Article written and supplied by Dan McEwen

78 years ago this month, the names Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seared onto humanity’s consciousness by flashes of light brighter and hotter than the sun. The 115,000 lives sacrificed in those flashes broke the iron grip of a military cult that had brought the country to the very brink of self-destruction. British PM Winston Churchill reflected popular opinion of the day when he stated; “To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world...by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.”

While the necessity of those “few explosions” in forcing a surrender remains hotly debated today, what’s not in question is that a genuine “miracle of deliverance” of vastly greater significance occurred well after the ink had dried on the peace treaty.

The US navy’s blockade of the Home Islands had brought starvation to over 10 million ragged, homeless, Japanese civilians. They swarmed American occupation troops at the docks, begging for food. Their commander, General Douglas MacArthur, quickly realized nothing could be done to begin reconstruction until all these mouths had been fed. However, his request for such massive food aid fell on vengeful ears. No one in Washington was inclined to be so charitable to an enemy who had extracted such an enormous price in American lives. Alas, such willful cruelty would ultimately have reaped a PR whirlwind that sucked all the individual pride, national honour and moral legitimacy out of America’s hard-fought victory over a fanatically murderous foe.

Imagine public reaction to newsreels and front page photos of these starving millions wandering like zombies through their bombed-out cities, mobbing U.S. occupation troops wherever they went; of marines chowing down in mess tents surrounded by silent crowds of toothpick-thin children; of Sea-bees bulldozing skeletal corpses into mass graves. With rare prescience, MacArthur persisted and got his way, enabling the Japanese to become what they are today: the staunchest defenders of democracy in the Far East. 

Convoys of food from the USA saved 11 million Japanese from imminent starvation. That alone qualified as the greatest humanitarian relief effort in history to date and yet the real miracle was still to come. The 1945 rice crop had failed, meaning famine in 1946. By September of that year, American occupation troops were feeding 50 million people, two thirds of the population! Japan would never have become the nation it is today without them. That 50 million who got to live long and prosper drove their bomb-ravaged country’s phenomenal postwar recovery. Their children and grandchildren transformed it into an industrial and technological titan.

Although the Land of the Rising Sun has now risen to its greatest ever strength as a military power, the enduring legacy of that 1946 “miracle’’ is that this time, for the first time, that power is dedicated to preserving democracy. Theirs, yours and mine. We should wish them well.  -   Dan McEwen

Sources

The Miraculous Deliverance from an Epic Tragedy: The End of the Asia-Pacific War - Richard Frank, webinar

Dropping the Atomic Bomb: Road to Hiroshima  - Dr. Roy Heidicker, online lecture

140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan’s Last Chance to Avert Armageddon - David Dean Barrett, National WW2 Museum webinar

To Bear the Unbearable: Japan's Surrender - National WW2 Museum website