Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

On July 26th the heavy cruiser Indianapolis , top heavy with new antiaircraft and radar equipment and still unequipped with underwater submarine detection devices, unloaded the bomb without its last essential part of Uranium-235 on Tinian. It put to sea at once and, in the night of July 29th, between Guam and Leyte, was practically blown apart by torpedoes from Japanese submarine I-58. In fourteen minutes, with all communications knocked out, the great ship rolled over and dived to the bottom. One-third of her 1,200 men were already dead; the rest were left struggling in the water. Four days passed without anyone in the American armed forces asking a question about the Indianapolis . Then an American plane spotted survivors in a large oil patch; 316 were picked up in the next few days. But the bomb was safe on Tinian.

While the I-58 was stalking the Indianapolis in the Pacific, the heavy cruiser Augusta was in mid-Atlantic, bringing President Truman and his assistants back from Potsdam. From midocean the President sent the signal to Washington and Tinian to drop the bomb on Japan. By August 5th all was ready, and at 2:45 a.m. the following morning the modified B-29 Enola Gay, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., in command, went roaring down the long Tinian runway on its 7-hour flight to Hiroshima. Only one man aboard, a scientist commissioned as a navy captain, William S. Parsons, knew exactly what the strange new bomb was or why Colonel Tibbets had been given such unorthodox orders regarding bombing technique. These orders were to dive for maximum speed and turn 150 degrees the moment the bomb was released. Parsons directly violated his orders to arm the bomb before it was loaded in the plane, because he had seen several B-29’s en route to Japan crash on takeoff, and he realized that an atomic accident might destroy Tinian airfield with its hundreds of million-dollar planes and its tens of thousands of trained men. Just before takeoff, Captain Parsons borrowed a loaded revolver to use on himself if the Enola Gay landed in Japanese territory.

Six and a half hours later, 1,700 miles north of Tinian, the Enola Gay came in sight of its target. The doomed city lay quiet in flooding early-morning sunshine. At 9:15, precisely on schedule, the giant plane went into its bombing run at 31,600 feet, speed 328 mph. As the bomb was released, the plane twisted violently away to get as far as possible from the blast. Seconds ticked off as the bomb fell almost five miles to 2,000 feet; then the two masses of uranium came together at lightning speed and turned to energy. The fireball expanded outward, enveloping the center of the city, its intense heat and blast driving outward to shatter buildings and ignite the debris. Fifteen miles away, the Enola Gay was slapped twice by the concussion. An hour and a half later, from 360 miles away, the crew could look back and still see the mushroom cloud rearing up to 40,000 feet. Under that cloud, at least 40,000 Japanese were killed instantly; an additional 12,000 died in the next few days; and eventually 60,175 perished, with an equal number injured. The city was over half destroyed, with the area of devastation extending out a mile from ground zero.

News of this great disaster was released at once in Washington, but in Japan communications were disrupted, and there was no agreement on what had happened. The emperor sent word to Premier Suzuki to accept the Potsdam Declaration, but the militarists insisted on three conditions: (1) Japan would disarm its own troops, (2) the occupation of Japan would be limited, and (3) war criminals would be tried by Japanese courts. All assumed that the emperor’s position was beyond discussion. The stalemate continued, as the Soviet Union declared war on Japan (late on August 8th). The Japanese Supreme War Council remained deadlocked day after day, in spite of a second, plutonium, bomb dropped on Nagasaki with about 100,000 casualties, of which one-third were dead (August 9, 1945).

Early on the morning of August 10th, when the War Council had been in continuous session for sixteen hours, Emperor Hirohito personally ordered it to make peace. A message accepting the Potsdam terms, with reservation of the emperor’s position, was sent the same day. This was accepted by an American note which provided that the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) would issue orders to the emperor and government of Japan. A military coup was attempted in Japan but was suppressed on August 15th. Seven Japanese generals and admirals committed hara-kari. The emperor then, for the first time inhistory, spoke on the radio, asking his people to accept the peace. Many listeners expected him to ask them to fight to the death.’ All were stunned, and remained in this strange condition for weeks. They had been so misled by their own propaganda that many had believed they were about to win the war. A cease-fire was issued late on August 16th. On September 2nd the final surrender was signed on the deck of the battleship Missouri in the shadow of the great 16-inch guns and under the thirty-one-star flag which Perry had flown at the same anchorage ninety-two years before.

Thus ended six years of world war in which 70 million men had been mobilized and 17 million killed in battle. At least 18 million civilians had been killed. The Soviet Union and Germany had lost most heavily. The former had 6.1 million soldiers killed and 14 million wounded, but lost over 10 million civilian dead. Germany lost 6.6 million servicemen killed or died in service, with 7.2 million wounded and 1.3 million missing. Japan’s armed forces had 1.9 million dead. Britain’s war dead were 357,000, while America’s were 294,000.

All this personal tragedy and material damage of untold billions of dollars was needed to demonstrate to the irrational minds of the Nazis, Fascists, and Japanese militarists that the Western Powers and the Soviet Union were stronger than the three aggressor states and, accordingly, that Germany could not establish a Nazi continental bloc in Europe nor could Japan dominate an East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. This is the chief function of war: to demonstrate as conclusively as possible to mistaken minds that they are mistaken in regard to power relationships. But, as we shall see, in demonstrating these objective facts in order to change mistaken subjective pictures of these facts, war also changes most drastically the objective facts themselves.

XVI. THE NEW AGE

Introduction

Rationalization and Science

The Twentieth-Century Pattern

Introduction

Any war performs two rather contradictory services for the social context in which it occurs. On the one hand, it changes the minds of men, especially the defeated, about the factual power relationship between the combatants. And, on the other hand, it alters the factual situation itself, so that changes which in peacetime might have occurred over decades are brought about in a few years.

This has been true of all wars, but never has it been truer than in respect to World War II. The age which began in 1945 was a new age from almost every point of view. Looking back, it is now clear that the first generation of the twentieth century, from about 1895 to 1939, was a long period of transition from the nineteenth-century world to a totally different world of the twentieth century. Some of these changes are obvious: a shift from a period of democracy to an age of experts; from a world dominated by Europe, and even by Britain, to a world divided into three great blocs; from a world in which man still lived, as he had for a million years, surrounded by nature, to a situation where nature is dominated, transformed and, in a sense, totally destroyed by man; from a system where man’s greatest problems were the material ones of man’s helplessness in the face of the natural threats of disease, starvation, and the unpredictability of natural catastrophes to the totally different system of the 1960’s and 1970’s where the greatest threat to man is man himself, and where his greatest problems are the social (and nonmaterial) ones of what his true goals of existence are and what use he should make of his immense power over the universe, including his fellowmen.