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The movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer has reopened the debate about the use of the atomic bomb. Of course, President Harry Truman made the decision. Conventional wisdom tells us that it was the only way to force Japan to surrender. The alternative, to invade Japan, would have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.
No one is against saving American lives. And no one is against victory. And besides, those who opposed the use of these weapons seemed, by most accounts, to have come from a pacifist anti-war left.
So, you will allow me to express some surprise to discover that many of America’s leading military commanders thought that we did not need to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. They believed that Japan had already been defeated and that we merely needed to negotiate a surrender.
So, I am not going to debate the situation as it may have presented itself at the time. I think it worth about emphasizzing that America’s commanding officers disagreed with the president’s decisions.
One Brian McGlinchey put it together on his Substack. I report, for example, the views of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower:
I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and voiced to [Secretary of War Stimson] 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. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’.
And, Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, said this:
The use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender….
And then we have the views of General Douglas MacArthur, who, surprisingly had not been consulted on the matter:
“When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb,” wrote journalist Norman Cousins, “I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted…He saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”
McGinley suggests that Japan would have surrendered if Harry Truman had allowed them to retain their emperor. Since Truman refused, a face saving surrender became impossible.
Other commentators have argued, persuasively, that Truman had no other choice. See this report from three members of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. Via Maggie's Farm.
I will not argue the two sides. I am not competent to do so. But, I am certainly intrigued by the fact that America’s leading military commanders thought that it was not necessary to drop the bomb. And I am puzzled that Gen. MacArthur was not consulted.
Of course, politics being what it is, historians and the media elite have happily to defend a Democratic president, one who, after all, led his troops to victory.
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1 comment:
As with everything in life, the truth is multi-factorial and people develop contrary opinions about the same issue, usually because of two things. First, either a lack of or a misperception of facts; second, interpretation of facts based on philosophical positions. Those who opposed the dropping of the A bomb fall into these two camps, either failing to have all the facts or philosophically opposing the decision to use a weapon of unprecedented destructive capacity. The first camp came to its decision without a full understanding the adamantine opposition to surrender held by a significant number of the Japanese military, which prevented any possibility of "surrender." (That such was the prevailing opinion in the military circles was demonstrated by the number of officers who committed seppuku rather than surrendering.) The latter group was simply opposed to the use of the bomb as a philosophical matter, although they did not have such strongly held opposition to the use of incendiary bombing of population centers, such as the March, 1945 raid on Tokyo that caused the death of about a hundred thousand Japanese, only slightly less than the Hiroshima event and arguably in an even more horrifying fashion, viz., burning to death rather than being instantaneously vaporized. Nor did they shrink back from the prospect of invasion of the Home Islands, estimated to cause the deaths of multiple millions of Japanese, civilian and military and perhaps as many as a million American casualties. The contention that Japan was "ready to surrender" before the bombings is largely a myth, based on speculation and conjecture rather than accurate perception of the realities of the time.
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