For the past year or so, the Washington Post has been running five-minute history lessons in the form of a feature that always begins “Five Myths About …”. A more honest head would be “Five Strawmen About …” A case in point—and one that, naturally, got under my skin—is a recent one by Gregg Herken, “Five Myths About the Atomic Bomb.”. Gregg is an emeritus professor of U.S. diplomatic history at the University of California and also the author of The Winning Weapon: the Atomic Bomb and the Cold War and Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller.
Gregg’s first “myth” is that The bomb ended the war. “The notion that the atomic bombs caused the Japanese surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, has been, for many Americans and virtually all U.S. history textbooks, the default understanding of how and why the war ended.” The problem—one of them—is that the link Gregg gives to back up his statement regarding “virtually all U.S. history textbooks” at teachinghistory.org The Atomic Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki doesn’t say what he claims it says. The page is about the use of the atomic bomb, not what ended the war, and it makes no claim about what you can find in “virtually all U.S. history textbooks.”
Gregg next tells us “The latest and best scholarship on the surrender, based on Japanese records, concludes that the Soviet Union’s unexpected entry into the war against Japan on Aug. 8 was probably an even greater shock to Tokyo than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima two days earlier.” But the link that he gives for this one, to a story by Gareth Cook, appearing in Boston.com on August 7, 2011, “Why did Japan surrender?”, focuses entirely on the work of one scholar, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who first advanced this argument in his 2005 study, Racing the Enemy. However, Cook also quotes Barton Bernstein, described by Cook as “professor of history emeritus at Stanford University [and] unofficial dean of American atomic bomb scholarship”, as saying “When you look through all the evidence, I think it is hard to weigh one or the other more heavily. [Hasegawa’s] analysis is well intentioned, but more fine-grained than the evidence comfortably allows.” And Bernstein must be pretty good, because Gregg quotes him too, regarding another “myth.”
Myth number 2 is a classic: The bomb saved half a million American lives. “As Stanford historian Barton Bernstein has noted, the U.S. Joint War Plans Committee predicted in mid-June 1945 that the invasion of Japan, set to begin Nov. 1, would result in 193,000 U.S. casualties, including 40,000 deaths.” There are, well, several problems with that statement. This estimate was given for the invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost large island in the chain, and the Tokyo “heartland” on Honshu, the largest island. It was not an estimate for the cost of forcing the Japanese surrender. In addition, there were a variety of other, larger estimates. Herbert Hoover warned incoming President Truman that an invasion could cost half a million lives. At the meeting where President Truman reviewed the report of the War Plans Committee, he heard verbal estimates that went much higher as well. All of this is discussed in detail in Chapter 9 of Richard Frank’s Downfall (1999), a thorough (to my mind), avowedly non-“revisionist” work.
Myth number 3: The only alternative to the bomb was an invasion of Japan. Not so, says Gregg. There were two alternatives: First, the U.S. could have given a demonstration of the bomb’s power. The only problem with this, as even Gregg admits, is that probably wouldn’t have worked.
Alternative number two is even simpler. The U.S. could have dropped its demand for unconditional surrender. “The United States knew from intercepted communications that the Japanese were most concerned that Emperor Hirohito not be treated as a war criminal. The ‘emperor clause’ was the final obstacle to Japan’s capitulation.” This is serious dissimulation. I’ve read the “intercepted communications,” often referred to as “Magic”—diplomatic communications that were decoded by the U.S. in “real time.” They were first published back in 1995 and are discussed in detail in Frank’s book. Saying what the Japanese were “most concerned” about does not describe a peace offer that they were actually willing to make. In fact there were strong factions, within the army in particular, who believed, up until the last, that if Japanese were willing to die in the millions, America’s will could be broken. The Japanese rejected the offer of peace that came out of the Potsdam Conference with scorn, and dithered endlessly before Hiroshima and the Russian assault, desperately forcing themselves to believe that Stalin could and would work out a deal for them, somehow not guessing the obvious, that Stalin wanted the absolute destruction of Japanese power. Even after Nagasaki, part of the Japanese leadership were unwilling to acknowledge the disaster they had brought on their country. Above all, Gregg is implicitly arguing, as many have before, that the U.S. had a moral duty to seek peace in a manner compliant with Japan’s imperial sensibilities. It did not. In fact, Japan’s emperor had a moral duty to worry less about himself and more about the terrible suffering inflicted on his people—and the even more terrible sufferings inflicted by his people on other nations—as the result of the stunningly incompetent leadership of the militarist fanatics who ruled Japan.
Myth number 4: The Japanese were warned before the bomb was dropped. This one is a bit of a quibble. They were not warned that the U.S. would drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. They were warned that they faced destruction from the air and, in fact, a notorious firebomb raid on Tokyo earlier in 1945 had killed around 90,000 people, a total similar to that reached in Hiroshima.
Myth number 5: The bomb was timed to gain a diplomatic advantage over Russia and proved a “master card” in early Cold War politics. This one is a bit of a canard. The only people who believe this are the “revisionists,” probably less than 1% of the U.S. population. How can something be a myth when no one believes it?
Endless controversy will swirl
The use of the atomic bomb was a terrible thing. It is human nature to wish that terrible things need not have happened. For this reason, scholars and autodidacts alike endlessly rehash the use of the bomb, disputing every possible fragment of evidence, looking for “proof” that things didn’t have to be the way they were, just as they rehash the causes of World War I, the failure of the western powers to stand up to Hitler at Munich, and their failure to save millions of Jews from Hitler’s death camps. But the Japanese leadership always had the power to end the war. The prospect of ruin did not move them. It was only when they experienced ruin that they found it to be intolerable.
