Reddit reviews Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan

In the last decade or so there has been a serious revision of the importance of the atomic bombs in ending World War II, due primarily to the work of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. His book Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan argues pretty effectively that in the minds of the Japanese Imperial government, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria is what really caused them to surrender when they did, not the atomic bombs. He has done quite a good job of going over the Japanese sources to really fill out their side of the story in a way that had been conspicuously lacking in previous historical work.

Not everyone is convinced (I'm a bit on the fence myself), but his book has certainly changed the terms of debate, and, at least with respect to every historian of the bomb I know (which is quite a lot of them!), pretty much everyone is willing to at least go half-way with Hasegawa, in that they are de-coupling the old cause-and-effect implications about the bomb and the end of the war.

That is, the typical story has always gone, "the US wanted to end the war quickly, they dropped two bombs, and Japan surrendered." Which is true! It's just that the correlation of those last two clauses may not actually equate with causation. The old debate about the "decision to use the bomb" always took for granted that the bomb actually mattered, in the end, but Hasegawa has really opened that up again as a live historical issue, and one which is actually in many ways entirely separate from the question of the motivation to use the bomb.

It’s actually a really interesting view that is posited by Japanese historians. Racing the Enemy is an amazing Japanese paper on the realities of the final days of the war from the internal view of the Japanese government.

I highly recommend reading the entirety of the work, but the summary goes along the lines of this:

The Japanese knew they were going to lose the war. They knew the Soviets were going to enter the war with the European front at peace. The Japanese government was terrified of what a Soviet-occupied Japan would look like and they preferred an American occupation. The problem was how to surrender while saving face and hopefully keeping the imperial system intact. The Soviets would have established a communist satellite state like they had done in Europe, while the Truman administration was at least amenable to keeping the emperor in place for public peace. The Japanese code of honour meant surrendering at all was problematic, but the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki allowed the Japanese to a) surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could enter the war, and b) save public face amongst the population of Japan by pointing to an apocalyptic bombing and say “we have to surrender”.

This article is a fairly succinct summation of the revisionist argument.

This book by a Japanese historian is the long form.

EDIT: Since I was asked to be a bit more explicit about the context of these links, I'll summarize. The basic argument here is that the dropping of the atomic bombs and Japanese surrender coming so close together is, in a way, coincidental. Japanese cities had basically been flattened (see this link for a comparison of Japanese cities destroyed to similar-sized American ones. Sorry I can't find a better page on short notice) and many of the conventional attacks were just as destructive as the atomic ones.

The Japanese high command weren't idiots, although some of them were nationalist fanatics. They knew they were losing the war, and indeed always stood very little chance of winning. However, they were hoping that a deal mediated through the Soviets, with whom they had a non-aggression pact, would allow them to hold on to some of their colonial possessions. Remember they had ruled Korea for decades, and were accustomed to it being fully in their control. They didn't see why surrender should necessarily end that.

The Soviets ultimately decided to break their pact with the Japanese, though and attacked Manchuria (with many many atrocities committed against Japanese colonists, btw. Read Japan at War for some first person accounts.) Their massive war machine, having been done with Germany for months, could have been in Hokkaido in weeks, rather than the months it would have taken to mount the American invasion of Kysushu. The Japanese military had been fortifying Kyushu with its best veteran troops in anticipation of American landings there. They would have been completely rolled in the north and Tokyo would have fallen by December.

The argument is that it was the prospect of occupation by the hated Russians that drove the high command to surrender, not the atomic bombs.

NOOOOO!!!!!!!

Okay, that's out of my system. But I think that this is a poor example for /r/BadHistory simply because it isn't particularly BadHistory. Plenty of reputable historians have argued for the Soviets being the primary reason for Japan's Surrender, Hasegawa being the most famous one. While it's definitely not cut and dry, "The Soviets forced Japan to surrender" it's a completely reasonable position to take and IMO, makes more sense as the primary motivator for surrender than the A-Bomb.

That’s US education at its finest.

The public estimate used to justify the bombing after the war was 500,000 casualties, not lives. Strange how it’s become so inflated as people began to question the use of the bomb...

The Army did at one point used a worst case “strategic planning” estimate of 750,000 replacements needed to cover all types of casualties and soldiers rotating out. 135k deaths would have be in-line with other pacific theater operations. 300k Purple Hearts were ordered to cover everything through the end of the war. There is zero evidence to support the idea that the US was preparing for “well over a million” American deaths in an invasion without the atomic bomb.

Today, we know that the number used to justify the bombings and given to us post war might have been inflated by as much as ten times, as the records we have now show that the US Joint War Plans Committee wrote in June 1945 (a month before we had a testable-bomb) that they expected a Nov. 1 invasion date and “only” 40k American deaths — 75k casualties.

Roosevelt’s and Truman’s own advisors wanted to allow conditional surrender, as the “emperor clause” was a major barrier to Japan’s surrender. There’s evidence the bomb wouldn’t have been necessary if they would have allowed the emperor to remain, but Truman continued to refuse (fun fact, after the bombing we did allow him to remain anyway, despite refusing to do so before the bombing, partially because of concerns it would drive post-war Japan into bed with the soviets).

Truman’s entire negotiation tactics with the Soviets changed after the first successful bomb test, and he used the first bomb to force them into Japan (which, Japan’s own records showwas more influential in their surrender than the bombing of Hiroshima was).

We dropped bombs as a show of force, and killed 200,000+ Japanese non-combatants in doing so. Here’s a good book to help correct some of what we were taught in schools.

This article is about the same theory and historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy. I think it's considered a big deal because it's saying that neither the atomic bomb nor the conventional bombing that preceded it broke Japan's will, i.e. city-bombing doesn't break wills, i.e. military thinking and the political narrative of WWII has been wrong and needs to change, and leaderships basically don't care about population loss.... and thus, there is likely to be political unwillingness to accept such a theory in both the U.S. (the atomic bombs didn't do anything) and Japan (the government didn't really care that the people were being bombed to death).

Well, Russia was eyeballing some northern Japanese islands and playing games with the Japanese government; it was a mess.

I don't know the text books, but I highly highly recommend Racing the Enemy:

https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/dp/0674022416

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Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy is the source.

Hasegawa presents an international history of the end of the Pacific War and although the atomic bombings were important in bringing about Japan's surrender, Hasegawa posits that the USSR's entry into the war provided a bigger shock to the Japanese government compelling surrender. Before the USSR's entry, the Japanese government was divided between those wanting unconditional surrender and those wishing to surrender under the condition that they'd retain the Emperor.

The Japanese approached Stalin with an offer to mediate a settlement with the US and Stalin exploited this situation to his own ends, keeping Japanese hopes alive that peace could be mediated. Once the USSR entered the war though, Japanese hopes were shattered and those in the government advocating unconditional surrender were empowered. After the surrender, the US occupational force decided to retain the Emperor anyways in the interest of a speedier, more stable reconstruction.

Hasegawa's argument is a mix of synthesis and original work and is an excellent history. There are the more radical interpretations though that are ludicrous because they remove the act of the bombings out of the context of the war and mobilization (See Gar Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy). The fact is that the US leadership from Truman to the generals never considered not using the bombs. The bombs were developed to be used and FDR green-lighted the Manhattan Project because he feared the Axis would get the bomb first and use it. Once the bomb was tested, the US leadership knew it was a powerful weapon but they never conceived that it would be a long-term game changer in warfare. The total war was still going on; there was no debate about using them, Truman just gave the order.

>WARNING:LONG POST


>Whether they had an accurate appraisal of the situation or not, the only things that matter in determining what ended the war are the subjective reasons that Japanese leaders chose to surrender when and how they did. Whether the US made the right choice is a separate question.

>Using the diaries and records of the meetings among Japanese leaders, Hasegawa has conclusively demonstrated that the atomic bomb had less of an influence on the debates in Tokyo than the standard American narrative would suggest. These strongly suggest that Soviet entry into the war was the critical point that made fighting on untenable, and also that up until that point, they were still expecting to fight the Allies on Japanese soil, despite the use of the bombs.

>It’s important to realize that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not, at first, particularly novel experiences for Japan. The firebombing of Tokyo had a higher death toll (estimates from 80,000-200,000; 130,000 a commonly cited figure) than either in terms of people killed outright. The true horror of the atomic bombs did not become clear until weeks, months and years after the fact (For Hiroshima, roughly 70,000 people died in the initial blast, 100,000 by the end of the year, and over 200,000 in 5 years). While the new bomb did condense thousands of planes worth of destruction into a single bomb, the actual level of destruction was not higher at the time that the Japanese government was making the decision to surrender. Disease and deaths from radiation would later change the balance of destruction, but it is incorrect to assume that the Japanese command was aware of the delayed effects of atomic bombs.

>This is not to say that the bombs did not have an effect, because they undoubtedly did. They sped the decision to capitulate, even if the Soviet entry into the war was the deciding factor. The bomb was also influential in solidifying Hirohito's stance on surrender, and gave the peace faction some ammunition against the war faction.

Courtesy of /u/t-o-k-u-m-e-i.

Full comment here.

The point of this post is to dispel the myth that millions more Americans would have had to die if the bombs weren't used.

Many of those figures were exaggerated and fabricated after the war, as historians have known for around fifty years.

Even the pre-war figures were also based on faulty, often racist assumptions, about the unwavering tenacity and fanaticism of the Japanese population, in which they argued that much of the civilian population would either fight invaders with their bare hands, or commit suicide rather than be conquered.

Both left out the fact that eight straight years of war, and being completely cut off from their empire in the last year, the Japanese were only months away from being completely without the resources, gasoline/oil/rubber/steel etc... necessary to continue the war. A fact which was not unknown to us, nor does it mention that Japanese were seeking conditional surrender for months before we dropped the bomb.

Edit: For further reading on the topic, I would recommend John Dower's War without Mercy, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy, Gar Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy and The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb

>I remember reading about a (recent) book that attributed the end of WW2 in the Pacific to the Soviet involvement more so than the atomic bombs dropped upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I can't recall the title. Maybe someone on here will be able to help with that...

You're talking about the following:

http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/dp/0674022416/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319085719&sr=8-1

Although it doesn't fall into the category of a general history of the Eastern Front, it is an excellent monograph on the subject(s) it concentrates on.

There is an interesting theroy out there that suggests that the Japanese simply didn't surrender solely because of the atomic bombs, but were in fact much more affraid of the Soviets invading. A fellow redditor pointed this out to me after i inquired about the esatern front in WWII .http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/dp/0674022416/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319085719&sr=8-1
TL;DR theory that the japanese were going to surrender anyway in fear of Soviet invasion

Was waiting for someone to bring up Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Pretty cool that he is your prof.

He wrote a whole book on this specific issue: http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/dp/0674022416/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

It is impossible to resolve the question as to whether or not Truman could have got an unconditional surrender from the Japanese government without the atomic bombs. It's one of the greatest 'What ifs..?" in history. Efforts were made and he and his advisors didn't believe they could have so we have to take them at their word. Truman was too good a man to have used those bombs unless he had felt that there was no other option to bring the war to a quick end. Truman and his staff did not know, and could not have known, how the Japanese cabinet was viewing the situation.

But Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's 2006 book, Racing The Enemy, based on the most comprehensive examination of archival resources in Japan, argues that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific war that was decisive. The Soviets declared war on Japan just two days after the Hiroshima bombing. Most Americans look at that event and just see it as Stalin trying to score some glory and territorial gains on the back of America's efforts and never consider how that news played with the Japanese leadership.

Hasegawa's research argues that it was this Soviet entry into the war that was the final straw that broke the camel's back. Communism was something totally anathema to japan's extremely conservative leadership. Losing the war to the Soviets would have meant, with no doubt, an end to the Japanese way of life and a far, far more brutal occupation. Surrendering when they did allowed them to escape any level of Soviet occupation. And in the end the Soviets only occupied (and Putin's Russia still occupies) some small fishing islands off the northern coast of Hokkaido.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's book "Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan", to which the Counterpunch article refers, can be found here.

Seems relevant not only because today's August 6, but in light of the recent revelations about the US fabrications of the rationales for and progress of the wars in the Middle East.

You're welcome. My next step will be to read the book mentioned in the article.


I, too, am hopeful that scholarship in this area will expand in the near future.

That's a discredited theory that's not supported by the evidence. Gar Alperovitz is a crank - he wants the history to support his clear moral vision re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he twists whatever facts he needs to, and ignore every source he can, to do so. His theory was at best speculative in 1964, and disproven since.

(Psst, if Japan was "going to surrender anyway," why did the Big Six dead lock on a *conditional* surrender after the nukes dropped? Why was unprecedented intervention of Hirohito necessary?)

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A much better, and much more comprehensive, account of the end of the Pacific War, based on American, Russian, and Japanese sources (the latter two virtually ignored by Alperovitz) is Downfall by Frank.

https://www.amazon.com/Downfall-End-Imperial-Japanese-Empire/dp/0141001461

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If you only trust "revisionist" historians, they've also concluded that Gar Alperovitz's thesis is wrong. I believe this is the standard text for contemporary revisionists: https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/dp/0674022416

As I said above, this is a controversial issue, and there are many people who believe this would not have been the case.

Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that he did not believe it to be strategically necessary:
>my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

There is a good book on the factors that led to the surrender of Japan by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa which I recommend.

There is of course a lot of opposition to this thinking. This article comes to mind. To your point:
>"We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated," by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender.

The Japanese parliament did approve a civilian defense force called Kokumin Giyū Sentōtai with a theoretical strength of 280,000. They were extremely poorly armed, but were charged with the defense of the mainland in the event of an invasion. They were disbanded without incident after the surrender was formalized. It is worth noting that Germany gave similar orders for a total defense of the homeland in the final weeks of the war - which went nowhere due to the lack of supplies, and tapped out manpower.

I have complex feeling on the subject, but I think I do believe that nuclear weapons were not a necessary part of why there was no insurgency within Japan after the war - the declaration of surrender, and the emperor's address to the nation was. Whether the declaration of surrender could only be obtained with nuclear weapons is a slightly different issue.

The Japanese historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa made the most thorough research on the matter to date, including all manner of Japanese political records from that time. It's always been known among people who know WW2 history, but the Soviet intervention that really pushed the Japanese over the edge at least to a substantial degree. Having dozens of their cities bombed and firestormed by the US already with similar or more destruction before the atomic bombs didn't cause them to surrender anyways, which is more telling than anything else.

One article regarding his research: http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/

He also wrote a book called Racing the Enemy. At the very least, it's a far deeper critical analysis than other existing works on the matter and especially the lazily-repeated "The nukes saved millions of lives."

Also, think about it this way: Do you really think the US government would admit their Soviet rivals pushed Japan over the edge after using nuclear weapons? Do you also think the US would give their Soviet rivals any credit for surrender of Japan? The biggest (and false) argument that is made to defend the use of nuclear weapons is "It saved lots of lives." Once that goes out the door, there's nothing left.

> It was only the sheer certainty of systematic destruction of every major Japanese city by atomic bombings that got the Japanese to surrender.
>
> A conventional invasion, the next and only other option, would have killed millions of Japanese civilians, directly and indirectly.

It really wasn't.



America were too slow, and it could be argued that the soviet invasion of Manchuria was far more influential towards ending the war as the japanese government feared a russian invasion far more than nuclear weapons.


this book makes a fairly good case into how it was the entry of the Russians that became the deciding factor, not the bombs:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674022416

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II&ved=2ahUKEwjB6Ynr9sHlAhVtwcQBHTHVAmkQFjAaegQIBhAP&usg=AOvVaw0f-Zu4889XYPIL7_vqNYH0

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943&ved=2ahUKEwich7aD98HlAhVS0aYKHW02BgkQFjAUegQIBRAB&usg=AOvVaw1yx2CdhanuhqHxo-kYK6YV

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-K%25C3%25A9bir&ved=2ahUKEwjpvp7X98HlAhU54KYKHfD6DogQFjAcegQIBxAX&usg=AOvVaw1sKVt554Rvtv18gzd6_5_m

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany&ved=2ahUKEwjW5-P398HlAhXHwqYKHQ-FCAIQFjAJegQIBBAI&usg=AOvVaw0vEdSlpE5N1_b4jz0bsYUy

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans&ved=0ahUKEwjRk8eN-MHlAhUO06YKHURACOMQFgh5MA4&usg=AOvVaw2_y4sEZdcrOYMuwJ9ow6KC&cshid=1572368442040

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/dp/0674022416&ved=0ahUKEwjHn8PF-MHlAhUVxMQBHYZeA6UQFghbMAU&usg=AOvVaw0ZQqZOxoHohKuP9t0uRhdv