Lots of people say aspects of the war with Japan in WW2 were immoral.
Issues they raise include:
1. The United States provoked the attack.
2. The United States knew about the attack but didn’t take defensive actions in order to maximize casualties and civilian response.
3. The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was immoral because killing innocent civilians is wrong.
Provocation
Let’s start with the first reason. Many, including those on the left and libertarians, say that Roosevelt basically provoked the Japanese into war by cutting them off from necessary resources. Here’s an explanation of the argument by a non-interventionist libertarian:
the Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan. In 1939 the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. “On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials.” Under this authority, “[o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted.” Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, “on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt “froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan.” The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in southeast Asia.
Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the Americans knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda had communicated to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: “Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas.”
So, through the force of economic power, the US and UK were able to threaten to grind Japan’s warmongering capacity to a halt — a warmongering capacity which had thus far inflicted brutal oppression on the Korean and Chinese peoples in order to serve the interests of Japanese imperial expansion — and a warmongering capacity in a nation moving resolutely towards cooperation with the Third Reich.
Also, are we to surmise that those who critique the morality of US actions towards Japan think that military attack is an appropriate response to concerted efforts at economic coercion? Somehow I doubt that they would have supported a US-led invasion of the middle east in response to the OPEC embargo in the 1970’s.
Letting It Happen
The article continues:
Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington knew as well that Japan’s “measures” would include an attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it. That Roosevelt and his chieftains did not ring the tocsin makes perfect sense: after all, the impending attack constituted precisely what they had been seeking for a long time. As Stimson confided to his diary after a meeting of the war cabinet on November 25, “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” After the attack, Stimson confessed that “my first feeling was of relief … that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.
A NYTimes article on Day of Deceit, a major book amongst the Roosevelt knew crowd, points out that:
Mr. Stinnett’s strongest and most disturbing argument relates to one of the standard explanations for Japan’s success in keeping the impending Pearl Harbor attack a secret: namely that the aircraft carrier task force that unleashed it maintained strict radio silence for the entire three weeks leading up to Dec. 7 and thus avoided detection. In truth, Mr. Stinnett writes, the Japanese continuously broke radio silence even as the Americans, using radio direction finding techniques, were able to follow the Japanese fleet as it made its way toward Hawaii.
Among the Japanese who made radio broadcasts were Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Imperial Navy, and Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo, commander of the leading element in the Japanese Pearl Harbor strike force. Mr. Stinnett writes that their messages were intercepted, deciphered and provided to Washington by a coded transmission procedure known as TESTM. Roosevelt, Mr. Stinnett says, would have been provided the TESTM documents, but they were not given to Kimmel or Short.
It is possible that Mr. Stinnett might be right about this; certainly the material he has unearthed ought to be reviewed by other historians. Yet the mere existence of intelligence does not prove that that intelligence made its way into the proper hands or that it would have been speedily and correctly interpreted.
Gaddis Smith, the Yale University historian, remarks in this connection on the failure to protect the Philippines against Japanese attack, even though there was a great deal of information indicating that such an attack was coming. Nobody, not even Mr. Stinnett, believes that there was any intentional withholding of information from the American commander in the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur. The information available was for some reason just not put to use.
In her 1962 book, ”Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,” the historian Roberta Wohlstetter used the word static to identify the confusion, the inconsistencies, the overall uncertainty that affected intelligence gathering before the war. While Mr. Stinnett assumes that most information that now seems important would have gotten speedy attention at the time, the Wohlstetter view is that there was a great avalanche of such evidence, thousands of documents every day, and that the understaffed and overworked intelligence bureaus may simply not have interpreted it correctly at the time.
This article was written in 1999, before 9/11, but its point is applicable to that situation as well. A common problem which plagues many individual’s historical analyses is to look with the benefit of hindsight and see “clearly” what must have seemed at the time a messy and confusing morass of intelligence — people suppose that the implications of all intelligence will be immediately self-evident, and then simultaneously imagine that there’s no bureaucratic friction as to the sharing of this information up the informational hierarchy. Then, when people fail to act according to this model, a conspiracy is born!
To sum up, the best that Stinnett has proven is that some intelligence existed as to the Japanese attack existed. This is hardly damning.
Killing Innocents
Finally, there’s the issue of the nukes. Either we were going to take the Japanese home islands by force of arms, force a total surrender through some other means, or negotiate a peace treaty while not bringing about significant social change in a militaristic imperial society that had imposed its will by brute force on much of Asia and had directly attacked us.
The third would have been extremely perverse — leaving a hostile, fascistic society simmering after total defeat is not a good strategy for building a better world.
The first was considered. The Army anticipated so many casualties from what was codenamed Operation Downfall, that they manufactured 500,000 Purple Heart Awards — they still haven’t used them all up. And depending on how vigorous the defense of the Japanese home islands was, the casualties on the Japanese side, including civilians, could have run into the millions. It’s a counterfactual scenario, so there is of course no way to really know — but it seems quite likely that significantly more than the 100,000+ plus Japanese that died immediately (or the additional 100,000 that died as a result of the lingering effects of atomic bombs) would have died had we invaded the home islands. That’s not even including the Americans who would have died.
Honestly, the moral blame should be assigned to the Japanese leadership for not surrendering when the writing was on the wall. Some of the reasons they were holding out included maintaining the Imperial Throne, trying to dodge serious war crimes tribunals, and trying to avoid an occupation. Perhaps they misjudged the West’s fortitude, but they were certainly on the hook for the consequences of that misjudgment for their civilian populace, since they were the initial aggressors.