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.
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