Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
July 24, 2015
“It is an atomic bomb. It is the greatest thing in history.”
- President Harry S. Truman (August 6, 1945)
One of the seemingly endless Good (sic) War myths goes a little something like this:
The U.S. had
no choice but to drop atomic bombs on Japanese civilians in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Had they not done so, the fanatical Japanese never would
have surrendered and millions of brave American soldiers would have
perished in the ensuing invasion of the Japanese islands.
As we approach the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I’ll try (yet again) to answer the question: Why was the bomb used?
The enemy was never fascism
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 Hitler’s 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 “unassailable
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:
“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. Truman’s
daughter, Margaret, remarked about her dad’s early presidential efforts
after the death of FDR in April 1945, “My father’s overriding concern in
these first weeks was our policy towards Russia.”
“Saved millions of lives”
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 storyline:
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 president’s
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 Truman’s public estimates throughout the years:
- Dec. 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 America’s 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.”
- Jan. 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 United
States, “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.”
The cold logic of capitalism
Some 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.”
So, 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 America’s 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.”
Truman’s reply?
“It’ll come out in the wash.”
Later, the president told an aide, “Don’t bring that fellow around again.”
“They’ll spit in your eye”
“Why did we drop (the bomb)?” pondered Studs Terkel, two decades ago. “So little Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we’ve got the cards,” he explained. “That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the goddamned Russians we’ve got something and they’d better behave themselves in Europe. That’s why it was dropped. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet you tell that to 99 percent of Americans and they’ll spit in your eye.”
Let the spitting begin.
Mickey Z. is the author of 12 books, most recently Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on the Web here and here. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here.
