Madam, - John Stafford rightly says (August 12th) that the Allied carpet-bombings of German and Japanese cities were as immoral as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and sometimes killed more people immediately.
All of these acts were also, legally speaking, war crimes. In the public discourse of the West they are not spoken of as such, and those responsible were not prosecuted and punished, because the US and Britain were on the winning side in the war. The Americans tried and executed Japanese generals and politicians for much lesser crimes. Saddam Hussein, another loser, is to be put on trial for much lesser crimes.
But Mr Stafford, having established moral clarity about the atomic bombings, goes on to obfuscate in the manner that American propaganda has made conventional. He suggests that the bombings brought the war to an end, thus saving the "hundreds of thousands" of American soldiers' lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. He is not, I am sure, suggesting that, even if this were true, it would have made the immoral and criminal bombings moral and legal by after-effect. But it can seem like that to many people, such has been our brainwashing.
However, it is not a fact that the bombings brought the war to an end, thus saving hundreds of thousands of American lives. In Japan the political process of surrender, sponsored by the Emperor, was already under way, with feelers put out through various channels. And the only estimates that matter of likely American military deaths in an invasion of Japan - those made by the American military in the summer of 1945 (i.e. after Okinawa) - contradict Mr Stafford's huge figure.
President Truman was aware that these military estimates ranged from 20,000 to 63,000 and that the most accepted estimate was 46,000. The huge figure cited by Mr Stafford derives from Truman's subsequent and well-observed lies (detailed in my letter of August 10th) and the related American propaganda.
Mr Stafford returns to firmer ground when he concludes that, alleged "results" aside, the pre-eminent motive for the bombings was to deliver a message of American power to the Soviets.
Dermot Meleady (August 13th) believes that, because of the great good that followed it, the decision to massacre and maim all those Japanese civilians was "tragically necessary". Granted, the belief that massacring great numbers to achieve some subsequent good was common in the 20th century - Soviet and Chinese communists, Nazis and the Khmer Rouge all believed that. But for myself, I hold, as do most Irish people, that massacring people can never be necessary. - Yours, etc,
Dr DESMOND FENNELL, Maynooth, Co Kildare.