by Ian Buruma
Was this really as obvious as Lifton and Mitchell, as well as many serious critics of Truman A-bomb policy, claim? Some historians, such as Gar Alperovitz, believe that the Potsdam Declaration was designed to be unacceptable to the Japanese, so that the United States would have time to drop the bomb and demonstrate its supremacy to the increasingly aggressive Soviet Union.* Truman, on the advice of his secretary of state, James Byrnes, withheld a guarantee of the Emperor’s status. In The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Alperovitz repeats over and over that Truman did this, fully aware “that a surrender was not likely to occur.” The implication is that Truman did not want the Japanese to surrender before the bomb was used. On his way to Potsdam, in July 1945, Truman heard the news that the first atomic bomb had been successfully tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico. With the bomb in his pocket, so to speak, he believed that the “Japs will fold up before Russia comes in.” Which was precisely what he wanted.
Alperovitz makes his case for the above scenario with mountains of documentary quotes. He shows how Truman’s desire to involve the Soviet Red Army in forcing a Japanese surrender cooled as soon as he heard the good news from Alamogordo. That the Soviet Union played a part in Truman’s calculations is neither a new nor an especially controversial observation. Most historians agree with Alperovitz that “even those who still wished for Russian help (to say nothing of those who opposed it) began to see the atomic bomb as a way not only to end the war, but perhaps to end it as soon as possible—preferably before the Russians attacked, and certainly, if feasible, before the Red Army got very far in its assault.”
But to say that Truman deliberately withheld a guarantee of the Emperor’s status at Potsdam so that he could drop his bomb is to assume it was clear the Japanese would have surrendered with such a guarantee. Alperovitz has no difficulty finding quotes from U.S. officials who thought so, but there is no reason to believe that they were right, and consequently that Truman was wrong, or merely Machiavellian, to press for an unconditional surrender. There is no evidence that Japan would have surrendered, even with a guarantee of the Emperor’s status, and there are good reasons to believe that it would not. As long as the Japanese were not ready to surrender on terms acceptable to the Allies, Truman had no option but to insist on a sharp ultimatum, bomb or no bomb.
What we know is that even some members of the so-called peace faction in the Japanese war cabinet were remarkably casual about the Potsdam terms—and not only because of the lack of guarantees for the Emperor. One of the “moderates,” Navy Minister Yonai, said there was no need to rush because “Churchill has fallen, America is beginning to be isolated. The government therefore will ignore [the Potsdam Proclamation].* Even after the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, half the Supreme War Leadership Council was still determined to fight on. Japan may have been “licked” militarily, as Eisenhower and other Americans said at the time, and later, but this did not mean it would give up. Instead of preparing for surrender, the Japanese government exhorted the population to defend the “divine land,” in mass suicide actions if necessary. The press kept up a daily Die-for-the-Emperor campaign. Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar describe in their book Code-Name Downfall how Japanese schoolchildren were trained to fight the enemy with bamboo spears, kitchen knives, firemen’s hooks or, as a last resort, feet and bare knuckles. Children were told: “If you don’t kill at least one enemy soldier, you don’t deserve to die.” Eight hundred thousand troops, including home defense forces, were gathered in Kyushu to resist an American invasion. If it had come to a final battle in Japan, after more months of firebombing and starvation, the human cost to the Japanese—leaving aside the Allies for a moment—would have been horrendous.
If saving Japanese lives was not Truman’s concern, it didn’t particularly bother the Japanese leaders either. The debate inside the Leadership Council at a crisis meeting on August 9 was not about whether to surrender but about whether to insist on one condition (retention of the imperial system, or kokutai) or four, including the demand that there be no Allied occupation. There had to be a unanimous decision. Without absolute consensus, the government would fall, more time would be wasted and more lives lost. This is the Emperor’s own account of the meeting, which took place in the sticky heat of an underground bomb shelter. The Emperor sat stiffly in front of a gilded screen, while his ministers sweated in their dress uniforms:
The meeting went on until two o’clock in the morning of August 10, without reaching an agreement. Then Suzuki asked me to break the deadlock and come to a decision. Apart from Prime Minister Suzuki, the participants were Hiranuma, Yonai, Anami, Togo, Umezu and Toyoda. Everyone agreed on the condition to preserve the kokutai. Anami, Toyoda and Umezu insisted on adding three more conditions: that Japan would not be occupied, and that the task of disarming our armed forces and dealing with war crimes would be in our own hands. They argued that at the present stage of the war, there was enough room for negotiation. Suzuki, Yonai, Hiranuma and Togo disagreed. I believed it was impossible to continue the war …*
And so, finally, after two atomic bombings, the Emperor spoke out in favor of the peace faction. It had become impossible to carry on the war. Not only had Hiroshima been obliterated, but on the day Nagasaki was bombed, the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan. Some have argued that this, rather than the nuclear bombs, forced Japan’s surrender. Perhaps, but the August 9 meeting had been convened before the Soviet declaration of war, and Alperovitz tells us that the Emperor, “on hearing of the Hiroshima bombing,” had already “agreed the time had come to surrender.” In the Emperor’s own account, he mentions both the Soviets and the bombs: “The people were suffering terribly, first from bombings getting worse by the day, then by the appearance of the atomic bomb. Because of these factors, and the fact that the Soviet Union had unleashed a war in Manchuria, we could not but accept the terms of Potsdam.”* In his broadcast to the nation, on August 15, the Emperor left the Soviet Union unmentioned, but referred to the bombs:
The enemy has begun to use a new and most cruel bomb to kill and maim extremely large numbers of the innocent … if the war were to be continued, it would cause not only the downfall of our nation but also the destruction of all human civilization … it is according to the dictate of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.
The Emperor’s decision to accept surrender is called the seidan, or sacred resolution. The Japanese war cabinet needed the voice of God to make up its mind. And as the above words show, the supreme descendant of the Japanese gods, in his divine benevolence, would save not only the Japanese nation but all human civilization. As a result of the bombs, the Japanese had been transformed from aggressors to saviors, a magnificent feat of public relations. In fact, official Japanese reasoning was more complicated than the Emperor’s speech suggests. The ruling elite of Japan, with the Emperor as its active high priest, was afraid that the Japanese people, exhausted, hungry, and sick of war, might become unruly. The atomic bombs offered a perfect excuse to end the war on terms that would not destroy the elite. Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa, a member of the peace faction, said on August 12, 1945:
I think the term is perhaps inappropriate, but the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, gifts from the gods. This way we don’t have to say that we quit the war because of domestic circumstances. Why I have long been advocating control of the crisis of the country is neither for fear of an enemy attack nor because of the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war. The main reason is my anxiety over the domestic situation. So, it is rather fortunate that now we can control matters without revealing the domestic situation.*
It is not certain that a warning, or demonstration of the bomb, would have been enough of an excuse for the peace faction and the Emperor to stand up to the diehards. Oppenheimer could think of no demonstration “sufficiently spectacular” to bring about surrender. Assistant
Secretary of War John McCloy disagreed; he recommended a demonstration. The least one can say is that it would surely have been worth a try. For 200,000 deaths was a high price to pay for a gift from the gods.
Alperovitz, among others, suggests that an earlier war declaration by the Soviet Union, coupled with an American promise to protect the Emperor, would have been enough to make Japan give in. After all, the Emperor was protected after the Japanese surrender, so why not before? As soon as Japan showed its readiness to accept the Potsdam terms on August 10, so long as the Emperor would be protected, Truman was so eager to end the war that the Emperor’s authority was recognized, “subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers” (SCAP).
Alperovitz finds this change of policy “puzzling.” If then, why not before? But there is quite a difference between recognizing the Emperor’s authority as a condition of surrender, and doing so under the auspices of SCAP, after Japan was defeated. For now the United States was in control of the institution. The result was not entirely positive. SCAP, that is to say General MacArthur, used his powers to protect Emperor Hirohito not only from prosecution for war crimes but even from appearing as a witness. This had serious consequences, for so long as the Emperor, in whose name the war had been waged, could not be held accountable, the question of war guilt would remain fuzzy in Japan, and a source of friction between Japan and its former enemies.
Alperovitz thinks that Truman’s uncompromising position at Potsdam had given “hard-line army leaders a trump card against early surrender proposals. The army could continue to argue that the Emperor-God might be removed, perhaps tried as a war criminal, possibly even hanged.” Here I think he is missing the point. The hard-liners, as well as the peace faction, were fighting to preserve a kokutai, which was hardly benign. Indeed, it was the very system that brought war to Asia. Herbert Bix, one of the most knowledgeable historians of the Japanese imperial system, has argued—I think, rightly—that even the peace faction wanted to retain an authoritarian system, which would have left substantial power in the Emperor’s hands. He writes:
If Grew and the Japan crowd [in Washington] had gotten their way, and the principle of unconditional surrender had been contravened, it is highly unlikely that Japan’s post-surrender leaders, now the “moderates” around the throne, would ever have discarded the Meiji Constitution and democratized their political institutions.*
Although Truman might have looked better in retrospect if he had guaranteed the Emperor’s status earlier, before dropping the atomic bombs, such a guarantee alone was unlikely to have pushed Japan toward surrender before August 9. The hard-liners rejected the idea of an Allied occupation, let alone the submission of the imperial institution to a foreign ruler. Indeed, some of the diehards, including War Minister Anami, continued to argue against the surrender until August 14, when the Emperor, once again, spoke in favor of peace. After that, Anami resisted no more, and committed suicide in the traditional manner of a samurai.
Those who claim that Truman should have been more flexible tend to misunderstand the role of the imperial institution. Alperovitz writes that the Japanese regarded their emperor as a god, “more like Jesus or the incarnate Buddha,” and that the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender “directly threatened not only the person of the Emperor but such central tenets of Japanese culture as well.” In fact, the Emperor was never regarded as anything like the Buddha; he was more like a priest-king, a combination of the Pope and a constitutional monarch. Alperovitz quotes, with approval, John McCloy’s proposal in 1945 that “the Mikado” be retained “on the basis of a constitutional monarchy.” But Emperor Hirohito already was a constitutional monarch. The problem was his other function, as the pope of Japanese nationalism. His position during the 1930s and early 1940s had less to do with central tenets of Japanese culture than with a political ideology, based in large part on nineteenth-century European nationalism. It was not culture or religion that the Japanese leaders tried to protect, but their own position in the kokutai. Without the Emperor, their power would have lacked any legitimacy. Since it was Truman’s aim to break their power, he had to break the kokutai first.
The question at the heart of Alperovitz’s book is “whether, when the bomb was used, the president and his top advisers understood that it was not required to avoid a long and costly invasion, as they later claimed and as most Americans still believe.” He has proved that avoiding an invasion was not Washington’s only aim. Secretary of State Henry Stimson’s statement (to McCloy) in May 1945 makes that pretty clear. The United States, he said, had “coming into action a weapon which will be unique.” The “method now to deal with Russia was to … let our actions speak for words.” And the United States might have to “do it in a pretty rough and realistic way.” There is no doubt that at Potsdam Truman saw the bomb as a joker in his pack.
But Alperovitz does not prove conclusively that the Soviet Union was the only reason for dropping the bomb. There were other considerations, which did involve the possibility of an invasion. Truman wanted to end the war swiftly to stop the Soviet advance in East Asia, but also because Americans were getting tired of fighting. Truman worried that the prospect of a prolonged war in the Far East, including an eventual invasion, would put pressure on him to accept a Japanese surrender on less than favorable terms. In other words, before Hiroshima, Truman did think the defeat of Japan, on American terms, might require a long battle. The problem with Alperovitz’s analysis is that he pays too little attention to the political situation in wartime Japan. In his famous book Atomic Diplomacy, published in 1965, there is only one reference to Prime Minister Suzuki, and none to his die-hard opponents Anami, Umezu and Toyoda. His new tome still only mentions them in passing.
Alperovitz’s case that the bomb was not dropped to prevent a final bloody battle rests entirely on the assumption that Truman and his advisers knew perfectly well that the Japanese were on the verge of capitulation before the destruction of Hiroshima. Closer examination of what went on in Tokyo shows that the Japanese were not. So long as there was no unanimity in the war cabinet and the Emperor remained silent, the war would go on. And so long as the hard-liners prevailed, any attempt by members of the peace faction, such as Foreign Minister Togo, to negotiate for peace had to be vague, furtive and inconclusive. Alperovitz makes a great deal of Togo’s dispatches in July 1945 to Sato Naotake, ambassador to Moscow, conveying the Emperor’s wish to discuss peace terms through the good offices of Moscow. He makes less of the fact that Ambassador Sato told his foreign minister that the mission was hopeless since Japan had nothing specific to discuss. And he makes nothing at all of the other reason for approaching Moscow: important members of the peace faction, including Admiral Yonai, still hoped to forge a Japanese-Soviet alliance against the United States and Britain.*
So I do not believe it was an irrational policy on Truman’s part to insist on unconditional surrender. But analyzing rational policies is not the business of a professor of psychiatry and psychology, so Robert Jay Lifton ignores these political considerations, and dwells on such issues as Truman’s “denial of death,” or James Byrnes’s “totalistic relationship with the weapon,” or “the formation of separate, relatively autonomous selves” in the personality of Henry Stimson. From this psychiatric perspective, anyone mad enough to drop an atomic bomb, even in 1945, when any means to end the war had to be considered, must be a mental patient. And the policy of a mental patient has to be touched with madness.
Lifton and Mitchell claim, like Alperovitz, that since the successful test of the atomic bomb, “Truman and Byrnes began to focus on how to end the war sufficiently quickly that the Soviets would not gain a foothold in Japan.” But again the authors do not consider the reasons why. To them it is but one more example of Truman’s irrational state of mind, because he was suppressing his feelings and “any tendency to reflect,” since he had been bad at sports as a child and was afraid of being “a sissy.” Even if all these things were true, there were still compelli
ng reasons for wishing to stop Soviet troops from entering Japan. There was concern in Washington about the swift expansion of the Soviet Empire in Eastern and Central Europe. The U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, W. Averill Harriman, called it a “barbarian invasion.” He believed, quite correctly, that Soviet control of other countries meant the extinction of political liberties in those countries and a dominant Soviet influence over their foreign relations. As subsequent events in China and the Korean peninsula have shown, Truman was right to worry about Soviet power in northeast Asia. It certainly would not have suited U.S. interests, or those of Japan for that matter, if the Japanese archipelago had been divided into different occupation zones, with Stalin’s troops ensconced in Hokkaido.
As he did in his book on the “genocidal mentality” of nuclear scientists and strategists,* Lifton uses the phrase “nuclearism,” which he describes as “a spiritual faith that the ultimate power of the emerging weapon could serve not only death and destruction but also continuing life.” Believers in this faith, such as Truman, feel like “merging with a source of power rivaling that of any deity.” They are, in short, possessed. Here Lifton and Mitchell are close to the religious position of Dr. Nagai: the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were propelled by a force beyond human reason. Having established that, the authors can dispense with political arguments and concentrate on the corruption of American life by irrational forces. They can write that the “nurturing of this deified object [i.e., the bomb], as our source of security and ultimate power over death, became the central task of our society,” without contemplating what the world would have been like if the sole possessors of this object had been the likes of Josef Stalin.