Note: This diary is a minor reworking and merger of two previous diaries I have published on the subject, which can be read here and here. I am publishing this because there have been a number of places that I continue to see references to "the lessons of Hiroshima" written by people who are obviously ignorant of the history from which they profess to have received enlightenment.
Sixty-three years ago today (August 6, 1945 Japan Time) the United States Army detonated a uranium bomb over the city of Hiroshima. The blast and the fire storms that followed it effectively destroyed more than ninety percent of the city and killed many tens of thousands of people. Three days later the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and began a massive offensive against the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Later that same day, the United States struck the city of Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb almost twice as powerful as the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. Due to the city’s geography and to some fortuitous cloud cover, the raiders missed their target by about a mile. Nevertheless, the effects were devastating. The Urakami valley section of the city was totally destroyed and, though the loss of life was not as great as it had been in Hiroshima, tens of thousands more were killed. Six days later, while many in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still suffering from the radiation poisoning which would claim thousands more lives before the year was out, the Empire of Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist.
More than six decades later these events remain a source of profound resentment in Japan and bitter controversy in the United States. In Japan (except for among a small and, with one major exception, very quiet group of diplomatic historians) articulate opinion is virtually unanimous in its vehement condemnation of the bombings. Along with the Holocaust, to which they are frequently compared, the bombings are often denounced as the most atrocious acts of the entire war, if not in all of history. In America, the situation is more complex. From the beginning, there were those (mostly Christian leaders or theologians) who immediately condemned the attacks out of hand. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Americans supported the decision to use the new weapon and most supported it enthusiastically. It heralded the downfall of a hated enemy and the dawn of a new age, one which promised nearly inexhaustible supplies of energy and unchallengeable American dominance in the world.
Before long, however, the horrors of Hiroshima grew progressively less abstract while the hopes to which they gave rise faded before the harsh realities of the atomic age. In August 1946, one year after the attacks, the NEW YORKER devoted an entire issue to John Hersey’s account of the Hiroshima bombing. That issue and the book as which it was later republished transformed the unfortunate city from, as President Truman had described it in his radio address announcing the bombing, "an important military base," into an actual town populated with living, breathing, feeling human beings, people who in another world might very well have been dear to those who read of their ordeals. Meanwhile, the exigencies of Cold War politics accelerated a reconciliation with a once-hated foe and the sub-human monkey-men of wartime propaganda soon replaced the Chinese as civilization’s greatest hope on what many Americans still considered the benighted continent of Asia. Then the illusion of nuclear security vanished in a mushroom cloud in central Asia in August of 1949 when the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic device and suddenly the victims of Hiroshima were transformed once again, this time from sympathetic human beings, to heroic martyrs, people whose suffering served as a potent warning against the scientific hubris of mankind, whose pitiable fates were no longer merely horrible things that happened to the people of an alien land, but terrors that might very well lay in wait for us, those who had brought them about in the first place.
Most Americans continue to cling to the orthodox interpretation of the bombings, the interpretation that asserts that, in the great scheme of things the bombs saved lives, both American and Japanese, by forcing an early surrender and obviating the need for a bloody invasion of the home islands. Nevertheless, the enduring postwar friendship between the United States and Japan, a growing awareness among many Americans of both the horrors of atomic warfare and of the racial antipathy that was a key element of the war effort against Japan, and an increasing readiness to embrace a more objective study of history, a study in which the narrow nationalist frames that had formerly determined so much of how we view the world, has led a substantial minority of Americans to question or reject the justifications given for the bombings.
Among that minority is likely a majority of contributors and readers of this forum. Many, having come of age at the height of Cold War revisionism have had their opinions shaped by the work of a number of scholars who were very critical of the bombings and who saw them not as militarily rational acts but as unnecessary slaughters that were the result of a combination of savage vengeance, bureaucratic indifference, racist hate, and geopolitical realpolitik aimed at the Soviet Union rather than the Empire of Japan.
Among the scholars that have supported or contributed to such an interpretation to a greater or lesser extent are:
Gar Alperovitz, Martin Sherwin, Barton J. Bernstein, and more recently, Howard Zinn.
The views expressed by these scholars can perhaps best be seen in the remarks of J. Samuel Walker, writing in 1995 on the state of historiography concerning the bombings:
The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.
Central to this presentation of the atomic bombings are a number of historical axioms.
Among these are:
1. Japan was defeated.
2. Japanese leaders accepted this.
3. Japanese leaders were looking for a face-saving way out of the war on conditions very much like those to which the United States eventually agreed.
In other words, Japan was on the verge of surrender and the atomic bombs were entirely gratuitous and immaterial to the final outcome of the war.
None of these assertions can withstand scrutiny. Moreover, the reasons for this are not hard to fathom: None of the historians listed above speaks or reads Japanese and none of them saw the need to overcome that limitation by seeking the assistance of anyone who did.
In other words, their assertions about the state of affairs in Japan were made without any reference to Japanese sources whatsoever.
In contrast to these scholars are the works of the following historians:
Robert J. C. Butow, Asada Sadao, Hasegawa Tsuyoshi, Herbert Bix, and Richard Frank.
Among these historians, all of whom made extensive use of Japanese sources (the first four speak and read the language and Frank hired translators to process Japanese documents for him), there is a great deal of disagreement on many issues, however the one issue on which there is no disagreement whatsoever is this: Japan was nowhere close to surrender prior to the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Though Hasegawa asserts (rather unpersuasively) that it was the Soviet intervention that caused Japan's surrender, there is no disagreement about the fact that Japan was nowhere close to surrender on August 6, 1945.
The idea that Japan was close to surrender has gained a great deal of currency in the years since the end of the war. Part of the reason for this comes from the fact that Japan appeared to be so thoroughly beaten when the first Americans landed in the country that they could not imagine that the people had the capacity to fight even another day. These impressions, together with postwar politics came to color the opinions of some prominent Allied leaders, especially in regard to the necessity of the use of the atomic bomb.
However, the far more cogent arguments concerning Japan’s willingness to surrender come from conclusions drawn about Japanese diplomatic activity in the summer of 1945. This activity provides the background for many revisionist arguments that Japan was on the verge of surrender and that the United States knew it. It was primarily of two kinds. First, there were various informal feelers put out by well-placed Japanese in neutral capitals in Europe who sought to begin the process of war termination. None of these had any formal sanction whatsoever and were rejected, rightly, by American intelligence as being little more than "peace entrepreneurs."
The second, far more serious effort was in the mission that the Japanese government had agreed to send to the Soviet Union. This mission was to be headed by former prime minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who was to be sent as the Emperor’s personal envoy to seek the good offices of the Soviet Union in ending the war. While on the surface, this may have seemed promising, Allied leaders knew of the mission and they knew that it was as good as meaningless.
In point of fact, Konoe was to have no mandate when he went to the Soviet Union. The "doves" within the government wanted to send him in order that he could begin to explore terms for ending the war, terms which Togo Shigenori, the leading "dove" in the government, instructed Sato Naotake, Japan’s ambassador to Moscow, were to be "nothing like unconditional surrender." These words, words which were intercepted and decoded by American intelligence, were those of the single most active proponent for peace in the Japanese government. The others of the "Big Six," on the Supreme War Council agreed to send Konoe with the understanding that he would do three things: 1. Seek Soviet belligerence on Japan’s side, 2. Failing that seek a benevolent neutrality in which the Soviet Union would supply Japan with needed war materiel in exchange for token territorial concessions, and 3, failing in the first two objectives insure that the Soviet Union stay out of the war. Thus the whole of this effort amounted to sending an envoy to a (then) neutral country with no clear idea of how to proceed and confused, if not contradictory objectives.
At this time Ambassador Sato informed Togo that the Soviets would not agree to accept an ambassador without a more specific mission. He also told his superior, in a cable which American listening stations intercepted and decoded, that the allies would only accept an unconditional surrender or conditions closely approximating such. At this point he suggested that Japan offer to accept surrender with the sole condition that it be allowed to keep its "kokutai." This word, often inelegantly translated as "national polity" has no precise equivalent in English. Part of the reason for this is that it has no precise meaning in Japanese. Ignorant western historians, particularly those in the atomic bomb revisionist camp, have often asserted that it meant simply "keeping the emperor." It did not. It was one of those elastic political phrases that had, by the end of the war, come to have almost mystic connotations. The thorny problem of rendering it articulate would cause considerable trouble for those who sought to end hostilities even after the bombs had been dropped and the Soviets had entered the war.
Linguistic and cultural complexities notwithstanding, the point here is that Sato specifically suggested keeping the "kokutai" as a condition for surrender. Togo unequivocally rejected this. He noted that it went without saying that the preservation of the "kokutai" was a must but that he was interested in "nothing like an unconditional surrender." This testy exchange, which American intelligence knew all about, is of great importance. It shows that the single most pacifically inclined of the six members of the Supreme War Council was adamantly opposed to ceasing hostilities on anything approaching terms the Americans would find acceptable. Moreover, they knew this AT THE TIME. In addition to this, three members of the council wanted to send Konoe not in order to make peace, but rather to explore the possibility of procuring Soviet assistance AGAINST the allies.
Given these conditions, even the most ardent dove and gifted politician could have made no substantial progress toward ending hostilities. Konoe was neither of these things. He was a weak an ineffectual leader who admired the Nazis (he once attended a costume party dressed as Hitler) and caved into the military whenever he was challenged. Konoe, who was prime minister at the outbreak of the war with China, later explained his decision to take a hard line against Chiang thus: "I was so eager to do away with friction and conflict within Japan that I acceded to the demands of the national renovationists as much as I could." This was hardly the kind of person who would show bold leadership to end the war. Konoe’s mission was a fool’s errand and everyone but Togo, and perhaps Konoe himself, knew it.
As to what sort of terms Konoe might have offered had he been a bolder sort, one need only look at the conditions debated by the Supreme War Council on August 10, AFTER both bombs had been dropped and the Soviets had entered the war on the American side.
The War Council split on the question of what to do. Togo had persuaded Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro and Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa to support his plan: accepting the Potsdam Proclamation with the sole condition that the "kokutai" be maintained, the plan that he himself had forcefully rejected in his earlier exchange with Sato. Opposed to these three were the hard-liners: Army Chief of Staff Umezu Yoshijiro, Navy Chief of Staff Toyoda Soemu and Army Minister Anami Korechika. This hard-line faction suggested that the Allies be presented with four conditions: that the "kokutai" would be preserved, that there would be no occupation of Japanese territory, that Japan would be entrusted with disarming itself, and that Japan would bear sole responsibility for the prosecution and trying of its own war criminals. Here the council deadlocked, and the hard-liners must have been happy with this, figuring that no decision was a decision in favor of the status quo, that is continued belligerence.
However, Suzuki was holding an ace up his sleeve and he played it well. By prior consultation with the Court, he had arranged for the possibility of bringing the matter before the Emperor. He thus announced that the Council was deadlocked and that the issue would have to be taken before the Emperor and the full cabinet. At that meeting Hirohito heard both sides of the argument and politely, but forcefully came down on the side of the peace faction: the only condition would be the maintenance of the "kokutai." That left the problem of deciding exactly what the "kokutai" was.
Here Togo proposed that a note be drafted that told the Allies that the government of Japan agreed to the terms of the Potsdam Proclamation with the understanding that the said proclamation did not in any way affect the position of the emperor under the nation’s laws. The hard-line nationalists at the meeting could not accept this formulation because it implied that the mystical emperor, who was coeval with both the heavens and the Japanese people, was merely a constitutional monarch subject to laws made by men. Baron Hiranuma asserted that a better formulation would be that the said proclamation did not in any way prejudice "his majesty’s prerogatives as a sovereign ruler." This was the version that was sent to the Allies.
Many revisionist historians, grossly ignorant of Japanese political history, have asserted that this was nothing more than them trying to keep the emperor. That is total nonsense. Iokibe Makoto, one of Japan’s leading historians on the subject and the current President of its Self-Defense Forces Academy, has called Hiranuma’s formulation a "greybeard’s guile." If accepted, it would have essentially negated all Allied war aims with a single phrase contained in a binding international agreement. Setting aside for the moment the fact that Hiranuma’s formulation was an explicit rejection of the notion of popular sovereignty, both the strong Hiranuma reservation and the weak Togo reservation would have preserved the constitution of the Empire of Japan more or less as it was. This constitution was drafted in such a manner that it specifically thwarted civilian control over the military, popular sovereignty, natural rights, an independent judiciary, or any of the other institutions of government that Americans see as essential to maintaining the liberty of the people and thus insuring that they control both their government and their military. That is to say that it would have allowed Japan to maintain the system of government (or more accurately of misrule) that had allowed the military to dominate the civilian organs of government and lead the nation on the road to conquest in the first place.
This fact was instantly recognized by Eugene Dooman and Joseph Ballantine, arguably the most pro-Japanese of State Department experts. Ballantine rejected the Japanese note out of hand, asserting, "We can’t agree to that, because the prerogatives of the emperor include everything, and if you agree to that, you’re going to have endless struggle with the Japanese."
On the advice of these two men Secretary of State James Byrnes recommended against accepting the Japanese provision. With the help of his assistants he drafted a reply that unequivocally rejected Japan’s demand while simultaneously implying the continued existence of the emperor and government of Japan. The reply ("From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms. . . .") made clear that all power would rest with the Supreme Commander. This was very clear to all in Japan, so clear in fact that the peace faction in the Foreign Ministry had to take to deliberately mistranslating the reply so that the words "subject to" were replaced by the far weaker "circumscribed by". The Army, however, produced its own, accurate, translation, correctly noted that the reply was a complete rejection of Japan’s minimum condition and demanded that the war be continued as the cabinet had previously agreed.
Only a second intervention by Hirohito ended the debate in favor of surrender.
That said, the government now faced the task of enforcing its decision. The simple fact was that no one, not even the militarists, had control of the army and no one knew how it would react. No one knew whether individual units or commanders would simply regard the surrender command as a trick by the evil counselors that had surrounded the Emperor. It order to forestall this possibility Hirohito, on the advice of his intimates, took the unprecedented step of recording a surrender broadcast himself, on the assumption that it would be next to impossible to reject the words if they came from the emperor’s own lips.
However, the story did not end there. On the night before the surrender broadcast a pitched battle was fought on the grounds of the Imperial Palace as hard-liners attempted to take over the palace and seize the recording of the Emperor announcing the acceptance of the Allied terms. Violence erupted throughout Tokyo. Both the Prime Minister’s official residence and his private home were attacked, captured and destroyed by die-hard incendiaries. Two days before MacArthur was scheduled to land at Atsugi Air Base, another pitched battle raged between the die-hards and those that sought to effect the surrender peacefully. Suzuki resigned after pushing through the decision to surrender and the new PM, Imperial Prince Higashikuni, was chosen specifically because it was felt that his Imperial blood and his ties with the military made him the only man capable of getting the Army to actually lay down its weapons. Hirohito’s brothers had to be dispatched to the armies in Asia to get them to cease hostilities. All of this occurred after the atomic bombings, the Soviet entry into the war, and the Emperor’s announcement of his "sacred decision" to cease hostilities.
Japan was nowhere close to surrender prior to the use of the atomic bomb and barely managed to pull it off even AFTER both bombs and the Soviet intervention. Had it not been for these things it is likely that no one in the Japanese government would have ever been able to muster the political will and political capital to force the army to lay down its arms.
Significantly, this was exactly the judgment of those involved in the actual events. Prime Minister Suzuki later asserted that the country was fully committed to continuing the war and was moving apace to make preparations to meet the expected invasion before the bombing of Hiroshima. After that, he said, it was obvious that an enemy in possession of such a weapon would have no need to invade. Navy Minister Yonai privately referred to the bombings and Soviet belligerence as "gifts from the gods." Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, and Hirohito’s closest confidante, Kido Koichi said they were "useful elements for making things go smoothly." Chief Cabinet Secretary Sakomizu Hisatsune, one of the primary strategists and plotters of the peace faction, and a man whose outright deception of his superiors kept the chance for peace alive, asserted that they were nothing less than a "golden opportunity sent by Heaven."
The reason that these men, all of them from the peace faction, could use such terms to describe the hellfires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they knew what many today refuse to face: the atomic bombs and the intervention of the Soviet Union might very well have saved Japan’s national existence. The hard-liners in the Army were hell-bent on resistance to the bitter end and their hold on power within the country was becoming stronger rather than weaker with the deterioration of the military situation. Without the twin shocks of the atomic bombs and the Soviet intervention, those in the peace faction might never have gotten enough control to push through and enforce a surrender.
The record is clear and the conclusions to be drawn from it are as inevitable as they are incontrovertible. Japan was nowhere close to surrender before Hiroshima.
While this does not change the fact that tens of thousands of noncombatants were slaughtered horribly in first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, it does complicate the picture and, I would argue, belie the notion that "the lessons of Hiroshima" are either unambiguous or entirely humanitarian.