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Separately, it needs to be stressed that this was just not an issue, hence the hypothetical aspect of it. Someone trying to invoke this, say, the day before the Nagasaki bombing, would have probably been subject to court martial for desertion or insubordination, and would not be able to demonstrate that they had a long-standing pacifism for religious reasons. There were thousands of American conscientious objectors during World War II, but they were registered under a different system before they entered into the military. Conscientious objectors are people who refuse to take part in the violent aspects of war on principle you don't get to be one for a specific operation or task. My understanding is that once you get to the point where you are actively in the war you cannot just turn around and say you are a conscientious objector. You specifically asked about conscientious objection, and that is an entirely different category. So my hunch is that this would be seen as insubordination at the least, and desertion at the most, both of which would be serious military crimes and lead to a court martial without a doubt. Even then, a lot of the modern understanding of this in the US military comes from post-Vietnam, notably in reaction to the My Lai massacre in 1968. Second, it's not clear to me how refusal of orders worked in World War II in general a lot of our modern ethics and practice about this came out of the Nuremberg Trials, when the defense of "I was just following orders" was soundly rejected. Hence the atomic bombings were not likely "illegal" by the standard of their day, but would probably be by the standards of today. One is that this sense of legality is a post-WWII concern it comes out of the postwar Geneva Conventions, and was plainly not the standard that any party was acting under during the war. Specifically, a soldier today is obligated to disobey orders they consider to be unlawful - which, under current understanding of the laws of war, would include the indiscriminate, mass slaughter of unarmed combatants, which was without any question what the atomic bombings involved. My suspicion is no, but this is where it gets beyond my main knowledge, because I don't know how a few things were handled exactly during World War II. Could they, if they had chosen to, have avoided getting on that plane legally? They knew what they were doing at that point, because Hiroshima opened up the discussion of the mission.
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And once in the air, there is no way they would have been allowed to desert their station without massive consequences every person on an active-combat B-29 is essential.īut let's instead imagine we are talking about Bocks Car, who is about to try to repeat the same operation a few days later against Kokura (and ended up bombing Nagasaki, but that's a longer story). But they weren't briefed on how it worked before they were in the air. Some had suspicions it was something unusual they knew they were training to drop some very large, unusual weapon on the enemy. So I've been thinking about this question for the last day or so, and it's a tricky one for a number of reasons.įirst, most of the crew on the Enola Gay did not know what their payload was.