#Historiography - #Hiroshima and #Nagasaki Part IV

The Revisionists

Revisionist interpretations of the bombings began to appear very quickly following the end of the war. As euphoria began to wane, former war correspondent and journalist John Hersey published Hiroshima one year after the bombings. The story of six bombing survivors, Hersey’s book stood in stark relief against the clinical backdrop of official accounts. In the April 1947 issue of The English Journal, educator Robert Frank posited the question: “Hiroshima: Moral or Military?” In an exercise designed to examine the moral implications of a weapon that could, in sufficient quantities, annihilate human civilization, Frank’s students, a majority of whom initially supported the bombings and the U. S. monopoly (at that time) on atomic weapons, came to see the survivors depicted in Hersey’s book as human beings, not as “the enemy.” Through this humanization of the statistics regarding the dead and wounded, the question became: “Could such an act ever be justified in terms of military expediency?”10 Revisionists rejected the expediency argument, and an increasingly cynical American public began to agree.

The revisionist argument found its champion in Dr. Gar Alperovitz. Dr. Alperovitz is an American historian, author, and professor who earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge University. His 1965 book, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam –The use of the Atomic Bomb and the American confrontation with Soviet power, based on his doctoral dissertation, was one of the seminal works of revisionist World War II history. Arriving at a time when the United States was becoming increasingly mired in an unpopular war in Vietnam and mistrust of American government and foreign policy was building, the book found a receptive audience.

Dr. Alperovitz asserted that following victory over Germany, the United States was in a weakened diplomatic position with the Soviets dominating the battlefields of the European Theatre. He challenged the long-held assumption that newly-inaugurated President Harry S. Truman continued the conciliatory tone of the Roosevelt Administration, instead taking aggressive measures to counter Soviet influence on the post-war world. Truman adopted a hard line with the Soviets, advised by such officials as U. S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Herriman, who believed Soviet “domination in Eastern Europe was intolerable,”14 though given Soviet success on the Eastern Front, it may have been inevitable. The Soviet entry into the war in the East had been assumed necessary to pin down Japanese forces in China to prevent reinforcement of the Home Islands, should a planned invasion be necessary. However, Dr. Alperovitz asserted that American control of the seas was, by spring 1945, so complete that such movement of troops by Japan would have been impossible, obviating fears of a massive Japanese troop buildup to resist such an invasion. With American expectations of China as a “faithful friend and ally,” Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew believed Soviet entry into the war should not be encouraged without Soviet agreement to “certain desirable political objectives.” Truman, an astute politician, no doubt valued a strong diplomatic hand with the Russians.

Dr. Alperovitz placed great emphasis on Japanese peace initiatives “as early as September 1944,” which in his estimation displayed increased urgency in the spring of 1945. However, the U. S. apparently did not consider such efforts sufficient or sincere. After the successful bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman had the diplomatic leverage he needed to exclude the Soviets from influence in the administration of post-war Japan, and minimize Soviet operations in Manchuria as a decisive factor in bringing the war to an end. According Stimson’s aide, Vannevar Bush, the bomb meant, “There was no necessity for any concessions to Russia at the end of the war.” Dr. Alperovitz concludes that deployment of the bomb following Los Alamos was a foregone conclusion, and political considerations, not military necessity, overrode all other factors in the American decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as soon as they became available, closing with an extended (albeit, edited) quote from physicist Dr. Leo Szilard: “Mr. [U. S. Secretary of State James F.] Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war… Mr. Byrnes’… view [was] that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.” Extensively footnoted and with multiple appendices, Dr. Alperovitz’s book is perhaps the most well-documented revisionist work on the topic.

#Historiography - #Hiroshima and #Nagasaki Part III

Early Topical Historiography

The historiography of the bombings defies chronological delineation. It does, however, bear the clear imprint of two distinct viewpoints. The traditionalist perspective that the bombs were dropped to shorten a costly and devastating war, saving lives on all sides, dominated early literature. This was no accident, as the leaders associated with the decision actively strove to shape the narrative. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote a lengthy defense of the government perspective in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Stimson unequivocally stated the aims of the Manhattan Project: to develop and deploy an atomic weapon for the purpose of hastening the end of the war. As a major participant in the decision, Stimson must be considered an authoritative source, but may have had a bias toward justifying what some considered a morally ambiguous decision and the project’s unprecedented investment.

Early historians tended to support this reasoning. In a review of noted historian Herbert Feis’ 1961 book Japan Subdued: The Atomic Bomb and the End of the War in the Pacific, Theodore McNelly describes Feis’ defense of traditionalist interpretation of the bombings. Although Feis acknowledged the findings of the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey (SBS) that Japan would likely have surrendered by November 1945, even without the bombings, American state and military leaders could not be certain of this timing. While some within the Truman Administration argued for a non-deployment demonstration of the weapon with Japanese witnesses, they feared a failed detonation (a serious possibility) would harden Japanese resolve to fight on. Feis concluded that although U. S. officials may be faulted for not revealing the destructive potential of the weapon as a warning of the consequences of rejecting the Potsdam Declaration, such criticism has the benefit of hindsight the decision makers were denied. The decision was reasonable based on the information American officials had at the time.

#Historiography - #Hiroshima and #Nagasaki Part II

Historiographical Trends

Scholarly works on the bombings have been influenced by several trends in historiography in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Following the war, historicist methodologies retained preeminence. As the United States emerged victorious from what was largely regarded as a just war against clearly aggressive regimes in Germany and Japan, consensus history seemed primed for the same supremacy to which the nation itself was ascending. For twenty years following the war, a period of economic prosperity that one historian called “rather placid,” the vision of America as the champion of democracy in a growing global conflict with communism had broad appeal. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s and the United States became increasingly embroiled in yet another conflict in Southeast Asia, a rising subculture of mistrust in traditional institutions and authority began to dominate academia. The “New Left,” or “Radical Historians” objected to traditionalist interpretations of the past, even progressive ones. Historians like Walter La Feber argued that U. S. foreign policy was dictated by the demands of capitalism and denied that the Soviet Union was a communist monolith intent on world domination.5 This revisionist perspective cast the triumphal leaders of the World War II era as aggressors, using America’s technological and industrial might to promote moneyed interests and confront Soviet “aggression,” which they believed was simply a natural reaction to U. S. attempts to maintain hegemony along its borders.

This wave of socially conscious scholarship found fertile ground in a nation preoccupied with what many viewed as an unjustified and increasingly costly war in Vietnam, and whose faith in its leadership was badly shaken by the Watergate scandal. Postmodernist interpretations seemed to fit a world where change was so rapid and widespread that continuity seemed not only elusive, but perhaps an illusion altogether.

#Historiography - #Hiroshima and #Nagasaki

I recently completed my first class of graduate school: Historiography, the study of the evolution of written history, essentially the history of history. My final project for the term was the historiography of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the next few posts, I'll share these thoughts with all three of you reading this page.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Perses Reborn

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22141958

On the morning of 6 August 1945, twenty-nine-year-old marine engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was leaving Hiroshima following a business trip, taking the train to his home in Nagasaki. He forgot his travel papers and had to return to the office to get them. Thus, he was approximately three kilometers outside the city center when the world’s first atomic weapon exploded over Shima Hospital. Severely burned but alive, he managed to stagger to an air raid shelter, finally taking the train home the next day. Two days later, heavily bandaged, he reported for work. As he stood in his office, his superiors haranguing him for fantastical stories of a single bomb destroying an entire city, “Fat Man” exploded over Nagasaki.1

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are among the most controversial military actions in history. More than seventy-five years later historians are still divided over the justification, if any is possible, for the most destructive weapon ever deployed. Historians have generally fallen on a spectrum between traditionalists who defend the bombings as necessary to swiftly end the war with Japan, and revisionists who argue that the bombings were unnecessary, immoral, and ushered the world into a nightmarish existence under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. More than half a century of debate in the nuclear shadow has seen revisionist interpretations rise, ebb, and rise again. While the revisionist perspective has gained wide acceptance in popular opinion and education, it has failed to overtake traditionalist scholarly interpretation.

1. Twice Bombed: The Legacy of Yamaguchi Tsuotomu, 2011, directed by James Cameron, accessed 22 Sep 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1931497/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2