Should we really celebrate military victory over Japan eighty years ago? After all, the war that we, the British, fought was an imperial war—a war in defence of the British Empire. And it was ended by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing up to 200,000 people, most of them civilians. How can we celebrate VJ Day?
For Christian pacifists, of course, the answer is clear: followers of Jesus cannot celebrate any war in any way, and certainly not this one. Since any deliberate killing of a human being is morally wrong, war is wrong in spades.
But if the answer is adamantly clear, the implications are very disturbing. For if war is always wrong, then Britain should never have used armed force to resist Nazi Germany, no matter imperial Japan—with fatal consequences for the Jews, the Slavs, the liberals, the gays, the gypsies, and, not least, non-Fascist Christians.
For what—other than war—would have stopped the horrifying triumph of massively murderous Nazism in Europe? The noble witness of innocent non-violence? Hardly. The historical evidence is that the kind of people who ran the likes of Auschwitz, were not at all shamed into repentance by the face of vulnerable innocence; on the contrary, it excited their lust for cruelty.
It’s in the face of this dilemma—how to protect the innocent, while being faithful to Jesus—that, starting with St Augustine of Hippo in the early 400s AD, Christian thinking about ‘just [or justified] war’ was born.
In brief, the thinking can be distilled into three points. First, Christians may not fight while motivated by vengeance, but they may fight out of love for the innocent.
Next, Christians may intend, not to exterminate an unjust enemy, but only to force him to stop fighting, thereby securing a just peace.
In the course of so doing, finally, Christians must never intend to kill non-combatant civilians, but they may risk killing them, if that can’t be avoided and if the risks are minimized.
With that in mind, let’s return to the war against Japan. Can we celebrate it?
The first thing to say is that celebration doesn’t have to be pure; it needn’t be unadulterated. Eighty years ago, my father (aged 32) and my mother (aged 25) rejoiced at the end of the war against Japan. But my mother also grieved the loss of her youngest brother, Jack, who had flown out from Chittagong over the jungles of Burma in late 1944 and was never heard of again. For a long time after the war, Mum and her family hoped that Jack would turn up in some returned batch of prisoners of war, but he never did. He vanished at the age of 22. So, grief and lamentation over the terrible costs of war are certainly appropriate here, too.
Even—and Christian love requires this—lamentation over the terrible costs of war to the enemy. If ever you find yourself in the centre of Tokyo, make your way to the north-west corner of the Imperial Gardens, and turn left. A few minutes will bring you to the Yasukuni-jinja, Japan’s most controversial site. This is the national shrine to the war-dead, whose two and half million resident “glorious souls” include fourteen Class A war criminals.
A hundred yards to the right of the main shrine stands a museum, the Yushukan. Upon entering it, the visitor immediately encounters a locomotive. (I’ll come back to that shortly.) As he moves further into the museum, he finds himself in a series of rooms, whose walls are covered by the photographs of Japanese soldiers from the Second World War. Most of them look about 18 years old. And if you know much about the war in South-East Asia, you’ll know that many of them will have suffered grievously, some of them starving to death. It’s impossible not to be moved.
So, we can and should lament the terrible costs of war, both to us and to our then Japanese enemies. But can we also celebrate our victory over them?
The first of the two obstacles standing in our way is that Britain’s war against Japan was a war in defence of the British Empire. And for those who assume that empire is always evil, that makes celebration on this day impossible.
But empires, I submit, are not always and equally evil. Surely, it must stand to the humanitarian credit of the British Empire that it was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slavery, and that it then used its imperial power to suppress it worldwide for a century and a half. And surely it stands to its credit that, from May 1940 when France fell, to June 1941 when the Soviet Union was invaded, the British Empire offered the genocidal Nazi regime the only military resistance—with the sole exception of Greece.
By contrast, the Japanese Empire had no just claim to any comparable humanitarian character. Yes, the Yushukan Museum claims that Japan’s imperial expansion in the 1930s and ‘40s was in fact a war of liberation, waged on behalf of subjugated Asian peoples, against Western colonial domination. And yet what the museum demurely describes as ‘the Chinese incident’ is known outside Japan as ‘the Rape of Nanking’, when in 1937-8 Japanese troops are reckoned to have slaughtered about 300,000 Chinese civilians. So much, for Imperial Japan’s solidarity with Asian peoples.
And then there’s that locomotive in the museum’s entrance. When a Briton or Australian of a certain age puts together Japan, Second World War, and train, he immediately adduces one thing only: the ‘Burma Railway’. This is the railway that was hacked through the Burmese jungle by Allied prisoners-of-war and Asian labourers, who were treated as slave labour and perished in their tens of thousands. Over 12,000 Britons and Australians died—about one in five of the POWs—alongside 150,000 Asians. No one who has viewed BBC 4’s showing of the tv dramatization of Richard Flanagan’s fact-based novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and has managed to keep watching the harrowing fourth episode in which a sick Australian POW is beaten to death, can doubt the shameless brutality of the Japanese Empire.
Certainly, most of the British Raj’s Indian subjects didn’t doubt it. Which is why, although 43,000 Indian POWs did sign up to fight for the Japanese, 2.5 million fellow Indians fought in British uniform.
So, no, the fact that the war against Japan was in defence of the British Empire should not stop us celebrating today. But what about the dropping of those atomic bombs?
Vengeance had nothing to do with it. The overriding motive of the US government was the desire to save lives by bringing the war to a swift end, through forcing the Japanese government to surrender. Two weeks before the first bomb was dropped, President Truman wrote: “My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children of Japan.”
The problem facing the president and his colleagues was that, even as the Japanese were forced back onto their home territory, they showed no sign of giving up the fight. Truman’s military advisors estimated that the invasion of the Japanese mainland in November would cost up to 1 million casualties (dead and wounded).
Therefore, the US government decided to use atomic bombs to intimidate the Japanese into surrender. The possibility of a ‘demonstration’ drop onto some sparsely populated desert or island was considered, but it was rejected as likely to be ineffective. So, the decision was made to bomb cities.
In deciding which cities to bomb, was the size of the population a consideration? No, the focus was on military and economic objectives. Hiroshima was known as a ‘military city’ by the Japanese themselves. It housed the army HQ for forces defending Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan, which was the first target of US invasion. Nagasaki was a port town with munitions factories.
Tragically, precise targeting was not an option. Due to technological limitations and persistent cloud-cover, American attempts at the precision-bombing of factories and industrial targets in Japan had failed. Moreover, those sites were often widely dispersed in residential districts. Therefore, Truman’s Target Committee decided to aim at Hiroshima’s city-centre, because there was a prominent bridge there that would be easiest to spot from 30,000 feet. The result was the killing of 140,000 people, mostly civilians.
Was a second bomb necessary? Sadly, yes. The atomic explosion in Hiroshima failed to persuade Japan’s government to surrender. So, three days later, on 9 August, another US bombing mission took to the air. Its intended target was in fact Kokura, whose centre hosted an enormous arsenal. In the event, however, Kokura was obscured by cloud-cover, so the bomber proceeded to the secondary target of Nagasaki. For reasons that remain unclear—the city wasn’t hidden by cloud—it dropped its bomb over two miles from the city-centre and hit a Mitsubishi armaments plant, killing 40,000 people.
Even after the bombing of Nagasaki, the Japanese war minister, General Korechika Anami, was still arguing in favour of fighting on to the bitter end. “We will find life out of death”, he said. “Wouldn’t it be beautiful?” Fortunately, his counsel didn’t prevail and eighty years ago today, on 15 August, the Japanese government finally decided to surrender.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was not an act of vengeance; it sought to save lives and secure peace. And it targeted military and industrial targets. However, a combination of their residential location, technological limits, and the weather made massive civilian casualties unavoidable. That was dreadfully, awfully tragic, but it wasn’t immoral.
So, yes, we can and should celebrate the 80th anniversary of VJ Day with a “full heart”, albeit lamenting the terrible costs on both sides. That day was indeed one that proclaimed liberty to the captives—not only the British and Australian POWs, and the American GIs gripped by fear at the prospect of having to charge up Japanese beaches right into machine-gun fire, but also the Chinese, Koreans, Indians, and Thais suffering under brutal Japanese rule, when, as our First Canticle intoned, “cruel men … furiously rose up in wrath, to make of them their prey”.
Thank God Almighty, for their deliverance.
And thank God for all those, like uncle Jack, who delivered them, sacrificing their todays for our tomorrows.
Amen.
