Publication of Hiroshima in the New Yorker (1997)
herseyhiroshima.com
herseyhiroshima.com
"The white band had originally been added as a bit of an afterthought. The editors knew that Hersey’s report was shocking, and they quickly realized that the cover they’d chosen for the issue—a vibrant, bucolic scene of children and families frolicking in a park—might not give readers enough warning about the devastating nature of its contents. (New Yorker covers rarely have a connection with the contents of an issue, but, in this particular case, the dissonance was marked.) “My God, how would a guy feel, buying the magazine intending to sit in a barber’s chair and read it!” one editor was said to have thought, during a meeting at the time. So the white band was hastily added to about forty thousand newsstand copies in New York. (It was not included in the national run.) Very few copies of the edition with the original band exist today, which is why, as Blume noted, it’s considered one of the “white whales” of the antiquarian-magazine world."
Steve's a good person; I'm sure he would have linked to the article he was citing if he could.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-yea... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616014
https://www.amazon.com/Plague-Year-America-Time-Covid-ebook/...
It's interesting that I never heard of him until watching a documentary about this while in Japan.
I suspect that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were as much to impress Stalin as for any other purpose.
At the time of the bombings, there were literally millions of battle-hardened Soviet troops in Eastern Europe. They were also commanded by very able generals (see Zhukov).
If Stalin wanted them to, they could have easily rolled west, and the American and British armies would have been no match for the Soviet Red Army.
However, the USA had the bomb. I think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were at least in part about demonstrating the awesome power of the atomic bomb to Stalin and forestalling any temptation he might have to continue west.
Japan was going to fight to the last man/woman/child. They were going to have seniors and children fight with sticks. The Pacific theater was already one of the bloodiest battle fronts in the war and the US was battle weary and didn't want to expend another 500,000 Americans to invade Japan. They dropped nukes to avoid another extended and unbelievably bloody conflict.
Go listen to the Hardcore History podcasts "Supernova in the East" and it'll make it much more clear.
"The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. . . . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before."[1]
Those are the facts... GP made nothing up.
OTOH - the Cold War should be ample evidence of the West's distrust of Stalin and USSR generally. I think it's entirely plausible the motivation to drop the bomb included Soviet deterrence.
He may have said that, but after reading books on Oppenheimer and other scientists at the Manhatten Project, I don't believe it is accurate
The most damning evidence against it being necessary is that the Japanese were actively trying to get the Soviets to help them negotiate peace in the weeks leading up to the bombing. The soviets played them, and didn’t carry the message since they were secretly in the process of staging an invasion against Japan in Manchuria, an event that the Japanese knew would be fatal to their war. It’s worth noting that Hirohito did not order the surrender of Japan after hearing of Hiroshima, but after hearing of the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria, which happened a few hours before Nagasaki.
Much of the reluctance to surrender was around guaranteeing that Hirohito could remain. A concession that we granted in the end.
Also keep in mind that the nuclear attacks weren’t even the most destructive aerial attacks that the US possessed. The firebombing of Tokyo did more damage to a wider area and killed more people. In fact, Hiroshima was the 6th most destructive bombing raid as far as land area destroyed goes. American forces wiped dozens of cities off the map using conventional attacks before Hiroshima.
Before August 6 the Japanese politicians were more than aware that the war was lost, and that surrender was necessary. There is a lot of the historical record that shows this.
There is also a lot of records that the bombing was as much a demonstration of power to Stalin as anything else.
Many of the justifications that we see know don’t appear in the written record until after 1945. You are welcome to do the research.
Most serious historians of the time acknowledge that the bombings might have shortened the war, but the effect was minimal. On the order of a few days or weeks at best.
Most of this is not disputed fact. The interpretation is certainly debatable, but we hide the complexity of the situation by perpetuating the story that it was either nuclear bombings or an invasion that would have killed millions.
More info with citations: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-the-us-really-bo...
that said, I do really appreciate this history, and while I firmly believe that we dont even need of these reasons to assert the moral human failure of the act, knowing them makes it even more disgusting.
The interesting part is that there are a lot of people in this comment section that are 100% convinced that the nuclear option was the only one. Your extreme take is a pretty standard one in the US…
This is not history, this is a hypothetical.
> They were going to have seniors and children fight with sticks.
I suspect this would have been ineffective.
https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/japanese-mass-suicide...
Also, keep in mind that Halsey had a bit of a problem with Nimitz and much of the Navy, particularly over the matter of two typhoons and Leyte Gulf, so he may not be entirely unbiased.
Given that we have evidence that many of those who were there at the time disagreed with the decision and that Japan had already been trying to work towards peace through back-channels, these responses seem to point to a deep need to feel like the United States didn't unjustifiably kill over 100k civilians.
There is little question that the bombings were a better strategic choice than Operation Downfall, which would likely have killed more on both sides, but to paint this as the only alternative is a false dilemma. There is even debate among (prominent, non-revisionist) historians and political scientists as to whether the bombings were the primary reason for the surrender -- contemporary letters from within Japan indicate that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria may have actually been the primary factor (though the bombings certainly played some part, and were a larger factor in arguments made by some particular officials).
While it is possible to find negative quotes from various individuals, such as the aforementioned Halsey, the question is really whether the people involved in the decision were making it in 'good faith' (i.e. out of the perceived necessity of ending the war on rational terms, and not diplomatic stick-shaking or the need to show off one's latest toys). Overwhelmingly, the primary sources argue that they were, and that the most salient concern was ensuring an unconditional surrender to avoid the mistakes made after the last war, in which the sociopolitical structures that enabled militarism were left intact. The "peace" that Japan was offering would have left its extremely dysfunctional political structures intact, and so was considered unacceptable.
The number of dead, and manner of their death, must also be seen in the context of the time. It doesn't really matter what we believe about the morality of targeting civilians in 2021; by 1945, that particular Rubicon had been crossed years before, and not just by the Allies. The Japanese Army committed atrocities on such a scale as to poison attitudes about the country to this very day; there is a good reason that people in China or the Philippines may roll their eyes when reading about poor Sadako and her thousand paper cranes (a story popularized by a 1977 Canadian novel).
I write this not to minimize any healthy sense of horror or responsibility, but to point out that "it's easy to say that now" is not merely a meme, but in this case responsible historical practice.
It is entirely possible that the decision to drop the bomb was made in good faith, but that the Japanese were already committed to surrender. The fog of war is very real (as this month has reminded us).
In context, the Hiroshima bombing wasn't the most deadly or the most destructive bombing of the war. The Tokyo firebombing takes that honor. Given that the US Army was in the habit of wiping cities off the map at will BEFORE Hiroshima, I wonder how much of an influence the bomb really could have had in 3 days...
The other side of it is that American history really undervalues the soviet contribution to the war. The US conventional story fully ignores that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was cited by Japanese leadership as one of the reasons for full acceptance of the Potsdam declaration.
I don't disagree with what you are saying, but the conventional narrative that nuking two cities was the ONLY way to end the war really seems like an oversimplification of a very complex situation.
As you mention "total war" was already fully accepted, but I wish that that the complexity of the full situation was taught
To argue that the atomic bombs were not decisive requires ignoring a lot of primary source evidence—including the declaration of surrender read by the Emperor to the Japanese people—in favor of mostly conspiratorial innuendo that is only convincing to those already inclined to be skeptical of contemporary American power structures. Beyond that, the argument seems to assume an omniscience on the part of Allied leaders. What was known at the time was that Japanese soldiers were often fighting to the last man, holding hopeless positions for the purpose of causing as many casualties to the enemy as possible, and that because of this American political will to continue the war was wavering, putting the goal of victory by unconditional surrender in doubt. In that context it was deemed necessary to end the war as quickly as possible.
I don't think that anyone would argue that dropping the atomic bombs was the only way to end the war. Alternatives were considered—but it was thought that those alternatives would result in an unsatisfactory postwar settlement, and simply repeat mistakes made in the aftermath of the last great war. In short, if the last years of the war were conducted with great brutality, it was because they were intended to be decisive.
(I don't disagree with you that a lot of popular Western histories undervalue contributions by the Soviet Union, but that largely applies to the war against Germany and its European allies, not the war in the Pacific. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria, for example, was probably a contributing factor to the collapse of support for the war, but far from a decisive one.)
EDIT: For some reason I can't reply to the child comment, so I'll address it here. I'm not talking about pundits. I'm talking about historians and political scientists, arguing compellingly from evidence. This case is drastically overstated, and mainstream, pro-military sources have been on both sides of the debate since the beginning (including the US Strategic Bombing Survey, which affirmed the usefulness of most other US bombing plans, and yet found that "Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."). The anti-bomb side also includes such obscure (/s) academic figures as Robert Pape, Gar Alperovitz, and Stephen Peter Rosen (certainly no anti-war/anti-government figure), as well as military contemporaries such as Douglas MacArthur, Chester Nimitz, William Leahy, William Halsey, Curtis LeMay, and Dwight Eisenhower.
The suggestion that this position is fringe or conspiracy-esque is simply not tenable.
The evidence, however, does not support it.
EDIT: To respond to your edit, statements of opinion made by American military figures after the war are not considered convincing. A lot of our war scholarship used to be based on statements made by participants after the war, but we have become increasingly skeptical of this approach, for good reason. For example, our narrative about the German invasion of the Soviet Union used to be largely based on the postwar testimonies of Nazi generals. However new examination of primary sources—i.e. records, receipts, transcripts of meetings (some of which were previously buried in Soviet archives)—have shown that their testimonies were often extremely inaccurate, misleading, self-serving, or else calculated to produce a political effect in a Cold War context.
For the same reason, what figures like Halsey—and particularly Douglas MacArthur, an unreliable narrator worthy of "Pale Fire"—have to say about whether the atomic bombs were decisive should provoke skepticism at best. And this is not just because they were political figures and seasoned inter-service warriors, jockeying for position in a postwar hierarchy, but because they weren't there. The best way to determine whether the bomb was decisive is to examine primary sources, both in the American and Japanese context, some of which have been posted elsewhere in this thread.
By examining those sources you cannot really make the case that the bomb was not decisive, nor can you claim that the decision to use the bomb was primarily motivated by factors other than the urgent need to end the war quickly. While some people may indeed make that argument, they are relying on questionable postwar statements of opinion, with no convincing evidence to support them.
The reality is that there was a peace faction in the Japanese government who did want to surrender but the ultranationalistic Japanese military was quite firmly in control and was very much _not_ interested in surrendering, even at the cost of millions of Japanese military and civilian casualties involved in continuing the war. (It's worth remembering that the Allied aerial firebombing campaigns had already devastated every other major city in Japan and caused far more civilian casualties than both atomic bombs did; both the Japanese and Allied militaries accepted this as part of the toll of war.) The aim (and preference of all factions) would have been a peace treaty that let Japan keep its ill-gotten gains in Asia. It took an unprecedented direct order from the Emperor to initiate the surrender, over the objections of the military. Even the high level overview provided by the Wikipedia article has excerpts like "[On August 9,] The cabinet meeting adjourned at 17:30 with no consensus. A second meeting lasting from 18:00 to 22:00 also ended with no consensus. ... The cabinet debated, but again no consensus emerged." and "As August 14 dawned, Suzuki, Kido, and the Emperor realized the day would end with either an acceptance of the American terms or a military coup." that directly contradict the idea that Japan was eager to surrender.
And beyond that, at the last minute, a coup attempt was made by fanatics willing to defy even the Emperor in an attempt to prevent the surrender proclamation from being broadcast (the Kyuujou incident).
Does any of this sound like a Japan that was eager to surrender? No, and that's why war historians generally deride this theory, quotes from Halsey, Eisenhower, etc. notwithstanding. Even just reading the Wikipedia article would make this clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan
Yalta agreement carved out areas south of this for the U.S.
And besides, all big cities in Manchuria and Korea were captured only after Japanese surrender.
1. The Emperor continued unmolested as the head of state,
2. Japan was responsible for its own disarmament,
3. There would be no occupation, and
4. Japan would conduct its own war crime trials.
In the end, of course, the Allies did decide to leave the Emperor in place as nominal head of state—but had not decided to do so before the Japanese capitulated, and certainly did not want to commit themselves to that course.
U.S. , Britain, Canada and France had millions of battle hardened troops, too ... and air and sea supremacy.
About a third of the total casualties of World War II were in Operation Barbarossa, 25 million out of 75 million, about 14% of the Soviet population, mostly within a few months in 01941. The battle hardened troops of the US and even France could mostly go back home to their families, barring Jody; the Soviet troops had, in many cases, had their families killed or starved to death by the Germans. And, when it came to land combat, the Soviets were enormously outproducing not only Germany, though not the US; in 01944, the last full year of war, they produced some 17000 tanks, and nearly 20000 in 01943. (The US numbers were 37000 in 01944 and 27000 in 01943.)
However, Russian tanks had a significant advantage over US tanks for combat in Europe: they were in Europe. And so were the farms that fed their crews.
So, I'm not sure if they "would have been no match for the Soviet Red Army", but I'm sure glad they didn't have to find out.
That's one of the reasons this article is very important.
Remember that the rest of western Europe and North America stood by and let Franco overrun Spain while the communist movement (small c and big-C) actively tried to fight him.
So there were in fact forces on the ground in many parts of Europe that would not have seen potential Red Army invasion forces as the same kind of invasion force as the Germans. At least for a period of time.
They also allied with them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
Remember this stuff also : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_French_Communis...
I am not an apologist for Stalinism, I am not saying any of this was a good thing. I am mostly accused of being a Trotskyist, or whatever.
But the role of the Communist movement in resisting Nazism in Europe is something not widely understood in the Anglo-American sphere. To the point where some on the right in the US have now started to conflate the two. Which is... nonsense.
Anglo-American post-war triumphalism is/was ridiculous. My father grew up in the rubble of the end of the war. There were no winners, it was tragedy all around.
Listen, all those people are fucking dead!
Hirohito was the last surviving World War II leader; he died in 01989, 33 years ago, at which point the other leaders had all been dead for decades.
There's nobody left to blame or punish!
The youngest WWII soldiers were born around 01930, which is 91 years ago; there are very few of them left alive either.
I have the unpleasant feeling that some people are commenting on this thread because they support one or another of the belligerents in that bloody slaughter, as if it were a sportsball game, rather than because they are interested in what is true and what is false. How could you go about debugging a program if you had to argue with advocates of one subroutine or another, intentionally feeding you unreliable information so you'll blame a different subroutine for the bug? How could you go about analyzing a chemical reaction if you had to argue with people who were fans of one or another chemical compound, and tried to argue that their favorite compound would be produced from any reaction, whether or not the necessary elements were present? This is an excellent example of what I mean when I liken HN to the intellectual equivalent of the impoverished slums where I used to volunteer.
The relevant point to the factual question being discussed is that the European Resistance was, as you say, led by people who supported Stalin, and they had largely been put in charge of their various countries under the occupation of the United Nations. At the point that we're talking about, in 01945, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had been dead for four years, and Europe was full of the tales of noble sacrifices and terrible suffering the Russians had experienced in order to resist the Nazis. So Stalin could reasonably anticipate a lot more popular support and a lot less government resistance for setting up Communist governments in them, should he push his military advantage further, than Hitler ever had for setting up Nazi governments.
As your own link states, this wasn't an alliance. Also if you read the "background" section of the article, you'll see that they very much saw Nazi Germany has a major threat and wanted to contains them early by allying France and Britain.
But France and particularly Britain instead prefered trying to appease Germany until the last minute with the results we know.
The non-agression pact might seem cynical from the west point of view, but if you put yourself in the soviet shoes for a second, it was a logical move.
As for your second link it's really not very assertive, most of the claims made early after the war were rebutted by historians later on.
I'm not sure what specific "rebutted by historians" you're talking about. There were disclosures about Nazi-Soviet secret protocols in 1946 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac... though Soviet attempts to deny this were not credible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
Alliance would mean joint fighting, not joint parading. Yes they secretly divided Europe on a map, and agreed not to fight over it, that not an alliance.
> I'm not sure what specific "rebutted by historians" you're talking about
Your second link on the French communist party activities during 39-41. It's like you didn't even read what you linked as source:
> but later historians have downplayed the PCF's role in any such actions, stating that they were isolated cases
Rather, my primary tank-related claim was that the USSR was producing enormous quantities of war materiel, as exemplified by tanks; in 01943 they outproduced Germany almost 2:1 in quantity of tanks, and even in 01944 when Germany was catching up, they still outproduced them. The quality of that materiel was merely adequate, but it still would have represented a very significant military threat to the US's position in Europe, as it had to Germany's.
My second claim was that the USSR was in a better logistical situation with respect to Europe than the US was. I don't think that's controversial, since Moscow is in Europe, and so was most Soviet farmland and much Soviet arms production.
U.S. + British + France GDP was 7 times bigger than Russia at end of the war. Western allied air supremacy ( including a nuclear monopoly ) would have obliterated Soviet logistics.
The West had the upper hand and Stalin knew it.
I wonder if those GDP numbers capture everything relevant to military advantage. The USSR produced as many tanks in a year and a half as Britain did throughout the whole war, despite having the same GDP.
Certainly it is true that with the nuclear monopoly the US had the upper hand; what we're discussing here is what Stalin would have believed if the bomb had remained secret, or perhaps only been demonstrated on uninhabited Pacific atolls, so the nuclear monopoly would not have figured into his calculations, or been a more theoretical factor. Or, more precisely, what Truman believed Stalin would have believed.
I also think, but can’t find hard numbers, that the USSR had more soldiers than the other allies combined (some strategists thought the allies would need the remains of the German army to help fight the Russians, if it were to come to that)
What they may not have had enough was technology. The USA provide them with lots of material (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease)
I think there is some truth in saying World War Two in Europe was won with American materiel and Russian blood.
That could have been their weak point. The western powers might have been able to hold of the larger USSR army by gaining air superiority. I’m not sure of that, though, as the time the USSR really needed US tech to survive was gone in 1945.
I think maybe this subject gets taught differently in America to the rest of the world.
The US side of that story is presented in "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb", by Paul Fussell. (1981) Fussell is a well-known essayist. He was in the Army during WWII, and he was in a unit scheduled for the invasion of Japan if the atomic bomb didn't work.
Look up "Operation Olympic". The first phase, the invasion of Kyushu, was scheduled for November 1, 1945, less than three months after the atomic bombing. This wasn't just planned; the equipment and soldiers were already in Okinawa and Saipan, the staging areas, and that invasion was going to happen if the atomic bomb didn't force a surrender. The operation was at least 3x the size of D-day and over a 500km sea approach. A million dead were expected on the Allied side. Far more on the Japanese side, because the defense was mostly infantry without enough heavy weapons, armor, or ammo.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_15_Incident
[2] https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/unde...
(From elsewhere in thread)