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Justice and Justification

Justin Semones

History 4000

Professor Dan L. Morrill

July 1, 2008

            This writer contends that President Harry S. Truman was justified in his decision to use atomic weapons to end World War II because they offered the most efficient way to accomplish the United States’s primary war objective, i.e. to achieve the unconditional surrender of the Japanese as quickly as possible while suffering the lowest number of American casualties.  The battles fought in the Pacific theater of World War II were exceedingly brutal, and the treatment of Allied POWs was abysmal.  As the war dragged on the list of American casualties continued to grow.  Truman understood that the war must be brought to an end quickly, but how, and at what cost?  A plan for the invasion of Japan’s home islands was drafted and American casualty projections were egregious.  The President had seen the butcher’s bill from several of the battles in the Pacific, and hoped that “there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”[1]  The President considered several alternatives to the costly invasion of Kyushu.  Some White House personnel suggested an amendment of the United States’s policy of unconditional surrender.  They argued that an alteration allowing for the retention of the Imperial Institution might make the Japanese more amenable to the idea of surrender. Others suggested the use of air power as a means of ending the war decisively, and rendering an invasion unnecessary.  Regrettably, these alternatives had some surprising disadvantages.  Fortunately, the United States had another option—the atomic bomb.  This new and awesome weapon offered the President a very appealing alternative.  Instead of becoming mired in a costly amphibious invasion he could use this new destructive force in an attempt to save lives and achieve America’s primary war objective.  Thus, President Truman’s use of atomic weapons helped to bring a horrible and bloody conflict to a swift conclusion.

Historiography

In the years since the use of atomic bombs against Japan, many historians have published monographs attempting to reevaluate the validity of Truman’s decision to use the bomb.  One such revisionist, Ronald Takaki, contends that the use of atomic weapons was not the great military necessity many traditional historical interpretations have made it out to be.  In his book, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb, he argues that several factors such as future American-Soviet relations, American racism, and President Truman’s “inferiority complex” played larger roles in the decision to use the bombs than has been previously suggested.

            Another historian looking to revise the established reasoning for America’s use of atomic weapons is John Ray Skates.  His book, The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb, Skates questions the necessity of America’s Olympic strategy, which was the contentious U.S. invasion plan for the Japanese mainland.  He argues that the state of the Japanese Empire during the summer of 1945 was so grave that an invasion of the Japanese mainland was unnecessary.  He also contends that the subsequent bombs that so many traditionalists suggest obviated the costly invasion were unnecessary.

            J. Samuel Walker is considered by some historians to be a post-revisionist.  In his book, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, Walker examines the arguments of revisionists, and also challenges the validity of the traditionalist view of the Truman Decision.  He concludes that, the bomb was necessary to, in combination with the Soviet attack on Manchuria, to save American lives and to end the war as soon as possible.  But that it was not necessary to end the war in a short time, and not to save hundreds of thousands of American lives as some traditionalists have argued.  Additionally, he criticizes some revisionists who rely on counterfactual evidence to advance their arguments.

            Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hotly debated by historians as early as 1946.  Still the debate continues, and historians seem no closer to a definitive answer.  J. Samuel Walker describes the division between traditionalists and revisionists by saying, “In light of the importance of questions that cannot be definitively resolved because they require speculation and extrapolation from incomplete evidence, the controversy over the use of the bomb seems certain to continue.”[2] (Recent Lit. 25)

 Japanese Atrocities

            The Japanese initiated the battle in the Pacific theater of World War II by launching a surprise attack against the United States naval base, Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  The attack came without warning, and Gene La Roque, an officer aboard the USS MacDonough, which was stationed at Pearl Harbor, remarked, “I personally thought that it was the United States Army Air Corps who’d mistakenly dropped their bombs on us, until we saw the red circles on the Japanese planes as they flew over.”[3] 

            The attack on Pearl Harbor caused great damage, but the injury to the American fleet was not as tremendous as many Japanese militarists hoped.  In all, the United States lost eight battleships, three light cruisers, three destroyers, and four auxiliary ships were sunk or sustained crippling damage.  In terms of casualties, the Navy lost 2,008 men and 710 wounded.  Fortunately for the United States, its three carriers, Enterprise, Saratoga, and Lexington—the primary targets for the Japanese—were absent during the assault and survived completely unscathed.[4]

The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in an unexpected, unification of the American people.   Historian Donald L. Miller explains this phenomenon quite clearly: “Republicans and Democrats, interventionists and isolationists, labor and capital, closed ranks in a solid phalanx, and a nation of nearly 140 million people moved from peace to war with a unity it had never known before in a time of crisis.”[5]  The American people were chagrined that they had been caught off guard, and an overwhelming majority of citizens awaited an American reprisal.  On December 8^th, only one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked a joint session of the Congress for a declaration of war against Japan—there was only one dissenting vote.[6]  America entered World War II.

            In the first weeks of the conflict, the Japanese set the mood for the majority of the war.  Many U.S. soldiers remember the Bataan Death March as one of the most terrible and inhumane acts committed by the Japanese during the war.  Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched an amphibious assault against the American held Philippines. On December 22, the Japanese landed on the island of Luzon at Lingayen, north of Manila, with 50,000 troops, their largest amphibious assault force of the war.  The American and Filipino defense force of 80,000 men, stationed at Manila, failed to repulse the Japanese on the beaches.  The defending American-Filipino army withdrew to the more defensible mountainous terrain of the Bataan peninsula.  Here, the defending allies held out against the invading Japanese.[7]  The defenders were ill armed and had little food; they were in no way prepared for a protracted siege.  Before long, the defenders were reduced to “eating horses, mules and monkeys; 20,000 had come down with malaria; and thousands more were stricken with dysentery, scurvy, hookworms, and beriberi.”[8]  On April 9, after months of staunch resistance and bloody combat, the American-Filipino forces, totaling around 78,000 men, surrendered to the Japanese invaders.[9]

            The American soldiers who surrendered at Bataan could not have known the horrors that awaited them as Japanese held prisoners of war.  Bushido, the Japanese warrior code, espoused the virtue of death before surrender.  While this code did not admonish the mistreatment of enemy captives, it had been corrupted by the contemporary military regime that preached a doctrine of Japanese racial superiority.[10]  It was this idea of superiority that led Japanese soldiers to believe enemy prisoners should be treated like animals for their cowardly act of surrender.  In addition to this virulent corruption of the ancient Japanese warrior code, the invading army was simply unprepared to deal with the sheer number of surrendering soldiers.  The Japanese expected approximately 25,000 prisoners, not the 78,000 they were saddled with.[11]  The large number of prisoners and the perverted Japanese mentality led to the atrocities of the Bataan Death March.

            The malnourished and diseased prisoners were forced to march from the tip of the Bataan peninsula to San Fernando where they would take a train to Capas, and then march again the rest of the way to the prison camp where they were to be held; Camp O’Donnell.  Along their perilous journey, these prisoners endured many hardships.  At one point, the dehydrated prisoners saw an artesian well.  One of the prisoners, Lester Tenney ran to the well and began drinking water as quickly as he could.  Several of his comrades followed suit.  One of the Japanese prison guards realized what was happening, and as the sixth man began drinking, the guard came up behind him and stabbed him with his bayonet.  The soldier fell to his knees and died.[12]  Such cruelty was commonplace.  Prisoners needing to defecate would stop on the side of the road to relieve themselves.  This pause often ended in a severe beating at the hands of the Japanese guards, if not death.  On the fifth day of the march, Tenney witnessed, “one of the most sadistic and inhumane incidents on the entire march.”  One of his fellows had a very bad case of malaria, and was disoriented by fever.  While waiting for another group to catch up the man had sat down to take a short rest.   When he was ordered by one of the Japanese guards to stand and continue the march, he could not.  Tenney continues: “Without a minute’s hesitation, the guard hit him over the head with the butt of his gun . . . and then called for two nearby prisoners to start digging a hole to bury the fallen prisoner . . . the [prisoner], still alive, started screaming as the dirt was thrown on him.”[13]

            The exact number of American and Filipino casualties suffered during the Bataan Death March is not known.  Estimates suggest that approximately 750 Americans and as many as 5,000 Filipino soldiers lost their lives on the rugged and brutal march.[14]  Atrocities similar to the Bataan Death March, while not on such a large scale, were not uncommon.  Allied prisoners of war were mistreated throughout the war in the Pacific.  Such atrocious acts inspired a maniacal hatred for the Japanese in many American soldiers, and it was hatred, prevalent on both sides, that contributed greatly to the brutality and violence of the war in the Pacific.

            Another glaring example of the mistreatment of prisoners of war by the Japanese can be found in the story of the allied soldiers held in the small town of Sandakan, on the island of Borneo.  These prisoners were used as forced laborers on Borneo to build an airfield on the northeastern tip of the island.  The living conditions these prisoners were subjected to were dreadful.  The food rations given to them were very low, and at one point dropped as low as four ounces of rice a day.  Medicine was quite scarce, and many soldiers were stricken with malaria or a cornucopia of other diseases born of malnutrition.[15] 

            There were many instances of abominable cruelty in the prison camp on Borneo.  One example of the inhumanity that occurred there was the use of captivity in small wooden cages as punishment.  Soldiers caught attempting to escape or failing to salute a Japanese officer could be thrown into these cages, which were not more than two and a half feet off the ground.  The length of internment varied, some sentences lasting as long as forty days.  Victims of this form of punishment would be allowed out of their cages once a day for “exercise,” which consisted of a severe beating at the hands of one of the Japanese guards before they were put back inside the cage.  Some of the soldiers subjected to this punishment were driven insane.  Dr. Mills, one of the prisoners remembers, “people went almost out of their mind, at times, in there.  It upset the camp terribly.  Everyone was on edge, especially when those in the cage were yelling and screaming.”[16]  These cages were not the only method employed by the Japanese to punish their prisoners.

            During the summer of 1943, the prison guards discovered a resistance group in the camp at Sandakan, led by Captain Lionel Matthews.  The Kempeitai, the Japanese secret military police, arrested every prisoner suspected of involvement in the group.  According to historian Laurence Rees, “The Kempeitai habitually used sadistic methods of interrogation, and Captain Matthews and the rest of the POWs suspected of being members of his resistance group were all brutally tortured.”[17]  The methods of torture used by the Japanese secret police were numerous.  Most interrogations began with a beating, and soon escalated to the use of hot iron bars.  Some suspects were hung in excruciating positions, while heavy stones were tied to them, weighing them down.  By far the most prevalent means of extracting information was water torture.  One former member of the Kempeitai, Yoshio Tshuchiya, described the process: “You tie them face up, lying on a long bench, and then you put a cloth on their face and then you pour water onto the cloth so the person can’t help drinking it.  You push their stomach out with water—blow it right up.”  After the prisoner’s stomach filled with water, the interrogator beat on it with a stick or similar implement forcing the prisoner to regurgitate the water, at which point the process was repeated.  Tshuchiya continues: “During the torture some people are killed.  Those people who aren’t expert at it kill them, because if water goes into the bronchial tubes and the lungs then they die . . . We try not to kill them—but to take them to the verge of being killed.”[18]  While this type of torture was not commonplace in the prison camps, similar horrors were certainly inflicted upon Captain Matthews and his coconspirators.

            The treatment of the allied POWs on Borneo was especially brutal.  Of the 1800 Australian prisoners, only six managed to survive by escaping into the jungle.  As for the 700 British soldiers imprisoned there, none survived.  The startlingly high attrition rate at Sandakan was not the norm.  By the end of the war, approximately twenty seven percent of the 350,000 Allied POWs held by the Japanese died in captivity.  This figure is put into perspective when compared to German and Italian POW camps on the western front of the European theater, which had a mortality rate of roughly four percent.[19]  The ghastly conditions suffered by POWs held by the Japanese further fueled the rancor that came to characterize the war in the Pacific.

Okinawa

            The American campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific was exceptionally brutal.  For the most part, it consisted of a series of amphibious assaults or “island hopping.”  The nature of amphibious invasions is risky, and casualties are often very high.  The dangers of amphibious assaults were compounded by the extremely rugged terrain and tropical weather conditions typical of the islands being assaulted.  The American soldiers were also fighting a tenacious adversary whose methods sometimes bordered on insanity.  The realities of the fighting in the Pacific theater of World War II were atrocious, and engendered a great deal of animus in soldiers on both sides.

            The battle for Okinawa, a small island southwest of the Japanese home islands, unequivocally demonstrates the horrible nature of the fighting in the Pacific.  The capture of Okinawa was of crucial importance to the Allied battle strategy.  It would act as a base of operation for the invasion of the Japanese mainland, which many Allied officers saw as inevitable.  By the spring of 1945, a large allied invasion force converged at the small island, which numbered over 170,000 soldiers and Marines, as well as 120,000 more men who provided logistic and technical support.  This force was carried on more than 1,200 vessels, and it was second only to the Normandy Invasion in size.  The campaign, which was under the command of Admiral Nimitz, began with a series of intense naval and aerial bombardment to soften Japanese defenses on the beach.[20]  But when the invasion force finally arrived on the beach they were met with a great surprise—the Japanese forces were not to be found.

            On April 1, 1945 two Marine and two Army divisions landed on the beachhead at Okinawa, and to their surprise the landing went largely uncontested.  The soldiers soon fanned out and took two air bases and covered several miles of ground in a matter of hours; ground that they had expected to fight on for days.  Incredulous, Admiral Richmond Turner, who was in charge of the landing force, wrote to Admiral Nimitz, “I may be crazy but it looks like the Japanese have quit the war, at least in this sector.”  Nimitz replied, “Delete all after ‘crazy.’”[21] Nimitz’s witty rejoinder would prove to be all too true for the soldiers fighting on Okinawa, because the Japanese were far from quitting.

            By this point in the war the Japanese Imperial General Staff could see the tide of war shifting in the Allies’ favor.  They predicted that an invasion of the Japanese mainland was inevitable, and they intended to alter their current strategy to allow for this eventuality.  The Imperial Army had, throughout the war, advocated death before surrender.  But now the leading strategists for Japan developed a new battle plan called, Ketsu-go, which would implement suicidal attack strategies.  Not only would Japanese soldiers continue to fight on when confronted with unavoidable defeat, but units were being created that would intentionally destroy themselves to damage the Allied war effort.  Kamikazes and other units utilizing a suicidal crew would be deployed against the Allied forces in unprecedented numbers.  Japanese military strategists reasoned that if the Allied forces could be made to pay a high enough price for the capture of each successive offshore (of the Japanese mainland) island, the leaders in Washington would estimate the cost of an invasion of the Japanese mainland to be too costly, and settle for a negotiated peace.  Unfortunately, these strategists would be correct in their predictions, but incorrect in calculating the implications of their predictions.[22]  It was with this new strategy in mind that General Mitsuru Ushijima, the leader of the Japanese contingent on Okinawa would make his plan for the island’s defense.

            General Ushijima’s primary objective on Okinawa was to make the American invading forces pay a high price for their capture of the island.  He pulled his entire force of over 110,000 Japanese Soldiers, 20,000 of which were Okinawa conscripts, to the southern tip of the island where he rigorously fortified the Japanese position.  For one hundred days prior to the American invasion, Ushijima ordered his men to build elaborate fortifications and tunnels, which came to be known as the Shuri Line.  This gave the defenders not only great protection and concealment, but also the high ground.[23]  The number of Japanese soldiers combined with the highly defensible nature of the Japanese position promised to bleed the invading forces dearly, and indeed they did.

            When the Allied invading force, which had enjoyed such a pleasant landing, encountered the fortified Japanese defenders in the south, their brief euphoria quickly evaporated.  Some of the more terrible fighting occurred on Sugar Loaf Hill.  Sugar Loaf Hill was a mound of coral and volcanic rock on the western side of the Shuri Line, and it acted as the anchor for the Japanese flank.  It stood approximately one mile away from General Ushijima’s headquarters in the tunnels underneath Shuri Castle. The battle over the hill lasted from May 13 to May 17.  During that period of time, the 6^th Marine division reached the top of Sugar Loaf Hill twelve times, but were unable to hold it despite heavy support from Allied artillery.[24]  The depredations of battle were also intense on a small ridge to the east called Half Moon Hill.  Half Moon was one of the key supporting positions for Sugar Loaf.  Eugene Sledge, a Marine mortarman with the 1^st Marine division, was stationed on Half Moon Hill.  When Sledge arrived on the ridge, he was taken aback by the intense carnage and destruction that had been visited upon the landscape, “It was the most ghastly corner of hell I had ever witnessed . . . The place was choked with the putrefaction of death, decay and destruction . . . The whole area was pocked with shell craters and churned up by explosions.  Every crater was half full of water, and many of them held a Marine corpse.  The bodies lay pathetically just as they had been killed, half submerged in muck and water, rusting weapons still in hand.  Swarms of big flies hovered about them.”[25]  Scenes similar to the one described by Sledge were quite common on the front lines of Okinawa.  The fighting was savage and the conditions horrendous.  Many veterans of Okinawa compared their experience to the trench warfare of World War I, and this estimation would not have been far from the truth.

            While Allied land forces fought and died on the Shuri Line, the ships waiting off the coast of Okinawa were assaulted by a suicidal air offensive.  During the course of the battle for Okinawa the Japanese launched a series of air attacks, mobilizing 1,900 Kamikazes and between 5,000 and 6,000 conventional aircraft.  The Kamikazes, which had never been used on such a scale, were evidence of the desperate position of the Japanese.  In addition to the Kamikaze, the oka (also referred to as the baka by American soldiers, which means “stupid” in Japanese), another type of suicide unit was deployed.  The oka was essentially a rocket powered glider attached to the bottom of a conventional bomber, and was usually used against other airborne targets.  At Okinawa however, there devastating power was turned against American ocean craft.  The nose of the oka contained around one ton of TNT, and when diving towards a target on the ocean, it could reach speeds in excess of six hundred miles per hour.[26]  One Japan-based reporter, Robert Guillain, commented on the new special units, “It was not even a question of winning or dying, but of dying in any case and winning if possible.”[27]  The desire of the Japanese to win a decisive victory was bleeding its nation dry.  But they were ostensibly committed to the warrior code, which they had so willfully corrupted, and the leading militarists in Tokyo favored death over surrender.

            The destruction that occurred on Okinawa was staggering, and it would be remembered as the bloodiest campaign of the war in the Pacific.  The air offensive launched by the Japanese did horrible damage to the Allied fleet.  During the series of attacks beginning on April 6, the United States Navy lost thirty-six ships and three hundred and sixty-eight others were severely damaged, including thirteen carriers, ten battleships, and five cruisers.  In terms of human casualties, 9,731 officers and men were killed or wounded off the shore of Okinawa (over 4,900 dead).[28]  The egregious naval losses suffered at Okinawa represented one seventh of the total American Navy casualties during World War II.  Back at the Shuri Line, the losses were even higher.  On Okinawa the Allied land forces suffered 12,510 deaths and 36,613 soldiers lay wounded.  As for the Japanese forces, the American Army counted 107,539 enemy dead.  This figure, however, does not take into account the thousands of Japanese soldiers who were buried in their cave fortifications, never to become a statistic.  More deaths were suffered on Okinawa—combatants and noncombatants—than died during the atomic bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.[29] 

The Japanese forces did remarkable work on Okinawa.  Their attempt to discourage an American invasion of the Japanese mainland by causing as many American casualties as possible might work; if not in the way they had hoped.  The statistics from Okinawa did not bode well for the prospects of an American invasion.

Ending the War

            As the battle for Okinawa was drawing to a close, the newly appointed President Truman was considering his options for bringing the war to an end.  He called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on June 18, 1945 to discuss this issue.  He asked his military leaders for an estimate of how long it would take to force a Japanese surrender, and for the approximate number of casualties to be expected during an invasion of the Japanese mainland.  Admiral William D. Leahy summed up the Presidents concerns quite clearly: “It is his intention to make his decisions on the campaign with the purpose of economizing to the maximum extent possible in the loss of American lives.  Economy in the use of time and in money cost is comparatively unimportant.”[30]  The President’s utmost concern was saving American lives.  The American forces suffered unsettling casualties on islands like Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.  The Joint Chiefs told President Truman that an invasion of the southern island of Kyushu would be necessary to force a Japanese surrender in the shortest amount of time.  This invasion, suggested the Chiefs, may need to be succeeded by a follow-up invasion of Honshu, but that this would likely prove to be unnecessary.  However, the Joint Chiefs were hesitant to supply the President with precise information on the aspect of the invasion that he was most concerned with—American casualties.[31]

            The issue of American casualty estimates for the invasion of Kyushu was crucial in the President’s decision-making process.  While the Joint Chiefs did not offer the President any exact predictions for the number of casualties that would be suffered during an invasion of Kyushu, they did say that losses suffered throughout the first thirty days of the invasion should not exceed those sustained during the capture of Luzon in the Philippines; they suggested roughly 31,000 casualties.  But this estimate has dubious origins.  Prior to the meeting of June 18, the Joint War Plans Committee, which was comprised of members from both the Army and the Navy, submitted a projection of potential casualties on Kyushu to the Joint Chiefs that suggested much greater losses.  According to their calculations, the invasion of Kyushu could be expected to cost 132,500 American casualties including killed, wounded, and missing.  If the subsequent invasion of Honshu became necessary, the Committee predicted the loss of an additional 87,500 men.  The committee asserted that, if both invasions were required to induce Japanese capitulation, the United States could expect to endure as many as 220,000 American casualties, 46,000 of which would be deaths.[32]

             The Joint War Plans Committee was not the only source of differing casualty projections.  General George C. Marshall, who had received these statistics, was reluctant to present them to President Truman because he feared that such high casualty estimates would intimidate the President and make him hesitant to order the invasion.  In his preparation for the June 18 meeting with President Truman, Marshall also asked General Douglas MacArthur to make an estimate concerning casualties at Kyushu.  MacArthur’s response was very similar to the prediction made by the Joint War Plans Committee.  He estimated that the United State could expect as many as 105,000 battle casualties, and an additional 12,600 nonbattle casualties during the Kyushu campaign.  MacArthur said that his predictions were “purely academic,” and that casualties might be much lower.  Of course many historian suggest that MacArthur was anxious to lead the largest amphibious assault in history, and that this desire may have inclined him to underemphasize his bloody prediction.  To any extent, neither the prediction of the Joint War Plans Committee nor that of General MacArthur was submitted to the President.[33]

            Alarmingly high casualty estimates were not the only negative aspects of the Kyushu invasion.  The invasion of the Japanese mainland at Kyushu would have been the largest amphibious assault in human history.  Olympic, the codename for the assault of Kyushu, called for a full fourteen divisions and 626,800 tons of supplies and equipment, which would have been transported by 1,318 transporters and landing craft.[34]  Such a great demand exceeded the number of troops and craft available in the Pacific.  Because of the great demand of Olympic, troops stationed in the European theater would have to be redeployed in the Pacific.  This redeployment would have had an extremely deleterious effect on the morale of the affected units.  Historian John Ray Skates suggest that, while leading officers such as Omar Bradley and George Patton requested a position in the pacific, the average soldier certainly did not.  “For them,” Skates writes, referring to the soldiers in Europe, “the joy of finishing the war in Europe would be haunted by the fear of redeployment to the Pacific.”[35]  In addition to the depleted morale of the redeployed troops, American morale and support for the war was beginning to diminish.  Some believed that this immense redeployment and continued fighting could severely tax the will to war of the American public.

Alternatives to Invasion

            In June of 1945, the prospect of invasion was daunting.  President Truman wanted to end the war as quickly as possible, while keeping American losses to a minimum.  The Truman Administration was searching for an alternative to the proposed invasion.  Several options were considered, but the most prominent was the amendment of the United States’s policy of unconditional surrender.  Some of Truman’s advisors suggested that this policy could induce the Japanese to fight to the last man in defense of their Emperor.  Another proposed alternative was the use of air power and blockade to end the war.  Curtis LeMay, one of the prominent advocates of air power argued that continued conventional bombing and blockading of the Japanese could nullify the need for an invasion.

            Truman inherited the policy of unconditional surrender from the late President Roosevelt.  The policy was announced during a meeting between Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.  It was not intended as a threat to the Axis powers, but as a declaration and solidification of Allied war aims: to demolish the war making ability of the Axis nations.  After Roosevelt’s passing, Truman was saddled with the policy, which was actually quite popular with American citizens.  Some of Truman’s advisors, however, looked at the policy as an impediment to peace.  The officials who supported the alteration of the policy argued that, if left intact it could prolong the war.  They suggested informing the Japanese that surrender did not necessarily include the deposition of Emperor Hirohito, nor did it mean that he would be put on trial for war crimes.  Supporters of the amendment or clarification of unconditional surrender thought the policy could inspire the Japanese to fight to a desperate conclusion, which would raise the number of combat and noncombat casualties.[36]  Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew, who fervently supported the policy’s amendment, explained the Japanese resolve to President Truman, “[The] Japanese are a fanatical people and are capable of fighting to the last ditch and the last man.”[37]  The Japanese proved their tenacity many times in the Pacific, but modifying the policy of unconditional surrender was not a certain avenue to peace.

            Modifying the policy of unconditional surrender had several disadvantages.  Primarily, the United States did not want to appear irresolute.  Choosing to alter the policy after Okinawa might lend credence to Japanese military hardliners.  Japanese militarists from the beginning of the war had preached the virtues of winning a decisive battle over the Americans in order to induce a negotiated peace.  An alteration of unconditional surrender could have emboldened the Japanese military, and encouraged their fanatical resistance.  One such fanatic, Japanese War Minister Anami, is reputed to have phrased the militarist’s sentiments by asking, “Wouldn’t it be to our advantage if peace were established after we had given the enemy a terrible beating in the decisive battle on the homeland?”[38]  Furthermore, the policy of unconditional surrender was exceedingly popular with the American public.  An amendment of the favored policy could endanger the morale of the American people as well as the soldiers preparing for the invasion at Kyushu.  The debate over unconditional surrender was very heated in the Truman administration, and this probably led to him vacillating on the issue.  Still others advocated air power as a means of avoiding an invasion.[39]

            General Curtis LeMay argued that the Japanese could be induced to capitulate with air power and blockading alone.  LeMay, who had overseen the incendiary bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, said in April of 1945 that air power could force the Japanese to surrender in six months.  But his opinion seems colored by a personal prerogative.  LeMay wanted to prove the importance of air power in hopes that a separate branch of the military be created solely for aeronautics.  His suggested strategy could save American lives, but some of the Joint Chiefs were skeptical.  General Marshall was one such skeptic.  He was doubtful of the ability of air power to induce a Japanese surrender.  The Joint Intelligence Committee, which reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was also doubtful.  They predicted that blockading and bombing alone could take as long as “a few months to a great many years” to force the unconditional surrender of Japan.[40] (Prompt 40)   Their most precise prediction calculated that LeMay’s approach would achieve Japanese surrender by mid-1946 at the earliest.  Most of the Joint Chiefs concurred with General Marshall’s skepticism.  Furthermore, the Joint Chiefs considered the use of conventional bombing and blockade to be a supplement to the invasion, not something to replace it.[41]

            The prospects of an invasion of Kyushu were grim, and the alternatives did not offer an incontestable road to peace.  Time was also of the essence.  The war had put great strain on the American economy, and the scarcity of food and clothing, as well as increasing labor strife caused some to worry about the conversion to a peacetime economy.  Fred M. Vinson, who directed the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, was “afraid of unrest in the country” and asserted “that the next three to six months will make a vital difference in our future economy.”[42]  Truman understood that he needed to make a decision quickly that would bring the war to an end.  Fortunately, there was another alternative to a costly amphibious invasion of Kyushu—the use of atomic weaponry.

            On July 16, 1945 the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated in Alamogordo, New Mexico.  At the same time, President Truman was at the Potsdam Conference in Berlin discussing the fate of Europe after the surrender of Nazi Germany, and how best to end the war in the Pacific.  While at Potsdam, the Allied powers drafted a declaration calling for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military.[43]  The Potsdam Declaration was intended to be a warning to Japan, and also a chance for the Japanese to surrender without a fight to the end.  The Declaration called for the end of military rule in Japan, and required that a new order of peace be established.  It even allowed room, albeit ambiguously, for the retention of the Imperial institution.  The Declaration made no mention of the possibility of an atomic attack, yet it concluded by warning that the Japanese could accept the terms of unconditional military surrender or face “prompt and utter destruction.”[44]  In Japan, the Declaration was widely ignored.  

The news of the successful detonation at Alamogordo reached President Truman on July 17. This recent development offered the President a new alternative to the costly invasion of Kyushu.  In using this bomb he could bring the brutality of the war in the Pacific to a decisive end and save the lives of many American soldiers.  On July 24, General Henry Arnold, the commanding officer of the U.S. Army Air Force received the order to use the atomic bomb on Japan.  The order called for the delivery of the bomb “around August 3, 1945” weather permitting.[45]  On August 6 the first atomic bomb, the u-235, gun-type bomb, “Little Boy,” was dropped on Hiroshima.  Three days later on July 9, another bomb, this time the larger plutonium implosion bomb, “Fat Man,” was deployed over Nagasaki.  The next day, July 10, 1945, Japan agreed to the Potsdam Declaration’s terms of surrender, “with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”[46]  The United States responded favorably, and the brutal war in the Pacific came to an end.

Conclusion

            The United States’s primary war objective was to achieve the unconditional surrender of the Japanese as quickly as possible while suffering the lowest number of American casualties.  The President wanted an end to the bloody combat of World War II, and the freedom of mistreated POWs.  For Truman, the atomic bombs represented the best way to accomplish America’s primary objective and end the suffering of American soldiers.  Even though the military was not engaged in any major operations during the month of July, they were still suffering casualties.  During July, the Army alone sustained 3,233 casualties.  If such figures represented a trend, and similar losses continued until November 1, 1945, the proposed D-Day for the invasion of Kyushu, American forces would have lost roughly 9,500 men before the invasion was underway.  Truman’s primary goal was the minimization of American casualties.  Confronted with the prospect of using atomic weapons to end the war immediately and save the lives of 9,500 soldiers; or wait until the proposed D-Day, forfeiting the lives of the 9,500 men, and allow the wholesale slaughter that a fight to the finish would have likely caused, there is no reason to believe that President Truman would have refrained from ordering the atomic attack.[47]  

Historian J. Samuel Walker raises an interesting point: “Whatever casualty estimates [Truman] might have received or projected, he was strongly committed to reducing them to a minimum.”[48]  As Walker infers, it is difficult to measure the number of American casualties that needed to be averted in order to induce Truman to use the atomic bombs against Japan.  The evidence suggests that the decisive number of American casualties required to prompt Truman’s use of atomic weapons might have been quite low.  This dedication to reducing American casualties was in accordance with American war aims.  The atomic weapons offered the President the most efficient means to achieve a decisive victory, with a minimum of American casualties, in the shortest amount of time.

End Notes