HIROSHIMA DEBATE: We Were Right to Drop the Bomb
Review of Richard Frank's Downfall
Hans Koning is a novelist and essayist. His most recent novel is
Pursuit of a Woman on the Hinge of History. He is a
contributing editor at TomPaine.com.
It is rare that a single book shakes one's long-held ideas about a crucial political drama, but such was the case for me by reading Downfall, a history of August 1945, the Japanese surrender and the ending of World War II. Its author is Richard B. Frank, whose second book it is. (His first one, Guadalcanal was the story of the American capture of that island from the Japanese in the summer of 1942). Frank's writing style isn't particularly inspired, but the book's impact lies in the vast amount of research he has done, going through four years of Japanese military messages deciphered by American Intelligence (the so-called Magic and Ultra decoding), and such hitherto unpublished material as a private journal kept by Emperor Hirohito during the war. It isn't a case of being won over by his arguments, but by his original presentation of new facts.
Like most leftish writers, I have held it proven that Japan was on the verge of surrendering in early August 1945, and that the primary reason for using the atom bomb was "to show" the Russians, to show them that their victory over the Germans had not bought them security and preeminence in Europe -- that Hiroshima was a diplomatic, not a military, move.
I, too, believed that if a discussion of the morality of Hiroshima was possible (Truman's "It saved a million American boys"), there was no conceivable justification for the second atom bomb, dropped three days later on Nagasaki.
Frank's data question both concepts. They do not make the use of atomic weapons seem less awesome and less awful, but they throw different light on it.
About the "pending surrender of Japan": the material on the cabinet meetings in Tokyo in early August (of the six men then in control of Japan's fate), mention the discussions of a negotiated peace among the civilian members but show how these led nonetheless to the unanimous rejection, and "with contempt," of the Allied ultimatum issued from Potsdam. The civilian members would have had to fear for their lives if they had acted otherwise. A total military take-over, and martial laws were, around the corner. The Emperor stayed silent.
The military plan, Ketsu-Go, for action after an American invasion of the mainland, foresaw the erasing of the line between soldiers and civilians. Massive suicide attacks, not only from the air but also on land, were planned and some six thousand primitive kamikaze planes were waiting on Kyushu, Japan's most southern island. Ketsu-Go was prepared to sacrifice the lives of twenty million Japanese. The military cast had started the war and losing it through surrender would be an unacceptable blemish on their reputations. One great victorious land battle was needed to maintain their honor; thereafter peace could be negotiated. As for Nagasaki, at the cabinet meeting on that same day (August 9), the military reported that the damage was considerably less than in Hiroshima, and that in all likelihood the U.S. had only one or two more atom bombs.
Actually the American top brass had already increasing doubts about "Operation Olympic," a landing on the island of Kyushu. The next non-atomic move for which there was complete support from the U.S. army, air force, and navy, was a series of bombing raids with planes and ships to knock out Japan's fragile railroad system of which the main lines ran along both coastlines, east and west. With the Japanese merchant fleet already gone, this would have brought almost immediate famine in the cities. (Japan had no road net for long distance freight. When I drove around there, twenty years later, I still found no asphalted roads outside Tokyo.) Would it then have been more humane to bank on famine as leading to a Japanese surrender?
Frank asks why it would have been more humane to kill Japanese women and children that way, and why Japan's victims were more expendable than the Japanese themselves. He estimates that some one hundred thousand Chinese died each month in the Japanese work camps, and thousands of allied prisoners-of-war and civilian internees. If it is argued that without atom bombs the war would have lasted "only" three months longer, he demonstrates that those three months, plus the ongoing famine, would have killed ten times more people than the two atom bombs. Moreover, without the bombs the Emperor would have had no "alibi" to stop his generals.
Frank, who was born in 1947, two years into the atomic era, may lack understanding of the feelings of horror the bombs created. Worldwide it was immediately realized that these were not "just bombs, only more so." Mankind had created the means to destroy itself. Frank doesn't argue this. But he gives a more precise insight into what was going on in the minds of the actors in that deadly August month, and into the options as they saw them.
Published: Jul 12 2000
