For thinking people - World War II:Civilian killings by US and Britain

Nuclear weapons were described as "the greatest achievement of organised science in history" by US President Harry Truman. Many would comment that it is correct to a certain non-negligible proportion to think that it says something of the mentality of a people when their leader eulogises the most monstrous creation of science in such terms.

Anyway, we just quote the facts. For thinking people, correct information and not opinion should be enough.

1)In 1939 the British Government had entered the war with high protestations of virtue. The then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told Parliament: "Whatever be the lengths to which others may go, His Majesty's government will never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children, and on other civilians for the purposes of mere terrorism." By the end of the war, the British had resorted to enough "mere terrorism" to destroy most of the cities of Germany and many of their inhabitants, 100,000 of them children.

2)300,000 British uniformed servicemen died in 1939-45 compared to the 600,000 German civilians killed.

3)Before August 1945, very many Japanese had already been killed by "conventional" bombing. On one night in Tokyo in March, American bombers killed 85,000 civilians — more than would die at Nagasaki — and at least 300,000 were incinerated in great fire raids over the following months.

4)It was argued then, and still sometimes is, that the bombing of Hiroshima 60 years ago on August 6, and of Nagasaki three days later, was justified by the Japanese surrender, obviating the need for an invasion of Japan which would have meant huge casualties.
By the summer of 1945, Japan was already prostrate. Not only were Japanese armies being driven out of the Pacific islands and Burma, American bombers were wrecking the cities of Japan and, in one of the most successful campaigns of the whole war, submarines of the United States navy had done to Japan what German U-boats had never managed to do to England, by completely destroying its shipping. Some American admirals believed then and ever after that surrender was a matter of time, and not much of it, and a strong suspicion persists of an ulterior motive by Washington, wanting to end the war with Japan quickly before Soviet Russia joined in.


Monsignor Ronald Knox, a conservative English Catholic (author of God and the Atom, an astonishing book, neglected at the time and since) : Hiroshima was an assault on faith, ... because — this answers those who still defend the bombing of Hiroshima — "men fighting for a good case have taken, at one particular moment of decision, the easier, not the nobler path."

The facts are taken from the editorial of the Hindu on 06-08-2005.