What Truman did not know, and which has only been established quite recently, is that the Imperial Japanese Army could never contemplate surrender, having forced all their men to fight to the death since the start of the war.
All civilians were to be mobilised and forced to fight with bamboo spears and satchel charges to act as suicide bombers against Allied tanks. Japanese documents apparently indicate their army was prepared to accept up to 28 million civilian deaths.
Antony Beevor is a bestselling military historian, specialising in the Second World War. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was justified at the time as being moral — in order to bring about a more rapid victory and prevent the deaths of more Americans.
However, it was clearly not moral to use this weapon knowing that it would kill civilians and destroy the urban milieu. Militarily Japan was finished as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that August showed. Further blockade and urban destruction would have produced a surrender in August or September at the latest, without the need for the costly anticipated invasion or the atomic bomb. As for the second bomb on Nagasaki, that was just as unnecessary as the first one.
It was deemed to be needed, partly because it was a different design, and the military and many civilian scientists were keen to see if they both worked the same way. There was, in other words, a cynical scientific imperative at work as well. I should also add that there was a fine line between the atomic bomb and conventional bombing — indeed descriptions of Hamburg or Tokyo after conventional bombing echo the aftermath of Hiroshima.
To regard Hiroshima as a moral violation is also to condemn the firebombing campaign, which was deliberately aimed at city centres and completely indiscriminate. But it is possible to imagine greater restraint. The British and Americans had planned in detail the gas-bombing of a list of 17 major German cities, but in the end did not carry it out because the moral case seemed to depend on Germany using gas first. Restraint was possible, and, at the very end of the war, perhaps more politically acceptable.
Richard Overy is a professor of history at the University of Exeter. A bloody invasion and round the clock conventional bombing would have led to a far higher death toll and so the atomic weapons actually saved thousands of American and millions of Japanese lives. The bombs were the best means to bring about unconditional surrender, which is what the US leaders wanted.
Only this would enable the Allies to occupy Japan and root out the institutions that led to war in the first place. The experience with Germany after the First World War had persuaded them that a mere armistice would constitute a betrayal of future generations if an even larger war occurred 20 years down the line. It is true that the radiation effects of the atomic bomb provided a grisly dividend, which the US leaders did not anticipate. I believe that it was a mistake and a tragedy that the atomic bombs were used.
Those bombings had little to do with the Japanese decision to surrender. The evidence has become overwhelming that it was the entry of the Soviet Union on 8 August into the war against Japan that forced surrender but, understandably, this view is very difficult for Americans to accept. Once the USSR entered the war, the Japanese military not only had no arguments for continuation left, but it also feared the Soviet Union would occupy significant parts of northern Japan.
Truman could have simply waited for the Soviet Union to enter the war but he did not want the USSR to have a claim to participate in the occupation of Japan. Another option which could have ended the war before August was to clarify that the emperor would not be held accountable for the war under the policy of unconditional surrender.
The conflict between the U. Like his band the Grateful Dead, which was still going strong three decades after its formation, Jerry Garcia defied his life-expectancy not merely by surviving, but by thriving creatively and commercially into the s—far longer than most of his peers. His long, strange trip Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Art, Literature, and Film History. Ancient Rome.
However, bomb supporters point out that since the United States was not a member of the League of Nations; its laws did not apply. And anyway, the League had been disbanded in , long before the atomic bomb was used. Additionally, the law did not specifically outlaw nuclear weapons. To that counter-argument, bomb opponents reply that since America presents itself to the world as a model for human rights, the U.
They also point out that nuclear weapons were not specifically outlawed because they did not exist, but as a weapon of mass destruction, they most certainly would have been. By contrast, anti-Japanese racism in American society targeted the Japanese as a race of people, and demonstrated a level of hatred comparable with Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda.
The Japanese were universally caricatured as having huge buck teeth, massive fangs dripping with saliva, and monstrous thick glasses through which they leered with squinty eyes.
They were further dehumanized as being snakes, cockroaches, and rats, and their entire culture was mocked, including language, customs, and religious beliefs. Even Tarzan, in one of the last novels written by his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, spent time in the Pacific hunting and killing Japs. Numerous songs advocated killing all Japanese.
Killing became too easy, and the dehumanizing of the enemy commonplace. Some American soldiers in the Pacific sent home to their girlfriends the skulls of Japanese soldiers, to be displayed on their desks at work. American soldiers did not send home Nazi skulls as trophies or sweetheart gifts. In a US Congressman presented President Roosevelt with a letter-opener purportedly made from the arm bone of a Japanese soldier.
Racists viewed allJapanese as threats not because of their political education, but because of their genetics. As further evidence, bomb opponents point to US policy toward the Japanese-Americans living in California at the time. In Mr. Yamamoto worked at a fish market, ran a sporting goods store, and was a solid member of his community, along with his wife and children.
They were interned, but Mr. Yamamoto applied for a relocation program, was cleared by the US government as loyal and trustworthy, and was packed off to Delaware to find work. He was run out of town before he could even start, and was relocated to New Jersey, where he was to work on a farm owned by Eddie Kowalick. But the citizens of New Jersey were no more accommodating.
A petition to evict Yamamoto was circulated, there were multiple threats of violence against him, and one of Mr. After threats were made against the life of Mr. Yamamoto to move on. Three weeks after Life printed this story, they printed letters written in response. Most of those selected by the editorial staff for publication were supportive of Mr.
Yamamoto and expressed embarrassment at the ignorance of some Americans. But the magazine also published this letter, written by William M. Hinds of Birmingham, Alabama:. Sirs, there are many of us who believe that the deceit, treachery and bestiality inherent in the Japanese we are fighting in the Pacific are traits not automatically removed from members of the race merely by accident of birth in the US.
There are many of us who believe, quite sincerely and simply, that Japanese immigrants to the US and their American-born children will deliberately live an impeccable American life while awaiting an opportunity to perpetrate a Pearl Harbor of their own dimensions.
Cheers for the public-spirited citizens of New Jersey who ran Mr. Yamamoto away. However, there are a few instances in the historical record where the President does refer to the Japanese in questionable terms. Opponents of the bomb are adamant that there were other options available to the President, which at the very least should have been tried before resorting to the bomb.
One alternative might have been to arrange a demonstration of the bomb. Although the U. It was already known in Washington that the Japanese had reached out to the Russians earlier to try to arrange some form of mediation with the U. After the war, the United States did conduct numerous atomic bomb tests on small volcanic atolls in the Pacific.
Such a site could have been prepared in If representatives of the Japanese government, military, and scientific community could have seen the bomb, it might have been enough to convince them of the foolishness of continued resistance. If not, at least the U. Bomb supporters make several counter-points. Although the test in the New Mexican desert had been successful, the technology was still new. The United States would have looked weak and foolish. A failed demonstration might even serve to increase Japanese resolve.
Additionally, the U. If the demonstration failed to convince the Japanese to surrender, only one bomb would remain. I had, perhaps, an unusual opportunity to know the pertinent facts from several angles, yet I was without responsibility for any of the decisions. I can therefore speak without doing so defensively.
While my role in the atomic bomb development was a very minor one, I was a member of the group called together by Secretary of War Stimson to assist him in plans for its test, use, and subsequent handling. Then, shortly before Hiroshima, I became attached to General MacArthur in Manila, and lived for two months with his staff.
In this way I learned something of the invasion plans and of the sincere conviction of these best-informed officers that a desperate and costly struggle was still ahead. Finally, I spent the first month after V-J Day in Japan, where I could ascertain at first hand both the physical and the psychological state of that country.
Some of the Japanese whom I consulted were my scientific and personal friends of long standing. From this background I believe, with complete conviction, that the use of the atomic bomb saved hundreds of thousands—perhaps several millions—of lives, both American and Japanese; that without its use the war would have continued for many months; that no one of good conscience knowing, as Secretary Stimson and the Chiefs of Staff did, what was probably ahead and what the atomic bomb might accomplish could have made any different decision.
Let some of the facts speak for themselves. W as the use of the atomic bomb inhuman? All war is inhuman. Here are some comparisons of the atomic bombing with conventional bombing. At Hiroshima the atomic bomb killed about 80, people, pulverized about five square miles, and wrecked an additional ten square miles of the city, with decreasing damage out to seven or eight miles from the center.
At Nagasaki the fatal casualties were 45, and the area wrecked was considerably smaller than at Hiroshima because of the configuration of the city. Compare this with the results of two B incendiary raids over Tokyo. One of these raids killed about , people, the other nearly , Of the square miles of greater Tokyo, 85 square miles of the densest part was destroyed as completely, for all practical purposes, as were the centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; about half the buildings were destroyed in the remaining square miles; the number of people driven homeless out of Tokyo was considerably larger than the population of greater Chicago.
These figures are based on information given us in Tokyo and on a detailed study of the air reconnaissance maps. They may be somewhat in error but are certainly of the right order of magnitude.
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