November 3, 2007
Paul Tibbets III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:50 PM EST John Steele Gordon posted yesterday about the death of Paul W. Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, the B-29 that at Harry Truman’s order dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Mr. Gordon notes, of the resulting controversy, that “Truman really had no political choice. I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative. Many of those deaths would have been American servicemen, of whom President Truman was commander in chief.” I am glad Mr. Gordon posted this, because I think it is true, but I also think his tactful remarks risk understating the moral pressure an ideal observer might have felt to use a nuclear weapon at Hiroshima, because while many of the lives Truman may have saved were American, most of them were not. The author of an interesting recent book on the morality of World War II, which I reviewed I reviewed on this website last year, offers several very professional estimates of how many lives the use of nuclear weapons saved; his most conservative estimate is that between 850,000 and 1.8 million lives were spared by the decision to drop the bombs, and that most of those lives were not American. I should underscore that this conservative estimate is very conservative indeed. In 1945 between 100,000 and 250,000 Asian noncombatants were dying every month, and a blockade of Japan that lasted through 1946, one of the most likely alternatives to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, could have killed as many as 10 million Japanese (the inhabitants of Tokyo were down to 800 calories a day in early 1946, and MacArthur brought in 800,000 tons of food to avert famine) So most of the lives Truman probably saved by dropping the bomb were, like the lives he took, Asian civilian lives, and many of them were the lives of enemy civilians, rather than American soldiers. Soldiers, by one way of reckoning, assume the risks of war when they take up their trade. By contrast, no Japanese civilian had voted for war, and very few of those who would have died in the famine, or the invasion, had committed atrocities. By one way of reckoning, a war leader has a special obligation to spare enemy civilians. Paul Tibbets probably saved, at Harry Truman’s orders, a staggering number of innocent lives. It is a little odd that almost no one says this in public, whereas the obscenely stupid phrase “Hiroshima and Auschwitz,” with its implied moral equivalence, is on many lips, and at the tip of many pens. Truman may not have long considered those Asian civilian lives when he made his decision, but we have to consider them, because we know things Truman did not, and we certainly ought to consider those lives when assessing Tibbets. Instead of being praised, in our day Tibbets is often explicitly damned, sometimes by people of imperfect moral standing. Assume, for the sake of the argument, that the victim’s of Hiroshima are the victims of simple and wholly vicious mass murder, the decision to kill them having been made for the worst of reasons. That assumption is made very frequently; as a specimen, Tibbets’s obituary in The New York Times notes that “while he was deputy chief of the United States military supply mission in India in 1965, a pro-Communist newspaper denounced him as “the world’s greatest killer.” This is a curiously self-abnegating claim for a pro-Communist newspaper to make, given Stalin’s record (a reasonable though conservative modern estimate of deaths from Stalin’s repression, leaving out all famine deaths) is four million. Of course, by 1965 Stalin had been dead for more than a decade, and perhaps the Indian pro-Communist paper meant “greatest living killer.” Well, Mao was still ticking along in 1965, and modern estimates of what is euphemistically called surplus mortality under Mao get to 70 million. If that high-end estimate is off by an exponent it would still make a pro-Communist newspaper unduly modest when awarding Tibbets the greatest-killer prize. The point is not that everyone does it, because everyone doesn’t. The point is that Tibbets probably saved more lives than anyone in history ever has by a comparably swift and discrete action.
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