The Truth Behind Hiroshima and Nagasaki

There has been much discussion lately around the racism and inhumanity behind the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is very true that many American military leaders such as Curtis Lemay and even President Truman viewed Asians as racially inferior, many popular cartoons and comics at the time were also infused with anti-Asian sentiment.

It is now widely known that racism was a major factor behind the United States decision to drop nuclear weapons on Japan and not Nazi Germany. There is another argument that gets much less press but might just be as important. This is the argument that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the last acts of World War II but were actually the firsts acts of the Cold War. Kenan Malik argues in an article written for the Guardian, that the bombings are indefensible. He begins his article with a quote from Lemay who stated after the bombings that if the US had lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes as these bombs directly targeted civilians. His overall argument is that it was not strategy but sheer inhumanity that led to the bombings, he is not wrong yet there might have actually been more strategy behind the bombs than he realizes.

The argument made by Truman for using the nukes was that a military invasion of Japan would cost thousands of American lives. This was absolutely true, yet the reality is that Japan had lost its will to fight long before the bombs were ever dropped. General Douglas MacArthur who commanded US forces in the Pacific Southwest stated that “there was no military justification for the dropping of the bomb” and the commander of the US Pacific fleet also admitted that the bombings were “of no material assistance in our war against Japan”.

Why is it always argued in history textbooks that the bombs were dropped to prevent further American casualties, when even the US military commanders in the pacific plainly admit this was not the case. A further examination of the state of Japan just prior to the bombings will help illustrate this point. Ward Wilson writes in an article for Foreign Policy that there are several key elements that do not jive with the argument that the bombs made the impact on Japan that the history books claim. The most important is that the nuclear bombs were not that destructive compared to the firebombing campaigns that had killed over 300,000 Japanese and leveled 68 of the most populous cities in Japan including Tokyo. The firebombing campaign carries out by Lemay was relatively more destructive because it used thousands of smaller bombs dropped over a much larger area meaning they devastated more landmass than the nukes did.

It was the firebombing that truly took Japan out of the war and American military and political leaders knew this. In fact, Japan would have surrendered long before Hiroshima if the US would have accepted a conditional surrender that simply allowed Japan to remain under the rule of the emperor. Wilson argues that Japanese military leaders attempted to discover a method to force the US to accept a conditional surrender, one method was to petition the Soviet Union to act as mediator and get better peace terms and the second was to inflict such a high number of US casualties in an attempted invasion of Japan that the US would accept peace terms. Both of the solutions prove that the Japanese military knew they had already lost the war and were trying to find a way out, yet the refusal of the US to accept a conditional surrender and the subsequent invasion of Manchuria (a region of what is now northeastern China that was under Japanese occupation during the war) by the Soviet Union kiboshed those plans.

Wilson correctly points out that the invasion of Manchuria effectively crushed any hope Japan had of either solution and forced them into a corner. He believes that this invasion by Stalin was the single most event that brought Japan to surrender and not the nukes. The reality was that the argument for the nukes hides the true immorality behind the firebombing campaigns and paints the US as protecting American lives. The Japanese military leaders also prefer the argument for the nukes because it allows them to blame their failure on “amazing scientific breakthrough that no one could predict”. This did not, however, stop the Strategic Bombing Survey in 1946 to conclude that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped”.

So if the purpose of dropping the bombs was not to win the war, what was it? Well General Leslie Groves may have spilled the beans when he stated in 1943 that, “the target was always expected to be Japan”. Malik attributes this decision to racist and inhuman attitudes, yet that only paints half of the picture. If the target was always Japan certainly race had a large role in that decision, yet if dropping the bombs was going to have no impact on the war why do it. The answer is simple, with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the ramping up of Soviet military might it was becoming quite clear that the communist nation was going to challenge Western capitalism in the region and as we know now the whole world.

The soviets had been allies during the war, but the combination of the invasion of Manchuria and threat of communist expansionism pressured the US into a show of force in the region. It has been argued that, if “the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years”. Could it then be that dropping two atomic bombs on Japan shortly after the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was a reactionary move to beat the Soviets in acquiring the surrender of Japan. Wilson further illustrates that if the Soviets had been the ones who had forced the Japanese to surrender then, “the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced. And once the Cold War was underway, asserting that the Soviet entry had been the decisive factor would have been tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy”.

It is no surprise that shortly after the Second World War, the US and the Soviet Union would slowly drift into a global conflict that became known as the Cold War. The ideological differences between communism and capitalism were the primary reason for the conflict and many military leaders on both sides knew it was only time before these two superpowers locked horns. After the defeat of Germany and Japan and the economic and military losses of Great Britain, the US and the Soviet Union where the only two Superpowers to emerge from the war in a stronger position than when they entered.

Stalin never trusted the West and believed they had been involved in the Russian Civil War (backing the White forces of the Tsar against the Red communists) and had refused to assist the Soviets on the Eastern front leaving them to fight the Germans alone costing millions of casualties. Truman would implement his Truman doctrine in 1947 attempting to contain the spread of communism, eventually rolling out the Marshall Plan that would offer assistance to help rebuild European countries devastated by the war. The Marshall Plan was part charity and part ideological conditioning as the plan was meant to promote western capitalism and in response the Soviets formed COMECON the Soviet equivalent to the Marshall Plan but with a communist twist.

It would seem naive to believe that both Soviet and military leader had not recognized that an ideological clash of the titans was right around the corner. It was quite clear to Stalin and other Soviet leaders that the US had been looking for any opportunity to overthrow communism in Russia after they failed to back the Tsar. No one truly believed that Japan would not have surrendered if they were offered anything but unconditional surrender and after the Soviets successful invaded Manchuria a Japanese surrender was only a matter of time. Thus, in order to beat the Russians to Tokyo and strike fear into the communist regime, the US dropped two atomic bombs on a defeated people not as the last act of World War II but as the first act of the Cold War.