On
the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped an
atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, Bock's
Car, released one over Nagasaki. Both caused enormous casualties and
physical destruction. These two cataclysmic events have preyed upon the
American conscience ever since. The furor over the Smithsonian Institution's Enola
Gay exhibit and over the mushroom-cloud postage stamp last autumn are
merely the most obvious examples. Harry S Truman and other officials claimed
that the bombs caused Japan to surrender, thereby avoiding a bloody invasion.
Critics have accused them of at best failing to explore alternatives, at worst
of using the bombs primarily to make the Soviet Union "more manageable"
rather than to defeat a Japan they knew already was on the verge of
capitulation.
By any rational calculation Japan was a beaten nation by the summer of 1945. Conventional bombing had reduced many of its cities to rubble, blockade had strangled its importation of vitally needed materials, and its navy had sustained such heavy losses as to be powerless to interfere with the invasion everyone knew was coming. By late June advancing American forces had completed the conquest of Okinawa, which lay only 350 miles from the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyushu. They now stood poised for the final onslaught.
Rational calculations did not determine
Japan's position. Although a peace faction within the government wished to end
the war-provided certain conditions were met-rnilitants were prepared to fight
on regardless of consequences. They claimed to welcome an invasion of the home
islands, promising to inflict such hideous casualties that the United States
would retreat from its announced policy of unconditional surrender. The
militarists held effective power over the government and were capable of
defying the emperor, as they had in the past, on the ground that his civilian
advisers were misleading him.
Okinawa
provided a preview of what invasion of the home islands would entail. Since
April I the Japanese had fought with a ferocity that mocked any notion that
their will to resist was eroding. They had inflicted nearly 50,000 casualties
on the invaders, many resulting from the first large-scale use of kamikazes.
They also had dispatched the superbattleship Yamato on a suicide mission
to Okinawa, where, after attacking American ships offshore, it was to plunge
ashore to become a huge, doomed steel fortress. Yamato was sunk shortly after leaving port, but
its mission symbolized Japan's willingness to sacrifice everything in an
apparently hopeless cause.
The Japanese could be expected to defend
their sacred homeland with even greater fervor, and kamikazes, flying at short
range promised to be even more devastating than at Okinawa, The Japanese had
more than 2,000,000 troops in the home islands, were training millions of
irregulars, and for some time had been conserving aircraft that might have been used to
protect Japanese cities against American bombers.
Reports
from Tokyo indicated that Japan meant to fight the war to a finish. On June 8
an imperial conference adopted "The Fundamental Policy to Be Followed
Henceforth in the Conduct of the War," which pledged to "prosecute
the war to the bitter end in order to uphold the national polity, protect the
imperial land, and accomplish the objectives for which we went to war."
Truman had no reason to believe that the proclamation meant anything other than
what it said.
Against this background, while fighting
on Okinawa still continued, the President had his naval chief of staff, Adm.
William D. Leahy, notify the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the Secretaries of
War and Navy that a meeting would be held at the White House on June IS. The
night before the conference Truman wrote in his diary that "I have to
decide Japanese strategy-shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and
blockade? That is my hardest decision to date. But I'll make it when I have all
the facts."
Truman met with the chiefs at
three-thirty in the afternoon. Present were Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C.
Marshall, Army Air Force's Gen. Ira C. Eaker (sitting in for the Army Air
Force's chief of staff, Henry H. Arnold, who was on an inspection tour of
installations in the Pacific), Navy Chief of Staff Adm. Ernest J. King, Leahy
(also a member of the JCS), Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Secretary of
War Henry L. Stimson, and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy. Truman
opened the meeting, then asked Marshall for his views. Marshall was the
dominant figure on the JCS. He was Truman's most trusted military adviser, as
he had been President Franklin D. Roosevelt's.
Marshall reported that the chiefs,
supported by the Pacific commanders Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester W.
Niniitz, agreed that an invasion of Kyushu "appears to be the least costly
worthwhile operation following Okinawa." Lodgment in Kyushu, he said, was
necessary to make blockade and bombardment more effective and to serve as a
staging area for the invasion of Japan's main island of Honshu. The chiefs
recommended a target date of November I for the first phase, code-named
Olympic, because delay would give the Japanese more time to prepare and because
bad weather might postpone the invasion "and hence the end of the
war" for up to six months. Marshall said that in his opinion, Olympic was
"the only course to pursue." The chiefs also proposed that Operation
Comet be launched against Honshu on March 1, 1946.
Leahy's memorandum calling the meeting
had asked for casualty projections which that invasion might be expected to
produce. Marshall stated that campaigns in the Pacific had been so diverse
"it is considered wrong" to make total estimates. All he would say
was that casualties during the first thirty days on Kyushu should not exceed
those sustained in taking Luzon in the Philippines-3 1,000 men killed, wounded,
or missing in action. "It is a grim fact," Marshall said, "that
there is not an easy, bloodless way to victory in war." Leahy estimated a
higher casualty rate similar to Okinawa, and King guessed somewhere in between.
King and Eaker, speaking for the Navy
and the Army Air Forces respectively, endorsed Marshall's proposals. King said
that he had become convinced that Kyushu was "the key to the success of
any siege operations:' He recommended
that "we should do Kyushu now" and begin preparations for invading
Honshu. Eaker "agreed completely" with Marshall. He said he had just
received a message from Arnold also expressing "complete agreement."
Air Force plans called for the use of forty groups of heavy bombers, which
"could not be deployed without the use of airfields on Kyushu."
Stimson and Forrestal concurred.
Truman summed up. He considered
"the Kyushu plan all right from the military standpoint" and directed
the chiefs to "go ahead with it." He said he "had hoped that
there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the
other," but "he was clear on the Situation now" and was
"quite sure" the chiefs should proceed with the plan. Just before the
meeting adjourned, McCloy raised the possibility of avoiding an invasion by
warning the Japanese that the United States would employ atomic weapons if
there were no surrender. The ensuing discussion was in- conclusive because the
first test was a month away and no one could be sure the weapons would work.
In his memoirs Truman claimed that using
atomic bombs prevented an invasion that would have cost 500,000 American lives.
Other officials mentioned the same or even higher figures. Critics have
assailed such statements as gross exaggerations designed to foreswear scrutiny
of Truman's real motives. They have given wide publicity to a report prepared
by the Joint War Plans Committee (JWPC) for the chiefs' meeting with Truman.
The committee estimated that the invasion of Kyushu, followed by that of
Honshu, as the chiefs proposed, would cost approximately 40,000 dead, 150,000
wounded, and 3,500 missing in action for a total of 193,500 casualties.
That those responsible for a decision
should exaggerate the consequences of alternatives is commonplace. Some who
cite the JWPC report profess to see more sinister motives, insisting that such
"low" casualty projections call into question the very idea that atomic
bombs were used to avoid heavy losses. By discrediting that justification as a
cover-up, they seek to bolster their contention that the bombs really were used
to permit the employment of "atomic diplomacy" against the Soviet
Union.
The notion that 193,500 anticipated
casualties were too insignificant to have caused Truman to resort to atomic
bombs might seem bizarre to anyone other than an academic, but let it pass.
Those who have cited the JWPC report in countless op-ed pieces in newspapers and
in magazine articles have created a myth by omitting key considerations: First,
the report itself is studded with qualifications that casual- ties "are
not subject to accurate estimate" and that the projection "is
admittedly only an educated guess." Second, the figures never were
conveyed to Truman. They were excised at high military echelons, which is why
Marshall cited only estimates for the first thirty days on Kyushu. And indeed,
subsequent Japanese troop buildups on Kyushu rendered the JWPC estimates
totally irrelevant by the time the first atomic bomb was dropped.
Another myth that has attained wide
attention is that at least several of Truman's top military advisers later
informed him that using atomic bombs against Japan would be militarily
unnecessary or immoral, or both. There is no persuasive evidence that any of
them did so. None of the Joint Chiefs ever made such a claim, although one
inventive author has tried to make it appear that Leahy did by braiding
together several unrelated passages from the admiral's memoirs. Actually, two
days after Hiroshima, Truman told aides that Leahy had "said up to the
last that it wouldn't go off."
Neither MacArthur nor Nimitz ever
communicated to Truman any change of mind about the need for invasion or
expressed reservations about using the bombs. When first informed about their
imminent use only days before Hiroshima, MacArthur responded with a lecture on
the future of atomic warfare and even after Hiroshima strongly recommended that
the invasion go forward. Nimitz, whose jurisdiction the atomic strikes would be
launched, was notified in early 1945. “This sounds fine' " he told the
courier, "but this is only February. Can't we get one sooner?" Nimitz
later would join Air Force generals Carl D. Spaatz, Nathan Twining, and Curtis
LeMay in recommending that a third bomb be dropped on Tokyo.
Only Dwight D. Eisenhower later
claimed to have remonstrated against the use of the bomb. In his Crusade in
Europe, published in 1948, he wrote that when Secretary Stimson informed
him during the Potsdam Conference of plans to use the bomb, he replied that he
hoped "we would never have to use such a thing against any enemy' "
because he did not want the United States to be the first to use such a weapon.
He added, "My views were merely personal and immediate reactions; they
were not based on any analysis of the subject." . . .
The best that can be said about
Eisenhower's memory is that it had become flawed by the passage of time.
Stimson was in Potsdam and Eisenhower in Frankfurt on July 16, when word came
of the successful test. Aside from a brief conversation at a flag-raising
ceremony in Berlin on July 20, the only other time they met was at Ike's
headquarters on July 27. By then orders already had been sent to the Pacific to
use the bombs if Japan had not yet surrendered. Notes made by one of Stimson's
aides indicate that there was a discussion of atoniic bombs, but there is no
mention of any protest on Eisenhower's part. Even if there had been, two
factors must be kept in mind. Eisenhower had commanded Allied forces in Europe,
and his opinion on how close Japan was to surrender would have carried no
special weight. More important, Stimson left for home immediately after the
meeting and could not have personally conveyed Ike's sentiments to the
President, who did not return to Washington until after Hiroshima.
On July 8 the Combined Intelligence
Committee submitted to the American and British Combined Chiefs of Staff a
report entitled "Estimate of the Enemy Situation' " The committee
predicted that as Japan's position continued to deteriorate, it might
"make a serious effort to use the U.S.S.R. [then a neutral] as a mediator
in ending the war." Tokyo also would put out "intermittent peace
feelers" to "weaken the determination of the United Nations to fight
to the bitter end, or to create inter- allied dissension' " While the
Japanese people would be willing to make large concessions to end the war,
"For a surrender to be acceptable to the Japanese army, it would be
necessary for the military leaders to believe that it would not entail
discrediting warrior tradition and that it would permit the ultimate resurgence
of a military Japan."
Small wonder that American officials
remained unimpressed when Japan proceeded to do exactly what the committee
predicted. On July 12 Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo instructed
Ambassador Naotaki Sato in Moscow to inform the Soviets that the emperor wished
to send a personal envoy, Prince Fuminaro Konoye, in an attempt "to
restore peace with all possible speed." Although he realized Konoye could
not reach Moscow before the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Foreign Minister
V.M. Molotov left to attend a Big Three meeting scheduled to begin in Potsdam
on the fifteenth, Togo sought to have negotiations begin as soon as they
returned.
American officials had long since been
able to read Japanese diplomatic traffic through a process known as the MAGIC
intercepts. Army intelligence (G-2) prepared for General Marshall its
interpretation of Togo's message the next day. The report listed several
possible constructions, the most probable being that the Japanese
"governing clique" was making a coordinated effort to "stave off
defeat" through Soviet intervention and an "appeal to war weariness
in the United States' " The report added that Undersecretary of State
Joseph C. Grew, who had spent ten years in Japan as ambassador, "agrees
with these conclusions."
Some have claimed that Togo's overture
to the Soviet Union, together with attempts by some minor Japanese officials in
Switzerland and other neutral countries to get peace talks started through the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), constituted clear evidence that the Japanese
were near surrender. Their sole prerequisite was retention of their sacred
emperor, whose unique cultural/religious status within the Japanese polity they
would not compromise. If only the United States had extended assurances about
the emperor, according to this view, much bloodshed and the atomic bombs would
have been unnecessary.
A
careful reading of the MAGIC intercepts of subsequent exchanges between Togo
and Sato provides no evidence that retention of the emperor was the sole
obstacle to peace. What they show instead is that the Japanese Foreign Office
was trying to cut a deal through the Soviet Union that would have permitted
Japan to retain its political system and its prewar empire contact. Even the
most lenient American officials could not have countenanced such a settlement.
Togo on July 17 informed Sato that
"we are not asking the Russians' mediation in anything like
unconditional surrender [emphasis added]." During the following weeks
Sato pleaded with his superiors to abandon hope of Soviet intercession and to
approach the United States directly to find out what peace terms would be
offered. "There is ... no alternative but immediate unconditional
surrender," he cabled on July 3 1, and he bluntly informed Togo that
"your way of looking at things and the actual situation in the Eastern
Area may be seen to be absolutely contradictory." The Foreign Ministry
ignored his pleas and continued to seek Soviet help even after Hiroshima.
"Peace feelers" by Japanese
officials abroad seemed no more promising from the American point of view.
Although several of the consular personnel and military attaches engaged in
these activities claimed important connections at home, none produced
verification. Had the Japanese government sought only an assurance about the
emperor, all it had to do was grant one of these men authority to begin talks
through the OSS. Its failure to do so led American officials to assume that
those involved were either well-meaning individuals acting alone or that they
were being orchestrated by Tokyo. Grew characterized such "peace
feelers" as "familiar weapons of psychological warfare" designed
to "divide the Allies."
Some American officials, such as Stimson
and Grew, nonetheless wanted to signal the Japanese that they might retain the
emperorship in the form of a constitutional monarchy. Such an assurance might
remove the last stumbling block to surrender, if not when it was issued, then
later. Only an imperial rescript would bring about an orderly surrender, they
argued, without which Japanese forces would fight to the last man regardless of
what the government in Tokyo did. Besides, the emperor could serve as a
stabilizing factor during the transition to peacetime.
There were many arguments against an
American initiative. Some opposed retaining such an undemocratic institution on
principle and because they feared it might later serve as a rallying point for
future militarism. Should at happen, as
one assistant Secretary of State put it, "those lives already Vent
will have been sacrificed in vain, and lives will be lost again in the future.
"Japanese hard-liners were certain to exploit an overture as evidence that
losses sustained at Okinawa had weakened American resolve and to argue that
continued resistance would bring further concessions. Stalin, who earlier had
told an American envoy that he favored..abolishing the emperorship because the
ineffectual Hirohito might be succeeded by "an energetic and vigorous
figure who could cause trouble," was just as certain to interpret it as a
treacherous effort to end the war before the Soviets could share in the spoils.
There were domestic considerations as
well. Roosevelt had announced the unconditional surrender policy in early 1943,
and it since had become a slogan of the war. He also had advocated that peoples
everywhere should have the right to choose their own form of government, and
Truman had publicly pledged to carry out his predecessor's legacies. For him to
have formally guaranteed continuance of the emperorship, as opposed to
merely accepting it on American terms pending free elections, as he later did,
would have constituted a blatant repudiation of his own promises.
Nor was that all. Regardless of the
emperor's actual role in Japanese aggression, which is still debated, much
wartime propaganda had encouraged Americans to regard Hirohito as no less a war
criminal than Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. Although Truman said on several
occasions that he had no objection to retaining the emperor, he understandably
refused to make the first move. The ultimatum he issued from Potsdam on July 26
did not refer specifically to the emperorship. All it said was that occupation
forces would be removed after "a peaceful and responsible" government
had been established according to the "freely expressed will of the
Japanese people. When the Japanese rejected the ultimatum rather than at last
in- quire whether they might retain the emperor, Truman permitted the plans for
using the bombs to go forward.
Reliance on MAGIC intercepts and the
"peace feelers" to gauge how near Japan was to surrender is
misleading in any case. The army, not the Foreign Office, con- trolled the
situation. Intercepts of Japanese military communications, designated ULTRA,
provided no reason to believe the army was even considering surrender. Japanese
Imperial Headquarters had correctly guessed that the next operation after
Okinawa would be Kyushu and was making every effort to bolster its defenses
there.
General Marshall reported on July 24
that there were "approximately 500,000 troops in Kyushu" and that
more were on the way. ULTRA identified new units arriving almost daily.
MacArthur's G-2 reported on July 29 that "this threatening development, if
not checked, may grow to d point where we attack on a ratio of one (1) to one
(1) which is not the recipe for victory." By the time the first atomic
bomb fell, ULTRA indicated that there were 560,000 troops in southern Kyushu
(the actual figure was closer to 900,000), and projections for November 1
placed the number at 680,000. A report, for medical purposes, of July 31
estimated that total battle and nonbattle casualties might run as high as
394,859 for the Kyushu operation alone. This figure did not include
those men expected to be killed outright, for obviously they would require no
medical attention. Marshall regarded Japanese defenses as so formidable that
even after Hiroshima he asked MacArthur to consider alternate landing sites and
began contemplating the use of atomic bombs as tactical weapons to support the
invasion.
The thirty-day casualty projection
of 31,000 Marshall had given Truman at the June 18 strategy meeting had become
meaningless. It had been based on the assumption that the Japanese had about
350,00 defenders in Kyushu and that naval and air interdiction would preclude
significant reinforcement. But the Japanese buildup since that time meant that
the defenders would have nearly twice the number of troops available by
"X-day" than earlier assumed. The assertion that apprehensions about
casualties are insufficient to explain Truman's use of the bombs, therefore,
cannot be taken seriously. On the contrary, as Winston Churchill wrote after a
conversation with him at Potsdam, Truman was tormented by "the terrible
responsibilities that rested upon him in regard to the unlimited effusions of
American blood."
Some historians have argued that while
the first bomb might have been required to achieve Japanese surrender,
dropping the second constituted a needless barbarism. The record shows
otherwise. American officials believed more than one bomb would be necessary
because they assumed Japanese hard-liners would minimize the first explosion or
attempt to explain it away as some sort of natural catastrophe, precisely what
they did. The Japanese minister of war, for instance, at first refused even to
admit that the Hiroshima bomb was atomic. A few hours after Nagasaki he told
the cabinet that "the Americans appeared to have Ae hundred atomic bombs
... they could drop three per day. The next target might well be Tokyo."
Even
after both bombs had fallen and Russia entered the war, Japanese rnilitants
insisted on such lenient peace terms that moderates knew there was no sense
even transmitting them to the United States. Hirohito had to intervene
personally on two occasions during the next few days to induce hard-liners to
abandon their conditions and to accept the American stipulation that the emperor's
authority "shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied
Powers." That the militarists would have accepted such a settlement before
the bombs is farfetched, to say the least.
Some writers have argued that the
cumulative effects of battlefield defeats, conventional bombing, and naval
blockade already had defeated Japan. Even without extending assurances about
the emperor, all the United States had to do was wait. The most frequently
cited basis for this contention is the United States Strategic Bombing
Survey, published in 1946, which stated that Japan would have surrendered
by November I "even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if
Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or
contemplated." Recent scholarship by the historian Robert P. Newman and
others has demonstrated that the survey was "cooked" by those who
prepared it to arrive at such a conclusion. No matter. This or any other
document based on information available only after the war ended is irrelevant
with regard to what Truman could have known at the time.
What often goes unremarked is that
when the bombs were dropped, fighting was still going on in the Philippines,
China, and elsewhere. Every day that the war continued thousands of prisoners
of war had to live and die in abysmal conditions, and there were rumors that
the Japanese intended to slaughter them if the home- land was invaded. Truman
was Commander in Chief of the American armed forces, and he had a duty to the
men under his command not shared by those sitting in moral judgment decades
later. Available evidence points to the conclusion that he acted for the reason
he said he did: to end a bloody war that would have become far bloodier had
invasion proved necessary. One can only imagine what would have happened if
tens of thousands of American boys had or been wounded on Japanese soil and
then it had become known that Truman had chosen not to use weapons that might
have ended the war months sooner.