Hiroshima: Historians Reassess
by Gar Alperovitz
Foreign Policy (Summer 1995) No. 99: 15-34.
Copyright 1995 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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Reexamining the Record

Many more documentary finds support the view that top U.S. officials, including Truman, understood that use of the bomb was not required to end the war before an invasion. However, as Robert Messer observed in the August 1985 issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the implications of Truman's diary and letters alone

"for the orthodox defense of the bomb's use are devastating: if Soviet entry alone would end the war before an invasion of Japan, the use of atomic bombs cannot be justified as the only alternative to that invasion. This does not mean, of course, that having the bomb was not useful. But it does mean that for Truman the end of the war seemed at hand; the issue was no longer when the war would end, but how and on whose terms. If he believed that the war would end with Soviet entry in mid-August, then he must have realized that if the bombs were not used before that date they might well not be used at all."

Minimally, the President's contemporaneous diary entries, together with his letters to his wife, raise fundamental questions about Truman's subsequent claims that the atomic bomb was used because it was the only way to avoid "a quarter million," "a half million" or "millions" of casualties.

The range of opinion even among expert defenders Truman's decision is extraordinarily suggestive. For instance, McGeorge Bundy--who helped Stimson write a classic 1947 defense of the bombing, "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb" in Harper's Magazine--now holds that the necessity of bombing Hiroshima was "debateable," and the bombing of Nagasaki was "unnecessary." In a MacNeil/Lehrer interview on the 40th Anniversary of the bombing, Bundy went so far as to state that he was "not disposed to criticize the use of . . . the bomb to help to end the war, but it does seem to me, looking back on it, that there were opportunities for communication and warning available to the United States government which were not completely thought through by our government at that time." He added:

"In July and early August, 1945, the United States government knew three things that the Japanese government did not. One was that the bomb was coming into existence, had been successfully tested. One was that the United States government was prepared to allow the emperor to remain on his throne in Japan, and the third was that the Russians were coming into the war. And the question, it seems to me, that was not fully studied, fully presented to President Truman, was whether warning of the bomb and assurance on the emperor could not have been combined in a fashion which would have produced Japanese surrender without the use of the bomb on a large city, with all of the human consequences that followed."

Or consider the views of the late historian Herbert Feis, who was for decades the voice of orthodox historical opinion on the subject and a friend of Stimson's as well as an adviser to three World War II-era Cabinet Secretaries. It is rarely noted that Feis recognized--and emphasized--that by July 1945 there was a very good chance the war could have been ended without dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the United States combined even the mere threat of a Soviet attack with assurances for the emperor. He wrote in his 1961 work Japan Subdued: The Atomic Bomb and the End of the War in the Pacific: "I think it may be concluded that . . . the fighting would have continued into July at the least, unless . . . the American and Soviet governments together had let it be known that unless Japan laid down its arms at once, the Soviet Union was going to enter the war. That, along with a promise to spare the Emperor, might well have made an earlier bid for surrender effective."

Feis' only reservation was that Stalin might not have wanted to signal his willingness to join the war against Japan at this time, a rather odd idea that many documents now available show to be illusory. In addition, if a mere announcement of Soviet intentions might have forced a surrender, as the JIC pointed out, the reality of the attack would have been even more powerful.

Related to this is the fact that so many World War II military leaders are on record as stating that the bomb was not needed. Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, reported in his 1963 Mandate for Change that he had the following reaction when Secretary of War Stimson informed him the atomic bomb would be used:

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him 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 measure to save American lives."

Historian Stephen Ambrose notes in his biography of Eisenhower that he also clearly stated that he personally urged Truman not to use the atomic bombs. Eisenhower's opinion in other public statements in the early 1960's was identical: "Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face.". . .It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

Admiral William Leahy, President Truman's chief of staff and the top official who presided over meetings of both the JCS and the U.S.-U.K. Combined Chiefs of Staff, also minced few words in his 1950 memoirs I Was There: "The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

The Army Air Forces commander, General Henry "Hap" Arnold, put it this way in his 1949 Global Mission: "It always appeared to us that atomic bomb or no atomic bomb the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." Britain's General Ismay said in his memoirs that his initial reaction on hearing of the successful atomic test was one of "revulsion." He had previously observed: "for some time past it had been firmly fixed in my mind that the Japanese were tottering. . . ."

The strong language used by high-level military figures often comes as a shock to those not familiar with the documents, memoirs, and diaries now available. Defenders of the decision sometimes suggest that such views represent only after-the-fact judgments, or are the result of interservice rivalry. However, in view of the traditional unwillingness of uniformed military officers to criticize their civilian superiors--and also the extraordinary importance of the historic issue--it is difficult to explain so many statements, made with such force, on such grounds alone.

All of these assessments also bear on the question of the number of lives that might possibly have been lost if the atomic bombs had not been used.

Over the last decade, scholars of very different political orientations, including Barton Bernstein, Rufus Miles, Jr., and John Ray Skates, have all separately examined World War II U.S. military planning documents on this subject. These documents indicate that if an initial November 1945 Kyushu landing had gone forward, estimates of the number of lives that would have been lost (and therefore possibly saved by use of the atomic bombs) were in the range of 20,000 to 26,000. In the unlikely event a subsequent full-scale invasion had been mounted in 1946, the maximum estimate found in such documents was 46,000.

Even these numbers, however, confuse the central issue: If the war could have been ended by clarifying the terms of surrender and/or allowing the shock of the Russian attack to set in, then no lives would have been lost in an invasion. Fighting was minimal in August 1945 as both sides regrouped, and the most that may be said is that the atomic bombs might have saved the lives that would have been lost in the time required to arrange final surrender terms with Japan. That saving lives was not the highest priority, however, seems obvious from the choices made in July: If the United States really wished to end the war as quickly and surely as possible--and to save as many lives as possible--then as Marshall had pointed out as early as June, the full force of the Russian shock plus assurances for the Emperor could not be left out of the equation.

Moreover, if we accept Stimson's subsequent judgment that "history might find" that the decision to delay assurances for the Emperor "had prolonged the war," then, as historian Martin Sherwin noted in the October 10, 1981, Nation, the atomic bomb may well have cost lives. Why? Lives were lost during the roughly two-month delay in clarifying the surrender terms. Many historians believe the delay was caused by the decision to wait for the atomic test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, and then, the bombs' use on Japan in early August. Several thousand American soldiers and sailors died between Grew's initial May 28 proposal to clarify the "unconditional" terms and the final surrender on August 14.

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