Thread by @EffInvictus, So let's do something positive today and talk about racism, the atomic [...]

So let's do something positive today and talk about racism, the atomic bombings, and the Pacific War.

My most important source here will be John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007GZKQCY/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2

To begin with, the United States of America is so heavily racialized a society that automatically answering "yes, it was racist" or "there was racism involved" to any question about a decision made by Americans is a workable heuristic.

So in that sense, the question of whether there was racism at play is not an interesting one. Of course it was at play, it would be shocking if it weren't.

What is worth examining is how racism manifested and how it shaped decisions.

Something that very much shines through in American primary sources is that the Pacific War was substantially more brutal than the European war. In 1940, Polish fighter pilots in the UK deliberately gunning down parachuting Germans was a shocking thing to the British.

In 1942, American and Japanese pilots more or less started off being willing to shoot up each other's parachutes without this drawing much comment.

And things proceeded to escalate from there. Something like half of all Japanese remains repatriated from Saipan after the war were missing their heads. The vast majority of these were taken as trophies by American troops.

And on Saipan and on Okinawa, the civilian population were "encouraged" to commit suicide en masse by the Japanese Army. The numbers are frankly stark for Okinawa. The Americans counted 40,000 Okinawan civilians or so that they believed they had killed.

The Okinawan prefectural government concluded that about 150,000 Okinawan civilians died during the overall battle. Some of that gap of 110,000 were certainly not counted by the Americans, and others died from disease and malnutrition, but it seems that tens of thousands died

at the orders of Emperor Showa, the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, and 32nd Army.

How did this state of affairs escalate so much?

The answer is more than a little complex.

One way is to talk about propaganda, and that's somewhat true, but what's also true is that the escalating propaganda was heavily based on what you might call a "cycle of atrocity".

That is to say, Japanese troops would engage in an atrocity, such as the Nanjing Massacre before the war, or the Bataan Death March during the early stages, and this would enter into the American consciousness through propaganda, rumor, and news.

This would in turn shape how Americans treated Japanese soldiers, and when this crossed over into atrocity (which it frequently did- it's still shocking to think of the casualness with which American naval commanders reported their sailors gunning down Japanese sailors

who were swimming from sunken ships, or downed aviators) then that atrocity would make its way into Japanese propaganda, shaping how Japanese soldiers responded later, and so on and so forth.

Where does race come in? I think the simplest way to put it is that race prevented rehumanization of Japanese soldiers for American and British soldiers. Because they had originally seen Japanese as subhuman before the war,

they were impaired in their ability to recognize Japanese soldiers as individuals rather than as aspects of a faceless mass that slaughtered American and Filipine soldiers on the way to starvation camps.

This was obviously not total- there are also instances of humanized communication between the two sides. It is also important to recognize that most of these atrocities were not systematically planned in the way that the Shoah or the "Three Alls" campaign in China were.

What about the atomic bombings?

The atomic bombs are a very twisty subject, because they were initially planned as a last-ditch superweapon against the Nazis by the British before the US entered the war.

However, it is worth noting the following factors influencing American decision-making in 1945:

1. The battles were becoming bloodier and bloodier the closer you got to Japan (From Tarawa to Peleliu and Saipan to Iwo Jima and Okinawa).

2. The war had to be ended quickly.

And a significant part of the bloodiness comes down to the cycle of atrocity, as commands to stand and fight to the last man became more and more credible compared to hoping for American mercy.

So the racialized cycle of atrocity is an engine that drove the US closer and closer to the atomic bombs, by making them seem necessary not in the sense of ending the war, but necessary in the sense that an even greater escalation of violence was essential if the war was to end.

So as a consequence, the US abandoned its belief in precision bombing, which had held against the evidence right up until then, and then switched to area bombing, intent on razing Japanese cities to the ground.

The US had, to be clear, believed in the use of aerial attacks against cities since the 1920s iterations of War Plan Orange for fighting Japan, in order to force a surrender. However, these would have been with what a 1920s carrier could put in the air, in the belief

that the Japanese were cowardly and gutless and would surrender with the lightweight attacks that could conceivably be mounted.

And then once the atomic bombs were ready, there was already an existing framework they fit into. They were special bombs, requiring a special mission be mounted to use them, but they weren't seen as a superweapon, but rather as something to be incorporated into the schedule.

As such, the actual decisions to use nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were made, effectively, by colonels and major generals, with the President and Secretary of War having to specifically intervene to shape those decisions, rather than serving as a checkpoint.

(By a similar token, the US Army assumed the IJA would use chemical weapons in large amounts and began amassing its own chemical weapon stockpiles near the invasion launch points to be able to retaliate.)

Could this cycle of atrocity have been avoided? Perhaps. But it would have been difficult. The IJA and IJN had spent decades shaping themselves to commit atrocities and the abandonment of Meiji/Taisho internationalism was the largest single cause of the war in the first place.

The United States of America was, for its part, a deeply racist country, not 20 years removed from the height of the second Ku Klux Klan, and that racism wasn't going to just disappear overnight.

So the driving factor and the "ratcheting factor" which hampered deescalation were always going to be present.

We could hope more for a contingent alteration that leads to a Japanese surrender before the bombs fall.

Of course, we don't know and it is extremely likely we can never know exactly "why" Japan surrendered, because a great deal of documentation was destroyed between the decision to surrender and the occupation, and because much of the decisionmaking may have gone undocumented.

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