According to a 1995 Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans approve of our dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The younger the people, the less they approve: among people 18-29, approval was 46 percent, with 49 percent disapproving. The students I taught in the late 1990s almost all disapproved.
I do too, intellectually. I know the Japanese were giving signs, albeit ambiguous, that they might sue for peace. I think there must have been some way to demonstrate the power of the bomb without killing 80,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimate you prefer. But that’s my intellect talking.
Another me speaks when I read about the bombing in Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II’s No High Ground (1960). The Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb, was accompanied by another plane, the Great Artiste, which parachuted equipment to record the blast.
The anti-aircraft gunners on Mukay-Shima Island in Hiroshima harbor could now see two planes, approaching the eastern edge of the city at very high altitude. As they watched, at precisely seventeen seconds after 8:15 [a.m.], the planes suddenly separated. The leading aircraft made a tight, diving turn to the right. The second plane performed an identical maneuver to the left, and from it fell three parachutes which opened and floated slowly down toward the city.
The few people in Hiroshima who caught sight of the two planes saw the parachutes blossom as the aircraft turned away from the city. Some cheered when they saw them, thinking the enemy planes must be in trouble and the crews were starting to bail out.
When I first read this, I thought, “Ah, gotcha, you bastards!” rather as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf did in the 1991 Gulf War when he realized the Iraqi air force and thus the enemy’s eyes were wiped out and so couldn’t know what he was cooking up on the western flank. “You think our guys are in trouble,” I thought. “Sorry, Charlie! It’s you.”
I believe this is a useful response for an American to have, even if one quickly despises it, because it shows us--shows you, reader, if you're an American--that, had you had the authority, you might have dropped the bomb to protect the lives of our soldiers or at least been among the 85 percent of our citizens who told Gallup in August 1945 they approved of the bombing.
Now an embarrassing confession. I thought this insight of mine important enough to share with John Hersey, who wrote Hiroshima (1946), the classic account of the bombing. In 1970, he was the Master of Pierson College at Yale College, and I sought him out during his office hours. He was tall, thin, and immaculate looking in blue slacks and white sweater; he reminded me of a Greek column with a capital of gray hair. What I was saying, as I trust I understood then, was that his book told only one side of the story--which was of course all he intended to do. I said that American students at that time (Vietnam!) needed to know the other side. He said he had told that story in his novel The War Lover (1959). He also said he agreed that it was wrong to draw a moral equivalence, as some on the left were doing (and do), between Hiroshima and Auschwitz. He also told me how touched he was by the mail he got from young people all over the world thanking him for informing them about the horror of nuclear bombs.
I didn’t bring up the question of our bombing Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima. I don’t think that can be justified.
