Gareth Cook
August 7, 2011
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/why_did_japan_surrender
What ended World War II?
For nearly seven decades, the American public has accepted one version of
the events that led to Japan’s surrender. By the middle of 1945, the war in
Europe was over, and it was clear that the Japanese could hold no reasonable
hope of victory. After years of grueling battle, fighting island to island
across the Pacific, Japan’s Navy and Air Force were all but destroyed. The
production of materiel was faltering, completely overmatched by American
industry, and the Japanese people were starving. A full-scale invasion of
Japan itself would mean hundreds of thousands of dead GIs, and, still, the
Japanese leadership refused to surrender.
But in early August 66 years ago, America unveiled a terrifying new weapon,
dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a matter of days, the
Japanese submitted, bringing the fighting, finally, to a close.
On Aug. 6, the United States marks the anniversary of the Hiroshima
bombing’s mixed legacy. The leader of our democracy purposefully executed
civilians on a mass scale. Yet the bombing also ended the deadliest conflict
in human history.
In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged.
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa - a highly respected historian at the University of
California, Santa Barbara - has marshaled compelling evidence that it was
the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that
forced Japan’s surrender. His interpretation could force a new accounting of
the moral meaning of the atomic attack. It also raises provocative questions
about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the
postwar period. And it suggests that we could be headed towards an utterly
different understanding of how, and why, the Second World War came to its
conclusion.
“Hasegawa has changed my mind,” says Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” “The Japanese
decision to surrender was not driven by the two bombings.”
President Truman’s decision to go nuclear has long been a source of
controversy. Many, of course, have argued that attacking civilians can never
be justified. Then, in the 1960s, a “revisionist school” of historians
suggested that Japan was in fact close to surrendering before Hiroshima -
that the bombing was not necessary, and that Truman gave the go-ahead
primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union with our new power.
Hasegawa - who was born in Japan and has taught in the United States since
1990, and who reads English, Japanese, and Russian - rejects both the
traditional and revisionist positions. According to his close examination of
the evidence, Japan was not poised to surrender before Hiroshima, as the
revisionists argued, nor was it ready to give in immediately after the
atomic bomb, as traditionalists have always seen it. Instead, it took the
Soviet declaration of war on Japan, several days after Hiroshima, to bring
the capitulation.
Both the American and Japanese public have clung to the idea that the
mushroom clouds ended the war. For the Japanese, Hiroshima is a potent
symbol of their nation as victim, helping obscure their role as the
aggressors and in atrocities that include mass rapes and beheading prisoners
of war. For the Americans, Hiroshima has always been a means justified by
the end.
“This seems to touch a nerve,” observes Hasegawa.
That may help explain why Hasegawa’s thesis, which he first detailed in an
award-winning 2005 book and has continued to bolster with new material, is
still little known outside of academic circles, says Ward Wilson, a nuclear
weapons scholar who has drawn on Hasegawa’s insights in his own recent work.
Measured against the decades of serious and settled thinking about World War
II, Hasegawa’s scholarship feels radical. But another reason, Wilson argues,
is that to look at history in this new light is to entertain what seem like
shocking ideas. That the destruction of cities does not sway leaders. That
what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not overly remarkable. And,
strangest of all: That nuclear explosives may not be particularly effective
weapons of war.
The Pacific War began in 1941 with the violent humiliation at Pearl Harbor.
Japan already held parts of China, and quickly invaded New Guinea, the Dutch
East Indies, Burma, and Singapore. Manila fell. The country enjoyed air
supremacy across most of Southeast Asia; in February 1942, it even attacked
Australia. Japan’s control was tightening, and it appeared unstoppable.
After the epic Battle of Midway in the summer of 1942, however, the United
States and its allies gained the momentum. Still, progress was slow as
Marines hopped from atoll to island to atoll: wading through bloody coral
shallows under a rain of shelling, engaging an enemy that was dug in, highly
trained, and willing to fight to the death. The names of these tropical
hells - Gaudalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa - have become Marine Corps legend.
The casualties were heavy.
By the summer of 1945, the Americans had cornered Japan and assembled a
final invasion plan, codenamed Operation Downfall. The first stage was
scheduled for the fall, and would have opened with the landing of more than
700,000 troops on Kyushu, the southernmost of the big four islands. It would
have been a larger operation than D-Day, certain to result in a bloody
slaughter.
Americans, then and today, have tended to assume that Japan’s leaders were
simply blinded by their own fanaticism, forcing a catastrophic showdown for
no reason other than their refusal to acknowledge defeat. This was, after
all, a nation that trained its young men to fly their planes, freighted with
explosives, into the side of American naval vessels.
But Hasegawa and other historians have shown that Japan’s leaders were in
fact quite savvy, well aware of their difficult position, and holding out
for strategic reasons. Their concern was not so much whether to end the
conflict, but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war
crimes trials, and preserving the imperial system. The Japanese could still
inflict heavy casualties on any invader, and they hoped to convince the
Soviet Union, still neutral in the Asian theater, to mediate a settlement
with the Americans. Stalin, they calculated, might negotiate more favorable
terms in exchange for territory in Asia. It was a long shot, but it made
strategic sense.
On Aug. 6, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped its payload on Hiroshima,
leaving the signature mushroom cloud and devastation on the ground,
including something on the order of 100,000 killed. (The figures remain
disputed, and depend on how the fatalities are counted.)
As Hasegawa writes in his book “Racing the Enemy,” the Japanese leadership
reacted with concern, but not panic. On Aug. 7, Foreign Minister Shigenori
Togo sent an urgent coded telegram to his ambassador in Moscow, asking him
to press for a response to the Japanese request for mediation, which the
Soviets had yet to provide. The bombing added a “sense of urgency,” Hasegawa
says, but the plan remained the same.
Very late the next night, however, something happened that did change the
plan. The Soviet Union declared war and launched a broad surprise attack on
Japanese forces in Manchuria. In that instant, Japan’s strategy was ruined.
Stalin would not be extracting concessions from the Americans. And the
approaching Red Army brought new concerns: The military position was more
dire, and it was hard to imagine occupying communists allowing Japan’s
traditional imperial system to continue. Better to surrender to Washington
than to Moscow.
By the morning of Aug. 9, the Japanese Supreme War Council was meeting to
discuss the terms of surrender. (During the meeting, the second atomic bomb
killed tens of thousands at Nagasaki.) On Aug. 15, the Japanese surrendered
unconditionally.
How is it possible that the Japanese leadership did not react more strongly
to many tens of thousands of its citizens being obliterated?
One answer is that the Japanese leaders were not greatly troubled by
civilian causalities. As the Allies loomed, the Japanese people were
instructed to sharpen bamboo sticks and prepare to meet the Marines at the
beach.
Yet it was more than callousness. The bomb - horrific as it was - was not as
special as Americans have always imagined. In early March, several hundred
B-29 Super Fortress bombers dropped incendiary bombs on downtown Tokyo. Some
argue that more died in the resulting firestorm than at Hiroshima. People
were boiled in the canals. The photos of charred Tokyo and charred Hiroshima
are indistinguishable.
In fact, more than 60 of Japan’s cities had been substantially destroyed by
the time of the Hiroshima attack, according to a 2007 International Security
article by Wilson, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation
Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In the three
weeks before Hiroshima, Wilson writes, 25 cities were heavily bombed.
To us, then, Hiroshima was unique, and the move to atomic weaponry was a
great leap, military and moral. But Hasegawa argues the change was
incremental. “Once we had accepted strategic bombing as an acceptable weapon
of war, the atomic bomb was a very small step,” he says. To Japan’s leaders,
Hiroshima was yet another population center leveled, albeit in a novel way.
If they didn’t surrender after Tokyo, they weren’t going to after Hiroshima.
Hasegawa’s work is an important new entry into the scholarly conversation,
reconstructing the conflicting perspectives of Russians, Americans, and
Japanese, and concluding that the bomb played a secondary role. Barton
Bernstein, a professor of history emeritus at Stanford University, is the
unofficial dean of American atomic bomb scholarship and counts himself as
both a fan and a critic of Hasegawa. Hasegawa’s ability to read three
languages, Bernstein says, gives him a unique advantage over other scholars.
Hasegawa spent years working through primary documents, with a deep
understanding of linguistic and cultural nuance. His knowledge was
especially valuable because historians of the period face such fragmentary
and contradictory evidence, in part because the Japanese destroyed many
documents.
But therein lies the weakness of the Hasegawa interpretation as well,
Bernstein says. After a long war and in the space of a few days, the
Japanese leadership was hit with two extraordinary events - Hiroshima and
the Soviet invasion - and sorting out cause and effect, based on incomplete
documentation, may prove impossible.
“When you look through all the evidence, I think it is hard to weigh one or
the other more heavily,” Bernstein said. “The analysis is well intentioned,
but more fine-grained than the evidence comfortably allows.”
Yet Bernstein, Hasegawa, and many historians agree on one startling point.
The public view that the atomic bomb was the decisive event that ended World
War II is not supported by the facts.
What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has framed the world’s thinking
about nuclear weapons. Those days in August remain the only instance of
nuclear war. The sheer horrors of the destruction, and the lingering poison
of radioactivity, inform what has come to be called nuclear deterrence: No
sane nation would bring a nuclear attack on itself, and so having nuclear
weapons deters your enemies from attacking. When two rival nations have
nuclear weapons, as during the Cold War, the result is stalemate.
Hasegawa’s scholarship disturbs this simple logic. If the atomic bomb alone
could not compel the Japanese to submit, then perhaps the nuclear deterrent
is not as strong as it seems. In fact, Wilson argues, history suggests that
leveling population centers, by whatever method, does not force surrender.
The Allied firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945 killed many people,
but the Germans did not capitulate. The long-range German bombing of London
did not push Churchill towards acquiescence. And it is nearly impossible to
imagine that a bomb detonated on American soil, even one that immolated a
large city, would prompt the nation to bow in surrender.
If killing large numbers of civilians does not have a military impact, then
what, Wilson asks, is the purpose of keeping nuclear weapons? We know they
are dangerous. If they turn out not to be strategically effective, then
nuclear weapons are not trump cards, but time bombs beneath our feet.
Whatever the merits of this position, it suffers the great handicap of
trying to change, fundamentally, how several generations have thought about
the atomic age, says Linton Brooks, who has served in arms control and
nuclear policy positions in several administrations. “Fifty years of telling
ourselves that these things are different has sort of made them different,”
says Linton. “That is the mystique of nuclear weapons.”
Hasegawa’s own relationship to the events of August of 1945 testifies to the
degree to which, all these years later, they resist clear appraisal. As a
child, Hasegawa watched the Tokyo firebombing from his roof, and he can
still recall the eerie orange glow on the horizon. Growing up, he felt anger
at the Japanese government for bringing the conflict onto its people. Later,
working as a scholar in America, he accepted the position that the atomic
bombing was necessary to end the war. Today he views America’s bombings of
Japan’s cities - Hiroshima and Tokyo included - as war crimes. Yet, he adds,
they are crimes America should not apologize for until Japan comes to terms
with war crimes of its own. These are the evolving views of a man who has
mustered the courage to look at an ugly period of history without flinching
- something that most people, Americans and Japanese alike, have found
themselves unable to do.
Gareth Cook is a Globe columnist and former editor of Ideas.