Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Terrible, but not a crime

That's the title of an op-ed in The Guardian yesterday, August 6. It's sub-head:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be remembered for the suffering which was brought to an end
The op-ed by Oliver Kamm, author of Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, is a "must read" and "clip and save." It begins:
Today is Hiroshima day, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb.

As the wartime generation passes on, our sense of gratitude is increasingly mixed with unease regarding one theatre of the second world war. There is a widespread conviction that, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America committed acts that were not only terrible but also wrong.

Disarmament campaigners are not slow to advance further charges. Greenpeace maintains that a different American approach might have prevented the cold war, and argues that new research on the Hiroshima decision "should give us pause for thought about the wisdom of current US and UK nuclear weapons developments, strategies, operational policies and deployments".

This alternative history is devoid of merit.

New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb. This conclusion may surprise Guardian readers. The so-called revisionist interpretation of the bomb made headway from the 1960s to the 1990s.

It argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.

Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb. The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan's military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.

Truman had to take account of this, and dropped the bomb for the reasons he said at the time. Contrary to popular myth, there is no documentary evidence that his military commanders advised him the bomb was unnecessary for Japan was about to surrender.

As the historian Wilson Miscamble puts it, Truman "hoped that the bombs would end the war and secure peace with the fewest American casualties, and so they did. Surely he took the action any American president would have undertaken."

Recent Japanese scholarship provides support for this position. Sadao Asada, of Doshisha University, Kyoto, has concluded from analysis of Japanese primary sources that the two bombs enabled the "peace party" within Japan's cabinet to prevail.
Kamm has more to say. You can read it all here.

Do you agree the op-ed's a "must read" and "clip and save?"

4 comments:

L Nettles said...

This so obvious that I don't consider it a clip and save, but then I have read E.B Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. I though he settled the question, from the viewpoint of an ordinary warrior.

Anonymous said...

I think what we have are points of fact which should be (and probably aren't) in every American History text. Unfortunately, revisionist history is taught and no amount of clipping and saving can undo the damage.

Anonymous said...

Sledg's books are excellent - would reccy "China Marine" as well.

I have always wondered, if the first (and only working) two bombs hadn't done the job, would we have waited six months and plastered them with hundreds of bombs or gone ahead with the invasion?

Today's so-called pundits don't seem to have read much history.

-AC

Anonymous said...

I agree it's a keeper.

Serendipitously, yesterday's Opinion Journal had a contribution from ION MIHAI PACEPA, titled
Propaganda Redux
(Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America's enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.)

The article touched slightly on the KGB's post-WW2 efforts to demonize Truman following his decision to end the Pacific war with the 2 bombs. We might suppose the current iteration of the KGB would continue to assist those who call it a crime.

TombZ