Was Dropping the Atomic Bomb Necessary?

During the war, my grandmother walked to school along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, and she saw gold stars in people’s windows. She was a young girl, but she knew what they meant—each marked a home to which a young man would never return. “You can talk about war theoretically,” she told me, “but seeing a gold star in the window . . .” she let the thought complete itself. I have never seen a gold star hanging in a window, and none of my friends even knew what one was. We are fantastically lucky: we have never had to worry about the draft. War, for most of us—even post-9/11—remains a distant and academic unreality. We owe it to those gold stars to understand how we got here.

My generation knows a little about the European war—we know about Hitler and the Nazis and the Holocaust. At least in general terms. But we are utterly in the dark about the war with Japan. The course of the war and the battles we fought are a mystery. The only thing that most of us know about the Pacific War is that America dropped an atom bomb on Japan. And there is absolutely no reason that should make sense to us except as an inexcusable atrocity when we don’t know why it was dropped.

Japan was the first Asian power to appreciate the military implications of the industrial revolution. She organized her Imperial Army in the late 19th century and in short order acquired the Kurile Islands, the Ryukyus, China’s Liaodong Peninsula, Taiwan, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, Korea, the Marianas, the Carolines, the Marshalls, and Palau. The latter four island groups were all won from Germany in the First World War and represent the center squares of the South Pacific chessboard.

Up to the end of the First Word War there was nothing particularly unusual about Japan’s empire except for the speed with which it had been achieved. But great changes were in the offing. In 1920, an intellectual named Ikki Kita published his innocuously titled Reconstruction Program for Japan, which Samuel Eliot Morison called “the Japanese Mein Kampf”—a volume that laid the philosophical foundation for Japanese world hegemony on the unlikely twin-pillars of hatred of the wealthy and hatred of “the white man.” The deepest convictions of the Japanese militarists, primarily younger middle-class officers, were here expressed in what was eventually termed Kodoha, “The Imperial Way.” Spurred by the economic unrest of the early 1920s, the Imperial Army employed a combination of treachery, mendacity, and outright murder to gain control of government. In 1928, the Imperial Army assassinated Manchurian ruler Chang Tso-lin. They murdered Japanese Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi in 1930. They murdered Japanese Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi in 1932. In between, they invaded Manchuria.

Though nominally parliamentary, the government of Japan was a military dictatorship, exercising “thought control” through the Kempeitai (the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo) and presided over by a mysterious emperor, who, as Herbert Bix writes, “whenever confronted with the option of peace, chose war.”

In 1933, the League of Nations condemned Japan’s brutalization of Manchuria and demanded a Japanese withdrawal. Japan responded by withdrawing—from the League of Nations. The Covenant of the League authorized (in fact demanded) economic and military action be taken against Japan, but the League did nothing. (This collective failure was noted by Germany’s newly-minted chancellor, Adolf Hitler, who followed Japan out of the League just seven months later.)

The Imperial Army grew with its rapacious appetite—17 divisions in 1931 became 34 divisions in 1938, 51 divisions by 1941. In 1937, having digested Manchuria, the Imperial Army invaded China proper, launching a new war in the course of which Japan would murder 17 million Chinese civilians, the “forgotten holocaust.”

The emperor’s closest adviser, Marquis Koichi Kido, had written in his diary back in 1931, “The army is trying to destroy political parties and parliament and establish a military dictatorship, and it is very difficult to devise a countermeasure.” Unfortunately, the countermeasure he chose was one of accommodation, hoping that if the militarists could not be eradicated they might at least be “guided.” This led him, in 1941, to recommend for appointment as Prime Minister the one man who, perhaps more than any in Japan, wished for war with the United States: Hideki Tojo.

The Japanese had renounced the Five-Power Treaty in 1934. They had transformed their South Pacific holdings into military bases in defiance of the League of Nations Mandate. Their navy was now third in tonnage, and had just launched the world’s largest and heaviest-gunned battleship. A final factor obsessed the Imperial strategist: the weakness of the United States Pacific Fleet, and its concentration at a single location, Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese plan of conquest, agreed at a September 6, 1941, meeting of the Supreme War Council, was, as Morison writes, “the most enticing, ambitious and far reaching in modern history, not excepting Hitler’s.” Prior to a declaration of war, the Imperial Navy would destroy the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the American air forces at Luzon and the British air forces on the Malay Peninsula. This would be followed by a lighting conquest of Guam, Wake Island, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Borneo, British Malaya, the Indochinese Peninsula, Burma, Sumatra, Java and the Dutch East Indies, Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomons. The establishment of a “ribbon” defensive perimeter running from the Kurile Islands through Wake, the Marshalls and around the Malay Barrier to the Burmese-Indian border would cut off Australia and New Zealand and allow Japan to complete its subjugation of China. The Empire thus achieved would enslave over half of the world’s population.

If the Japanese war plan seems delusionally grandiose today, it didn’t look remotely delusional in May 1942, when Japan had achieved every single conquest she had attempted and was two battles away from completing the isolation of Australia and New Zealand. This was the height of the Japanese empire, and it took the combined strength of the Allies the next three years to undo what Japan had achieved in six months.  Had the U.S. Navy not stopped Japan at Midway, August of 1942 would have seen not the American invasion of Guadalcanal, but the Japanese invasion of Hawaii.

Everywhere Japan went, she made herself—to use a Churchillian phrase—hated as no race has ever been hated. The frenzied, inhuman cruelty of the Imperial Army, which had no parallel outside the worst Nazi concentration camps, was visited upon every town, city and village as a matter of policy. When the Japanese Army entered the undefended Chinese capital of Nanking in December 1937, half its million residents remained. In just six weeks, the Japanese managed to murder half of those—250,000 people—and roving gangs of soldiers raped more than 1,000 women every day. Manila was similarly destroyed in 1945, this time as the Japanese were on the retreat: They killed 100,000 civilians in just 28 days. Babies were ripped from wombs, tossed in the air and caught on bayonets. The hospital was set on fire after the patients had been strapped to their beds.

As the Imperial Army was beaten back, the barbaric Japanese blowtorch turned in on itself. Tojo’s “frontline code of honor” prohibited surrender, and the Army rigorously adhered to this suicidal standard. Of the 18,000 Japanese defending Guam in late 1944, fewer than 485 surrendered. On Peleliu 202 surrendered out of 13,600. On Iwo Jima, 216 out of 21,000. And on Iwo Jima alone 7,000 Americans were killed and nearly 20,000 wounded.

The final stepping stone, and the best predictor of what we could expect to face in Japan itself, was Okinawa. It was the only island on which we encountered a sizable civilian population loyal to Japan—some 600,000. These were ordered by the Japanese Army to commit suicide. Hand grenades were distributed for the purpose. When hand grenades weren’t available, garden tools and bare hands were put to work. When the spirit was unwilling, the Japanese Army helped by machine-gunning civilians, or by driving them off “suicide cliffs,” or by conscripting them into the Army or using them as human shields; 150,000 civilians died on Okinawa, more than twice the number of Japanese soldiers killed, more than died at Hiroshima.

In June 1945, the Japanese War Council made their only initiative to end the war diplomatically, via the Soviet Union—an initiative not for surrender, but for a negotiated settlement that would preserve the militarist hegemony in Japan. On July 26, 1945, the Allies issued an ultimatum from a summit meeting in Potsdam: Japan would surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction.” The question of whether the emperor would stay in power was not mentioned—in fact, was still being debated by the Truman administration: Secretary of State James Byrnes argued vehemently that Hirohito, in whose name the war had been launched and fought, was culpable; Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who eventually carried the day, wanted to retain the emperor for the sake of postwar stability. In either case, unconditional surrender was the cornerstone of Allied war aims: Japan with her militarist order intact was no more acceptable than Germany governed by the Nazis.

A blockade of the home islands was never seriously considered, nor would it have been practicable: At the time of the Potsdam Proclamation, the Japanese still had 2.5 million men under arms, 9,000 combat aircraft, half of them kamikazes, and one million tons of shipping. To quote Joseph Grew, who had been U.S. Ambassador to Japan and was subsequently Secretary of State: “I know Japan; I lived there for ten years. I know the Japanese intimately. The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or psychologically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face. They will pull in their belts another notch, reduce their rations from a bowl to a half bowl of rice, and fight to the bitter end. Only by utter physical destruction or utter exhaustion of their men and materials can they be defeated.”

Added to this was a horrific and ongoing civilian toll. As Richard Frank writes, “Several American historians led by Robert Newman have insisted vigorously that any assessment of the end of the Pacific war must include the horrifying consequences of each continued day of the war for the Asian populations trapped within Japan’s conquests. Newman calculates that between a quarter million and 400,000 Asians, overwhelmingly noncombatants, were dying each month the war continued.” Finally, there were the 300,000 allied POWs in Japan, whom—as former POW Lester Tenney wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal—the Japanese were to begin executing on August 17, so the Imperial Army could “unburden” itself and concentrate on what was important. (The Japanese applied their rule of “no surrender” to POWs too—when they realized Wake Island was about to be retaken, they took all the American civilians who had been captured and used as slaves for two years, marched them out to the beach, and shot them. There were no survivors.)

The Japanese response to the Potsdam Proclamation was, according to Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki, to “kill it with silence” (mokusatsu). The Supreme War Council of six men was divided. The Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Navy Minister were in favor of parlay. War Minister General Korechika Anami and the Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff believed the war was not yet lost. Emperor Hirohito demanded one great victory (or a substantial defeat inflicted on the Allies) before any peace negotiations began. The military had plans to organize more than 20 million civilians into a last-ditch defense force. There were 680,000 regular army troops on Kyushu to repel the invasion.

As Japanese wartime reporter and editor Masuo Kato wrote in The Lost War, “the Japanese are a people of paradoxes. That is why they could cling to victory in the midst of the fact of defeat. Even though some had come to accept defeat as likely, a companion conclusion was that it would come only after Japan had gone down gloriously fighting to the last man.”

On August 6, 1945, we dropped atomic bomb “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. On August 9, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.

As Arnold Brackman records, Hirohito sent a message to the Prime Minister saying the war must end. The War Council militarists were unmoved: “Anami,” writes Kagan, “went so far as to deny that Hiroshima had been struck by an atomic bomb. Others insisted that the US had used its only bomb.”

On August 9, we dropped atomic bomb “Fat Man” on Nagasaki.

Astonishingly, this too failed to sway the War Council. Anami declared “we must fight on.” Army Chief of Staff Yoshijiro Umezu declared Japan would “deal a smashing blow to the enemy.” Navy Chief of Staff Soemu Toyoda added “we do not believe that we will possibly be defeated.”

But one man had been convinced by the second bomb—Hirohito. He saw Japan facing the “utter destruction” the Allies had promised, and, unlike his generals, he was not content to see the entire nation go down with him. He announced to a stunned War Council (over which the emperor traditionally presided in silence) that the Potsdam Proclamation would be accepted. This decision was conveyed to the Allies immediately (in the nick of time, as, secret of secrets, we had no more atom bombs to drop).

Hirohito believed, no doubt correctly, that only his own voice could persuade the Japanese to accept defeat. Never in the history of Japan had an emperor spoken to the common people. On the evening of August 14, Hirohito recorded a message to his “good and loyal subjects,” which made no mention of the Soviets, but described “a new and most cruel bomb” that could cause the “ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation.”

The speech was very nearly never heard. In the early morning of the 15th, the militarists attempted a coup, storming the palace and murdering the commander of the Imperial guard. The rebels scoured the palace for the recording but never found it. General Tanaka arrived hours later and put down the rebellion, which might yet have succeeded had it been supported by General Anami. But Anami could not bring himself, ultimately, to disobey his emperor, and chose suicide instead.

And so, on August 15, the recording was released and the war ended, eight years and more than 32 million lives after the Japanese had invaded China and destroyed Nanking. Of those lives lost, 26 million were civilians who were guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there is a final point to be made by George MacDonald Fraser, who fought the Japanese in Burma and produced perhaps the finest and most extraordinary memoir of the War: Years later, in a heated argument over the bomb, he called himself and his comrades civilians in uniform, no more guilty of starting the war or perpetuating it than the civilians in Japan. He dreamed of no conquests—he had simply been born at the right time to fight. He was indignant that his anti-bomb interlocutor should have piously been willing to sacrifice him in a continuing conventional war. His life, he thought, was worth no less than anyone else’s. I hope the reader will agree. 

Daniel Gelernter is CEO of the tech startup Dittach and editor of shortbookreviews.com.