Interviews with US experts (2)

September 19, 2015

INTERVIEW/ Samuel Walker: U.S., Japan must shed myths of atomic bombs

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/opinion/AJ201509190027

By MASATO TAINAKA/ Staff Writer

Editor's note: This is part of a series of interviews with U.S. experts on whether the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified.

* * *

WASHINGTON--American historian Samuel Walker argues that U.S. President Harry Truman used the atomic bomb to end the war as quickly as possible, but dismisses as a “myth” the traditional U.S. theory that the nuclear weapon saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.

“Using the bomb was an easy decision. It’s not anything that Truman or anybody else agonized over,” Walker, author of “Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan,” told The Asahi Shimbun in an interview. “It took the bomb and the Soviet invasion to convince Japan that it had to surrender.”

Walker said he believes that even if Truman had not dropped an atomic bomb, an American invasion of the Japanese mainland was not “probably” necessary.

“It (an invasion) would have been a terrible event ... but it would not have caused hundreds of thousands of American deaths,” he said.

Walker, who says he is on a “middle-ground” between traditionalists and revisionists with regard to the atomic bomb controversy, urges both the United States and Japan to shed “mythologies” and relearn the history of why the bomb was used.

“In my mind, Truman had no reasonable alternative but to use the bomb,” he said. “In my mind, too, the Japanese should have surrendered long before Hiroshima.”

Excerpts of his interview follow:

* * *

Question: You are known as a post-revisionist among American historians. Why?

Walker: What it meant originally was just those who don’t agree with either the revisionist or the traditional view in pure forms, and they kind of look for answers to the important questions about the use of the (atomic) bombs somewhere in between the two poles.

It is an extremely polarized controversy. On the one side you have those who say that the bomb was absolutely unnecessary because Japan was trying to surrender, and on the other hand, the older, traditional view in this country that Truman had to use the bomb because the only alternative was an invasion.

Q: In your book, you called both arguments a mythology.

A: Yes. Both are wrong, and both depend on misreadings of the evidence, in my view and in the view of most historians. There is just this broad middle-ground now where most scholars are situated, and that is why we have moved away from the two polar views, the two extremes, and that’s a good thing. But there is still a lot of disagreement within this broad middle-ground but on smaller issues, on less important issues, than the polar interpretations.

Q: Your book said a combination of five points is the background of Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb. First was to finish the war as early as possible. Second was to justify the cost of the bomb's development under the Manhattan Project. Third was to send a signal to the Soviet Union. Fourth, there was no motivation for Truman not to use the bomb. Fifth is a kind of a revenge on the enemy. Could you elaborate?

A: The most important of those five by far was to end the war as quickly as possible. The evidence is just absolutely irrefutable. There is no question that that was the priority goal, and the bombs seemed like the most promising way to do that.

There were other means of ending the war. One was to make a statement that guaranteed that the emperor could stay on his throne. Another was to wait for Soviet entry into the war against Japan in Manchuria. Another was to continue the conventional bombing and the blockade, which was just causing enormous death and destruction in Japan and was cutting off vital supplies for the livelihood of the nation. We had been doing that for six or seven months, and Japan still hadn’t surrendered, and no one knew how long it would take with those.

American policymakers probably underestimated the impact of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Their view in the summer of 1945 was that that would be helpful. We would like to have the Soviets tie down Japanese troops that then couldn’t be shipped back to the homeland to fight against an American invasion if it were necessary.

The potential drawback of guaranteeing the status of the emperor as a figurehead, as a constitutional monarch, was that that would encourage the militants within the Japanese government, by saying, "Look, we just had this really tough battle at Okinawa where we inflicted a lot of American casualties and so now the Americans are softening their stance, so this gives us even more reason to hold out, to continue the war, to inflict as much pain on the Americans as we can."

All of those alternatives, in combination, eventually would have forced a Japanese surrender. But they all had disadvantages, real and potential, whereas the bomb didn’t.

The bomb looked like the best way to end the war, maybe. No one was certain that the bomb would end the war, either, but it seemed to be the best, the most likely way to force a Japanese surrender because of the shock value. You have a single bomb just wiping out an entire city, and the hope was that that would be enough to force the Japanese to say, "Hey it’s time to end the war."

In that sense, using the bomb was an easy decision. It’s not anything that Truman or anybody else agonized over. You found out on July 16 that (the bomb) worked, so why not use it and hope for the best? That is about as much thinking as was ever done about whether or not the bomb should be used. It just wasn’t a question as to whether to use it, but to use it as quickly as was available in hopes that that would convince Japan that it had to end the war.

Q: The difference between you and the so-called revisionists is that they argue that the Soviet factor was decisive.

A: Correct.

Q: They also argue that dropping the bomb was not necessary to finish the war.

A: Correct. But this is “the” major fallacy, or one of two major fallacies in their argument.

First, they argue that Japan had decided to surrender, and we now know that is not true.

Japan was incapable of deciding on a surrender before Hiroshima. From what evidence we have, it appears evident that it was Hiroshima that finally convinced (Emperor) Hirohito that the war had to end and more or less convinced him that the war had to end on the basis of the Potsdam (Declaration) if he could remain on his throne. That was the one condition that everyone insisted on.

But the revisionists claim that Japan had decided on surrender if only the emperor could remain as a constitutional monarch. (But it) simply “doesn’t hold water,” at least according to those scholars who have looked at the Japanese sources. These are not necessarily people who are supporters of Truman. They are scholars who have looked at the Japanese documents and simply say that there is no evidence that Japan had decided before Hiroshima to surrender.

That does raise a question which you just alluded to: "Which was more important?" If we had not used the bomb, would the Soviet invasion itself have been enough? Well, there’s no way of knowing and there is no way of telling. There has been some fairly fierce, animated controversy among scholars as to which was more important, but the general consensus now is that it took both. It took the bomb, at least at Hiroshima, and the Soviet invasion. No one is exactly certain what the impact of Nagasaki (was to) Japanese policymakers, but it took the bomb and the Soviet invasion to convince Japan that it had to surrender, both the emperor and then the militants within the Supreme Council for the duration of the war.

There is a historian, Richard B. Frank, who makes an argument that it was Hiroshima that convinced the emperor to surrender, but it was the Soviet invasion that convinced the generals who commanded the armies in China and in other parts of East Asia. He has convinced me that there was a lot of resistance to the emperor’s rescript saying that it’s time to surrender.

I don’t know if that is the final word on that or not, but it’s a very interesting argument.

The other major problem with the revisionist position is that they argue that not only had Japan decided to surrender, but that Truman and his advisers knew that. In spite of the fact that they knew that Japan wanted to surrender (under) the sole, reasonable condition that the emperor remain on his throne, they still went ahead and used the bomb when they could have ended the war by simply allowing the emperor to remain. There is an abundance of evidence that shows that in fact, Truman and his advisers were concerned about how long the war was going to go on, that they didn’t see any convincing evidence that Japan had decided to surrender. What they saw was from the "Magic" (Japanese diplomatic cable traffic) that they intercepted, that in fact there were plenty of people in powerful positions in Japan who were opposed to surrender. Even if the emperor was allowed to remain, these officials were still calling for other conditions that would’ve been totally unacceptable to the United States.

Truman, (General George) Marshall, (Secretary of War Henry) Stimson and other leading officials within the American government really had no reason to believe, and certainly did not believe that Japan was on the verge of surrender. They knew that Japan couldn’t win the war. The Japanese knew that too, but the question is, "What does it take to force a surrender?"

Q: Those arguments have been gradually getting more understanding among scholars. Are they reasonable ideas? Or do they still have a long way to go?

A: I think the far left, where the die-hard revisionists are, and the far right, where you have the die-hard traditionalists, are pretty small groups now. I don’t think anyone, at least anyone who is publishing or doing research or keeping up with the literature, takes revisionism in its pure form seriously.

It’s the same with the traditional view that Truman had to authorize the bomb because the only alternative was an invasion that was going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. I think we know beyond reasonable doubt that that wasn’t true.

One, the invasion probably was not going to be necessary. We don’t know for certain, but it probably would not have been necessary. Two, even if it had been necessary, it was not going to claim hundreds of thousands of American lives. It would have been a terrible event, for both the Americans who invaded and the Japanese who resisted, but it would not have caused hundreds of thousands of American deaths. But that is still the prevalent view.

Q: Why do both sides--those who believe in the Truman myth and those challenging it--continue to stick to their positions? I went to the Smithsonian Annex. It glorifies the Enola Gay and provides no explanation about the aftermath. I thought that Americans are trying to convey the airplane as a winning weapon.

A: Partly because that’s what they grew up with. Certainly that is true of my generation. It’s not as though they are against considering new views, but I think it’s not a welcoming thing. It’s the hard thing to think about, the effects of the atomic bomb.

The Smithsonian obviously got burned so badly (by what happened 20 years ago) that they just simply have the plane out there, and as you say, without any sort of explanation. As I say in my book, when the Enola Gay exhibit was presented after the controversy, it was almost devoid of interpretation, but still not entirely, and what they did have in the way of interpretation tended to reinforce the traditional view.

Q: It’s easy for Japanese to understand the so-called revisionist argument because it’s very sympathetic to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but difficult to think that nuclear weapons are necessary to keep the world safe. For Americans, it would be easy to get used to that idea, but difficult to imagine what happened under the mushroom cloud. What do you think is the difference in their viewpoints?

A: As you know there are those who say that we should just get rid of all nuclear weapons. Ideally, that would be a good thing, but practically I am not sure that it would be because the knowledge is there. If we don’t have them, somebody else might.

I guess my point is that once you had the bomb then you are not going to get rid of it, and what you need to do is to find a way to survive it and to live with it. That’s the dilemma we have been facing for 70 years or so, or more than 70 years, if you talk about the development of the bomb.

Q: Does that mean that the American people can discuss this objectively and calmly and accept something that they couldn’t 20 years ago?

A: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. I mean most people don’t think about it. What they do is to see a newspaper article some place or a magazine article, or more likely now something on television, and that is just a snippet.

Again, in my experience, and maybe it’s not typical, but I think it is, that most people are willing to listen to other ideas or to learn something new and to make their judgments based on that. I certainly don’t think that the American people are so committed to one point of view that they simply refuse to listen to something that they don’t necessarily agree with or hadn’t heard before. I think it is important, both in this country and in Japan, for people to shed the mythologies and to learn.

Q: To shed the mythologies?

A: Yes, to (get) rid of the mythologies on both sides and to learn the history of why the bomb was used is much more complicated than (what) they have heard, and it’s much more ambiguous than they have heard. It’s not a question of bad people doing bad things on either side. In my mind, Truman had no reasonable alternative but to use the bomb. In my mind, too, the Japanese should have surrendered long before Hiroshima. I mean they knew they couldn’t win the war but they kept fighting, and those who were being slaughtered were their own citizens. It’s completely unjustifiable.

Q: What is your goal as a historian after decades of study about Truman’s decision? What would you like to achieve?

A: What I would like to achieve is just to educate people about how complicated it was. I would like to educate them about the context in which that decision was made, that World War II was a terrible, terrible war, and that you really have to understand the entire context in which the bomb was used. You also have to understand why it was such an easy decision for Truman and his advisers. That’s a long-winded way of saying to educate, to inform and to make people think about it.

Did we have to use the bomb to force a Japanese surrender, a quick Japanese surrender, a prompt Japanese surrender? The answer in my mind is: Yes, we had to.

But that doesn’t answer the question of how long the war would have gone on if we hadn’t used the bomb. Would the Japanese have surrendered right after the Soviets invaded Manchuria? Probably not.

Would the war have gone on for another two weeks? Would the war have gone on for another 10 weeks? Would the war have gone on for another three months? We don’t know, and there is no way we can know, but it would’ve gone on longer.

The reason that Truman used the bomb as quickly as he did was that he hoped it would end the war as soon as possible, and, therefore, stop Americans from dying in combat. It didn’t have to be a large number. I mean nobody ever told him that using the bomb is going to save hundreds of thousands of lives. They did need to because saving a far, far smaller number of lives for him was ample reason to use it. When I say a “much smaller number,” I am talking about maybe 10.

Q: Maybe one. Truman lost his colleague during his service for World War I as you noted in your book.

A: Yes, maybe one because that’s what was critical for him. Yes, one American life because that’s what you care about. When I talk to students, they say, "Well, how could he do that? How could he kill tens of thousands of Japanese to save a few American lives?" The only answer is: That’s the way war is. You don’t do those kinds of equations. The idea is just to win the war and get your soldiers home. At least that was true during World War II, and that’s the great tragedy of war, but that’s the reality of it.

* * *

Samuel Walker, born in 1946, has written books on the history of nuclear energy, including “Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan.”