Friday, March 29, AD 2024 4:25am

Victory Over Japan

Today marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the ending of the attempt of Japan to conquer East Asia and form a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.  In that attempt, Japanese forces murdered some three to ten million civilians.  This figure does not include civilian deaths caused from military operations which resulted from Japanese aggression or famines that ensued.  It is estimated that some 20,000,000 Chinese died as a result of Japan’s invasion.  Approximately a million Filipinos died during the military occupation of the Philippines by the Japanese.  The video above depicts the battle of Manila in which 100,000 Filipino civilians died.  During lulls in the fighting, Japanese troops would engage in orgies of rape and murder, with decapitation being a common method of killing.  Special targets were Red Cross workers, young women, children, nuns, priests, prisoners of war and hospital patients.

Victory by the US and its allies brought this Asian Holocaust to a stop.  Perhaps something else to recall on Catholic blogs each August.

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GodsGadfly
GodsGadfly
Saturday, August 14, AD 2010 8:19pm

Ends do not justify the means. The Church is very clear that the intentional killing of civilians is always unjust.

Brian Alcorn
Brian Alcorn
Saturday, August 14, AD 2010 10:20pm

Donald – I certainly agree with you. My Dad (US Army Platoon Sgt) was a “guest of the Emperor” (that means he was a Japanese POW) for almost 4 years. My Dad told me that when the atomic bombs were dropped, the POWs in the Japanese camps noticed a change in the behavior of the guards. This made my Dad nervous as there was a standing order to kill all POWs if the Americans landed on the Japanese mainland. The POWs were looking for signs of that and planned to go out with a fight. My Dad had several sticks of dynamite he had stolen from the copper mine he labored in, and he kept these wrapped in an oil cloth buried about 6 inches underneath where he laid his head at night. I am not kidding when an I say these POWs planned to not accept execution without a fight. My Dad talked to one of the guards and he said that there was a horrific bomb dropped by the Americans on two Japanese cities. He described to my Dad the results. My Dad was really scratching his head wondering what kind of bomb that could be. The guard told him it “even killed the little fishes in the streams for miles around the cities”. My Dad didn’t know of a bomb that could do the things this guard described. It was a bit of a mystery to the POWs, but they knew it was big, because of the marked change of behavior of the guards (they appeared less focused, more distracted, kind of stunned). My Dad believes that these two atomic bombs saved him, of course, but also many other people. I have never met a Japanese POW yet who didn’t agree with my Dad 100% on that . I know he is correct, and I laugh off the revisionists.

I took my kids to see the Enola Gaye at the newer Smithsonian Museum near Dulles Airport. I pointed to the plane and explained to them that we would not be here, if it had not been for that very plane flying its famous mission. It was a great history lesson for them. I know some have felt displaying that plane was controversial – definitely not for our family! I didn’t know that that plane was displayed there until I got to the museum. Many things went through my head looking at it.

In the video above of the Japanese signing the surrender papers, my Dad was on a ship heading home, with a lot of other POWs (American and British). He actually got to see from afar this surrender event as they passed by. My Dad said that a British Man of War ship lowered their flag in honor of the POWs on the transport ship. A British navy man and former POW told him that that was an unheard of honor at that time. My Dad and all the other POWs really appreciated their honor.

I appreciate the videos above and discussion. It is important to remember history and learn all the lessons we can from it.

Donna V.
Donna V.
Sunday, August 15, AD 2010 1:44am

I find the August bomb follies a sickening ahistorical bout of Monday Morning quarterbacking by people who usually have not a clue about the actual historical record.

Exactly. Ask a Filipino what Japanese occupation was like – one I met many years ago had an uncle who was shot dead in the street for failing to show the proper subservient attitude toward Japanese soldiers.

The annual August self-castigation beloved by so many strikes me as just another example of Western self-hatred.

Greg Mockeridge
Greg Mockeridge
Sunday, August 15, AD 2010 10:42am

For the 1000th time: the U.S. was not targeting non-combatants with the atomic bombs. In fact, that would have been impossible given the fact that the line bewteen combatant and non-combatatnt was completely erased by the Imperial Japanese with their conscription of practically the entire adult population and training small children to roll under alllied tanks with explosives strapped to themselves.

This is a salient fact calumnious jackasses like Jimmy Akin, Mark Shea, and the pseudo-Catholic ignoramus Amen corner deliberately ignore.

Greg Mockeridge
Greg Mockeridge
Sunday, August 15, AD 2010 11:08am

Furthermore, if you search for a Catholic magisterial condemnation of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki you will search in vain.

Learning
Learning
Sunday, August 15, AD 2010 11:39am

“Every of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation” CCC 2314

L’Osservatore Romano in 1945 deplored the atomic bombing of Japan because of lack of protection for civilians. Bishop Fulton Sheen thought it was a horror. Eisenhower did not think it was necessary.

Learning

Greg Mockeridge
Greg Mockeridge
Sunday, August 15, AD 2010 1:28pm

“Every of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation” CCC 2314

This CCC statement, taken form Gaudium et Spes #80, IS NOT a proof text to condemn the Hiroshinma and Nagasaki bombings. For one, it does not address the issue of the line between combatant and non-combatant being erased. Secondly, it could not do so without contradicting moral principles already recognized by the Church.

Learning
Learning
Sunday, August 15, AD 2010 6:16pm

“I assume Learning that you have been reading one of those idiotic cut and paste lists of quotations….”

Three quarters of blogging is other cutting and pasting other quotes. St. Paul did it a lot too back in his day.

Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul V thought nukes were evil also. If they did not condemn America out right it may have been for prudence sake. I think you folks are just making excuses for a total war mentality. The USA is not the only purveyor of this evil idea but has surely participated in them from the march through Georgia to the Indian wars to Dresden. Consequentialism in action.

Shawn
Sunday, August 15, AD 2010 9:01pm

[My Dad had several sticks of dynamite he had stolen from the copper mine he labored in, and he kept these wrapped in an oil cloth buried about 6 inches underneath where he laid his head at night.”]

No doubt the shameless slandering revisionist “apologists” would castigate your father by waving the seventh commandment about and intoning “thou shalt not steal” while your father (who in my eyes is a hero) did what he needed to do in order to survive. And of course if he had shot a bomb laden child waddling towards him in Okinawa or elsewhere these same sorts would be calling him a “murderer.” I have no doubt based on what I have observed from these sorts over the years that they would do that -and my money is that if there was not a sizable Catholic population in Nagasaki these sorts would not give a damn about this issue. Their fallacious provincialism is evident to anyone with eyes to see and it stinks much worse than three week old moldy fruit. Not to mention the constant appeal to “consequentialism” is bunk, I am probably the only Catholic in recent years who has actually bothered to explain what that term (along with “proportionalism”) even means* and it is quite evident that these clowns do not know what they are talking about.

Indeed so many of these sorts have no problem engaging in the most uncharitable, unethical, irrational, and unCatholic of behaviour towards those who do not tip the biretta, bow three times, and incense uncritically their pro-offered proof texts from various and sundry church sources, etc. That unquestionably involves objectively grave matter on their parts and when you further consider that (i) they are not coerced to do so and (ii) the knowledge of these people (even so-called “big time apologists”) is far from being even vincible most of the time but instead is what would be called “crass ignorance”**, this does not bode well for them. For essentially, most “apologists” who approach these things are arguably guilty of mortal sin. (Particularly those who ignorantly attempt to brand what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “war crimes” via shoddy methodology and the sort of Monday morning quarterbacking that if they had a conscience on these matter should make them ashamed of themselves.)

* http://rerum-novarum.blogspot.com/2008_10_05_archive.html#8806531154296846595

** http://rerum-novarum.blogspot.com/2009_08_02_archive.html#3846558720127615604

c matt
c matt
Monday, August 16, AD 2010 9:49am

So basically, your position is that nothing can be labelled consequentialist or proportionalist thinking unless a particular decision is made only 100% purely on consequentialist/proportionalist grounds. If anything else factors in, even 0.000001%, it is no longer consequentialist/proportionalist. Just want to be clear.

JohnH
JohnH
Monday, August 16, AD 2010 4:51pm

Bishop’s Sheen observation was made long after the war and after he knew how the wind was blowing in the Church. Bishop Sheen always tailored his thoughts to what the current policy of the Church was.

Oh?

From The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, May 1, 1946:

Use of Atom Bomb Assailed by Sheen

Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen of Catholic University in a sermon on April 7 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York scored our use of the bomb on Hiroshima as an act contrary to the moral law and said, “We have invited retaliation for that particular form of violence.”

Both obliteration bombing and use of the atomic bomb are immoral, Msgr. Sheen said, because “they do away with the moral distinction that must be made in every war—a distinction between civilians and the military.”

After quoting the Pope’s warning against destructive use of atomic energy in an address made at the opening session of the Pontifical Academy of Science on Feb. 21, 1943, Msgr. Sheen said: “It is to be noted that the Holy Father not only knew about atomic energy and something of its power, but he also, exercising his office as Chief Shepherd of the Church, asked the nations of the world never to use it destructively. This counsel was not taken. This moral voice was unheeded.”

Discussing arguments that use of the atomic bomb shortened the war and saved the lives of American fighting men, Msgr. Sheen declared: “That was precisely the argument Hitler used in bombing Holland.”

Link.

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 9:26am

Donald, I don’t have access to any full texts. His remarks about Hiroshima turn up twice in the NYT archives from 1946, if you search there. It appears he was pounding this point home starting around when the bombing took place.

Also, if you look at the free archives of Time magazine online, you can see that condemnation of the atomic bombing of Japan was widespread.

See here:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,934449-2,00.html

and:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,792444,00.html

It seems that there was a fairly immediate condemnation of the bomb from clergy across the spectrum of the Catholic and Protestant worlds. So to suggest that the stances of people like Jimmy Akin, Mark Shea, etc as “a sickening ahistorical bout of Monday Morning quarterbacking” seems rather ahistorical in itself. Their condemnation of the bombing follows in the footsteps of Catholics who were giving voice to this same condemnation in the months following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 10:38am

They are deeply unserious individuals who live in peace and security precisely by the hard decisions made by men like Truman.

Unserious individuals such as Pope Paul VI?

If the consciousness of universal brotherhood truly penetrates into the hearts of men, will they still need to arm themselves to the point of becoming blind and fanatic killers of their brethren who in themselves are innocent, and of perpetrating, as a contribution to Peace, butchery of untold magnitude, as at Hiroshima on 6 August 1945?
Pope Paul VI, January 1976

Or maybe someone ignorant of the historical record like Pope John Paul II?

I bow my head as I recall the memory of thousands of men, women and children who lost their lives in that one terrible moment, or who for long years carried in their bodies and minds those seeds of death which inexorably pursued their process of destruction. The final balance of the human suffering that began here has not been fully drawn up, nor has the total human cost been tallied, especially when one sees what nuclear war has done — and could still do — to our ideas, our attitudes and our civilization.
—Pope John Paul II, Hiroshima, 1981

And, of course, the Catechism:

“Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons—especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons—to commit such crimes.

Thanks, but I think I’ll stay “unserious”.

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 10:54am

The great tragedy of the attomic bomb program was that it could not have been completed earlier, say in 1943

The same year Venerable Pius XII warned of using atomic power in a destructive manner.

Sorry, but your position on this matter is just not in the Catholic mindset. Defend it if you must, but don’t try and pretend it’s Catholic.

and brought World War II to a rapid conclusion, sparing tens of millions of lives.

As Sheen said:

Discussing arguments that use of the atomic bomb shortened the war and saved the lives of American fighting men, Msgr. Sheen declared: “That was precisely the argument Hitler used in bombing Holland.”

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 11:10am

Sheen’s statement was idiotic, and morally repulsive. Hitler was fighting for world conquest and to set the stage for his extermination of the Jews of Europe and other “undesirable” races. The comparison was unworthy of both his intelligence and his office.

I think Sheen’s point was that we should not stoop to the total warfare barbarism embraced by thugs such as Hitler.

Actually JohnH my viewpoint is completely Catholic on this issue, if one does not confuse Catholicism as something that came into being only in the last century.

Really? I’d really like to see how you can mount a defense of the 20th century atomic bomb using Catholic teaching from the previous centuries, when destruction on this scale was unimaginable.

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 11:29am

Donald, I think what you mean is “do you think it is permissible under Catholic teaching to punish the innocent as a means to accomplish good”. And the answer is no. That is a perversion of the principle of double effect.

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 12:01pm

Placing a town under interdict (or even under seige) is not equivalent to the instant destruction of a city and its inhabitants.

Can you try again?

Blackadder
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 12:15pm

They are deeply unserious individuals who live in peace and security precisely by the hard decisions made by men like Truman.

I’m sure that when JP II was living in Communist Poland he thanked God nightly that Truman had nuked Hiroshima, thus providing him with such peace and security.

Blackadder
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 12:32pm

I am sure that John Paul II thought as little as he possibly could about the connection between the massive bombing raids that blasted apart German cities and civilians and thereby spared his life.

Maybe because there was no connection. JP II’s life wasn’t spared by those raids and neither were the lives of anyone else. On the other hand, hard decisions made by Truman did result in Poland being under Communist domination for the next several decades.

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 12:33pm

it is far worse… The interdict deprived completely innocent people of these sacraments, the food of immortality.

I’m not sure if you understand what the interdict meant historically. Generally, even under interdict certain sacraments were available to the dying or those about to engage in battle.

And if you can’t see the difference between a siege and a total destruction of a city, well… those are your moral blinkers, not mine.

Blackadder
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 12:36pm

Btw, during the 1940s the population of Berlin was around three million. What Don appears to be contemplating is mass murder on a horrendous scale. That he tries to justify the position as Catholic based on an analogy to interdiction is bizarre.

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 12:42pm

Donald, Extreme Unction was denied at times, but usually not confession (even by Innocent III, who popularized the idea of the interdict).

In regard to sieges, of course you reject it out of hand. It is inconvenient to your argument and you apparently have no response.

Actually, I do have a response above. A siege of a town or city is not the same as total destruction of a town or city. I think that’s pretty clear.

Blackadder
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 12:46pm

Actually JohnH my viewpoint is completely Catholic on this issue, if one does not confuse Catholicism as something that came into being only in the last century.

Don may have a point. I can’t find any Church statement from more than 100 years ago condemning the use of nuclear weapons. It’s almost like they didn’t exist back then or something.

On the other hand, I find this dismissal of any statements from the last 100 years somewhat odd. Has Don become a Sedevacantist without telling anybody?

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 1:01pm

In regard to the interdict argument, it strips away the idea that the Catholic Church has always regarded the innocent as having an all-embracing immunity.

Well, if you want to go down that road… Pope Innocent III, who popularized the interdict, also adopted rules at the Fourth Lateran Council that prohibited Jews from public office and compelled them to wear distinctive dress to set them apart from the general populace.

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 1:09pm

Quite true JohnH and other popes took an opposing view.

Can they be ignored? The other popes, I mean?

Blackadder
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 1:14pm

Out of curiosity, I took a look at the article on War from the old Catholic Encyclopedia (which Don cites as an example of how Catholics used to think before they were weenified). Here is an excerpt:

In the prosecution of the war the killing or injuring of non-combatants (women, children, the aged and feeble, or even those capable of bearing arms but as a matter of fact not in any way participating in the war) is consequently barred, except where their simultaneous destruction is an unavoidable accident attending the attack upon the contending force. The wanton destruction of the property of such non-combatants, where it does not or will not minister maintenance or help to the state or its army, is likewise devoid of the requisite condition of necessity. In fact the wanton destruction of the property of the state or of combatants — i.e. where such destruction cannot make for their submission, reparation, or proportionate punishment — is beyond the pale of the just subject-matter of war. The burning of the Capitol and White House at Washington in 1814, and the devastation of Georgia, South Carolina, and the Valley of the Shenandoah during the American Civil War have not escaped criticism in this category. That “war is hell”, in the sense that it inevitably carries with it a maximum of human miseries, is true; in the sense that it justifies anything that makes for the suffering and punishment of a people at war, it cannot be ethically maintained.

Perhaps if Don wanted to know what the Church used to think about war he could have looked at the article titled War, rather than the one titled Interdict.

JohnH
JohnH
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 1:32pm

My point in regard to the interdict was to distinguish it from the example that you chose. If part of Catholic teaching or praxis is to go down the memory hole it is handy to at least have popes who have lined up on opposing sides.

Interesting. So you acknowledge that the Church’s position on issues may shift slightly over the ages (except in the 20th century, where the statements of the Popes on the use of nuclear weapons can be ignored starting with Pius XII).

Why is it that the Church’s teaching on war should be heeded up until the very century with the greatest rise in wholesale destruction the world has seen? Shouldn’t the opposite be true?

From your position, shouldn’t it have also been allowable for the Allies to operate concentration camps on the scale of the Nazi machine so long as the goal was the capitulation of the Axis powers?

Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, August 17, AD 2010 1:39pm

Perhaps if Don wanted to know what the Church used to think about war he could have looked at the article titled War, rather than the one titled Interdict.

I cannot see how your excerpt provides a definitive refutation of Mr. McClarey’s argument.

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