[rad-green] Did America Have To Drop the Bomb? Not to End the War, But Truman Wanted To Intimidate Russia -- Washington Post

*https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1985/08/04/did-america-have-to-drop-the-bombnot-to-end-the-war-but-truman-wanted-to-intimidate-russia/46105dff-8594-4f6c-b6d7-ef1b6cb6530d/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1985/08/04/did-america-have-to-drop-the-bombnot-to-end-the-war-but-truman-wanted-to-intimidate-russia/46105dff-8594-4f6c-b6d7-ef1b6cb6530d/>Washington
Post          August 4, 1985Did America Have To Drop the Bomb? Not to End
the War, But Truman Wanted To Intimidate Russia*

*By Gar Alperovitz, author of Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima & Potsdam*

[image: image.png]
THE AMBASSADOR HAD just had a long private meeting with President Harry S
Truman, in office less than six weeks following the death of Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Truman had told him two extraordinary things: First, if all went
well, the United States would soon possess a weapon of awesome and hitherto
unknown power.

Charging him with "utmost secrecy," Truman revealed something "which I have
not told anybody" -- that he had decided to postpone negotiations with
Stalin on the shape of the postwar world until he knew for sure whether the
weapon really worked.

"I was startled, shocked and amazed," Joseph E. Davies, former U.S. envoy
to the Soviet Union, wrote in his diary on May 21, 1945 after the meeting.
In an asterisked footnote he added: "Uranium -- for reason of security I
will have to fill this in later."

On July 16, the first atom bomb was tested successfully at Alamogordo, N.M.
On July 17, Truman sat down to talk with Stalin. And on Aug. 6, a bomb
would fall on Hiroshima, ultimately killing an estimated 130,000 Japanese
and changing the world.

Now, 40 years later, revelations based on privately held and previously
classified information continue to illuminate the complex decision-making
that led to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Most Americans assume the reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed was
simply to prevent a costly invasion of Japan.

However, the newest documents have strengthened the theory that other
considerations -- especially the new weapon's impact on diplomacy toward
the Soviet Union -- were involved.

The invasion of Japan -- which President Truman claimed might cost up to a
million casualties -- was scheduled to begin on Nov. 1 with a landing on
the island of Kyushu, with a full invasion in the spring of 1946.
(Documents of the time suggest that many planners foresaw far fewer
casualties.)

But by the mid-summer of 1945 Japan was in a very bad way. How allied
intelligence understood the situation at the time was detailed in a report
to the American and British Combined Chiefs of Staff, made public in 1976:

"The increasing effects of sea blockade and cumulative devastation wrought
by strategic bombing . . . has already rendered millions homeless and has
destroyed from 25 percent to 50 percent of the built-up area of Japan's
most important cities . . . . A conditional surrender . . . might be
offered by them at any time . . . ."

The Japanese code had been broken early in the war. Faint peace feelers
appeared as early as September 1944.

In July, Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal's diary described the
latest cables as "real evidence of a Japanese desire to get out of the war
. . . ."

Forrestal was referring to a message from Togo to his ambassador in Moscow
instructing him to see Molotov before he and Stalin left to meet Truman at
the Potsdam Conference. The Japanese envoy was "to lay before him the
emperor's strong desire to secure a termination of the war."

Forrestal noted that "Togo said further that the unconditional surrender
terms of the Allies was (sic) about the only thing in the way . . . ."

Discussion of surrender was also underway through a channel in Switzerland.
In a recently discovered memo dated May 12, William J. Donovan, director of
the Office of Strategic Services, told Truman that an OSS source had
"talked with Shunichi Kase, the Japanese minister to Switzerland . . . .
Kase expressed a wish to help arrange for a cessation of hostilities . . .
."

Donovan reported the same judgment as that contained in the intercepted
cables -- a slight change in the surrender formula seemed the only
remaining issue: "One of the few provisions . . . would be the retention of
the emperor . . . ."

Did top U.S. officials understand the import of the cables? There was, to
be sure, the possibility that the initial feelers were without substance.
However, Truman's diary, discovered in 1978, terms the key intercepted
message "the telegram from Jap emperor asking for peace."

Adm. William D. Leahy, who served as chief of staff to the President and
presided over the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in his diary in mid-June
that "at the present time . . . a surrender of Japan can be arranged with
terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory
provision for America's defense against future trans-Pacific aggression."
Afterwards, Leahy would reflect that "the use of this barbarous weapon at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against
Japan . . . ."

Likewise, Eisenhower would later state that "it wasn't necessary" to hit
the Japanese "with that awful thing." On July 20, 1945, in front of Gen.
Omar Bradley, he advised Truman of his objections.

There is some confusion as to precisely how other top military figures
felt, particularly in the crucial last month before Hiroshima. There is no
doubt, of course, that they approved planning for an invasion.

The important question is whether by July and early August military
planners still believed an invasion would be required if the atomic bomb
was not used.

Adm. Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, had for much of
the war argued that naval blockade would secure unconditional surrender
without an invasion.

The top Army air forces commander, Gen. H.H. "Hap" Arnold, said
unconditional surrender could be won by October. He outlined the
devastation that would hit the Japanese population, with its enormous
casualties.

"Japan, in fact, will become a nation without cities, with her
transportation disrupted and will have tremendous difficulty in holding her
people together for continued resistance."

Precisely how the leading Army figure, Gen. George C. Marshall, felt is not
entirely clear. On the one hand, Marshall pressed forward on invasion
planning, but he also urged changing the surrender formula and, as we shall
see, advised of the importance of a Russian declaration of war.

As for the troops in the field: "Every individual moving to the Pacific,"
Marshall said, "should be indoctrinated with a firm determination to see it
through."

Once the new weapon had been proven, the military leaders went along with
the president's decision to use it. But this fact has often led subsequent
observers to confuse approval with the question of whether, as Eisenhower
put it, the weapon was still deemed "mandatory as a measure to save
American lives." Strategy for the bomb was in any event largely handled
outside the normal chain of command by the president and his advisers.

Did the president understand the possibility that the atomic bomb was not
required to prevent an invasion? On this question there is much dispute.
However, the documents now available make it very difficult to believe he
did not.

First, Truman was repeatedly advised that a change in the unconditional
surrender formula allowing Japan to keep the emperor seemed likely to end
the war. There is also documentation -- from the diaries of Secretary of
War Henry L. Stimson, acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew and from
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill -- confirming that the president
did not regard such a change as major. And in the end, of course, he did
make such a change after the bomb was used.

It is sometimes argued that the Japanese military would have prevented a
surrender had the atomic bomb not been used. But this argument usually
assumes there would have been no change in the surrender formula. Given the
right terms, as Leahy put it, "We were certain that the Mikado could stop
the war with a royal word."

Of course, the president preferred not to alter the terms if possible.

The idea that the atomic bomb had to be used to avoid an invasion turns on
whether or not there were other options.

As early as September 1944, Churchill felt the Japanese might collapse when
Russia entered the war. On May 21, 1945, Secretary of War Stimson advised
of the "profound military effect" of Soviet entry.

In mid-June, Marshall advised the president that "the impact of Russian
entry on the already hopeless Japanese may well be the decisive action
levering them into capitulation at that time or shortly thereafter if we
land in Japan."

A month later the Combined British-U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed the
Russian option at Potsdam. Gen. Sir Hastings Ismay summarized the Combined
Intelligence Staffs' conclusion for Churchill: "If and when Russia came
into the war against Japan the Japanese would probably wish to get out on
almost any terms short of the dethronement of the emperor."

Did the president also understand the advice that the Russian declaration
of war was likely to bring about capitulation?

After his first meeting with Stalin on July 17, 1945 -- three weeks before
Hiroshima -- the president noted in his diary:

"He'll be in the Jap war on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about."

It is clear that the president preferred to end the war without Russian
help, but that does not mean that he had no alternative but to use the
atomic bomb. We now know he rejected Russian help for political, not
military, reasons.

The original planning date for Russian entry into the war was August 8.
Hiroshima was bombed on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9.

The person for whom the linkage between the atomic bomb and strategy
towards Russia was most direct was Secretary of State James F. Byrnes --
Truman's chief adviser both on diplomacy and on the atomic bomb.

Byrnes was a complex, secretive, even devious politician. In his diary
Truman refers to him at this time as "conniving."

There is unmistakable evidence that Byrnes tried to rewrite the historical
record, in part by destroying documents, in part by literally rewriting the
private diaries of his assistant, Warren Brown -- and passing them off to
official government archivists as authentic.

In any case, Forrestal's diaries, show Byrnes "most anxious to get the
Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in . . . ." It was also
Byrnes who formally proposed that the bomb be targeted on a factory
surrounded as closely as possible by workers' housing to achieve maximum
psychological effect.

Ambassador Davies, who was "shocked, startled and amazed" when told of the
decision to postpone talks with Stalin, was disturbed by "Byrnes' attitude
that the atomic bomb assured ultimate success in negotiations . . . ." On
July 28, 1945 Davies warned him that "the threat wouldn't work, and might
do irreparable harm."

Byrnes was particularly worried that if the Russians entered the Japanese
war they would get control of Manchuria and north China. He was also
concerned about Eastern Europe. Roosevelt had selected Byrnes -- his
"assistant president" at the time -- as the leading public advocate and
defender of the famous Yalta agreement which promised democracy and free
elections in Eastern Europe.

Though at Yalta Byrnes participated in cutting the teeth out of language
that would have made the agreement more than a statement of general
intentions, recent research indicates he hoped the atomic bomb would
enforce in practice what had been signed away in principle.

According to atomic scientist Leo Szilard, who met with Byrnes on May 28,
1945 -- 10 weeks before Hiroshima: "Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was
necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the
war . . . " Byrnes "was concerned about Russia's postwar behavior.

"Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Rumania; Byrnes thought it would
be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw . . . and that Russia
might be more manageable if impressed by American military might.

"I shared Byrnes's concern . . . " Szilard observed, "but I was completely
flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia
more manageable . . . ."

There is no evidence Byrnes used the atomic bomb as an explicit threat, but
a month after the Potsdam meeting with Stalin, for example, Stimson talked
with him at the White House, and noted in his diary: "I found that Byrnes
was very much against any attempt to cooperate with Russia. His mind is
full of his problems with the coming meeting of foreign ministers, and he
looks to having the presence of the bomb in his pocket, so to speak, as a
great weapon . . . ."

Byrnes, who previously had been senator from South Carolina, was on very
intimate terms with the president. He had, in fact, acted as Truman's
mentor when he went to the Senate from Missouri. Roosevelt had also
seemingly selected Byrnes to be vice president in 1944, switching only at
the last minute to Truman.

One of the reasons Truman made Byrnes secretary of state was that this move
put Byrnes next in line of succession for the presidency after Truman moved
up from vice president.

On May 3, 1945, Truman also asked Byrnes to be his representative on the
"Interim Committee" studying atomic strategy -- and there were numerous
meetings between the two men throughout the summer.

Truman and Byrnes left Washington together on July 7 to meet with Stalin at
Potsdam, where Stimson complained that Byrnes was "hugging matters pretty
close to his bosom."

Before the Potsdam conference Truman was also advised by Stimson: "We shall
probably hold more cards in our hands later than now." During the
conference Truman was enormously bolstered by the successful atomic test.
"Now I know what happened to Truman yesterday," Churchill observed. "I
couldn't understand it. When he got to the meeting after having read this
report (of the atomic test) he was a changed man."

"He told the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed
the whole meeting."

He also told Stalin that America had developed a powerful new weapon, but
did not specify that it was atomic.

There are still many unanswered questions about the decisions made during
the month before Hiroshima. However, there is little doubt about some
things. Had the United States so desired, either the forthcoming Russian
declaration of war or a change in the surrender formula (or both together)
seemed likely to end the war without the atomic bomb. There was also plenty
of time to use the weapon if these options failed in the three months
before the Kyushu landing.

"The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the aftertime," Churchill
subsequently observed, "that the decision whether or not to use the atomic
bomb . . . was never even an issue." It is possible that top policy makers,
especially the president, simply wanted to leave no stone unturned to end
the war.

However, in view of what we now know about Japan's attempt to surrender,
military factors alone appear inadequate to explain the choice.

As historian Martin Sherwin put it, the idea the atomic bomb would help
make Russia manageable both in Asia and in Europe was an important
consideration -- "inextricably involved."

In mid-May America's leaders had postponed negotiations with Stalin, basing
their strategy on the assumption the bomb would strengthen their hand.
Thereafter, some of those most intimately involved in diplomacy -- unlike
some of the top military figures -- apparently were either unable or
unwilling to understand the significance of the June and July information
on Japan's collapse.

The evidence that diplomatic considerations were very important is
especially clear in connection with the president's closest adviser,
Byrnes. Nevertheless, 40 years after the fact some government documents
still remain classified. It may be that when these are finally released --
perhaps when still other diaries are discovered -- we will know the full
story.

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