Before my friends in the local peace movement choke on their gluten-free bagels, I want them to imagine that it’s August 1945, not August 2023. That means that the great social, political and spiritual transformations of the 1960s never happened. You haven’t smoked marijuana, meditated, practiced yoga or raised your consciousness. You don’t have a “preferred pronoun.”

Any peace movement is microscopic with no effect. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are not marching in the streets to protest World War II and neither are you, who unequivocally support the war effort. The only organic food your family eats is from your Victory Garden. The terror of Nazi Germany has been defeated and now it’s time to finish the job with Japan through their unconditional surrender.

The second scenario to imagine is that you or your husband, father, son, brother or boyfriend is currently in the United States military and thus, preparing to invade the Japanese homeland. Which means that there is a good chance that you or your loved one will be either killed or grievously wounded.

The first evil, of course, was the Hiroshima bombing. Most literate Americans are knowledgeable of the death and destruction rained upon that unfortunate city. Many of those not killed immediately succumbed to the ravages of radiation sickness both within days and for decades afterward. However, Japanese intentions to surrender before Hiroshima that now might be clear in hindsight were murky at the time. Japan had a Peace Party but also a fanatical War Party that threatened to assassinate the former. The deciding factor, Emperor Hirohito, refused to surrender.

The second evil would have been the planned November 1945 invasion of Japan by the United States. Such an assault would have been catastrophic for both the invaders and the invaded. One constant during the Pacific War was that the Japanese never surrendered and saw suicide as honorable. The Japanese had 7,000 kamikazes to defend the home islands as well as tens of millions of soldiers and drafted civilians willing to fight to the death. Schoolgirls were trained to kill with bamboo spears.

By 1945, the Japanese military had become a virtual suicide death cult and expected their nation to act likewise. American planners estimated a worst-case scenario of over a million Americans and millions of Japanese killed had the invasion gone forward. Japan’s military had also threatened to murder all 100,000 Allied POWs if its homeland was invaded. The invasion would have created mutual atrocities too horrible to contemplate.

The third evil was to forestall the invasion and starve the Japanese into surrender by a blockade and the systematic destruction of their infrastructure. All shipping around the island would be sunk. Its oil and irrigation systems demolished; roads and railroads pulverized. Cities and industries would have been incinerated by mass bombings. The resulting starvation and disease would have killed untold millions of Japanese and taken Japan decades to recover.

The fourth evil would have been the Soviet invasion of Japan, scheduled for soon after the Hiroshima bombing. This was agreed upon at the February 1945 Yalta Conference. The result would have been Japan divided into a Communist North and a Democratic South just like Korea and Vietnam. We all know how well that turned out. The Korean and Vietnam wars combined killed a total of 7 million people, mostly civilians.

In conclusion: By August 1945, 50 million men, women and children had perished in World War II, the worst cataclysm in modern history. The firebombing of Tokyo the previous March had immolated more people than Hiroshima. One can debate whether it’s nicer to kill hundreds of thousands with many bombs versus one. As hideous as they were, the Japanese atomic bombings immediately ended the war and paved the way for Japan to become a modern progressive democracy.

The other options would have left the nation either a destitute wasteland or a divided battlefield.

Oddly, it appears that the Japanese are less outraged by the Hiroshima bombing than American peace activists, the result perhaps of their belief in the law of karma. The Japanese militarists were just as brutal and oppressive as the German Nazis, and some Japanese today are willing to admit to those crimes. It’s well known that the site of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor is a popular spot for Japanese tourists.

What’s less known is that in the 1960s, the plastic scale model company Revell opened sales in Japan. The best-selling kit there was none other than the B-29 bomber, the perpetrator of Hiroshima.

Daniel A. Brown lived in Franklin County for 44 years as a teacher, writer and photographer. He is a frequent contributor to the Recorder and lives in northern New Mexico with his wife, Lisa and dog, Cody.

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