Madam - If Desmond Fennell (August 10th) thinks that the wiping out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs was a war crime pure and simple with "no possible justifying circumstances or motives", he should not need to enter the argument over the figures for American military losses put forward by the US military.
Since he does choose to enter that field of argument, he should pay more attention to historical accuracy. His claim that 46,000 was the "most accepted estimate" for likely US losses in a full-scale invasion of Japan can only be based on an early, and highly optimistic, reckoning of the possible casualties. After the battles fought for the Japanese Pacific islands no such optimism could be sustained. The losses suffered by the US Marines in the taking of Guam, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and other islands were truly staggering. Okinawa, an island measuring only 50 miles long and 10 miles wide, was taken on June 21st, 1945 only after 12 weeks of the fiercest fighting and at the cost of 15,000 American lives. Japanese deaths, military and civilian, ran to 140,000. It was thus a perfectly reasonable expectation that a quarter of a million or more American soldiers, and at least a million Japanese (that is, some five times the combined death tolls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) would die in an invasion of the Japanese mainland.
These numbers supply the context for the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Much of the commentary on the anniversaries this year has omitted or minimised this context, in the process tending to suggest a moral equivalence between the cause of the Allies and that of barbarous Japanese militarism, which had visited mass slaughter on the populations of East Asia since 1931. To end a war on such a scale, there were simply no choices available which did not entail catastrophic consequences for civilian populations.
It would be more honest of armchair revisionists such as Dr Fennell to admit that the peaceful conditions of liberal democracy under which they grew to maturity, including their freedom to debate such matters as this, would not have existed had they not been bought, firstly, at the cost of so many young American and other Allied lives, and, in the end, buttressed by the tragically necessary decision to use atomic weapons. - Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.