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Between
August 6 and August 9, 1945, the American military dropped two atomic bombs
on separate locations in the country of Japan, the cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
The decision to drop the bomb on Japan was made by the Truman administration
in order to secure the immediate surrender of the country, which it did.
However even to this day, some authors question the actual necessity of
decimating Japan’s cities, as opposed to doing so on Germany’s, the main
antagonist of the Allied forces during World War II.
This is the question that is put into focus by this paper as it explores the
actual circumstances that led to the American government’s atomic bombing of
Japan. This paper forwards the thesis that the Japanese internment camps,
U.S. propaganda, and the Americans' hatred of the Japanese, including
Japanese-Americans, all conspired to gain support from the U.S. population
for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japanese soil.
A primary
premise that should first be substantiated sufficiently in this paper is
that the decision of dropping an atomic bomb on any target was a politically
complex matter. Unlike other weapons that were used during that time, the
atomic bomb would unleash such destruction upon its target that it would not
just wipe it out, but make it uninhabitable for years to come. Scientists of
the Manhattan Project, the program that developed the atomic bomb for the
United States, knew that they were unable to gauge the extent of long term
damage that the bomb can do,
and so dropping the bomb anywhere in the world had several possible
political consequences for the United States. If the dropping of the atomic
bomb led to dire consequences not just to its target but to the territories
around it or worse, to the entire world, America needed to make sure that
they would not be seen as a greater evil than that which they sought to
destroy. Thus, there was more than military strategy that was necessary in
selecting a target. More importantly, the United States needed to select a
target that embodied evil, a target that was not just a military threat, but
a societal one as well. Germany could not be targeted in this manner because
of two reasons. First, its location in the European continent placed it
close to the territories of countries that are allied with the U.S. Dropping
the bomb in Berlin meant risking the allegiance of those countries should
the damage reach their lands. Second, the German population and the American
population were both largely Caucasian, making it impossible to depict that
the Germans in general, not just their leaders, were animals and monsters.
This led the military to turn their attention to a different target, Japan.
Japan fit
the bill much better than Germany, especially because of the events that
followed the bombing of the Pearl Harbor. First, much of the Japanese and
Japanese-American populations were gathered and placed in internment camps
by the military to prevent them from contacting the Japanese forces and
giving them any information about American troop movement or other military
intelligence.
What this did was that it established that the enemy was not just the
Japanese military, not even just the country of Japan itself, but the
Japanese wherever they may be. A manifesto issued by the state of California
stating that the Japanese were driven by heritage, culture, and their very
race to be loyal to the emperor further established the collectiveness of
Japanese wickedness.
Secondly,
American propaganda made sure that the Japanese were portrayed as immoral
rapists and murderers who were akin to beasts and even demons.
This is evidenced through an examination of the various posters that were
released by the American government during the war. As can be seen from the
images, American propaganda aimed to show the American public that the
Japanese were intent on harming them. Many of the posters showed Japanese
soldiers kidnapping Caucasian women.
Others showed them in the apparent act of raping or murdering an American
female or child.
The
bombing of Pearl Harbor and other Japanese atrocities to American soldiers
such as the Death March where thousands of American soldiers were forced to
travel without food or drink across 60 miles to prison camps,
fueled the American population’s animosity against the Japanese people even
further. With the American portrayal of the Japanese as monsters and the
internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans showing the American public
that these people could not be trusted, it successfully created in Japan the
politically and socially viable target for the atomic bomb.
Bibliography
Andrew Taslitz. “Stories of Fourth Amendment Disrespect: From Elian to the
Internment”, 70 Fordham Law Review. 2002, 20 – 40.
Ben Waldron and Emily Burneson. Corregidor: From Paradise to Hell!
Trafford Publishing, 2006.
Greg Robinson. A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North
America. Columbia University Press, 2009.
Martin Sherwin. A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its Legacies.
Stanford University Press, 2003
Posters from World War II. Available from http://bss.sfsu.edu/internment/posters.html;
internet, Accessed: January 24, 2010.
Stephane Groueff. Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the
Making of the Atomic Bomb. Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1967.
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