Thursday August 6th, is the anniversary of the use of an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Why did the USA use an atomic bomb against Japan? Was it really “necessary”? Did it end World War 2? Many Americans still think that using atom bombs on Japan in 1945 was justified, even if was regrettable, because it ended the war and thus saved American lives. For decades, the official line supporting the morality and lawfulness of the Hiroshima bombing has been that it saved up to one million US lives (and many Japanese lives) by ending the Pacific War without an invasion of the Japanese home islands. Historians now know that this is a myth, and that it was known not to be true at the time by President Truman and his advisors. The evidence is strong that Truman wanted to use the Bomb before the war ended. Using the Bomb was intended to scare the Russians. Also, he wanted to end the war before the Russians joined the war; this was scheduled for mid-August. Refusing to budge on the demand for “unconditional surrender” prolonged the war until the Bomb was ready. Reading Japanese codes and Japanese messages to the USSR, the Americans in 1945 knew that Japan would surrender if Russia, which had a neutrality treaty with Japan, were to break it and declare war on Japan. Unknown to Japan, at the Yalta Conference in early 1945 Russia had agreed to declare war Japan three months after the German surrender in Europe (May 8, 1945). In July, at the conference in Potsdam attended by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, Stalin repeated his promise. Thus the United States expected Russia to declare war in mid-August, and for Japan to surrender soon after. There was no need to consider using the atom bomb, which was not even tested until July 16th, in the military planning against Japan. An “invasion of the Japanese ‘home islands’” would never be necessary, the US military leaders understood, because the war would be over in August 1945, once Russia attacked. President Truman also said this many times. Going further, it appears that Truman and his close advisers rejected the possibility of a Japanese surrender in the late spring, keeping the war going so that the atomic bomb, if tested successfully, could be used. The strategy of Truman and his inner circle was to prolong the war until the atomic bomb was ready, and then to use it before Russia entered the war and Japan surrendered. Alperowitz amplified the importance of using the bomb on US diplomacy with the Soviets in the mid-1960s in his book Atomic Diplomacy, when the diaries of Secretary of War Henry Stimson first became available. Later publication of relevant documents, including the Soviet and Japanese archives used by Professor Hasegawa, later painted the broader picture. The thought that ending the war was postponed from April 1945, when it was clear that the Japanese were looking to surrender if the status/life of the Emperor could be preserved, is almost too horrible to contemplate. The period from April to August 1945 included the battle of Okinawa, during which 12,500 US soldiers were killed and 38,000 wounded. As for the Japanese, about 100,000 soldiers were killed in Okinawa, and anywhere from 50,000 to 150,000 civilians died also. During the same period, US firebombing of 66 Japanese cities continued, with an estimated 240,000 to 300,000 civilians killed. And of course there were the casualties of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August: by the end of August the death toll was 140,000, with thousands more dying in the months and years afterward from radiation poisoning. Thus the number of deaths, soldiers and civilians, US and Japanese, resulting from the extension of the US war against Japan from April 1945 to August 1945 probably approaches one million.
|
