about all the excuses and how bogus they are.
Oh, whoops, I forgot.
Let me play this for you real quick.
This is just newly unearthed audio from, actually a video, of Harry Truman in Japan in, I believe, 1962 or 68 or something like that, and excusing himself for nuking them and, of course, lying like Rand Paul in order to do so.
So here it goes.
The objective was to end a war in such a way that there would not be half a million people killed on each side and that many injured from then on.
And that's all it was.
You know, when you're running a war, the objective is to win it.
There you go.
Hey, when you're running a war, the objective is to win it.
So I guess if the Nazis had used nukes on all the Jews and Slavs all the way to the Bering Sea, that would have been okay, as long as it was because they were trying to win the war, man, right?
I mean, that's the only measure of morality.
Or maybe that's only if you're from the middle part of North America.
Then you get to kill whoever you want and use whatever excuse you want.
But there's an important point here beyond just my blabbing and cursing about Truman.
And it's something that you mentioned earlier.
I forgot exactly how you said it, but it was sort of along the lines of how important this sacrifice of the Japanese, not of ourselves, this sacrifice of Japanese civilians is in America's civic religion.
And I've long maintained that instead of Washington and Jefferson, that it's FDR and Truman who are the founders of the modern American empire, the founding fathers of it.
And we've really kind of replaced Washington and the cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln and the slaves and those previous civic myths with America as Superman, like that one time that we saved the French from the Nazis and this kind of thing.
And, you know, they even portray Libya.
Any war that they do is always like that time we saved the French from the Nazis.
And World War II is that kind of foundational thing.
And so that explains, I think, to a large part, I think that's part of what you're trying to say in this article, why people refuse to just be honest about this for a minute.
You know, hey, Zora Neale Hurston was right.
He's the butcher of Asia.
Why is that so hard to say?
And it's not because of the actual act.
It's because of what all it means for the American empire and how our goodness defines evil things as good things when we're the ones carrying them out.
And all this that Americans have a lot invested in.
Because the nuke in Japan was wrong.
Think of all the other stuff that could have been wrong, too, then.
Yeah, there seems to just be this undying, broad faith that really in American exceptionalism, a key part of which is this idea that we are more virtuous than other nations and that we put a higher price on life than other nations and that because we are so well-intentioned, it justifies just about anything we do.
I mean, I quote in this article a moment in 1988, now long forgotten, when the United States Navy in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian civilian airliner and it killed, I think, 290 people, all civilians, 66 children.
And George Bush, who then was the vice president, running for president, said, and this is a direct quote, I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever.
I don't care what the facts are, right, in the aftermath of that shoot-down.
So again, as you say, almost anything can be justified so long as we adhere to this notion that we are the indispensable nation, always a force for good in the world, no matter how much it defies the reality, the facts.
We don't care what the facts are.
Yeah, it's funny because especially the conservative nationalists who are always denouncing moral relativism who are the first to say, like Giuliani when he's asked about waterboarding being tortured, he says, well, it depends on who does it.
Anything else is moral equivalence.
Yeah.
How dare you?
Right.
Well, you know, Karl Rove, the key White House advisor for a few presidents, but most recently George W. Bush once said that, he admitted it privately the way presidents won't, we're an empire now, we make up our own reality, and you journalists, you reality-based journalists, you'll run around trying to find the facts, and by the time you do, we'll be on to a new story.
We can create our own reality.
So in a sense, the earlier Bush was right.
It doesn't matter.
The facts don't matter.
We can make it up.
But, yeah, the bombing of Hiroshima, it really, they've gotten a lot of, it's interesting, the e-mails, I've gotten a lot of e-mails in response to that article.
They run kind of 50-50, but I've gotten more negative responses to this than anything I think I've really ever written, including some very tough critiques of the Vietnam War.
This sense, this idea of challenging this idea of American virtue in the so-called good war.
And listen, I believe it was a just war.
I'm not a pacifist.
I would have supported fighting in World War II.
My father was a Marine Corps dive bomber in the Pacific.
Some of the nasty e-mails to me have said, well, your father might have died and you never would have lived if we hadn't bombed, nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
How many women and babies are you willing to kill in order to live?
Well, apparently, as one of these e-mailers said, I would have killed every one of the Japanese if it would have saved even a few thousand American lives.
See, that's what I appreciate, is when people go ahead and just come out and be honest about it.
And you know what?
A very young person that I know who had just barely heard of such a thing one time asked me, how could that be?
And he understood just it was a bomb big enough to kill a whole city.
And I said, well, you know, I mean, the truth of it is, they looked at the Japanese like they might as well have been from another planet or animals.
It's like kicking over an anthill.
There's no limit to the number of jabs you can burn to death.
Who cares?
That was the attitude.
It was.
I mean, and I do think the most virulent forms of racism have certainly subsided.
There was a Pew poll recently that suggests some real respect among Americans for the Japanese and their culture.
So we're not where we were in the 40s, but in the 40s, if you just picked up a Life magazine, you would see the Japanese depicted as monkeys and insects and vermin.
And the kindest caricatures had them as sort of buck-toothed, nearsighted, you know, cartoons.
Actually, even Dr. Seuss wrote a bunch of cartoons, you know, depicting them as a fifth column waiting to sabotage the United States on orders from Tokyo.
Yeah, actually, right.
And we, of course, need to remember that the United States government did order the removal of Japanese Americans, more than half of them American citizens, to concentration camps away from the California coast, 120,000 of them, which was supported by the Supreme Court.
All right.
Now, real quick here before my last, well, it's not so much a question, but a request.
Before that, I just want to mention to the audience again here real quick that Tom Dispatch has run another article about the nuclear bombings.
This one is called Under the Mushroom Cloud, and it's a book excerpt of just telling the stories of survivors of the Nagasaki attack.
And you've got to read it, man.
And it's at TomDispatch.com, and it's also running today on AntiWar.com and under Tom Englehart's name on AntiWar.com.
Yeah, it's a new book.
Yeah.
Yeah, I really hope that people will look at that.
I mean, it is really something else, that article.
But now, so back to your thing again.
Can you talk to me, talk to us a little bit about this movie, Unbroken, and about the example that you use of this Smithsonian exhibit and what happened to that and what it all means?
Yeah, sure.
Just briefly, I was sort of thinking, what's the most popular book about World War II today?
And unquestionably, it's been this book and movie, Unbroken.
The book itself was on the bestseller list in hardcover for almost four years.
And it tells a riveting story of this guy, Louis Zapparini, who was a bombardier on a B-24, got shot down, survived 47 days in a lifeboat, and then was captured and brutally tortured in POW camps by the Japanese.
And so the focus really is on this American survivor who was amazingly resilient.
It's incredible that he got through it.
But my thought is that nothing in that book gives any indication that the United States had anything to apologize to.
And you get this very one-sided view of the sort of monstrous suffering of American soldiers.
And you look at the comments on Amazon and people say, oh, it just increased my appreciation for the American fighting man.
And so, you know, I don't really have any problems with the book itself, but it just, it's so skewed toward, you know, thinking about our own experience.
So there's that.
And just compare it to a book that came out way back in, the one you mentioned that came out now, Nagasaki, and this book Hiroshima by John Hersey that came out the year after the bombing in 46, which gives a very empathic view of the survivors.
So I still, I raise that subject just to show how still in our culture, we're just not ready yet to really take on the moral reckoning with our bombing.
And let me add to that part too, right there real quick, about just how simple that level of propaganda is in a way where, you know, that's like junior high school kids stuff where there was a plane crash, three Americans were killed and everybody else, and they kind of matter a little bit less like that can really leave an impression on you when you're young, that that's just how we look at things.
One quick story.
I have a student who teaches high school in Massachusetts and he was talking to colleagues.
He'd been reading some of our, he's one of my, it was my graduate course and we were doing some critical reading of, of the atomic bombing of Japan.
And he, he talked to colleagues and no fewer than three of them said to him, some version of the, you know, I used to think it was wrong that we nuked Japan, but I just saw this movie unbroken.
And now I'm beginning to think, you know, we had to do it.
Oh, for crying out loud.
So there's that.
And then go to go back to.
It makes you wonder.
Yeah.
Right.
See before when they were against it, it was just because, well, whatever, I'm a liberal Democrat and that's what we think now or whatever.
It wasn't because they had any good reasons.
It's not because they actually believe in human rights or they don't believe in anything.
They just believe in, well, the people I fit in with are against it.
So I guess I'm against it.
And then I saw a movie and that was the last argument I heard about it.
So.
Right.
It can be discouraging, but.
It is.
And, you know, the thing I, you mentioned this, this exhibit that had been planned 20 years ago, and this is 20 years ago.
So my question, I raised this article, have we come any closer?
And I don't think we really have to really taking seriously the impact of the bombs.
The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in 1995 was on the 50th anniversary of the nuclear bombs was going to do this major amazing exhibit, very ambitious.
They were not only going to show the refurbished fuselage of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first of the atomic bombs, but they were going to surround it by an important context and raise really important questions about, you know, the decision to drop the bomb and its long-term legacies, how it was not only the last act of World War II, but really ushered in the age of nuclear arms and nuclear arms race and, and all the threat that that posed.
And they got creamed a script of the exhibit got released by the Air Force Association and critics lined up to attack it so much so that they ended up canceling the exhibit.
They did eventually just show the fuselage, but none of this surrounding context, which raised some of the questions that I've been raising about, you know, well, did you know that Eisenhower opposed it, things like that.
And the other thing I would just mention is there wasn't just these conservatives that were attacking it, though they'd led the charge.
Eventually the United States Senate voted unanimously by bipartisan Democrats to a resolution condemning the Smithsonian for its political correctness for offending veterans of that war.
And they should know, they should know better that they, that the Enola Gay was part of the momentous effort to bring a merciful, they use this word in the resolution, a merciful ending to world war II and saving thousands of lives.
And I just wanted to point out that, you know, as I say, at least 250,000 civilians were killed in those two bombs alone, nevermind the rest of the war.
And that, by the way, is more than two times the number of American troops that died in the entire Pacific war.
I'm not discounting that momentous sacrifice of 108,000 or whatever it was close to that who died in the Pacific war.
But we killed more than twice of that civilians with those two bombs alone.
So I'd hardly refer to that as merciful.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm sorry, I'm keeping you a little bit over time into the top here, but I just want to point out that, you know, I had a great uncle who was a prisoner of war fighting.
He was in the Canadian army fighting for the British in the Pacific and was captured.
And, you know, I don't know the entire details, but I'm certain that he did not have a good time being a captive of Japanese over there.
So the Japanese committed heinous war crimes for which they too need to apologize and haven't sufficiently apologized.
So it's not, I'm not saying that, you know, we're, we're the only guilty party here, but we could, you know, if we really are going to be an exceptional country, we should lead the way.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the whole thing.
It's one of those kind of fake arguments, you know, in my Twitter fights over the nuking.
Well, you just don't understand the brutality of the Japanese.
Oh, really?
What?
I just fell off the turnip truck yesterday.
I never heard of the Japanese occupation of China or the Imperial Japanese or what they did to my own kin in that war.
Yeah, you're right.
I just have no idea, but it's just another one of those.
Anything to change the subject from the actual vaporizing of the babies that were killed that day, which is what they don't want to discuss is the real reality of the situation.
Yep.
Anyway, I'll let you go.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show and for writing this great article.
I sure appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Scott.
That's a Christian Appie.
He is the author of American reckoning, the Vietnam war and our national identity.
And he wrote this thing for a truth, pardon me, for Tom dispatch.com and it's running at antiwar.com under Tom Englehart's name there as well.
And it is called our merciful ending to the good war, how patriotism means never having to say you're sorry, AKA America's Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years later.
And we'll be right back in just a sec.
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