“But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

[Belated Thoughts on the 60th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki]

[Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005  The portion of this post appearing below in boldface has been revised.  Please see endnote for details.]

There’s a couple of reasons why I’m a theoretical physicist.  For tonight, the pertinent one is this:  I can feel numbers.  To me, they’re not symbols long since divorced from the consequences they were meant to quantify.  Instead, in my imagination, their consequences are palpable, sometimes vividly so.   Thus, while I can intellectually understand the truth behind those now immortal cynical sayings of good ol’ Senator Dirksen ("A million here and a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.") and mean ol’ General Secretary Stalin ("The death of one man is a tragedy.  The death of millions is a statistic."), I don’t personally feel their truth.    Rather, I personally feel a million dollars as the accumulation of a lifetime or two of paychecks, and a million deaths as an utterly satisfactory reason to emulate Job and blaspheme God to His Face should He ever take the time out of His very, very busy eternity to grant me the ultimate honor of some individualized revelation. 

Now, as you can see from the above examples, my natural knack for internalizing numerical knowledge doesn’t so much have to do with any mathematical facility per se, but rather an ability to imagine something personally poignant in place of the numbers.  And so, gentle reader, if in recent days you have pondered the morality of dropping atomic weapons on Japan and have found yourself confounded by all the cold counteractuals it entails, and if–more importantly–you’re now willing to partake in some moderate emotional masochism, then let me commend to you the following excerpt of Errol Morris’s stunning 2003 documentary on Robert McNamara, The Fog of War.  Better than anything I’ve ever seen, it conveys the brutal emotional truth behind the cold, hard statistic that in the five months leading up to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, US firebombing campaigns on 67 Japanese cities directly killed at least 175,000 civilians and burnt to the ground the homes of at least 8,000,000.

The excerpt is entitled Lesson 5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.  In it, McNamara’s words alone do a good job of conveying the magnitude of the devestation wrought on the civilian population of Japan in the months leading up to the atomic bombings for McNamara conceives of a chilling set of analogies between Japanese and American cities.

MORRIS: The choice of incendiary bombs—where did that come from?

McNAMARA: I think the issue is not so much incendiary bombs. I think the issue is: In order to win a war, should you kill 100,000 people in one night, by firebombing or any other way? LeMay’s answer would be, clearly, “Yes.”

[Speaking rhetorically] McNamara, do you mean to say that instead of killing 100,000—burning to death 100,000—Japanese civilians in that one night we should have burned to death a lesser number or none and then had our soldiers cross the beaches in Tokyo and been slaughtered in the tens of thousands? Is that what you’re proposing? Is that moral? Is that wise? Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan?

And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama’s roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which, by the way, was dropped by LeMay’s command.

However, the true genius of Morris’s film in this excerpt is that he breaks away from his characteristic close-ups of his subject’s face to extend McNamara’s analogy of Japanese and American cities to all 67 cities that were the targets of LeMay’s firebombing campaign.   Morris shows a series of bomb damage photographs at speeds that eventually become subliminally fast.  He first captions these with titles in red letters that give the name of the Japanese city bombed and the fraction of its area that was thus burned to the ground, and he then switches to a caption in black letters giving the name of an equivalent US city.  If one is neurotic and masochistic enough to watch in slow motion, one can catch all 67.  As I don’t wish for you, gentle reader, to partake in that much emotional masochism, I transcribe them here in the order shown

Japanese City	Equivalent American City	Area Destroyed
Yokohama	Cleveland	58.0%
Tokyo	New York	51.0%
Toyama	Chattanooga	99.0%
Nagoya	Los Angeles	40.0%
Osaka	Chicago	35.9%
Nishinomiya	Cambridge	11.9%
Shimonoseki	San Diego	37.6%
Kure	Toledo	41.9%
Kobe	Baltimore	55.7%
Omuta	Miami	35.9%
Wakayama	Salt Lake City	50.0%
Kawasaki	Portland	35.2%
Okayama	Long Beach	68.9%
Yawata	San Antonio	21.2%
Kagoshima	Richmond	63.4%
Amagasaki	Jacksonville	18.9%
Sasebo	Nashville	41.4%
Moji	Spokane	23.3%
Miyakonojo	Greensboro	26.5%
Nobeoka	Augusta	25.2%
Miyazaki	Davenport	26.1%
Ube	Utica	20.7%
Saga	Waterloo	44.2%
Imabari	Stockton	63.9%
Matsuyama	Duluth	64.0%
Oita	Saint Joseph	28.2%
Hiratsuka	Battle Creek	48.4%
Tokuyama	Butte	48.3%
Yokkaichi	Charlotte	33.6%
Unyamaoa	Columbus	41.3%
Ogaki	Corpus Christi	39.5%
Gifu	Des Moines	69.6%
Fukui	Evansville	86.0%
Tokushima	Fort Wayne	85.2%
Sakai	Fort Worth	48.2%
Hachioji	Galveston	65.0%
Kumamoto	Grand Rapids	31.2%
Isezaki	Sioux Falls	56.7%
Takamatsu	Knoxville	67.5%
Akashi	Lexington	50.2%
Fukuyama	Macon	80.9%
Aomori	Montgomery	30.0%
Okazaki	Lincoln	32.2%
Shizuoka	Oklahoma City	66.1%
Himeji	Peoria	49.4%
Fukuoka	Rochester	24.1%
Kochi	Sacramento	55.2%
Shimizu	San Jose	42.1%
Omura	Santa Fe	33.1%
Chiba	Savannah	41.0%
Ichinomiya	Springfield	56.3%
Nara	Boston	69.3%
Tsu	Topeka	69.3%
Kuwana	Tucson	75.0%
Toyohashi	Tulsa	67.9%
Numazu	Waco	42.3%
Choshi	Wheeling	44.2%
Kofu	South Bend	78.6%
Utsunomiya	Sioux City	43.7%
Mito	Pontiac	68.9%
Senoai	Omaha	21.9%
Tsuruga	Middletown	65.1%
Nagoka	Madison	64.9%
Hitachi	Little Rock	72.0%
Kumagaya	Kenosha	55.1%
Hamamatsu	Hartford	60.3%
Maebashi	Wheeling	44.2%

When Morris returns to McNamara’s face after this devestating montage, McNamara’s words are absolutely chilling:

McNAMARA: Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50 to 90% of the people in 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional in the minds of some people to the objectives we were trying to achieve.  [Bill's Note: This 50-90% figure is not to be taken literally.  See endnote for context.]  I don’t fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The U.S.-Japanese War was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history. Kamikaze pilots, suicide, unbelievable. What one can criticize, is that the human race prior to that time and today has not really grappled with what I’ll call “the rules of war”. Was there a rule then that said you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death 100,000 civilians in a night? LeMay said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He’d, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

---

Endnote (Sept 4, 2005):  In the original version of this post, which appeared on August 10, 2005 at 2:22 AM—and thus, like most every other post on this blog, was a post written in a state of aggravated sleep deprivation—the "cold, hard statistic" that appears above in boldface

…in the five months leading up to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, US firebombing campaigns on 67 Japanese cities directly killed at least 175,000 civilians and burnt to the ground the homes of at least 8,000,000.

instead read

…in the five months leading up to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, US bombing campaigns killed over 50% of the populations of 67 separate Japanese cities.

In my sleep deprived state, having just rewatched The Fog of War, I had misunderstood McNamara’s quote to be a statement of the actual results of the firebombing campaign.  Later that day, when it finally dawned on my sleep-reinvigorated mind that if McNamara’s statement were literally true then the US firebombing campaign in 1945 would have killed roughly 10,000,000 (!!) Japanese civilians, I placed the following notice atop the post:

UPDATE IN PROGRESS: Aug 10, 1:22 PM.  I believe there is some sort of major misstatement in this post’s key statistic (found in boldface below) regarding civilian casualties due to the non-nuclear component of the US bombing campaign against major Japanese cities in 1945.  Please note, however, that the misstatement is not my own.  The statistic is an accurate quote of Robert McNamara’s own words describing his World War II service doing statistical analysis in General Curtis Lemay’s Pacific Bombing Command as recorded in the Errol Moris documentary The Fog of War. (For the full quotation see the very bottom of this post.)    I am currently trying to figure out how exactly McNamara misspoke, for example, perhaps confusing civilian fatalities with total civilian casualties and/or the number of civilians rendered homeless.

I must say that I was rather embarassed, given how I’d prefaced the post with all that purple prose about how I’m a theoretical physicist since I have such a keen intuitive and emotional grasp of numbers.   Sleep deprivation is no excuse to be off by 2 orders of magnitude…one maybe… any physicist can be off at first by one order of magnitude… but two!, that’s ghastly.

Anyway, after quite a bit of reading, including the companion book to The Fog of War and several portions of the comprehensive, official US Strategic Bombing Survey, I must honestly say I still don’t know precisely what Messrs. McNamara and Morris were thinking.    However, I think the most likely explanation is that McNamara was speaking of the potential worst-case effects of the bombing, which certainly would be relevant to any ethical discussion about proportionality.   For example, US estimates of the potential effects of the first spate of firebombings on Japan’s 6 largest cities (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Kobe, and Kawasaki) were the burning down of 70% of the civilian housing [1]. Granted, overall deaths in these estimates were much lower than 70% of the civilian population, being around 500,000 civilians [1], which would have been about 4% of the population in these 6 cities [2]. And of course, the actual results of these raids were even lower: 124,362 deaths and the burning down of the homes of 5,578,000 Japanese, which are 0.94% and 42.5% of these cities’ 1944 populations respectively [2].  But there’s no doubt that the firebombings were planned with knowledge that they well could burn down the vast majority of these cities’ residential areas, and the bombings weren’t going to wait for guarantees that the Imperial Japanese government would implement effective firefighting and evacuation plans. 

References

[1] Schaffer, Ronald.  Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II,  (Oxford University Press, 1985), page 116

[2] Table 30 of the "United States Strategic Bombing Survey — The Effects of Air Attack on Japanese Urban Economy (Pacific Report #55): Summary Report (Urban Affairs Division, March 1947)" as reprinted in MacIssac, David, ed., The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Volume IX,(Garland Publishing, 1976).