I read Chris Check’s reflections on the death of Brigadier General Paul Tibbets with great interest. Most historians believe that Tibbet’s role in the atom bombing of Hiroshima was the caused U. S. victory and the end of the Second World War. Check expresses reservations as to the necessity of this action, indeed whether or not the theory, practice and technology of modern warfare allows any war to be prosecuted in accordance with the Just War theory. Check does not seem to fall into the camp of those historical revisionists who make spurious claims that the Japanese were readying plans to surrender anyhow—which negated using the A-Bomb. Instead he offers a pointed criticism that the bomb was employed under any rationale and a concomitant reappraisal of Gen. Tibbets’ role on that historic mission.

Cicero, Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, St. Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotious attempted to codify the requirements for Just War. To them any war must conform to certain principles which would allow the waging of war within a synthesis of classical Greco-Roman, as well as Christian, values. Thus, Just War theory can be divided into three parts—

1) Jus ad bellum, concerning the justice of resorting to war in the first place;

2) jus in bello, dealing with the justice of conduct within war after it has begun; and

3) jus post bellum, applicable to the justice of peace agreements and the termination phase of war.

Here I will examine Check’s premise concerning Tibbets and the Hiroshima A Bomb. in light of all three.
Jus ad Bellum.
The US was negotiating in good faith with Japanese diplomatic envoys for a peaceful resolution to the crisis occasioned by the Japanese occupation of French Indochina and FDR’s subsequent oil embargo right up to the moment Japanese naval aircraft bombed Pearl Harbor. This despite US expectations of an imminent attack by Japan on the U.S, sphere of influence, most notably the Philippines. Under this rubric, the deaths and wounding of almost 3600 Americans, and the destruction of 6 battleships, 3 destroyers, 3 cruisers, hundreds of aircraft and port facilities at Pearl Harbor amply satisfied the justification for a recognition of the state of war existing between the US and Japan. President Roosevelt’s ringing speech to Congress requesting a declaration of war promised that the US would “win through to inevitable triumph, so help us God.” Germany’s declaration of war on the US followed three days later. To my mind, there is little doubt that the Jus ad bellum consideration was met.
Jus in Bello
This aspect of the just war principle is the most problematic for those of us who defend the use of the A Bomb.
It is an inherently monstrous act to use a weapon of the indiscriminate nature of the Hiroshima A Bomb on a target peopled largely by civilians. It seems to violate rules of discrimination, porportionality, and minimum force.

But we are cannot return to ancient tactics with serried phalanxes drawn up against each other—with no civilians in sight. No side will yield the advantage of technology. “End justifies the means” arguments for the taking of any life are unpersuasive to me—notwithstanding in the abortion example the rare “physical life of the mother” exception. But an argument can be made for the unique qualities of the Second World War as an exception to the discrimination and minimum force rule if not the proportionality argument.

Any study of this issue must include context. That context was total war against an unrelenting foe whose national character and policies developed a struggle of utmost savagery. The slaughter and barbarism of the Pacific war was immeasurably aggravated by Japanese refusal to contemplate surrender no matter how hopeless the situation as well as their disregard for the accepted conventions of legal conduct in war.

I think that I can show that a greater evil would have been done by allowing the war to continue rather than to shock the Japanese people into an abrupt surrender by the use of nuclear weapons.
The invasion of Japan was in the offing. At the Potsdam Conference of 24 July 1945, the Allied position was that the ‘Japanese forces would be disarmed’ Japanese sovereignty would be limited to the four main islands of Japan ‘and such minor islands as we shall determine’ and ‘respect for fundamental human rights’ would be established.
The message ended with this: ‘We call upon the Government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is complete and utter destruction.’

This publicly stated objective of what the U. S. described as “Operation Downfall” required the complete defeat of Japan and its occupation. The militarists controlling Japan were determined to resist even unto the destruction of Japan. While Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro was willing to negotiate peace through Switzerland or the Soviet Union, War Minister Anami Korechika and the Chiefs of Staff Gen. Umeza Yoshijiro and Adm Toyoda Soemu insisted on ‘ prosecuting the war to the bitter end in order to uphold our national essence, protect the imperial land and (incredibly) achieve our goals of conquest’.

The Japanese correctly viewed “Operation Downfall” as divided into two phases. They were:”Olympic,” the invasion of Kyushu and “Coronet,” the invasion of the main island of Honshu.
Accordingly the Japanese prepared Operation Decision (Ketsu-Go) which envisaged the deployment of over 2 million troops along the coast to repel Allied landings, to be reinforced by four million armed forces and civilian employees as well as a civilian militia of the elderly and children (boys and girls) totaling 28 million.

An invasion of Japan would have been D-day magnified a thousand times. It would have been Stalingrad waged from the sea. For instance, the 2nd Marine division was slated to be in the initial U. S. D-Day assault. But the 2nd division no longer appears in the plans for “Operation Olympic” four days following D-Day. The entire division would have been either annihilated or combat ineffective. Other units are similarly erased from future tactical plans. The enormity of such destruction can hardly be visualized, even today. .

Lest you think this is speculative, understand that the actual model already took place—Okinawa. Pre invasion Okinawa was populated by 574,368 Okinawans.. Take a trip to Okinawa and visit Peace Prayer Park. It’s easy to find. It is right next to the Suicide Cliffs just down the road from the Japanese naval underground headquarters. There you will see the names of 200,656 men women and children inscribed on black marble slabs who died on that island in the last battle of World War II.

Those slabs reveal the following death toll:

Japanese 188,136
Soldiers and civilian employees 65,908
From Okinawa (soldiers and civilian employees) 28,228
From Okinawa (civilians fighting in battles) 56,861
From Okinawa (non-fighting civilians) 37,139
Americans 12,520

Following the battle there was not one stalk of grass, shrub or man-made object remaining on the island that was over 24 inches high. The population of the island was 574,368. There were 4.72 artillery shells fired per person during the battle. The land war on Okinawa was unremittingly brutal as U. S. soldiers and Marines attempted to break the ferocious Japanese resistance. Names like Sugar Loaf and Kakazu Ridge still invoke nightmarish memories from Okinawa veterans. The U..S. Navy suffered the worst pounding in its history, with over 5000 Navy personnel killed and, astoundingly, no fewer than thirty-five ships sunk by kamikaze attack.
Extrapolating from these gruesome statistics, it is clear that a wide arc of deaths and injuries would swing from a minimum of 48,000 American and 230,000 Japanese deaths and casualties at Okinawa to 500,000 American and millions of Japanese deaths and casualties for mainland invasions.
Those estimates could have vastly understated the actual causalities. Japan’s 374,000 mountainous square miles mathematically enables over 500 defensive redoubts comparable to General Ushijima’s formidable Okinawa constructions such as those on the Shuri line that inflicted most Okinawa losses. The “War Faction” of the Japanese government adopted the motto of “100 million Japanese deaths” for planning final mainland battles. Besides kamikazes, redeployed Kwantung divisions, and bamboo spears for civilians, the allies faced biological warfare. Occupation searchers uncovered large stockpiles of viruses, spirochetes, and fungus spores throughout rural Japan. One delivery plan directed Japanese to infect themselves and then surrender.

What we view now as “The Greatest Generation” would have been sizably decimated. To learn later that the means to obviate this destruction was in our power but unused by us would prompt national outrage and near revolution as families would discover that more than 500,000 young Americans might otherwise have been saved.
Nor was Hiroshima was a largely civilian-populated city with little or no military value. .

It was headquarters for the 2nd Japanese Army, charged with the defense of the southern island of Kyushu, the objective of “Operation Coronet.” It was a center with which we would have been required to battle had the invasion taken place. It had many factories producing military goods. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops and a legitimate military target.

What alternatives existed other than invasion and the dropping of the A-Bomb? The slow starvation of the Japanese people.

Their island nation’s food supplying merchant fleet was at the bottom of the Pacific, with 5 million tons of it put there by the extraordinarily successful American submarine campaign.
What inhumane means would have been used by the Japanese in retaliation to either invasion or slow starvation? In the summer of 1945 Field Marshal Terauchi had openly ordered prison camp commanders to slaughter the Allied prisoners in their control (who were dying at a 33% death rate) at the onset of the invasion. The brutal Japanese occupations of the conquered Asian nations were killing tens of thousands of civilians a month in China, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore, the Solomons, Thailand and wherever the empire of Japan sent its soldiers, to rape, pillage and kill without mercy. Millions of Asian civilians were killed and others in China served as guinea pigs for Unit 731’s depraved medical experimentations into human vivisection, disease infestation and other atrocities more horrifying than the vilest of Josef Mengele’s worst inspirations.

Japanese scientists performed tests on prisoners centering on the plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism and other diseases. This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread the bubonic plague. Some of these bombs were designed with ceramic (porcelain) shells, an idea proposed by Shiro Ishii in 1938.
These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrying fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera and other deadly pathogens.
Additionally, infected food supplies and clothing were dropped by planes into areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces. These activities continued until war’s end.

The Japanese had concocted a plan to launch M6A1 Seiran floatplane bombers from their huge I-400 class subs to drop bombs loaded with biological agents such as plaque and Anthrax on the West Coast of the US. The ships had sailed with a target date of 15 August 1945. Only the end of the war on 14 August occasioned their recall before they reached landfall.

In the afternoon of August 14, Japanese radio announced that an Imperial Proclamation was soon to be made, accepting the terms of unconditional surrender drawn up at the Potsdam Conference. That proclamation had already been recorded by the emperor.

The news did not go over well, as more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers stormed the Imperial Palace in an attempt to find the proclamation and prevent its being transmitted to the Allies. Soldiers still loyal to Emperor Hirohito repulsed the attackers.

That evening, General Anami, the member of the War Council most adamant against surrender, committed suicide. His reason: to atone for the Japanese army’s defeat, and to be spared having to hear his emperor speak the words of surrender. Foreign minister Shidehara wrote, “If we continue to fight back bravely, even if hundreds of thousands of noncombatants are killed… there would be room to produce a more favorable international situation for Japan.” He continued:

“Due to the nationwide food shortage… – it will be necessary to kill all of the infirm old people, the very young, and the sick.”

Here are other stand-and-die watchwords which went out to the Japanese people at that time: .

Admiral Onishi: “If we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives in kamikaze effort, victory will be ours.”

“With luck, we will repulse the invaders before they land.” – General Yoshijiro Umezu

“Who can be 100% sure of defeat?” – War minister General Anami

All said in the August 9th meeting of the 6 man ‘Supreme Council for the Direction of the War’ held in Tokyo. These are words to ponder when we are tempted to agonize over Japan’s so-called “willingness to surrender.: .
Another item:

The bomb also stopped Soviet expansion in Asia. The USSR. declared war on Japan on August 8 and if the war had continued the Soviets would have invaded and occupied large parts of northern China and northern Japan. Thus it would have had a disastrous presence in the Far East as well as eastern Europe. As it was, the Soviets occupied North Korea and set up a Stalinist regime that troubles the world to this day. Imagine the Soviets with a Stalinist puppet government in Northern Japan. You don’t have to wonder, you have the examples of East Germany, or North Korea, as opposed to West Germany and South Korea.

This certainly cannot be attributed to the foresight of the Allies, as the Soviets entered the war against Japan in response to the Allies importuning Stalin at Yalta. It was about the only commitment he kept, since he saw an opportunity for territorial aggrandizement. But it is an admittedly unforeseen and fortunate subsidiary result of the rapid end of the war.

The extraordinary nature of the war against Japan requires that the Jus en Bello aspect of just war theory be considered in light of the extraordinary evils that were stopped or prevented by a sudden end to the war, bought about by the A Bomb. The Japanese could view it as a force of nature against which they were helpless to resist, and therefore serve as a legitimate rationale for surrender for a people that viewed that as an absolute disgrace. At the very least, the proportionality rule seems to be honored by using a horrendous method for the purpose of forcing an end to the war and stopping even greater continued slaughter and atrocity.
Jus Post Bello.
Despite the unremitting nature of the total war against Japan and the unparalleled atrocities committed by Japan, it was not transformed into a post Punic Wars Carthage.. The U.S. extended it’s protections to her against the Soviet Union, demilitarized her, helped it to create a classically liberal representative democracy, with the emperor demoted to nominal head of state from demigod status. The U.S. was instrumental in elevating Japan into a rehabilitated and respected player on the world stage, a leader in technological innovation and manufacture and a reliable ally against Soviet expansion in the Pacific. While we had considerable personal interest (as could be expected) our occupation of Japan was conducted with magnanimity in great contrast to one the most savage conflicts in human history.

Even though the Japanese surrendered unconditionally, utterly defeated; they are a better world partner for the effect of the generous American peace terms and post war assistance. The Jus post bello criteria was more that adequately satisfied by the exemplary American post war treatment of Japan.
And Finally…Tibbets.
Before his service in the Pacific, Paul Tibbets was with the 97th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force. The 97th was the model for the famous movie “Twelve O’ Clock High..” Tibbets, as a Major in charge of the Group, was depicted in the film. The new commanding officer of the 97th, appointed Tibbets his executive officer.
Tlbbets flew 25 B-17 combat missions in the most deadly environment American airmen have ever had to endure—through flak- and fighter-filled skies of the European theatre. . Later assuming command of the 509th composite bomb group, the B-29 force t charged with delivery of the bombs, he bought the unit to a peak of efficiency and operational security. He remained with the Air Force, and participated in the development of the B-47, our first all-jet bomber. In the early 1950’s, he flew B-47’s for three years.
He advised on the making of the movie “Above and Beyond” whose role was played by Robert Taylor. From the 1950’s through the 1960’s Tibbets had a number of overseas assignments, including in France and India. After his retirement from the Air Force, he became president of Executive Jet Aviation in Columbus, Ohio.

For this almost matchless dedication, patriotism and bravery, he will be revered and held in the eternal gratitude of our nation. . He disdained to engage in post modern self flagellation. He chose to accept as his legacy the war ended and the lives saved by his actions rather than fixating on the awful human cost of the bombing. He earned that right a hundred times over.

He said he did not want a marker on his grave lest it serve as a focal point for demonstrators.
That is the only thing about his actions where I disagree.

He deserves the honor of a proper memorial so that it many be rendered honors on appropriate occasions.

Let me say it rhetorically to his gallant spirit:
Godspeed to you sir. You served your country and the world well.
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The writer of this scholarly and persuasive work, Frank Penn, is a highly decorated veteran of Vietnam and a former Chicago police officer. He is a regular columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.