WASTED OPPORTUNITY:

The U.S. obstructed Japan's surrender to test nukes: claim (MICHAEL HOFFMAN, 8/19/07, Japan Times)

The moral questions swirling around Hiroshima and Nagasaki haven't been solved 62 years after the bombings and probably never will be. Did the bombs that ushered in the terrors of the nuclear age save lives by abruptly ending the war? Or did they butcher hundreds of thousands of defenseless civilians to no purpose?

Kagoshima University professor Akira Kimura, chairman of the Japan Peace Foundation, is an eloquent exponent of the latter view. In an interview with Shukan Kinyobi, he goes beyond the widely held though disputed notion that Japan's surrender was known to be imminent, and that American political and military authorities ordered the bombings anyway, primarily as a warning to the increasingly obstreperous Soviet Union. Kimura adds to that a startling accusation. The United States, he says, in its determination to demonstrate the Promethean force it now commanded, deliberately obstructed Japan's surrender.

Hiroshima: the ‘White Man’s Bomb’ revisited: On the 62nd anniversary of Hiroshima, read Mick Hume's essay on how the dropping of the A-bomb was the final act of a bitter race war in the Pacific. (Mick Hume, 8/06/07, Spiked)

In 1993 the author Gar Alperovitz obtained hundreds of pages of US National Security Agency intercepts of secret enemy wartime communications. These revealed that US intelligence knew top Japanese army officers were willing to surrender more than three months before the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. For instance, one document intercepted by the NSA quotes a German diplomat reporting back to Berlin on the state of Japan on 5 May 1945: ‘since the situation is clearly recognised to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavour an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard’ (see New York Times, 11 August 1993). Alperovitz has noted that the president’s rediscovered diary ‘leaves no doubt that Truman knew the war would end “a year sooner now” and without an invasion’ (Nation, 10 May 1993).

Despite the evidence that they knew of an impending Japanese collapse, the US authorities not only blasted Hiroshima, they also dropped another bomb on Nagasaki three days later, before the Japanese had a chance to assess the Hiroshima damage and surrender. Even Dwight D Eisenhower, the wartime Supreme Allied Commander in Europe who went on to become US president, later admitted that ‘the Japanese were ready to surrender and we didn’t have to hit them with that awful thing’ (quoted in Newsweek, 11 November 1963). All of which begs the question, why did they do it?

The decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly rested on something more than battlefield calculations about the specific state of the military campaign in August 1945. Two broader political considerations made up Truman’s mind. First, the politics of international power dictated that the USA would definitely drop the Bomb somewhere, regardless of the state of the war. And second, the politics of racial superiority determined that that somewhere would definitely be Japan.

Having developed the Bomb, the US administration was always going to use it. Truman and his predecessor as president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had invested $2 billion in the Manhattan Project to develop the Bomb, a massive sum at that time. The government was under considerable pressure from Congress to show some bang for its megabucks expenditure. That was one reason why Truman’s Secretary of State, James F Byrnes, demanded that the atom bomb be dropped as soon as possible in order to ‘show results’. And international considerations proved even more influential in the Truman administration’s decision to use its new atomic weapon.

By the end of the Second World War, the USA stood head and shoulders above every other nation as the leading economic, political and military global force. America’s new standing was perfectly symbolised by its massive nuclear bomb programme, which gave Washington a unique power to destroy the world it dominated. To be effective as a tool of international politics, however, that power had to be demonstrated in practice. Detonating an atomic device at a time when no other state could come close to building one would be the ultimate demonstration of American supremacy on Earth - a demonstration to be aimed not merely at the Japanese regime, but at Stalin’s Soviet Union, the other Allies, the whole of Asia and indeed the world.

A detailed study by the Japanese Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki puts the attacks in something like their proper international perspective:

‘the A-Bomb attacks were needed not so much against Japan - already on the brink of surrender and no longer capable of mounting an effective counter-offensive - as to establish clearly America’s postwar international position and strategic supremacy in the anticipated Cold War setting. One tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that this historically unprecedented devastation of human society stemmed from essentially experimental and political aims.’

In this sense, America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was motivated less by a need to end the war than a determination to shape the postwar era in international politics.

If the US authorities always intended to drop the Bomb, it is equally certain that they always intended to drop it on the Japanese. There was no high-level discussion about using the Bomb in Europe against Nazi Germany. Only the Japanese were ever in the Allies’ nuclear bombsights. Here we come to the hidden history of Hiroshima: the story of the Allied powers’ race war against the Japanese, which culminated in the explosion of the White Man’s Bomb.

On 23 April 1945, General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, sent a memo to Henry L Stimson, the American Secretary of War, on plans for using the Bomb. It included the striking observation that ‘[t]he target is and was always expected to be Japan’ (emphasis added).

When he unearthed this memo during research in the 1990s, Arjun Makhijani discussed its implications with leading scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project. He reports that they were ‘amazed’ to learn of Groves’ attitude, 50 years after the event. Most leading members of the Manhattan project team were east European emigres, who had agreed to work on the Bomb only on the understanding that the Nazis were both the target and their competitors. Joseph Rotblat, the Polish scientist, told Makhijani that ‘there was never any idea [among the scientists] that [the Bomb] would be used against Japan. We never worried that the Japanese would have the Bomb. We always worried what Heisenberg and the other German scientists were doing. All of our concentration was on Germany’ (see A Makhijani, ‘Always the target’, Bulletin of AtomicScientists, May/June 1995). All of the concentration of the political and military strategists, however, was on using the Bomb against the Japanese. [...]

The racial dimension made the Japanese a very different enemy from the Germans. The Japanese posed not just a military threat to the old imperial order, but a political challenge to white power that could spark the fires of Asian nationalism. The leaders of the Allied powers saw the Pacific War as a life-and-death struggle to salvage the prestige of the Western elites. They had been humiliated by ‘Asiatics’. As a consequence they were fighting a race war, in which the enemy had to be not just contained, but crushed if the white powers were to retain any authority in Asia. The extent to which they saw the Japanese as different was reflected in the ruthless attitudes and actions adopted by Allied governments and forces during the Pacific War, culminating in the decision to drop the White Man’s Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Throughout the conflict, the Japanese were depicted and treated as a lower race. These attitudes predated Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. America’s president Roosevelt, the leader of Western liberalism, seriously considered the proposition that the Japanese were evil because their skulls were 2000 years less developed than the white man’s civilised cranium, and that the solution might be to encourage some cross-breeding to create a new ‘Euroindoasian’ race that could isolate the Japanese. On the British side, Churchill was always noted for espousing the blunt racial attitudes of his Edwardian background, disparaging Asian peoples as ‘dirty baboos’ and ‘chinks’ in need of a good thrashing with ‘the sjambok’. And Churchill was far from the exception. In the months before the Pacific War began, the diary of Sir Alexander Cadogan of the British Foreign Office records Cadogan’s own views of the Japanese as ‘beastly little monkeys’ and ‘yellow dwarf slaves’.

Once the war with Japan had begun, these prejudices were no longer confined to the private diaries and dinner party conversations of the Western elite. Instead, the politics of racial superiority were made public by Allied propagandists, and put into practice by the US and British military.

The American press branded Japan ‘a racial menace’, and routinely depicted the Japanese as monkeys, mad dogs, rats and vermin. Hollywood war movies emphasised the sadistic character of Japanese soldiers, who seemed to break the rules of ‘civilised’ warfare in every film. Allied propagandists made a clear distinction between their two major enemies. They showed the problem in Europe not as the whole German nation, but as Hitler and the Nazis. In Asia, by contrast, the enemy was ‘the Japs’ - an entire malignant race. As one of the best studies of the race war in the Pacific points out, ‘Western film-makers and publicists found a place for the “good German” in their propaganda, but no comparable counterpart for the Japanese’ (J Dower, War Without Mercy, 1986, p322n).

The racial denigration of the Japanese did not only happen in the movies. In America, the only German immigrants interned were those with suspected Nazi connections. Meanwhile, 120 000 Japanese-Americans, many of them born US citizens, were indiscriminately rounded up in camps. Asked to justify this treatment, General De Witt announced bluntly that ‘a Jap is a Jap’. Meanwhile in the Pacific war zone, working on the assumption that the only good Jap was a dead one, Admiral William Halsey of the US Navy urged his men to make ‘monkey meat’ out of the Japanese, and demanded that any Japanese survivors of the war should be rendered impotent.

The lower ranks took their lead from above. The US Marine Monthly “Leatherneck” counselled the extermination of the ‘Louseous Japanicus’, depicted as a vicious Asiatic cockroach. One US marine explained the racial outlook which made it easy for his comrades to slaughter the Japanese and mutilate their bodies on the battlefield:

‘The Japanese made the perfect enemy. They had many characteristics that an American marine could hate. Physically they were small, a strange colour and, by some standards, unattractive....Marines did not consider that they were killing men. They were wiping out dirty animals.’ (Quoted in J Weingartner, ‘Trophies of war: US troops and the mutilation of Japanese war dead, 1941-45’, Pacific Historical Review, February 1992)

If the Americans were happy ‘wiping out dirty animals’ with bayonets and flame-throwers on the beaches of Pacific islands, why should they worry about wiping out two whole cities of ‘beasts’ with the atom bomb?

The tragedy isn't so much that we atomic bombed Japan unnecessarily--nothing was stopping them from surrendering outright after all--but that we could have done lasting good by actually bombing Moscow and terminating the regime instead of just demonstrating the weapon in Japan. Had the Russians been Asian and the Japanese been European we'd have done just that.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 19, 2007 3:16 PM