Two weeks ago, I wrote a diary in this series called "Dropping the Bomb on Japan." I was surprised when it recapitulated the Enola Gay controversy of 1996, and I would have said it turned into a gun diary only that would be insulting to the RKBA people who generally, as is traditional here at Daily Kos, trade in facts. I generally try to stay out of controversy in my own diaries, but the problems that comments headlined "Warning to all readers of this diary" and "The scholarship on the revisionist side is awful" caused seemed to me to require more than just a "thanks for your comment" approach.
I've done some reading on the various players in the Enola Gay controversy and I've come to the conclusion that the complaints about my presentation of the event were ideologically based, not rooted in fact. I also think there's some residual xenophobia involved too, but that's a more difficult claim to make because I don't know how old all of my attackers were (and yes, age makes a difference here). I'm going to do some deconstruction of some of the more outrageous attacks on what I wrote, but first I need to get a few things straightened out about the use of the epithet "revision" when it's applied to a scholarly endeavor.
Revision based on "new" documents and other new information or new interpretation of existing source material is central to ALL scholarship. As far as the revisions we do in history are concerned, almost everything passes unnoticed, and people who don't pay attention to the changes (like the recent incident at CPAC when a young delegate began to speak about how good American slavery was) tend to be ridiculed. But call it "revisionism" and all of a sudden you can't find an article on it using a Google search that isn't biased in one way or another. Wikipedia's article on Historical Revisionism bends over backwards to be fair, and so, I'll use it for this section. After observing that it CAN be (and often is)
legitimate scholastic re-examination of existing knowledge about a historical event,
it notes that it can also be
the illegitimate distortion of the historical record such that certain events appear in a more or less favorable light.
Since this is what I was being accused of, I believe unfairly, let's see what Wikipedia has to say about the causes:
Broadly understood, there are two motivations behind revisionist history: the ability to control ideological influence and to control political influence.
political influence is easy: Herodotus wanted to produce Greek support for the Persian War or the Soviet Union had a version of the truth they wanted to promote. Yes, I TEACH students who come into my classroom after studying history in the former Soviet Union. It makes for a good discussion.
Ideological uses are more, well, sinister. Look at the Turkish attempt to deny the Armenian genocide of the 1910s. Look at the Holocaust deniers. THAT's revisionist history used in a pejorative way because it's being used to whitewash something unpleasant. But, of course, we have some revisionist history going on in the description of Japan's conduct in World War II as well. Right-wing Japanese writers don't want textbooks to describe any of the atrocities committed by the Japanese Army. But when it comes to discussing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in this article:
The Hibakusha ("explosion-affected people") of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seek compensation from their government and criticize it for failing to "accept responsibility for having instigated and then prolonged an aggressive war long after Japan's defeat was apparent, resulting in a heavy toll in Japanese, Asian and American lives." Historians Hill and Yukiko have pointed out that attempts to minimize the importance of the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is revisionist history. EB Sledge expressed concern that such revisionism, in his words "mellowing", would allow us to forget the harsh facts of the history that led to the bombings.
That's not the "revisionism," however, that some of our fellow Kossacks were accusing me of. 45 minutes after I posted the diary I was subjected to this:
The author is clearly prejudiced and slanted the diary to support his bias.
There is much missing from this diary, the military had every reason to believe that a million U.S. casualties would result from an invasion of Japan, and Soviet Russia was moving to invade Japan and stake a claim to the spoils that would result from an Allied victory. We would have had a partitioning of Japan and much more if the Soviets had gotten their foot in the door.
There is much more that is suspect about the bias of this diary, but I am no longer interested in hashing it out with Johnny come lately's.
Never mind that I WROTE
An invasion might have cost a million American lives and enormous devastation to Japan. [Incidentally, that "million" figure appears to have been an exaggeration, which I'll discuss below.] In the political climate of 1945 after V-E Day it is difficult to imagine that the American leadership would sacrifice American servicemen to save Japanese civilians (yes, there's a decidedly racist component to this argument); further, the firebombing of Tokyo, which had begun in Tokyo March 9, would certainly have continued.
This wasn't important. The commenter went on to say in so many words that he's old enough to remember the end of World War II and that THAT makes him the final authority on all things War. In other words, I read something at the beginning that I didn't like so I want to warn people off a diary series
that has been running for over a year now. Source material? Fuck that, memory is good enough, although I am at a loss to understand how what someone felt at the end of the war tells me about the decisions that went into ending the war. Not at a fact-based blog like this.
And that, in a nutshell, was what went wrong when the Smithsonian wanted to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima the morning of August 6 1945. My source for all this is a terrific book compiled by Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt
that explains who the adversaries of a carefully-vetted presentation of the end of the war and the impact of the Bomb were, a
non-profit, independent, professional military and aerospace education association promoting public understanding of aerospace power and the pivotal role it plays in the security of the nation
called
the Air Force Association. NOT, incidentally, associated with the federal government but VERY well-connected. This group already had the Smithsonian Air and Space museum on its radar for a display of air power during World War I which they thought spent too little time on the facts and too much time on interpretation, As Richard H. Kohn, the chair of the museum's advisory committee and collections management, observed, the critics wanted to see
a certain political use of the museum: to downplay war's reality and to glorify military aviation.
They REALLY attacked the Enola Gay exhibit as it was originally staged on those grounds. The developers of the exhibition took great pains to make sure it wasn't too celebratory. The AFA just could NOT have that, and with the help of the editorial pages of the
Wall Street Journal and the
Washington Post, they got the exhibition around the plane cancelled. That, folks, is
revision for political and ideological purposes. It's also ahistorical, and, well, faith-based. Never mind that a couple of hundred thousand people died, some of their relatives had done terrible things during the war and they had to pay for it.
That was one critic. A second commenter thought that all we needed to know about the bombs was that they stopped the war cold (this, of course, was repeated five times as a reply to comments that weren't celebratory enough). This is what the historian John Dower, writing in History Wars, calls the "heroic narrative." Dower is interested in what the heroic narrative omits: concerns expressed by Truman and Eisenhower about the morality and necessity of the bombs, and Nagasaki (most serious Japanese accounts agree that surrender was hastened by Hiroshima and the Soviet entry into the war). He also talks about an "almost sacred numerology": did as many people die in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as China claims died in Nanking, for instance. This numerology also applies to what he calls (the italics are his) "imagined American deaths" were an invasion of Japan to become necessary. As he observes, the favored numbers, 500,000 - 1,000,000 (there's that million that some people consider gospel), are imaginary based on the timetables for both Operation Coronet and Operation Olympic, the two components of the plans to invade Japan starting in October 1945. Dower goes on to make this observation:
The heroic narrative is also hostile to two notions that most historians take for granted: that controversy is inherent in any ongoing process of historical interpretation, and that policymaking is driven by multiple considerations and interpretations.
He also reminds us that, after the bombs had been dropped on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States sent a massive final bombing run over Tokyo August 14 which killed additional thousands of civilians. It does us no good whatsoever to harp on the atrocities other people committed while paying no attention to our own. To do so? Faith-based history, or at least incomplete history.
A third critic took one of the most recent well-reviewed books on the war, Richard B. Frank's DOWNFALL: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire as gospel because Frank believes the bombs were pretty much necessary. Well, that's at least based on a source, a source which a New York Times reviewer who liked the book a LOT admits doesn't embrace the traditionalist view completely either:
Frank also raises doubts about another staple of the traditional interpretation -- that without the bomb an invasion would have been essential. He makes clear how vulnerable the Japanese railroad system was to aerial attacks and how dependent food distribution was on the railroads. Food supplies were already short in August 1945, and the scarcities would have become increasingly acute if the war had continued. Thus, vast numbers of Japanese faced death from starvation within the not-too-distant future. Frank demonstrates as well that the emperor and his closest advisers were growing concerned that domestic unrest and internal upheaval might pose as much of a threat as the American military. Therefore, the emperor was likely to have sought peace even without the atomic bomb, particularly since, Frank suggests, the United States would have shifted its strategy from invading Japan to starving it into submission.
Isn't that a "revisionist" conclusion too? I suppose that what matters is who you agree with on the issue of the end of the war with Japan. There's far too much nuance and hedging in history to stop with one interpretation because you like it.
I've read a LOT of books since the fall of 1995, when I went back to grad school for doctoral study (and for those of you who don't know [and I'm not doing this to pull rank, just to state facts] I became Dave in Northridge, Ph.D in September 2003), and I use most of them in putting together my lecture notes which become, with very slight rewriting, many of these diaries. I like the fact that I'm not the only possessor of an advanced degree at this site and that's part of the reason why I'm so committed to it.