An eye on history - moral aspects of dropping atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan

On August 1, 1945, as the bomb called Little Boy (by those who delivered it) and Original Child (by those who received it) was being assembled on the island of Tinian, my father, Master Sergeant James Aloysius Doyle, was in a building at Santa Ana racetrack in Manila reading aerial photographs for the United States Army.

His job was to "interpret" photographs of enemy-held areas taken by Far East Air Force pilots. His annotated photographs were bound into handbooks for the commanders of invading forces. The handbooks described beaches to be attacked, streams and rivers to be crossed, moon and tide tables, and the positions of towns, villages, and enemy forces. They were marked to indicate beach hazards, road barriers, enemy camps, airstrips, supply areas, anti-aircraft and artillery placements, major streets and buildings in towns, and hidden or camouflaged vehicles and troops.

On that day, a Wednesday, my father was working on photographs of the home island of Honshu and of the area around Tokyo; his team was preparing handbooks for the invasion of Japan.

To read photographs, says my father, you hunched over a special stereo viewer - something like thick spectacles on small stilts - and used magnifying flashlights, rulers, and reference books. The reference books were for identifying equipment, aircraft, and vehicles. You also collected information about the area from local citizens or captured Japanese soldiers.

August in Manila is thick, wet, hot. My father, age twenty-four, hunches over his stereo viewer, sweating. Perhaps his thoughts drift. He thinks of his young wife, waiting in a tiny apartment in New York City. He thinks of the estimated casualties (both combatant and noncombatant) of the invasion of Japan: 1 million. He thinks of what the Far East Air Force pilots have been telling the couriers who bring him the photographs under his stereo viewer: There is a new weapon, a bomb, which will bring the war to an end. As he sits there sweating, the bomb is being assembled in an air-conditioned hut.

Four days pass. On Monday morning, August 6, Hiroshima is wiped out. The next day, photographs of the new Hiroshima pass under my father's stereo viewer. "The city was obliterated," says my father, not a hyperbolic man.

"We did not realize then the impact that the bomb would have," says my father now. "In retrospect we would like not to have had to use it. But we judged it necessary then and I judge it necessary still. It ended the war. It saved lives. I have no doubt that the war would have gone on for months. Two invasions of Japan were being planned: Operation Olympic, set for November 1945, and Operation Coronet, set for spring 1946. Olympic was aimed at Kyushu, the southern island; Coronet was aimed at Honshu, 'the heart of Japan,' according to MacArthur.

"I have heard the decision to use the bomb criticized on moral grounds - that is, that this weapon of war was immoral and should not have been used. But all weapons of war are immoral. Is killing one person with a bullet moral? Is killing a few with a grenade? Is killing a hundred with artillery? Is killing a hundred thousand with firebombs, like Dresden, like Tokyo? I doubt it.

"What we have learned about the atom bomb and its successors since 1945 has caused us, and other nations, to avoid using it again. But we have not stopped using the other weapons of war."

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine, published at the University of Portland in Oregon.

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