American History Revised (59 page)

Result? The number of hits increased so dramatically the Germans lost more submarines than they could produce. This attrition, combined with the astonishing growth of U.S. ship construction (from 1.2 million gross tons in 1941 to 13.7 million in 1943), enabled the United States and England to win the U-boat war.

1945
Was the atom bomb necessary? Ever since President Truman made the decision to drop the atom bomb, people everywhere have argued passionately whether such a brutal act was necessary.

What people forget is that Truman’s predecessor, FDR, had just recently bombed a Japanese city into oblivion—with no signs of submission by the Japanese. The city was Tokyo, fire-bombed on the night of March 9, 1945. Conventional bombs were used, and it was the greatest single destruction in the history of
warfare: in just a few hours, 84,000 people burned to death and one million people were wandering the streets, their homes and apartment buildings reduced to rubble. Fifteen square miles were totally destroyed.

Yet Japan did not surrender; it continued fighting. Five months later, with the knockout weapon finally perfected and made available, Truman must have reflected on how the destruction of Tokyo had failed to get the message across.

Certainly it was not for want of trying. Before bombing Tokyo, the United States had sent planes over the city to drop leaflets warning civilians to evacuate the city immediately. Entitled “Appeal to the People,” the leaflet stated: “You are not the
enemy of America. Our enemy is the Japanese militarists who dragged you into the war.”

Tokyo after the fire-bombing. For ten years the Japanese government, ashamed of its lack of defense against a conventional air raid, refused to let this picture be published.
   
Photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Absolutely.
   
But Tokyo? No.

But militarist nations do not go down easily. “Practically all Germans deny the fact that they surrendered during the last war,” Franklin Roosevelt said, “but this time they are going to know it. And so are the Japs.” Only it didn’t work. Back in 1920, the Englishman A. G. Gardiner observed about Germany, “Wars do not always end with the knowledge of defeat. They only end with the admission of defeat, which is quite another thing.” In the case of Japan in 1945, the country was defeated, but the country’s leaders wouldn’t admit it.

The man who planned the bombing of Tokyo was General Curtis LeMay. “If this raid works the way I think it will, we can shorten the war,” he said. Years later, after the war was over, LeMay was asked about the moral considerations of dropping the atom bomb. He responded:

At Hiroshima, the death toll was 78,000; at Nagasaki, 64,000. We remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not the 84,000 dead at Tokyo.
*

The purpose of the atom bomb was not so much the damage but to deliver a colossal shock. Explained Gen. George Marshall to the head of the British Military Mission in Washington: “It’s no good warning them. If you warn them, there’s no surprise. And the only way to produce shock is surprise.”

Viewed in this context, the atomic bomb is a military tool of limited utility. Bombed nations will always fight back. The key is shock and surprise, which the United States achieved in its “Shock and Awe” bombing of Baghdad in 1991. And which al-Qaeda achieved on 9/11.

1945
An anonymous document, written by “a prominent economist” recommended
by ex-president Herbert Hoover, arrived on the desk of Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Among its conclusions was an estimate that an invasion of Japan to end the war would cost “500,000 to 1,000,000 American lives.”

It was a number totally out of the blue, a wake-up call. Who this economist was, Hoover would not say. Yet this secret memorandum developed a life of its own and became the major rationale used by Stimson and Truman to justify using the atom bomb.

Today, nine out of ten Americans believe the bomb was justified because it saved a million American lives. Critics of the bomb have jumped on this figure and accused Truman of fiddling with the truth, to the point of being dishonest. Defenders of the bomb, for their part, have used it to come up with their own greater estimates. Never has a simple number played such a pivotal role in history: it brought America into the atomic age.

The first to cite this number was Winston Churchill. When he heard the news of the bombing of Nagasaki, he applauded the news and said it had saved 500,000 lives. Two weeks later, he used the higher number, one million. (In two weeks?)

There it lay quiet for another year or two while the world rejoiced over long-awaited peace. Then, when more and more questions were raised over the morality of using the bomb, Harry Truman defended his action by citing “half a million,” “a million,” or “several million.” You would think, given the importance of his decision, that a president would have his basic numbers straight.

The confusion all started with General George Marshall. In developing the two-phase plan to invade Japan—an attack on Kyushu in November 1945 followed by an attack on Honshu in March 1946—he cited losses of twenty thousand at Kyushu (subsequently updated to forty thousand), and made no prediction what would happen at Honshu if the war lasted that long. Other military planners were not so sanguine. They noted that it took eighty-two days of fierce fighting to capture the island of Okinawa, resulting in 200,000 fatalities (12,520 of them American). They also noted how the Japanese at Luzon and Iwo Jima had been willing to use kamikaze attacks and “fight to the death,” committing suicide rather than surrender. Growing evidence emerged about Japanese plans to mobilize women and ten-year-old children to defend the homeland at all costs, and to execute the 31,617 Americans being held in Japanese prison camps. General Douglas MacArthur feared a worst-case scenario: “If the Japanese government lost control over its people and the millions of former Japanese soldiers took to guerrilla warfare in the mountains, it would take a million American troops ten years to master the situation.”

Trying to get a grasp on all these
numbers, Stimson sought the advice of Justice Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter advised him to stick with the simple one-million-lives figure: “The longer a sentimentally appealing error is allowed to make its way, the more difficult it is to overtake it.” Stimson, admitting that “history is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such,” went along with the figure.

Caught in the fog of war, U.S. Army planners had no degree of certainty how many American lives would be lost. But the picture looked grim. The U.S. invasion of Kyushu alone, code-named Operation Olympic, expanded to 650,000 troops. Compounding American concerns was the morale of the U.S. armed forces: five years of fighting had stretched manpower resources thin. When Stimson visited the military bases in Georgia, he was stunned by the low morale and tired condition of the troops. Human resources for fighting the war were diminishing rapidly. A quick victory was vital.

Problem was, the U.S. Army Air Force had run out of military targets to bomb. The crusty General Curtis “Bombs Away!” LeMay, cigar in his mouth, complained that his planes were reduced to “bombing garbage cans.” The only targets left were civilian cities. Intense bombing of Tokyo had devastated the city, but had not worked. The atom bomb looked like the only solution.

That it worked, there is no doubt. Even the emperor himself—the only man who could bring Japan to the peace table—admitted that the primary reason for surrendering was the atom bomb. A national poll taken of Japanese in 1946 revealed a startling fact: the Japanese people blamed not the Americans for the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but their militarist leaders for wanting to fight so long.
*
Hard to believe, but even after the two bombs had devastated Japan, the vice-chief of the Japanese navy, known as the “father” of the kamikazes, was running around Tokyo trying to take over the government. He told the army minister and the army chief of staff, “Let us formulate a plan for certain victory: if we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives in a special attack [kamikaze] effort, victory will be ours!”

Viewed in a larger context, whether Truman’s decision saved forty thousand lives, or a million or several million, pales beside the fact that in more than sixty years no lives have been lost to a cataclysmic bomb. It all began with the man who wrote that secret memo; to this day we do not know who he was.

1948
Every time there’s an international crisis that calls for massive nation-building, pundits call for another “Marshall Plan.” Just send in a couple of billion dollars to rejuvenate Eastern Europe or Iraq or Africa or wherever, and the money will be well spent.