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 Proclamation 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. Such Americans have learned a great many disturbing things from the scholarship of a group of researchers that came of age after the hatred of wartime had begun to fade.
Among the things they have learned are the following:
Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki Kentaro had essentially signaled his government’s willingness to accept the terms of the Potsdam Proclamation well before the bombs were dropped. Unfortunately he used an obscure term, "mokusatsu," to convey this idea and it was mistranslated (possibly deliberately) by American officials. As a result this overture was ignored and the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were needlessly sacrificed.
American leaders knew, or should have known, Suzuki’s meaning. They were well aware that Japanese leaders were ready to surrender before the dropping of the bombs or the Soviet intervention. They knew this because they had broken Japan’s diplomatic ciphers and could read the messages from Tokyo to its embassies around the world, most importantly, its embassy in Moscow. This traffic makes clear that Japan was trying to end the war.
Japan had already approached the United States through intermediaries and offered to surrender on the sole condition that they keep the emperor, the condition upon which hostilities were eventually terminated after the bombs were needlessly dropped.
Truman knew that the bombs were unnecessary to end the war. His closest military advisors, including General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William Leahy, General Douglas MacArthur, General Claire Chennault, General Carl Spaatz and others all told Truman that the bombs were not needed to end the war.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, the most thorough and objective study of the effects of the American strategic bombing campaign, a campaign that included the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, concluded that the war could have been won without the bombs.
Hiroshima was not "an important military base" but a densely populated civilian urban area with little or no military significance.
All of these disturbing facts are now well known to a great many Americans and probably known to a most readers of this blog.
However, what is most disturbing about them is that not one of them is true.
More disturbing still is the fact that most of them were first introduced into the American discourse by radical right-wingers seeking to discredit Truman, Roosevelt, and the mid-century transformation of American politics. In fact, many of these myths were given their first airing in the May 10, 1958 issue of William Buckley’s NATIONAL REVIEW in an article titled "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe" penned by inveterate revisionist Harry Elmer Barnes. Later they were assembled into a chapter in Anthony Kubek’s, HOW THE FAR EAST WAS LOST, essentially a pseudo-academic presentation of the views of the John Birch Society. What is intriguing about both Barnes’s and Kubek’s presentation is that they absolutely insist that Truman and his pinko advisors refused to let Japan surrender until Stalin could get into the war and share in its spoils.
Two years after Kubek’s work Gar Alperovitz retooled the assertions put forth by Barnes and Kubeck in order to argue that Truman used the bombs primarily as a weapon against his most hated enemy, Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. Through Alperovitz many of these stories, stories which had originally had been concocted to smear the Roosevelt and Truman administrations as soft on communism, have now been largely adopted by new left historians to argue exactly the opposite point. Through the works of those historians many of these myths have entered main-stream discourse in the United States and are taken as articles of faith by many in the progressive community.
However, whether these myths are used to argue that Truman was a pinko, delaying the end of the war to help his Communist buddies, or that he was a fanatic anti-communist ready to erase two cities from the earth in order to let Stalin know who was boss, is ultimately far less important than the fact that they are indeed myths. Not one of them can survive scrutiny.
Considerations of space prohibit a thorough refutation of all of the points mentioned above so in this diary I will discuss only one of them, the "mokusatsu" myth. If this diary generates any interest, I will discuss the others later, either in the comments or in follow-up diaries.
The Mokusatsu Myth:
This is a story that pops up all over the place. It appears in revisionist literature, at popular books aimed at would-be translators in Japan, and even in beginning psychology courses at universities. The story, which has grown in the telling, first appeared in English in the following terms:
The Japanese cabinet...had already decided in favor of the Potsdam Declaration when Premier Suzuki was questioned about the ultimatum at a Tokyo press conference. The Premier told the Japanese newsmen that his cabinet was holding to an attitude of mokusatsu, a word that is difficult to translate directly into English. He meant that the cabinet was withholding comment on the ultimatum, that a decision was not yet to be announced. But the Domei News Agency, in translating Suzuki's statement into English for short-wave broadcast to the West, put the wrong meaning on mokusatsu, and mistranslated it as "ignore." The Allied Powers--waiting for Japan's answer to Potsdam--were informed that the Suzuki cabinet was "ignoring" the surrender ultimatum. On the basis of this apparent rejection, the final effort to crush Japan was launched and the surrender came three weeks later, after the atomic bombs had been dropped and Russia had entered the war.
This story was first introduced into English in the early 1950s by Kawai Kazuo, who served as editor of the NIPPON TIMES during the war. Put simply, Kawai was peddling nonsense and a few too many in America eagerly purchased what he was selling. There never was a mistranslation by Domei or anyone else. "Ignore" is in fact a rather bland, but certainly suitable translation of "mokusatsu." To see this, one need look no further than the headline that accompanied Prime Minister Suzuki’s statement in Kawai’s own (English language) NIPPON TIMES: "Potsdam Declaration to be Ignored in Japan."
Moreover, the precise meaning of "mokusatsu" has little effect on the overall purport of what Suzuki actually said. When he was asked about the Potsdam Proclamation Suzuki responded as follows:
I consider the joint proclamation of the three powers to be a rehash of the Cairo Declaration. The government does not regard it as a thing of any great value; the government will just ignore [mokusatsu] it. We will press forward resolutely to carry the war to a successful conclusion.
The meaning of the word "mokusatsu" is immaterial. The force of the statement is clear: Japan would fight on. If there were any doubts remaining about Suzuki’s intentions, he effectively laid them to rest shortly thereafter when he was challenged on his statement by a group of businessmen that thought the terms offered by the Allies were rather generous:
For the enemy to say something like that means circumstances have arisen that force them also to end the war. That is why they are talking about unconditional surrender. Precisely at a time like this, if we hold firm, then they will yield before we do. Just because they broadcast their declaration, it is not necessary to stop fighting. You advisers may ask me to reconsider, but I don't think there is any need to stop [the war].
The Japanese response to the Potsdam Proclamation was a clear and unequivocal rejection. Any assertion to the contrary belies an ignorance of the Japanese language and of the political situation obtaining in Japan at the time.
None of this is to say that well-informed people of good will cannot question, criticize, or even condemn the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan. The bombings have long been and will long continue to be controversial. Some will simply assert that the amount of wanton destruction of life and property necessarily involved in the use of such weapons means that they should never have been used under any circumstances. Such an argument certainly cannot be summarily dismissed. Others will question why the bombs were employed the way they were. Why, for example, were Japanese leaders not given an explicit warning? Why were the Soviets not asked to join in the Potsdam Proclamation, thus making a Japanese surrender more likely? Why was a demonstration not attempted? Why was there no explicit guarantee that Japan could keep its emperor (or at least his dynasty) as part of a constitutional monarchy?
All of these are good questions and questions that anyone considering the enormity of the bombs’ aftermaths should ponder deeply. That said, I think that there is an unfortunate tendency of many in this community to regard the bombings as the original sin of American foreign policy in the postwar world and one which necessarily disqualifies American power as a positive force in world affairs. I believe that if Democrats are once again going to seize control of foreign policy (and I believe we will) then we must not reject out of hand the use of American power to effect positive change in the world. Above all we must not use right-wing lies about the Truman administration as a justification for taking such a position.