Dr. Charles N. Steele

Eighty years ago this past August the Japanese Empire was finally defeated. It took over four and a half years of bloody fighting and the ferocious bombing of Japanese cities with incendiaries and atomic bombs to beat them into surrender. It is a great thing that the Japanese Empire was crushed. It was a remarkably brutal regime and it had the support of most of its people. It was totalitarian, racist, and out to subjugate Asia. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) were triumphs for civilization.

It is a dark and terrible thing that it required such force to end Japan’s resistance. The records of Emperor Hirohito’s cabinet show that the bombing of Hiroshima was not sufficient; Hirohito and his cabinet chose to continue fighting. And even after Nagasaki some in the cabinet desired to press on with their suicidal war. Hirohito himself finally resolved the debate by accepting surrender. 

It is a dark and terrible thing that it required such force to end Japan’s resistance.

Some people today condemn the use of atomic weapons on Japan as a war crime. It is easy for them to deliver moral lectures from the safety of their armchairs and flaunt what they imagine is their superior virtue. It is easy precisely because they have no responsibility for anything, they face no difficult choices, and there are no consequences for their moral posturing. Those people who were fighting to defeat the Axis powers were in a quite different position. The sooner they could end the war with the defeat of Japan, the better. Millions of Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and others were saved by ending the war quickly and violently. The Japanese were preparing their islands and population for an Okinawa-style last stand. 

Some people today condemn the use of atomic weapons on Japan as a war crime. It is easy for them to deliver moral lectures from the safety of their armchairs and flaunt what they imagine is their superior virtue.

Why was ending the war important? The death count for Chinese people from the start of the war for them, the 1937 Lukouqiao Incident, until the end was 15-20 million civilian and military dead from Japanese violence and starvation. Using the lower bound of this estimate, this means the Japanese were killing on average 5,100 Chinese every day of the war. The horrific massacre of civilians in Nanjing, documented so well in Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking, was reported in Japan regularly as it went on, as if it were some sort of sporting competition, with officers piling up civilian body counts. Unit 731 in Manchuria was a Japanese medical experimentation center that murdered at least 200,000 people in gruesome experiments that rivaled and exceeded those of Joseph Mengele in Nazi Germany. When my parents worked as missionaries, I had the opportunity to meet the Brauns, an American M.D. and his wife, a nurse, who were Lutheran missionaries in New Guinea prior to the Japanese invasion. The Japanese captured them, tortured them, starved them, and kept them prisoners until Japan was finally defeated. The Japanese Empire was a brutal, racist, tyrannical regime. 

American casualties in an invasion of the Japanese islands were expected to be 1,000,000. My father, Charles H. Steele, was a U.S. Navy pilot. He and his unit were training in Florida, and had just received orders to begin packing for Japan when news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki arrived. My Aunt Johane, a U.S. Army nurse officer, and her fiancé, my Uncle Charles “Tuck” Tucker, a U.S. Army engineer officer, were in Germany and had just received orders to prepare for Japan. Several of my other uncles were also preparing—all but one, Lt. James Paton, who had already been killed by the SS while arranging the surrender of a German division in the last two weeks of the war in Europe. None of my relatives were sent; the invasion was rendered unnecessary. Japan was defeated.

All of my relatives I ever asked were grateful for the atomic bombs that brought that evil regime to its knees and senses, and ended the war and preserved their lives. They regretted these weapons hadn’t been ready earlier, for use on Germany, to spare family and friends who died fighting. It’s possible that I would never have existed had my father gone into combat in Japan. The Brauns and many other prisoners were liberated. Because of the atomic bombings, the evils perpetrated by the Japanese regime and its people were stopped. Nuclear weapons brought the war to a quick end—and without millions of additional American and Japanese casualties. Just two bombs and it was over. This is good.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dark, terrible, wonderful, righteous things.

Dr. Charles N. Steele is an Associate Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College.