War Crimes

"One would have to have been brought up in the “spirit nut militarism” to understand the difference between Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the one hand, and Auschwitz and Belsen on the other. The usual reasoning is the following: the former case is one of warfare, the latter of cold-blooded slaughter. But the plain truth is that the people involved are in both instances nonparticipants, defenseless old people, women, and children, whose annihilation is supposed to achieve some political or military objective.… I am certain that the human race is doomed, unless its instinctive detestation of atrocities gains the upper hand over the artificially constructed judgment of reason."

"Let us sum up the three possible explanations of the decision to drop the bomb and its timing. The first that it was a clever and highly successful move in the field of power politics, is almost certainly correct; the second, that the timing was coincidental, convicts the American government of a hardly credible tactlessness [towards the Soviet Union]; and the third, the Roman holiday theory [a spectacular event to justify the cost of the Manhattan Project], convicts them of an equally incredible irresponsibility."

"The most massive exposure of human persons to ionizing radiations took place in August, 1945, in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The desirability of detecting any genetic effects of such exposure was recognised by the U. S. A.-sponsored Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC Report 1956). To this end, between February 1948 and February 1954, about 65 000 births in both cities were studied; the results were reported in great detail by NEEL, SCHULL and many others. In this publication, referred to henceforth as the ‘ABCC Report’, possible genetic effects are studied in relation to maternal age, parity, maternal state of health, parents’ socio-economic status]], as well as to exposure of the parents to the bomb. For the latter factor, the births (after eliminations of multiple births and of those from consanguineous unions) are distributed in a number of ‘exposure cells’ according to a system of grades, as follows for each parent:"

"The dropping of the Atomic Bomb is a very deep problem... Instead of commemorating Hiroshima we should celebrate... man's triumph over the problem [of transmutation], and not its first misuse by politicians and military authorities."

"The Hiroshima people’s experience, is a picture of what our whole world is always poised to become, a backdrop of scarcely imaginable horror lying just behind the surface of our normal life, and capable of breaking through into that normal life at any second."

"What happened at Hiroshima was less than a millionth part of a holocaust at present levels of world nuclear armament."

"安らかに眠って下さい 過ちは 繰返しませぬから"

"After all, the United States is the only country in the world that used nuclear, atomic weapons, moreover against a non-nuclear state - against Japan, against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the end of World War II. There was no absolute military sense in this. This was a direct extermination of the civilian population."

"If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people must unite, or they will perish."

"[E]very act of aggression between nations; every act of terror and corruption and cruelty and oppression that we see around the world shows our work is never done. We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations –- and the alliances that we’ve formed -– must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them."

"We stand here, in the middle of this city, and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war, and the wars that came before, and the wars that would follow. Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering, but we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again. Someday the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of August 6th, 1945 must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change. And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan forged not only an alliance, but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a Union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed peoples and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that worked to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back, and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons."

"Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds; to cure disease and understand the cosmos. But those same discoveries can be turned into ever-more efficient killing machines. The wars of the modern age teach this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution, as well."

"There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war -- memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species -- our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction."

"The purpose of the bomb was to destroy cities, to kill Japanese, and to destroy the Japanese will to continue the war. So long as mass killing was considered necessary, it should not make any difference whether people died from the blast, the heat, and the fires created, or the radiation. War itself is horrible. We wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and minimize the overall casualties, particularly for Americans; at that time we all remembered Pearl Harbor."

"The majority of primary data on radiation-induced cancers in humans come predominantly from atomic bomb and nuclear accident survivors, as well as the medically exposed. A number of studies on survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan demonstrated a greatly increased incidence of various cancers among survivors (Folley et al., 1952; Watanabe et al., 1972; Wakabayashi et al., 1983; Carmichael et al., 2003)."

"The pace of change and the growing lethality of weapons have gone on accelerating ever since. Think of the flimsy, single-engined, unarmed planes which took to the skies in 1914 at the start of the First World War and compare them to the faster and more powerful ones that had emerged by 1918, capable of firing machine guns and dropping heavy bombs on the enemy. By the end of the Second World War aircraft were flying higher, faster, further and carrying much greater loads, and the jet engine was starting to replace propellers. When the American bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the new and terrifying nuclear age was inaugurated. Today new weapons, from fighter planes to aircraft carriers, are often obsolete by the time they are in service. The world’s arsenals are immense: it is estimated that there are over a billion small arms alone in the world and, at the other extreme, nuclear weapons capable of destroying humanity several times over. And serious disarmament measures remain more distant than ever. Yet so many of us, our leaders included, still talk of war as a reasonable and manageable tool."

"The Second World War introduced total war — unprincipled in method, unlimited in violence, and indiscriminate in victims. The ovens of Auschwitz and the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inscribed a still-darker chapter in the chronicle of human brutality."

"Once it had been tested, President Truman faced the decision as to whether to use it. He did not like the idea, but he was persuaded that it would shorten the war against Japan and save American lives. It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and that wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

"While an older generation justified the nuclear bombing of Japan because it had shortened the war, the new generation once again, as children, had seen the pictures and they viewed it very differently. They had also seen the mushroom clouds of nuclear explosions on television because the United States still did aboveground testing. Americans and Europeans, both Eastern and Western, grew up with the knowledge that the United States, which was continuing to build bigger and better bombs, was the only country that had actually used one. And it talked about doing it again, all the time―in Korea, in Cuba, in Vietnam. The children born in the 1940s in both superpower blocs grew up practicing covering themselves up in the face of a nuclear attack. Savio recalled being ordered under his desk at school: "I ultimately took degrees in physics so even then I asked myself questions like, 'Will this actually do the job?'""

"Although the current criteria had been eased from the former criteria, so far only about 6,400 atomic bombing survivors have been officially recognized as atomic bomb illness sufferers. They account for only about 3 percent of some 201,800 survivors as of the end of March 2013."

"Under the new criteria, the government recognizes a person as an atomic bomb disease sufferer if certain conditions are met, including the existence of cancer, leukemia, parathyroid hyperfunction, cataracts, or myocardial infarction, and confirmation that one was exposed to radiation within about 3.5 km of ground zero or entered an area near ground zero within about 100 hours after the bombing. A certified atomic bomb disease sufferer receives medical treatment at public expense and a monthly medical allowance of about ¥137,000."

"We were on garrison duty in France for about a month, and in August, we got great news: we weren’t going to the Pacific. The U.S. dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, the Japanese surrendered, and the war was over. We were so relieved. It was the greatest thing that could have happened. Somebody once said to me that the bomb was the worst thing that ever happened, that the U.S. could have found other ways. I said, “Yeah, like what? Me and all my buddies jumping in Tokyo, and the Allied forces going in, and all of us getting killed? Millions more Allied soldiers getting killed?” When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor were they concerned about how many lives they took? We should have dropped eighteen bombs as far as I’m concerned. The Japanese should have stayed out of it if they didn’t want bombs dropped. The end of the war was good news to us. We knew we were going home soon."

"The atomic age began on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped its first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, killing more than seventy thousand people, injuring an equal number, and destroying four square miles of Japan’s eighth-largest city. Three days later the United States dropped an equally destructive bomb on Nagasaki. At the time Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons to end the war quickly was scarcely questioned. Yet almost immediately afterward, the world public recognized a quantum change in modern warfare: a device threatening human life and the earth itself. Truman’s supporters insisted that the bomb had saved the hundreds of thousands of American lives that would have been lost in an amphibious invasion of the Japanese mainland and pointed to the even worse bombing atrocities during the war. His critics protested the callous and even unnecessary destruction of an enemy about to collapse, when either a demonstration test or a blockade could have convinced Japan to capitulate. Some also suspected that this US show of force was designed to intimidate Stalin and check Soviet designs in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world."

"It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a downtown street corner, looking at the front page of the Detroit News in a news rack. A streetcar rattled by on the tracks as I read the headline: a single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought: “I know exactly what that bomb was.” It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall. I thought: We got it first. And we used it. On a city. I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very dangerous for humanity had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at fourteen, that my country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad when the war ended nine days later, but it didn’t make me think that my first reaction on August 6 was wrong. I felt uneasy in the days ahead, about the triumphal tone in Harry Truman’s voice on the radio—flat and Midwestern as always, but unusually celebratory—as he exulted over our success in the race for the bomb and its effectiveness over Japan. This suggested, for me, that our leaders didn’t have the full picture, didn’t grasp the significance of the precedent they had set and the sinister implications for the future. Unlikely thoughts for a fourteen-year-old American boy to have had the week the war ended? Yes, if he hadn’t been in Mr. Patterson’s social studies class the previous fall."

"In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."

"If I had foreseen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would have torn up my formula in 1905."

"America is a democracy and has no Hitler, but I am afraid for her future; there are hard times ahead for the American people, troubles will be coming from within and without. America cannot smile away their Negro problem nor Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are cosmic laws."

"Would an alien outsider judge America's performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson?"

"War has its own laws and one of the oldest and most persistent is that those who have surrendered and civilians, where possible, should be spared. Yet we all know the stories or have seen pictures of the sacking of cities, the execution of prisoners of war, the shelling of churches filled with refugees, or the farm buildings deliberately set on fire, and we remember names such as Oradour or Wounded Knee or Nanjing. For any American who lived through the Vietnam War the incident at My Lai, when a representative group of ordinary American soldiers rampaged through a village, has come to represent the barbarism of much of that war. (The Vietnamese forces committed their own atrocities, but Vietnam has been slow to come to terms with them.) In 1968 American reporters in the country started to hear stories about the murder in cold blood of some 500 villagers, of all ages, by an American patrol. One courageous helicopter pilot who was there did his best to save the Vietnamese and later filed a report with his superiors, who did nothing."

"We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism; and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers that hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of "free-fire zones," "shoot anything that moves," and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals. We watched the United States' falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against “oriental human beings,” with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in a European theater -- or let us say a non-third-world people theater."

"That day it was just a massacre. Just plain right out, wiping out people."

"As it happened, the fifth anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam occurred at the time of the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee. It was difficult to miss the analogy between the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and My Lai, 1968. Alongside the front-page news and photographs of the Wounded Knee siege that was taking place in real time were features with photos of the scene of mutilation and death at My Lai. Lieutenant William "Rusty" Calley was then serving his twenty-year sentence under house arrest in luxurious officers' quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, near his hometown. Yet he remained a national hero who received hundreds of support letters weekly, who was lauded by some as a POW being held by the US military. One of Calley's most ardent defenders was Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia. In 1974, President Richard Nixon would pardon Calley."

"It was terrible. They were slaughtering villagers like so many sheep"

"The My Lai killings weren’t indiscriminate. The GIs weren’t killing just anyone. They were killing everyone. They were killing everything: chickens, pigs, dogs, rabbits, cows, water buffalo, grandmothers, and children. Young girls, wounded boys, toddlers, infants. More than half of the 504 people murdered in Pinkville that morning were minors. The GIs were following orders and the orders were: to kill everything. Kill everything that breathes. Kill everything that moves."

"After nearly four hours of gunfire, there was silence. There was silence, even though the order only applied to American soldiers. There was silence because none of the in the village were firing back. There was silence because the Viet Cong had never fired on US troops that day. There was silence because there were no Viet Cong in the village that day. There was silence because most of the people who were in the village that day were dead."

"The first martyr in the American national war of liberation against the British colonialists in the eighteenth century was an African descendant, ; and both slave and free Africans played a key role in Washington’s armies. And yet, the American Constitution sanctioned the continued enslavement of Africans. In recent times, it has become an object of concern to some liberals that the U.S.A. is capable of war crimes of the order of My Lai in Vietnam. But the fact of the matter is that the My Lais began with the enslavement of Africans and American Indians. Racism, violence, and brutality were the concomitants of the capitalist system when it extended itself abroad in the early centuries of international trade."

"Senior officers in Vietnam and later in Washington did their best to cover the incident up. In 1969 one of America’s most respected journalists, Mike Wallace, interviewed Paul Meadlo, one of the soldiers responsible, who admitted freely that he had fired at point-blank range into helpless civilians. ‘And you killed how many?’ asked Wallace. It was hard to tell, replied Meadlo, because with an automatic rifle you just spray the bullets about. Possibly, he added, ten or fifteen. ‘Men, women, and children?’ Yes, said Meadlo. ‘And babies?’ said Wallace. ‘And babies.’ Meadlo’s mother, who was interviewed by Seymour Hersh, who had first broken the story, said of her son, ‘I gave them a good boy and they sent me back a murderer."