There Is No Peace: 60 Years Since End of World War II

To this day, the U.S. capitalist rulers justify these barbaric crimes, arguing that they “saved American lives.” Pacifist critics decry the bombings as irrational and “unnecessary.” The nuclear annihilation of these two cities, however, was a consequence of a war driven by the struggle between the leading rival Allied and Axis imperialist powers over the redivision of the world’s markets and resources. It was a trial run for further military assaults that Washington was planning, from intervening against the Chinese revolution to taking on the Soviet workers state.

On August 6, the U.S. warplane Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb dubbed “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. For maximum effect it exploded almost 2,000 feet above ground. Everything within four square miles was obliterated. Some 70,000 people were killed instantly, many of them incinerated.

Within five years the death toll would rise to 200,000 as a result of severe injuries and radiation sickness caused by the bomb. Of Hiroshima’s 90,000 buildings, more than 60,000 were destroyed.

Three days later the U.S. bomber Bockscar dropped a plutonium bomb, “Fat Man,” over the industrial seaport of Nagasaki. The bomb instantly took the lives of some 40,000 people. The death toll would rise to 140,000 within five years.

In an August 9 radio address, U.S. president Harry Truman threatened to continue the atomic bombing of Japanese cities until Tokyo surrendered unconditionally. The Japanese government surrendered the following day.  
 
Imperialist rationalization
The U.S. government’s rationale for use of this new and terrible weapon, in this case to "save American lives," was as self-serving as that given for Washington's entering the war against Japan—the “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor.

The central argument for deploying the atomic bombs was that it was the only way to compel the unconditional surrender of the Japanese government and thereby preclude a U.S. invasion of that country costing the lives of thousands of U.S. troops. In fact, however, Japan was on the verge of surrendering.

The tide of the war had begun to turn against Tokyo as early as mid-1942 and especially by 1943 with the Japanese defeats in the battle of Midway and the battle for Guadalcanal. The expulsion of Japanese forces from Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands in July 1944 brought U.S. bombers within range of the Japanese capital.

While the tremendous loss in human life resulting from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is widely known, apologists for Washington downplay the fact that those numbers pale in comparison to those killed in the systematic U.S. firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities during the previous months. Between February and August 1945 more than 300,000 Japanese were killed in the firebombings and nearly half a million were injured, according to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. U.S. forces dropped 41,500 tons of firebombs, wreaking destruction on 64 Japanese cities.

Tokyo was a special target. On the nights of March 9 and 10, nearly 300 B-29 bombers dropped firebombs on the capital. They burned out 16 square miles of the city, killing an estimated 83,000 people. The capital was struck again on the nights of May 23, 24, and 26. A combined total of nearly 1,000 bombers dropped more than 3,000 tons of napalm bombs on the city.

Reporting on the firebombing raids in the June 19, 1945, Militant, Joseph Hansen wrote that an area “twice as great as New York's Manhattan…has been burned out by fire bombs” in successive raids on Tokyo. “All the horrors that have blotched the pages of human history,” Hansen wrote, “were amateur beginnings in brutishness compared to the planned burning of women, children, and old men in Japan for the sake of imperialist profits and plunder.”  
 
Japan seeks end of war
Washington was aware of Tokyo's intention of ending the war. As early as June 1945 Japanese officials approached the Soviet government, the only member of the Allies with whom it had a neutrality pact, seeking its assistance in negotiating an end to the war. U.S. intelligence had broken the code to Japanese secret transmissions and intercepted several messages between the Japanese foreign minister and its ambassador to Moscow seeking the USSR’s aid.

The main condition the Japanese government presented for its surrender was guarantees for the emperor’s safety. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S. government dropped its insistence on the emperor’s abdication and accepted Japan’s surrender.

Tokyo’s hopes of negotiating an acceptable end of the war were dashed when the Soviet government, headed by Joseph Stalin, declared war on Japan. Soviet troops invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria August 9, the same day “Fat Man” exploded over Nagasaki.

Ahead of a July 17, 1945, meeting of the Allies at Potsdam, Germany, the Stalin-led government had agreed to enter the war against Japan on August 8. It was seeking to strengthen its own negotiating position with its imperialist allies over the postwar division of “spheres of influence.”

At the Potsdam conference, however, Truman delayed opening the meeting, expecting to receive confirmation of the results of an atomic bomb test in New Mexico. After being informed of the successful test, Truman persuaded Stalin to delay the USSR’s entry by a week. He then gave the order to drop the atomic bombs in the weeks before the USSR’s entry into the war. With the bombing of Hiroshima Stalin realized he had been outmaneuvered, and Soviet troops launched their assault on Manchuria.

The Daily Worker, newspaper of the Communist Party USA, which backed U.S. imperialism in the war, hailed the bombings and the Soviet military action as the "old one-two."  
 
How Washington provoked Tokyo
As with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Washington’s December 1941 declaration of war on Japan after Pearl Harbor is presented as a necessary act of self-defense. But Tokyo’s attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked by Washington and was the inevitable consequence of the rivalry between Japanese and U.S. imperialists for domination of markets and resources in Asia and the Pacific.

Ten days before Pearl Harbor, on Nov. 27, 1941, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. War Department sent a message to the Hawaiian Command that negotiations with the Japanese government appeared to be terminated with little chance of resumption. “If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot, be avoided, the U.S. desires that Japan commit the first overt act.”

In September 1940 Washington stepped up its economic war against Tokyo, prohibiting the export of steel and iron scrap to Japan. In July 1941 Washington imposed an oil embargo on Japan, which was also cut off from shipments of arms and ammunition, as well as machine tools, scrap iron, pig iron and steel manufactures, copper, lead, and a variety of other commodities.

Added to this was Washington’s abrogation of Japan’s “most favored nation” trade status and the freezing of Japanese credits in the United States. For example, Japan depended on its lucrative silk trade with the United States to finance its imports. On Oct. 9, 1941, the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, reported to Washington that “the frozen-credit policy of the United States was driving Japan into national bankruptcy and she would be forced to act.”

The final piece in provoking the Japanese rulers came on Nov. 26, 1941, when the U.S. government presented Japanese representatives in Washington with a 10-point “peace proposal” that amounted to asking Japanese imperialism to surrender its position as a Pacific power. It required the Japanese imperialists to withdraw their military forces from China and French-dominated Indochina in return for lifting economic sanctions, unfreezing Japanese credits, and concluding a new trade treaty.

The Pearl Harbor attack and the U.S. declaration of war on Japan took place 11 days later.
 
 
Previous article in the series:
How miners defied ‘no-strike’ pledge in WW II
 
 
 
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