A rite of summer

Yesterday marked the 62nd anniversary of the start of the Atomic Age, and almost like clockwork, the annual spate of essays and articles poured forth discussing the ethical and political dimensions of the US’s decision to use atomic weapons on the Japanese.

This year’s festivities were kicked off by Oliver Kamm, writing in The Guardian, who argued that “New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb.” He continued:

“Contrary to popular myth, there is no documentary evidence that [US President Harry S. Truman’s] military commanders advised him the bomb was unnecessary for Japan was about to surrender. As the historian Wilson Miscamble puts it, Truman ‘hoped that the bombs would end the war and secure peace with the fewest American casualties, and so they did. Surely he took the action any American president would have undertaken.’ Recent Japanese scholarship provides support for this position. Sadao Asada, of Doshisha University, Kyoto, has concluded from analysis of Japanese primary sources that the two bombs enabled the ‘peace party’ within Japan’s cabinet to prevail.”

Mr. Kamm’s essay, published as is was in a left-of-center magazine, was then immediately seized upon by the American conservative establishment. Roger Kimball, the crotchety cultural critic associated with The New Criterion, blogged on it yesterday, followed by a train of reply and counter-reply.

Dr. Asada, mentioned above by Mr. Kamm, currently serves as Professor Emeritus of Diplomatic History at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. His most recent study, Culture Shock and Japanese-American Relations: Historical Essays, published in June, picks through a century of diplomatic history, treating the bomb controversy in context of the larger history of Japanese-American relations. I’ve not had an opportunity to read Dr. Asada’s book and therefore cannot vouch for Mr. Kamm’s allusion.

I have had occasion to read Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, written by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and published in 2005. Racing the Enemy provides a challenge to the ‘traditionalist’ interpretation of the atomic bombs, not so much from an ethical perspective, but from a political one. Hasegawa’s main claims attribute Japanese surrender more to the opening up of a second front against the Japanese Empire by the Soviet Union. The USSR, per Allied agreements at Yalta, ended neutrality against the Japanese and began Operation August Storm on August 8, 1945—after Hiroshima, but before Nagasaki—attacking the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria. The Soviets very quickly rolled forward against weak opposition. This, in concert with the bombs, tilted the balance in favor of Japan’s ‘peace party.’

Determining which cause—the Red Army or American atomic weaponry—led most directly to Japanese surrender is very difficult and ultimately (to me) is six of one, half-dozen the other, and any associated ethical argument turns on what the Americans think they knew and when they knew it (regarding the Japanese state of mind), which becomes hazier with time. It is difficult to know one’s own mind, much less your foes’.

Obviously, the main decision-makers—President Truman, his cabinet, and the generals—have always had historically powerful reasons for shading the interpretation of August 1945 toward the “bomb = unconditional surrender = fewer American and Japanese casualties” formula. This is likely true, but it is complicated by our early experiences with the Soviet Union in post-war Europe. It was becoming very clear to nearly anyone with half a brain that the USSR was going to be very aggressive after the hostilities were over. To the extent that Hasegawa’s book aims to demonstrate how the bombs functioned as Act I of the Cold War, it is successful, and one needn’t view the Americans’ decision as morally bankrupt to reach that conclusion. After all, when the Japanese themselves were presented with the not-so-hypothetical choice among two ‘evils’, the Americans were deemed the lesser of the two, a position that history has heartily endorsed.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention two additional texts worth reading for anyone who has not encountered them yet. Both are standard texts and have been used for many years. The first is Paul Fussell’s essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” Fussell, a brilliant literary and cultural critic, was badly wounded in Europe, but shipped out to the Pacific theatre anyway; he would have surely taken part in any invasion of Japan. “Thank God…” is quite memorable, and to this day I remember vividly the image of GIs sliding down “hills of dysentery shit” as one of the highlights of this very engaging essay. The second must-read text is John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which still ranks as one of my favorite non-fiction books. A very visceral and gutty book, Hiroshima chronicles the immediate before and after of the bombing as it occurred to a few central characters. Aside from providing almost documentary insight to the bombing itself, the book was quite revolutionary for its episodic style, jumping from character to character at various stages of the story, and in many respects greatly influenced the narrative structure that we associate today with the disaster movie genre.