“It will not be long before we are reduced to savagery. We are the barbarians within our own empire.”
—Russell Kirk
Eighty years ago today, the U.S. government committed one of the awful acts in human history. Three days later, it did it again.
Harry Truman insisted the decision to vaporize or fatally irradiate almost a quarter million civilians (plus a dozen American prisoners of war) was his and his alone.
Whether meant as acknowledgment or confession, this assertion was correct. The buck stopped with him. It was Harry Truman who (literally) “gave ‘em Hell”.
The president assured the world (and presumably his conscience) that he had no choice. Proud and stubborn, the Japanese would never surrender. Nuclear weapons were the only way to end the war.
In a sense, like an abortionist convincing himself his victims aren’t really human, Truman had to believe that. Otherwise, what would his actions say about him?
Most Americans seemed to accept his argument. Retroactive propaganda argued the destruction of two sizable cities saved up to “a million lives” that would’ve been lost by invading the islands. Besides, “the Japs” had it coming for bombing Pearl Harbor!
OK. But which “Japs”?
Leave aside FDR’s pre-war actions intended to entice a Japanese attack. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were filled with half a million civilians who had no say in what their government did. Were those “the Japs” who had it coming? Why?
Grasping for Straws
Almost four years earlier, 2,400 Americans died on the “date which will live in infamy”. Most were in the Navy… plus over 200 in the Army, about a hundred Marines, and 68 civilians. Nearly half the dead were on the USS Arizona.
Government officials (in Tokyo and DC) needed to answer for that. But did the mothers, infants, and elderly of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How many of them picked the fight, gave the orders, flew the planes, or dropped the bombs that killed Americans that morning in Hawaii?
Dastardly as Pearl Harbor was, the attack was obviously trained on a military target. Atomic bomb advocates, including Truman, suggested Hiroshima and Nagasaki were too. That’s preposterous… akin to wiping out Waikiki because Pearl Harbor was near Honolulu.
Truman grasped for more straws. On the day Nagasaki was obliterated, the president defended the first bombing by saying Hiroshima was “an industrial center”. But its major factories sat far from the bullseye at the center of the city, and “Little Boy” left those largely unscathed.
As historian Ralph Raico wondered, if Hiroshima were such a vital military target, why was it untouched by years of air raids, and excluded from Bomber Command’s list of thirty-three primary targets?
After the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden earlier that year, official angst over innocent life carries little credibility. The U.S. government clearly had few qualms about killing civilians. Truman was caught chuckling during his announcement of the Hiroshima bombing (at the 2:30 mark):
The president did acknowledge some compunction during an inadvertent confession. He’d contemplated a third bomb, but rejected the idea because (as he put it to his Cabinet the day after Nagasaki), “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people”… including “all those kids”… was “too horrible” to contemplate.
The president was well aware the number of innocents he was killing, including “all those kids”. But did the quarter million dead Japanese save half a million Americans (or “millions”, as President George HW Bush once ludicrously claimed)?
It’s astounding that anyone accepts this. But for decades it’s what Americans have been taught. They’re expected to believe that an invasion of Japan would’ve cost almost as many lives as the War Between the States, and more than America lost in every other theater of Second World War combined.
Worst-case scenarios for a Nipponese D-Day come to fewer than 50,000 American dead. This estimate (approaching the U.S. death toll in Vietnam) is obviously horrific. But it’s still unrealistic. An invasion was never necessary to compel Japan to give up.
“Barbarians of the Dark Ages”
As citizens of China, enemy prisoners of war, and the peoples of Pacific archipelagos will attest, the Japanese military was vicious and barbaric.
But by 1945, despite its persistent pride and notorious intransigence, it was on the cusp of defeat. The Imperial government knew it, and was prepared to capitulate.
As Stanford professor Barton Bernstein relayed in a New York Times article preceding a Smithsonian exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
“Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either of these events took place.”
These weren’t Barton’s words. He was quoting what Brigadier General Bonnie Fellers wrote to General Douglas MacArthur soon after V-J Day.
As John Denson relayed in his terrific anthology, The Cost of War, “other high ranking military expressed similar sentiments.”
Among them was Admiral William Leahy, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the war:
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was no material success in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use [nuclear weapons] we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”
Former President and retired Five-Star General Dwight Eisenhower chimed in with similar sentiment:
“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. … I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”
Major General JFC Fuller described the bombings as “a type of war that would’ve disgraced Tamerlane.” He also dispensed with the common justification:
“Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.”
This isn’t the convenient clarity of 20/20 hindsight. Skeptics were wearing corrective lenses many months before the Enola Gay left the runway.
In January 1945, the Japanese offered to surrender on terms virtually identical to those they accepted after Nagasaki. MacArthur informed FDR of this two days before the president left for Yalta. Leahy provided the information, and Truman himself later corroborated the account.
Had the US accepted the overture, not only the devastation of the atomic bombs would’ve been avoided, but Iwo Jima and Okinawa wouldn’t have occurred, sparing 20,000 American lives.
Denson elaborates on the Japanese proposal:
“… the surrender terms of the Japanese government were specified in a 40-page memorandum from General MacArthur to President Roosevelt dated January 20, 1945, which has never been made public, acknowledged, or denied by the American government. It is reported that the information in the memo was secretly delivered by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, to journalist Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune because the Admiral rightfully feared that the offer would be ignored by the president and he wanted history to record the truth. Furthermore, President Truman, who assumed office after Roosevelt’s death in April, 1945, is reported to have later admitted to former President Herbert Hoover that by early May, 1945, he was aware of the peace offer and that further fighting was unnecessary, yet he still authorized the bombing. It is further alleged that President Truman also discussed the specific terms of the peace offer with Stalin at Babelsberg prior to the bombing; and finally, that General MacArthur confirmed the existence of this memo and its contents after the war.”
Wartime censorship forced Trohan to withhold this vital information for seven months. As Denson notes, he “first published this information about the Japanese peace offer in the Chicago Tribune on August 19, 1945, after the bombs were dropped earlier that month causing the deaths of approximately 210,000 civilians.”
The Japanese kept fighting only because the U.S. required unconditional surrender. This destructive demand (which Truman reiterated at Potsdam) had prolonged the war in Europe, and extended fighting in the Pacific.
The Japanese assumed those terms included dethroning the Emperor, which they wouldn’t abide. Truman knew this, yet insisted the bombs be dropped. Not to end the war, which was happening anyway… but to send a message to someone else.
The bombs were less to subdue Japan than to signal the Soviets. British scientist P.M.S. Blackett, one of Churchill’s advisers, wrote that dropping the bombs was “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.” They were the opening shots of the Cold War, with a quarter million innocents lined against the wall.
