Harry Veeder wrote:
it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the Smithsonian
downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many tens of
thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military target."
Hiroshima had some of largest army and navy installations in Japan.
Nagasaki was and still is one of the largest shipyards in the world. The
supertankers I saw under construction there dwarfed the whole downtown
area. They built the superbattleship Musashi there, and recently they have
constructed gigantic cruiseships, as well as wind turbines and solar cells.
Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate
surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese
home islands." But it's not that straightforward.
Nothing in history a straightforward.
As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing the
Enemy" and many other historians have long argued it was the Soviet
Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima
bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation.
That is unquestionably true. Every surviving account of the emperor's
counsel emphasizes that the Russian attack was the straw that broke the
camel's back. However, whether that alone would have been sufficient, and
whether they would have surrendered without the nuclear attacks is
impossible to know. The final cabinet vote was a tie -- all of the
civilians in favor of surrender, all of the military leaders against it.
The emperor broke the tie, voting himself for the first and last time in
Japanese history.
My guess is that there would have been at least one or two more large
battles: one in Kyushu against the US, and one in Hokkaido or Tohoku
against the Russians. The Japanese still had a million trained soldiers and
ungodly amounts of ammunition and fortified bunkers in Kyushu that would
have survived a nuclear attack. (Everyone could see that is where the
attack would come.)
The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on
Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.
That is ridiculous. They dropped leaflets continuously, starting in the
fall of 1944. It was one of the most effective weapons of the U.S., since
the purpose of the bombing was to frighten the civilians and get them to
leave the cities and stop weapons production. It worked.
The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives
were not saved.
No one can possibly say how many lives were saved. If the war had dragged
on another six months, hundreds of thousands would have starved to death.
(Several thousand people starved to death after the surrender, including
~20,000 Japanese P.O.W.s in Southeast Asia, who were half dead when they
surrendered.) The invading Russians would have killed hundreds of thousands
more, as they did in Manchuria.
The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the
Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated
enemy."
No one disputes that. The problem was, even though they were defeated they
did not want to stop fighting. Roughly 2 million Japanese people had been
killed, or 3% of the population. But they might have fought on and lost
another 7 million people (10% of the population). During WWII, Germany lost
7 million people (9%) and Russia lost 25.5 million (13%). In the U.S. Civil
War, the Union states lost 1.4% of the population and the Confederacy lost
2.5%. There have been wars in modern history in Central America in which
half the male population was killed off, and medieval European wars which
depopulated entire fiefdoms.
And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as
they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese
were looking for peace.
They could hardly disagree about that! The Japanese government was sending
them cables asking for peace, and they were tapping and decoding the
Japanese ambassador's correspondence from Moscow to Tokyo. The only issue
was the terms of the peace. The Japanese did not want to surrender their
colonies, allow an occupation, war crimes trials, any change in the status
of the emperor, or any changes to their constitution or government. (They
were willing to surrender their military forces and leave China.)
Within days after the bombing, many columnists and opinion makers began to
speculate that the real reason the US dropped the bomb was to send a
message to Moscow. I have read many of Truman's papers, biographies and the
books that he himself wrote and I have not found a one sentence to back
this up. Truman described his motivations and actions in detail. If he had
felt this way he would have said so. He was a hard-line cold warrior. He
did not hesitate to go to war in Korea. There is no question he was willing
to sacrifice lives in the fight against communism: American, Koreans and
Chinese lives, and Japanese lives too. He summed up his own views about
Hiroshima many years after the war with a single sentence, a quote from
Macbeth:
"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
That seems like an excellent summary to me. That pretty much describes all
wars.
- Jed
