The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki - Research Paper Example

?The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki in Historical Perspective The decision by President Harry S. Truman to use an atomic bomb on the Japanese of Hiroshima and then again on Nagasaki is today seen as one of the more controversial executive orders in twentieth century American history. The Hiroshima bombing of August 6, 1945 resulted in the death of some 140,000 people and the subsequent August 9 bombing of Nagasaki killed some 80,000.1 They were and are the two single greatest and most destructive acts of war ever committed by one nation against another. It is the legacy of that decision which since 1945 has come to have a variety of interpretations among both laymen and scholars alike. Despite the ensuing controversy, the bombing of Nagasaki was both necessary and militarily expedient. Shortly after the Hiroshima bombing President Truman addressed the American people regarding his decision and the implications it and nuclear weapons would have for the future of the country and the world. …It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.2 The President in no uncertain terms sought to justify his decision as one that would prevent the costly use of manpower needed to carry out an amphibious invasion of Japan. This comes as little surprise given that by 1945 some “7,000 American families had already sacrificed two or more of their boys for freedom.”3 Many Americans had grown tired of the war, then in its fourth year. Truman made it clear that his decision stemmed from the sole desire to utterly destroy and annihilate Japan’s war-making capacity and shock that country into surrender. The decision to bomb Nagasaki therefore was a pragmatic one. Secretary of War at the time, Henry L. Stimson, played a major role in the decision to use the bomb on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A recent biography of Stimson by Prof. Sean L. Malloy has claimed that Stimson took part in the most significant foreign policy decision of the twentieth century: “to use nuclear weapons against Japan and as a diplomatic tool against the Soviet Union.”4 Revisionist historians have long sought to claim that the use of the bomb was to intimidate the USSR and not due to real military needs. Many historians today look to Truman and Stimson as being the two biggest factors in the decision to use the bomb. They assert the president’s role by virtue of his office and Stimson’s role by virtue of his political influence with the president. Stimson supported both Truman’s reasoning and his decision. The fact that he saw the practical effects of the bomb for diplomatic and political ends after the war is not surprising. Given that the post-war world was shaping up to be one dominated by the US, a weakened Britain, and a war-ready and war-ravaged Soviet Union, men like Stimson (who had far more foreign policy experience than Truman) were well aware of the implications of atomic weaponry. And yet the war in the Pacific Theatre had been an especially sanguine one. This is not to say that the European Theatre was nothing to fret about, after all death and mayhem are, in the end, death and mayhem. Many accounts of American soldiers who fought in both Europe and the Pacific often detail the outright perseverance, refusal to surrender, fight-til-death mentality of the Japanese as being somehow more pronounced than in other armies’ soldiers. Japanese tenacity was well demonstrated and DOWNFALL (the code name for an invasion of the Japan) assumed a death toll of at least 500,000 and as much as 1 million.5 The unanimity of Japanese defense commanders is striking. Navy and air commanders presided over mere remnants of their forces, but the Japanese spirit, and their suicide devices, still gave them hope. The army, short as it was of fuel, was almost manic because of its powerful defense of Okinawa…Pride and Prejudice would mitigate against confessions of weakness.6 The catastrophically high casualties that American forces had suffered after each tedious landing and invasion of the various islands and archipelagoes of the Pacific were well-known on the home front where the casualty lists were as long as they were heart-wrenching. The mainstream historian Robert Newman wrote that “[t]he preponderance of evidence shows that at the time of decision the Truman administration believed, with good reason, that invasion plans threatened an unacceptable loss of life, to Japanese as much as to Americans.”7 Winston Churchill “declared that the atomic bombings had saved well over 1,200,000 Allied lives, including about a million American lives.” Revisionist historians point to Truman and the various casualty claims he made in speeches and writings. During Truman’s years in the White House, the president usually placed the number at about a quarter of a million lives, and occasionally at only 200,000. But after leaving the White House, he began raising this number. His memoir writers stated in their first draft, ‘half a million casualties with at least 300,000 dead.’ But by the time Truman’s book came out in 1955, they had increased the number to ‘half a million American lives’ saved and cited George C. Marshall, wartime army chief of staff, as having given that estimate to Truman shortly before Hiroshima. That is the number that Truman often used publicly in his post-presidential years.8 The fact that Truman’s own publicly voiced claims regarding the casualty estimates varied so much lends some credence to the revisionist camp. As time passed and he (and the world) came to recognize the enormity of the loss of life at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it stands that he wanted the world to know what the alternative of bombing was: the immeasurable deaths of American soldiers. At the same time to assert that an invasion would not have been catastrophic for the Allied soldiers involved is not one made in good faith. The bomb was the ultimate decision. Trying to prove what would have happened otherwise becomes an impossible exercise since doing so constitutes an attempt to prove a negative and is thus a logical fallacy. The claim that Japan was very soon to surrender and thus the use of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki was unnecessary and even vindictive, is one which encounters serious resistance when measured by the available facts. The United States government of Truman had long maintained that the only possibility for peace with Japan short of outright annihilation was unconditional surrender. This later became modified to allow for the Japanese Emperor to remain on the throne. “Byrnes [a close presidential adviser] continually stressed to Truman that abandonment of unconditional surrender would be politically costly, and…that modification would simply [be seen] as a sign of American fatigue and a reason to hold out…”9 It is possible then that when Truman decided on the bomb, political realities influenced him. But that is not enough in itself to support the revisionist claim which simple intuition can refute. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945. The destruction and power of the new weapon was immediately understandable to the Japanese authorities. And yet they did not surrender. It was not until the August 9 bombing of Nagasaki that the Japanese government offered its conditional surrender. If surrender had for some time been its intent, the Japanese government would surely have surrendered immediately after Hiroshima. The fact that it held out for another 3 days demonstrates that its policy was in fact to endure at all costs and was only changed after two such earth-shattering bombings provided the needed incentive to do so. The Nagasaki bombing then was necessary. The political and practical wish to see the end of the war cannot be denied. By 1945 Americans were ready for peace. There is still a great amount of evidence that Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified if one values Americans lives above Japanese ones. This is not intended in an ethnocentric way but rather to state the simple fact that the war placed America on one side and Japan on the other. War is something that a country must fight to win, a reality which results in the morally troublesome claim that one man’s death is another man’s life. Racism aside, not all revisionist claims are completely off the mark. The casualty estimates of the Truman administration, given that they changed with each passing moment, cannot be taken as the sole reason for dropping the bomb. As well, the influence of men like Stimson and others made sure that the practical effects of the bomb for geopolitics were known. The Soviet Union, though in no condition to threaten American hegemony, was in any case a potential rival of the United States. The fact that the Japanese did not surrender after Hiroshima and only after Nagasaki demonstrates that they were prepared and preparing to fight on. Add to that the rise of the Soviet Union and the perceptions it provoked in Allied governments10 (Tal 10), it is well-nigh surprising that Truman did not drop a third bomb. The revisionists deserve their due credit; but the truth of the matter must not be misrepresented. Despite these other factors, Truman’s decision to deploy the second bomb was a means to realizing a practical military objective: the complete and utter defeat of Imperial Japan. Works Cited Bernstein, Barton J, “A Post-War Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved,” Hiroshima’s Shadow. Ed. Kai Bird (Stoney Creek, CN: The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998), 130-134. Craig, Campbell and Sergey Radchenko, The Atomic Bomb and the origins of The Cold War. London: Yale University Press, 2008. Fic, Victor, “Revisiting the atomic bomb debate,” Washington Times 11 November 2009, 23. Little, Monroe H., “Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb against Japan,” Journal of American History 96:1 (2009): 279-280. Newman, Robert P., Truman and the Hiroshima Cult. Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1995. Tal, David. The American Nuclear Disarmament Dilemma, 1945-1963. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Truman, Harry S. “Statement by the President Announcing the Use of the A-Bomb at Hiroshima.” Essential Speeches 1 (2009): 1. Read More