A review by simonmee
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B. Frank

4.0

It is good that we confront the decisions of the past, it is good that we account for voices of dissent. However we cannot strip decisions and the dissents from the context they inhabited.

Downfall was explicitly written as a counter the “revisionist” view that the bombing of Japan was militarily unnecessarily and perhaps even a war crime. I’m not going to make a call on that, but there has been a preponderance towards the revisionist view in articles.

There are major discussion points around whether the Japanese were willing to surrender from June 1945 (Frank says they weren’t and were pretty keen on decisive battle) and that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria would have been sufficient (Frank says that’s overstated and would you have liked the Soviets in Hokkaido, knowing that 300,000 Japanese died as prisoners of the Soviet Union?). Despite this, I will focus on the war crime part.

Agents of Mass Death

When you open a book on atomic weapons with the conventional fire-bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, perhaps the most single devastating event of the war, it’s clear you want to make a point:

…central to understanding this period is the basic fact that atomic bombs were not the sole agents of mass death.

In World War Two, the Western Allies propped up the Soviets (morally troubling to Frank) and launched bombing raids over Axis cities:

If Bomber Command could not hit what it would, it would hit what it could. That meant an “exterminating” rain of high explosives and incendiaries on urban centres to destroy civilian “morale” – “a cosmetic word for massacre,” observed John Terraine.

Frank notes that the British, with some squeamishness from the Americans, intended to bomb the civilian areas of Germany to force surrender, i.e. terrorism. The point I take from Frank is that the atomic bombing was not a tremendous leap morally from what the Allied powers had committed themselves to doing anyway.

There has been commentary that 7 of the 8 five-star generals opposed the atomic bombings. That is not covered directly, but Frank pushes back on the contemporaneousness of Eisenhower’s comments. Further, MacArthur was slated to lead the most brutal invasion of the war, knowing from Saipan, Luzon and Okinawa that civilians would be involved as combatants or victims.

A Plethora of Unattractive Options

“I don’t get the problem,” you say. “They are all war crimes.”

…and look, yeah, probably… Frank points out the Allied populations imbibed those beliefs in mass bombardment, but it kind of helps they were on the winning side. Germans imbibed Anti-Semitism in one form or another, and it hardly stands as a criminal defence. At best it is evidence of political will.

Frank alludes to the escalation by the Axis powers at Guernica, Chungking, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry. However, he does ignore the British bombing of villages during the 1920s revolt in Iraq, a pretty notable precursor. As Frank himself acknowledges, Allied leaders often placed a patina of legality over the mass bombardments, suggesting an underlying admission of the wrongness of their actions.

His better point, and the one he emphasises, is that there was a race against time. Death rates among European and Asian (particularly Asian) prisoners and slave labourers were astoundingly high, estimated by Frank as 100,000-250,000 a month:

Any moral assessment of how the Pacific war did or could have ended must consider the fate of these Asian noncombatants and the POWs.

Frank states was fundamental for political purposes to maintain political support and this was enshrined in the goal to end the war against Japan within a year of Germany’s surrender. The prospect of massive casualties on both sides by way of invasion, or starvation of millions via blockade hardly appears more attractive than going to the atomic bomb.

Bombs Away?

I feel Frank:

(a) makes a good point in making the atomic bombings a lot less exceptional from a war crime perspective in the context of the war; but

(b) doesn’t undermine the basic contention that it was a particularly war crimey time, going instead with the position that were clear trade-offs.

The book never really tries with the second point from a legal perspective, and that does hurt it. The trade-offs come down to which number is bigger, and Frank places the blame on Japan’s refusal to surrender being the prime cause of those numbers:

It might appear obvious in hindsight that Japan's leaders should have recognized the impossibility of continuing a modern war of attrition and the clear course was to surrender. The reality, however, is that they chose a different path.

Despite weaknesses, that Frank works within the context of the time, even if imperfectly, should be acknowledged. Atomic bombing another country is never a great choice. The issue is, were there any better ones?