Reddit reviews The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
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Used Book in Good Condition
I'll chime in. To be honest, I’m surprised that contributors here are so willing to give Truman the benefit of the doubt regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I've become much more critical of his decision as I learned more about it.
So you can get a sense of my viewpoint, I am also left-wing though I find my eyes rolling out of my head about five minutes into most Young Turks video. I am not a historian or expert by any means, but I am currently reading a book relevant to this discussion: The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: The Architecture of an American Myth by Gar Alperovitz. Going into the work I was of the mindset that the nuclear bombings were militarily justified and motivated solely for the purpose of ending the war. I am no longer convinced of this.
I would encourage you to read more broadly on the subject and above all try not to be dismissive of the opposing point of view. No less a historian than Stephen Ambrose wrote that "For my part I've gone back and forth on the A-bomb decision so many times I can't have much confidence in hard conclusions" (Personal note to Alperovitz - Jan. 28, 1993) [11]. I'll do my best to explain what I find so compelling about this book (which, it must be said, relies heavily on historical documentation such as meeting minutes, cables, diary entries, and other primary sources) .
[All page citations are presented in brackets. Page numbers are accurate to the 1995 first edition]
You wrote that Japan had been militarily defeated by summer 1945 but it is erroneous to assume the Japanese government would have behaved exactly as Germany’s had in January ’45. The two countries were in very different situations. US Secretary of War Henry Stimson provided the following appraisal to President Truman on July 2, two weeks after the fall of Okinawa and a little over a month before Hiroshima:
> We have the following enormously favorable factors on our side – factors much weightier than those we had against Germany:
> Japan has no allies.
> Her navy is nearly destroyed and she is vulnerable to a surface and underwater
blockade which can deprive her of food and supplies for her population.
> She is terribly vulnerable to our concentrated air attack upon her crowded cities, industrial and food resources.
> She has against her not only the Anglo-American forces but the rising forces of China and the ominous threat of Russia.
> We have inexhaustible and untouched industrial resources to bring to bear against her diminishing potential. [21]
Stimson’s point regarding the threat of Russian entry in the war against Japan cannot be emphasized enough. It is important to be reminded that by this point the United States had cracked Japan’s coded transmissions. This allowed the Allies to read top secret diplomatic cables and military reports between Japanese officials.
The Japanese Ambassador to Russia, Naotake Sato, was a notable source of information to the Allies. One intercepted cable he sent to Tokyo on June 11, 1945 recognized the existential threat posed by Russia:
> If Russia by some chance should suddenly decide to take advantage of our weakness and intervene against us with force of arms, we would be in a completely hopeless situation. It is clear as day that the Imperial Army in Manchukuo would be completely unable to oppose the Red Army which has just won a great victory and is superior to us on all points...
Should the Red Army join forces with the Americans Sato wrote that “the disparity and strength between the two sides would indeed be so great that there would be no hope at all of saving the Empire.”
> I think that we would have no choice but to reach the decision quickly and, resolving to eat dirt and put up with all sacrifices, fly into her arms in order to save our national structure. [122]
The War Department’s Intelligence division offered the following “Estimate of the Enemy Situation” on June 30:
> It is believed that many Japanese now consider defeat to be probable. The increasing effects of sea blockade and the cumulative devastation wrought by strategic bombing should make this realization increasingly general. The entry of the Soviet Union into the war would finally convince the Japanese of the inevitability of complete defeat.” [124]
Japan was in a more desperate situation than Germany and their leadership knew it. Moreover, the Allies knew that they knew it. Below is a report submitted to the Combined Chiefs of Staff from the same week Stimson wrote his report to Truman:
> The Japanese ruling groups are aware of the desperate military situation…
> We believe that a considerable portion of the Japanese population now consider absolute military defeat to be probably. The increasing effects of sea blockade and the cumulative devastation wrought by strategic bombing, which has already rendered millions homeless and has destroyed from 25% to 50% of the builtup area of Japan’s most important cities, should make this realization increasingly general. [22]
On July 12, while Truman was en route to Potsdam, the US intercepted the following cable from Foreign Minister Togo to Japan’s Ambassador to Sato. The cable read as follows:
> We are now secretly giving consideration to the termination of the war because of the pressing situation which confronts Japan both at home and abroad.
The letter confirmed it was sent with the authority of Emperor Hirohito itself – an unprecedented development:
> His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated.
The cable also laid out the one caveat for Japan, they would not accept the terms of unconditional surrender:
> so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on with all its strength for the honor and existence of the Motherland. [233]
(I cannot find the location in the text but there were many intelligence reports and analyses that suggested a simple guarantee that the Emperor would survive as an individual and an institution was all the terms needed by Japan. Apologies for not locating a definitive citation)
After digesting this cable the Pacific Strategic Intelligence Section wrote the following summary of the situation:
> Although the above [intercepted cable] traffic does not reveal definitively whether or not the Japanese Chiefs of Staff participated with the Foreign Office in “secretly giveing consideration to termination of the war”, the fact that the move is stated to be an expression of “the Emperor’s will”, would appear to be of deep significance. [234]
Even far into Eisenhower’s presidency, he remained attuned to the significance of Togo’s cable. The following notes were written by historian Herbert Feis in 1960 during an interview with President Eisenhower:
> The President said that his first quick thought was to the effect that he hoped we would not have to use this new awesome weapon, since Japan was so nearly beaten then. This view of the prospect he had in part derived from the intercepts of messages between the Japanese government in Tokyo and its Ambassador in Moscow. [236]
All this suggests that Japan was on the brink of capitulation and that the Soviet Union’s declaration of war would push Japan into surrender. In his own memoirs from 1955 Truman wrote tellingly of why he worked so hard to secure Russian involvement during Potsdam:
> It the test [of the atomic] should fail, then it would be even more important to us to bring about a surrender before we had to make a physical conquest of Japan. [124]
If the nuclear bombings were truly a military necessary to prevent the Kyushu invasion, it is odd of Truman to suggest that there was a third option open to him besides Operation Downfall and Little Boy/Fat Man.
I’ll finish with my general thoughts and less-informed speculation. Apologies but this section will contain no specific quotes or citations due to me being tired/not having finished the damn book yet. The nuclear bombings of Japan were not rooted in military necessity. While Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the immediate goal of bringing Japan to surrender, there were other means at the disposal of the Allies to accomplish this end(namely Russian entry into the war and a guarantee of the survival of the Chrysanthemum Throne, a concession Japan was granted anyways).
Why insist on using the weapons then? The United States ultimately wanted to prevent the Soviet Union from establishing a strong military presence in Japan’s sphere of influence while simultaneously establishing itself as the pre-eminent world power in the new United Nations paradigm. The US was already in the midst of rapidly securing uranium deposits worldwide – a clear sign that Washington desperately wanted a monopoly on nuclear power.
The atomic bombings were not then purely military acts, I believe the historical record indicates they were also politically motivated. How then can we continue to justify the deaths of the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to say nothing of the suffering endured by the Hibakusha? While the political motivations of Truman may have been noble – his nation ascendant as the sole superpower with possession of the sole superweapon – those lofty goals and good intentions turned to ash barely four years later with the detonation of the first Soviet nuclear weapon.
I’ll end by encouraging any skeptics of my argument to please read The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb if they want a thoroughly researched counter-point to their own beliefs regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Thanks! I hope this doesn't suck.
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.
It depends on how you view dropping the bomb and what it accomplished. My sources here are Alperovitz's book examining the decision to drop the bomb. Worth checking out the wikipedia page as well but it's nowhere as interesting as the book.
But the 20th century changed war in a way that Clausewitz might not have expected, it introduced total war. A slugfest to the end where every part of every country is mobilized to the war effort. Civilians are as much part of the war effort as everyone else. We're no longer talking two professional armies on a field settling things, but a huge industrial enterprise dedicated to protracted multi-year multi-theater wars. This is why strategic bombing was ok for example.
In this view the atomic bombs weren't different. They were a means to stop by way by attacking a fundamental resource of the war: the civilians that produce things. Both sides were ok with this and Japan also attacked civilians. In this way it's not terrorism, it's just total war. The total numbers are higher at about 350,000 Japanese civilians killed in strategic bombing, about 3 times as many as died due to the atomic bombs.
German officials and generals credit the allied strategic bombing offensive with crippling their ability to continue the war and leading to a much earlier end. Donitz, who was in charge of the German navy and briefly replaced Hitler at the end of the war, even thought that the battle in the Atlantic might have gone a different way if it wasn't for strategic bombing. The actual impact on the war has been debated for a long time but it's clear that it was significant but not decisive. A lot more people would have died without it.
At one point the Joint Chiefs estimated that 1.6 million US soldiers would be injured and nearly 400,000 would die. Truman says that he was told that around 250,000 to 1 million US soldiers would die. You have to remember that the US had just finished with Okinawa and that was insanely bloody. It went far longer than expected and far more soldiers died than expected. About 20k US soldiers died, around 100k Japanese soldiers died (that is 100% of the soldiers died!), and about 40-50% of the population died. The Japanese ordered all civilians to commit suicide rather than be caught and unable to fight back.
The home islands had 4 million Japanese soldiers, 31 million civilian conscripts. If it would shape out to be like Okinawa it would be the biggest blood bath in history. "Only" 8 million civilians and 10 million soldiers died in all of WW1! Japanese propaganda had already started trying to convince people that everyone should die on the home islands if it came to it with a propaganda campaign called "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" If the home island invasion was similar, and it would likely not be so this overstates matters, it could lead to more deaths than WW1!
The numbers floating around were so huge that the US made 1.5 million Purple Hearts preparing for the invasion.. To this day no new Purple Hearts have been made. Most of the medals made were lost, stolen, and a much smaller number were awarded during the war, only about 500,000 of those remained. Today, despite 80 years of military action, there still exist 120,000 Purple Hearts and that's what soldiers get from the stock made for Operation Downfall. That's how serious this was.
It's not clear the Japanese would have given up even with Operation Downfall! There was an idea at the time that they would fight to the bitter end and the US would be involved in a mass slaughter of civilians. That would have been far worse but even the optimistic numbers for Downfall involve far far fewer casulaties than the atomic bombs.
So you can see that technically it's probably not terrorism, that total war means you can't divide military from civilian affairs and that no side did this, that it was an accepted strategy by all sides to do strategic bombing against populations, that the alternative might have been far far worse, and that there was a certain urgency to the matter because civilians elsewhere in the world were dying due to the Japanese at immense scales (far higher numbers than died to the bombs).
Now, this isn't without some debate. People accept the facts above but there are many other points one can make. For example, the Japanese had been putting out peace feelers for quite a while and their main reservation was preserving the Emperor. Some talk of a peace went back to 1944 but by early 1945 the emperor was the only sticking point. Truman didn't want this for one reason or another, the historical record is very unclear and muddled about why he didn't end the war earlier on this condition. Particularly because it's clear he didn't want to get rid of the emperor. There is some speculation that it was clear to everyone that the USSR was going to be an enemy and that this was part of the machinations around who would have influence where. The effect of the bombs on people's thinking is unclear, even in Japan. Some Japanese historians think the entry of the USSR into the war was the decisive factor and that the bombs played no role, while others think that the emperor was moved to act because of this new weapon.
We'll probably never know what effect it had in reality so the debate is unlikely to ever be settled, but it is complicated and nuanced.
A week ago I would have said the same thing as you, but recent scholarship does not support even the idea that the people at the time thought it was necessary.
On Monday I listened to this great lecture by Gar Alperovitz based on his book The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. He goes through all of the military reports and journals of the people involved.
The military didn't think it was necessary (particularly Eisenhower). The British didn't think was necessary. The political staff didn't think it was necessary, except for Truman's Secretary of War Henry Stimson who had enormous influence over Truman because Stimson was his former patron in the Senate.
> He was the only top government official who tried to predict the meaning of the atomic age—he envisioned a new era in human affairs. For a half century he had worked to inject order, science, and moralism into matters of law, of state, and of diplomacy. His views had seemed outdated in the age of total warfare, but now he held what he called "the royal straight flush." The impact of the atom, he foresaw, would go far beyond military concerns to encompass diplomacy and world affairs, as well as business, economics and science. Above all, said Stimson, this "most terrible weapon ever known in human history" opened up "the opportunity to bring the world into a pattern in which the peace of the world and our civilization can be saved." (Wikipedia)
What struck me about Alperovitz's talk was the casualty figures. The realistic casualty figures were 0 (that's right, zero) because the Japanese were dying to surrender. The estimated casualties if an invasion were necessary were about 45,000, because they had no fighting capacity left. The estimate of 500 thousand to 1 million were only mentioned after the fact to justify was was basically a war crime.
These cities had no industrial capacity. They were filled with women, children, the elderly, and the injured. The bomb was only dropped to scare the Russians and set up the stage for the Cold War.
Alperovitz is talking about his book. Zinn about his book. I'm not trying to sell you stuff, or convince you to read the whole thing. But they aren't just pulling stuff out willy nilly. They are respected historians. Here is a link to an excerpt from Zinn's book.
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
There's one book you need to read, by Gar Alperovitz. It explains much of the reasons for dropping the bombs.
Just for reference: https://www.amazon.com/Decision-Use-Atomic-Bomb/dp/067976285X
Yes. Here is an overview of the word that was mistranslated. Here is an NY Times article on the subject. Here is the book the artical was referencing.
If I remembered my college history Textbook's name I'd source that to you as well because there was a whole chapter on this... Because it's basically the biggest fuckup in history. And it's all thanks to the fact that Japanese is a highly contextual language.
A simple google search will give you thousands of sources but the seminal work is this acclaimed book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/067976285X/ref=redir_mdp_mobile?qid=1239874025&ref_=sr_1_3&s=books&sr=1-3
Japan tried to surrender since february!
>resulting in MILLIONS of deaths.
This statistic is a tall tale made up after the war to justify the use of the atomic bomb. Do me a favor, and read The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb by historian Gal Alperovitz. After doing so, you won't believe all of the lies you were taught in junior high.
And if you want a not-so-quick reference, dig into Gar Alperovitz's bombshell of a book. Long, but well worth the read. A very thorough analysis arguing AGAINST the "saving lives" theory.
Ok well first you can start with the US Strategic Bombing Survey. It's public record. I linked you to a mirror but here's a pdf from a .mil source: http://web.archive.org/web/20080528051903/http://aupress.au.af.mil/Books/USSBS/USSBS.pdf
Key quotes:
"Sixty-four percent of the population stated that they had reached a point prior to surrender where they felt personally unable to go on with the war."
"The timing of the Potsdam Conference interfered with a plan to send Prince Konoye to Moscow as aemissary with instructions from the cabinet to negotiate for peace on terms less than unconditional surrender, but with private instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price. Although the Supreme War Direction Council, in its deliberations on the Potsdam Declaration, was agreed on the advisability of ending the war, three of its members, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and the Navy Minister, were prepared to accept unconditional surrender, while the other three, the Army Minister, and the Chiefs of Staff of both services, favored continued resistance unless certain mitigating conditions were obtained."
"By 1944, the average per capita caloric intake had declined to approximately 1,900 calories.By the summer of 1945 itwas about 1,680 calories per capita.Coal miners and heavy industrial workers
received higher-than-average rations, the remaining populace, less. The average diet suffered even more drastically from reductions in fats, vitamins and minerals required for balance and adversely affected rates of recovery and mortality from disease and bomb injuries."
Second, you can read the following documents on your own time: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/index.php
and
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/hiroshim.htm
Particularly of interest are the notes of the targeting committee:
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/4.pdf
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/9.pdf
http://www.dannen.com/decision/targets.html
If you want an overall take on the war, you're free to read this, for starters (although I disagree with him about some major points, he's got the basic chronology): http://www.amazon.com/Decision-Use-Atomic-Bomb/dp/067976285X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1426968243&sr=8-3&keywords=gar+alperovitz
The point was that Japan would have surrendered before the US invasion. The US invasion was. not. going. to. happen. There was no tradeoff between US deaths and Japanese civilians because there would not have been an invasion.
Moreover, US policymakers didn't care about the calculations. If you read through the various memos and Truman's diary entries it's clear that no one, not even once, ever mentions any concern for Japanese civilian casualties, tries to quantify that number, or even speculates on how much it might be. They simply did not care and to me having our war chiefs indiscriminately and without care kill hundreds of thousands of civilians is totally unacceptable.
I'm sorry that real history reads like Comic Sans to you but the truth is the truth.
It is truly sad to see somebody still making these arguments in favor of what--you really need to remind yourself--was the conscious decision to burn a quarter of a MILLION civilians alive with two bombs. To say nothing of the many who went on to die of cancer or had their lives cut short or crippled in other ways. Again, a quarter of a million people. Or maybe more graphically, burning 50,000 schoolchildren alive.
Most people killed in the bombings were women, kids, old people, Korean slaves, prisoners, etc.
You seem to think there is something wrong with "revisionist" history, but of course history is continually revised, as we learn more about the flaws in our narratives about the past and try to improve them. If you are interested in reading a counter-narrative to the official American justifications for the disgusting moral outrage they did in 1945, I recommend this one, but there are plenty. Sure, it may have saved some American troops (in the event that a Home Islands invasion actually proved necessary), but the reality is that the war was all but over when the bombs were dropped.
The Japanese were already if I recall, tendering surrender offers; they just weren't 'unconditional' yet; things like wanting to keep their ceremonial emperor...
The bombs were dropped because (a) the Japanese were 'subhuman apes' so it didn't matter. (b) Because the Manhattan project had been a big investment and this was the last chance to use them. (c) to intimidate the Russians who wanted to take large pieces of China and Japan for themselves, as they did in Eastern Europe.
I do not have a poor understanding of history, and my understanding of 'military science' is that in democracies it is subservient to civilian decision making.