Atomic - Pacific War, part 3

"The world is what it is, which isn't much."


"We can sum it all up in one sentence: the civilization of the machine has just achieved its ultimate degree of savagery."

Both of these quotes come from the author, journalist and editor Albert Camus (1913-1960)  in the French revolutionary newspaper Combat in 1945 and refer to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. They were published August 8, 1945, two days after Hiroshima, one day before the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

After Saipan was conquered American forces were able to send bombers not only over factory and industrial centres, but civilian ones as well. From March 1945 334 bombers attacked Tokyo - destroying over a quarter of the city, killing 83,793 civilians, wounding 40,918 and leaving millions homeless. "By the end of the war sixty-six cities had been attacked from the air and sea." (Japan: A Short History, Misiko Hane, p172).
The poor citizens of Okinawa suffered the wrath of both the Japanese and the Americans as being "hostile" and over one hundred thousand Okinawan civilians died.

The Japanese not only suffered human losses. They lost essential raw materials to the tune of 4 million metric tonnes and 44 million tonnes of crude and refined oil. The entire economy of Japan was miniscule compared the US and the latter did everything they could to cripple it further. And they succeeded. The protracted war and huge losses meant that Japan's economy was in real trouble, even before these devastating air raids.

The Japanese began to think of ways to end the war. In May 1945 the Germans, Japanese allies, surrendered and everything looked even more ominous.

The Allies offered a series of ultimatums for surrender, under the Potsdam Declaration, which the Japanese ignored. President Truman took these as a total rejection and ordered the use of the nuclear bomb.

"On the morning of August 6 the bomber Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima and dropped an atomic bomb with a force of twenty thousand tons of TNT on the center of the city...The victims, those who died instantly and those who died of radiation soon after, numbered about 140,000." (Japan: A Short History, Hane, p174)

                                         Source: UCLA
 

As Camus so eloquently put it - and he was one of the very few journalists world wide to offer such a condemning view on the use of the bomb - it was "the ultimate degree of savagery."


As an historian and as a human, I have to ask why, given the facts outlined in these posts on the war in the Pacific, would America drop the bomb?? Any ideas?
 
Sources:
"Japan: A Short History" Misiko Hane, Oneworld Publishing, 2000
"Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947," edited by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, Princeton University Press, 2006