Hiroshima
by Mickey Z

It is an atomic bomb. . . . It is the greatest thing in history.
President Harry S. Truman, August 6, 1945

About two months ago, I wrote an article about the film, Pearl Harbor,
in which I attempted to present some context about December 7, 1941. I
received hundreds of e-mails, mostly supportive, I must add. There was,
however, one point made repeatedly by those less then thrilled with what
I had to say about U.S. actions in WWII: America had no choice but to
drop atomic bombs on Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had
they not done so, my detractors declared, the Japanese never would have
surrendered and millions of American soldiers would have perished in the
ensuing invasion of the Japanese islands.

We are approaching August 6, 2001, the 56th anniversary of the bombing
of Hiroshima, and it¹s apparent that this issue is long from settled.
Thus, I¹d like to begin yet another discussion on the question: Why was
the bomb used?

Before confronting the unleashing of the bomb, there is lesser-known
myth that must be dealt with: the life-and-death race with German
scientists. “Working at Los Alamos, New Mexico,” writes historian
Kenneth C. Davis, “atomic scientists, many of them refugees from
Hitler¹s Europe, thought they were racing against Germans developing a
Nazi bomb.” Surely, if it were possible for the epitome of evil to
produce such a weapon, it would be the responsibility of the good guys
to beat der Führer to the plutonium punch. While such a desperate race
makes for excellent melodrama, the German bomb effort, it appears, fell
far short of success.

Thanks to the declassification of key documents, we now have access to
“nassailable proof that the race with the Nazis was a fiction,” says
Stewart Udall, who cites the work of McGeorge Bundy and Thomas Powers
before adding that, “According to the official history of the British
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), those agents maintained contacts with
scientists in neutral countries . . .” These contacts, by mid-1943,
provided enough evidence to convince the SIS that the German bomb
program simply did not exist. 

Despite such findings, U.S. General Leslie Groves, military commander of
the Manhattan Project, got permission in the fall of 1943 to begin a
secret espionage mission known as Alsos (Greek for “grove,” get it?).
The mission saw Groves’ men following the Allies armies throughout
Europe with the goal of capturing German scientists involved in the
manufacture of atomic weapons.

While the data uncovered by Alsos only served to reinforce the prior
reports that the Third Reich was not pursuing a nuclear program, Groves
was able to maintain enough of a cover-up to keep his pet project alive.
In the no-holds-barred religion of anti-communism, the “Good War” enemy
was never fascism. Truman¹s daughter, Margaret, remarked about her dad¹s
early presidential efforts after the death of FDR in April 1945, “My
father¹s overriding concern in these first weeks was our policy towards
Russia.” 

The most commonly evoked justification for the dropping of atomic bombs
on Japan was to save lives, but was it true? Would such an invasion even
have been necessary? Finally, were the actions of the United States
motivated by an escalating Cold War with the Soviet Union? Here are the
facts that don’t mesh with the long-accepted story line:

Although hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives were lost in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, the bombings are often explained away as a “life-saving”
measure, American lives. Exactly how many lives saved is, however, up
for grabs. (We do know of a few U.S. soldiers who fell between the
cracks. 
About a dozen or more American POWs were killed in Hiroshima, a truth
that remained hidden for some 30 years.) In defense of the U.S. action,
it is usually claimed that the bombs saved lives. The hypothetical body
count ranges from 20,000 to “millions.” In an August 9, 1945 statement
to “the men and women of the Manhattan Project,” President Truman
declared the hope that “this new weapon will result in saving thousands
of American lives.”

“The president¹s initial formulation of `thousands,’ however, was
clearly not his final statement on the matter to say the least,” remarks
historian Gar Alperovitz. In his book, The Decision to Use the Atomic
Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, Alperovitz documents but
a few of Truman¹s public estimates throughout the years:

• December 15, 1945: “It occurred to me that a quarter of a
million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of
Japanese cities...”

• Late 1946: “A year less of war will mean life for three hundred
thousand‹maybe half a million‹of America¹s finest youth.”

• October 1948: “In the long run we could save a quarter of a
million young Americans from being killed, and would save an equal
number of Japanese young men from being killed.”

• April 6, 1949: “I thought 200,000 of our young men would be
saved.”

• November 1949: Truman quotes Army Chief of Staff George S.
Marshall as estimating the cost of an Allied invasion of Japan to be
“half a million casualties.”

• January 12, 1953: Still quoting Marshall, Truman raises the
estimate to “a minimum one quarter of a million” and maybe “as much as a
million, on the American side alone, with an equal number of the enemy.”

• Finally, on April 28, 1959, Truman concluded: “the dropping of
the bombs . . . saved millions of lives.” 

Fortunately, we are not operating without the benefit of official
estimates.
In June 1945, Truman ordered the U.S. military to calculate the cost in
American lives for a planned assault on Japan. Consequently, the Joint
War Plans Committee prepared a report for the Chiefs of Staff, dated
June 15, 1945, thus providing the closest thing anyone has to
“accurate”: 40,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500
missing.

While the actual casualty count remains unknowable, it was widely known
at the time that Japan had been trying to surrender for months prior to
the atomic bombing. A May 5, 1945 cable, intercepted and decoded by the
U.S., “dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue
for peace.” In fact, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reported shortly
after the war, that Japan “in all probability” would have surrendered
before the much-discussed November 1, 1945 Allied invasion of the
homeland. 
Truman himself eloquently noted in his diary that Stalin would “be in
the Jap War on August 15th. Fini (sic) Japs when that comes about.” 

Many post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki sentiments questioned the use of the bombs.
“I thought 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,” said General Dwight D. Eisenhower
while, not long after the Japanese surrender, New York Times military
analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, “The enemy, in a military sense, was in a
hopeless strategic position . . . Such then, was the situation when we
wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Need we have done it? No one can, of
course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.”

Or was it the cold logic of capitalism that motivated the nuking of
civilians? 
As far back as May 1945, a Venezuelan diplomat was reporting how
Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller “communicated to us the
anxiety of the United States government about the Russian attitude.”
U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes seemed to agree when he turned
the anxiety up a notch by explaining how “our possessing and
demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in the East . .
. The demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia with America¹s
military might.”

General Leslie Groves was less cryptic: “There was never, from about two
weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my
part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on
that basis.” 

During the same time period, President Truman noted that Secretary of
War Henry Stimson was “at least as much concerned with the role of the
atomic bomb in the shaping of history as in its capacity to shorten the
war.” What sort of shaping Stimson had in mind might be discerned from
his Sept. 11, 1945 comment to the president: “I consider the problem of
our satisfactory relations with Russia as not merely connected but as
virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb.”

Stimson called the bomb a “diplomatic weapon,” and duly explained that
“American statesmen were eager for their country to browbeat the
Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip.”

“The psychological effect [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] on Stalin was
twofold,” proposes historian Charles L. Mee, Jr. “The Americans had not
only used a doomsday machine; they had used it when, as Stalin knew, it
was not militarily necessary. It was this last chilling fact that
doubtless made the greatest impression on the Russians.”

It also made an impression on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific
director at Los Alamos. After learning of the carnage wrought upon
Japan, he began to harbor second thoughts and he resigned in October
1945. In March of the following year, Oppenheimer told Truman:

“Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.” 

Truman¹s reply? ”It¹ll come out in the wash.” 

Later, the president told an aide, “Don¹t bring that fellow around
again.”

“Why did we drop [the bomb]?” pondered Studs Terkel at the time of the
fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. “So little
Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we¹ve got the cards,” he explained.
“That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the goddamned Russians we¹ve
got something and they¹d better behave themselves in Europe. That¹s why
it was dropped. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet you tell that to
99 percent of Americans and they¹ll spit in your eye.”

Let the spitting begin.

Mickey Z. (Michael Zezima) is the author of Saving Private Power: The
Hidden History of “The Good War”
(http://www.softskull.com/html/saving.html), on which this article is
based. He can reached at mzx2@earthlink.net.