Historians tend to write about the causes of events, not about whether those events should have happened. They don’t usually ask if the American colonists should have declared war against Britain or whether Robert E. Lee should have decided to lead the Confederate army.
But some subjects are so momentous that historians have difficulty avoiding moral questions. That is the case with Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, a decision that continues to be controversial.
According to Tsoyushi Hasegawa, there has long been a debate between orthodox historians and revisionists. The former argue that it was necessary in order to avoid the loss of thousands of lives in an invasion of Japan. The latter say it should not have been used because Japan was essentially defeated already and the actual purpose of the bombings was to send a message to Stalin.[1]
In this and two following posts I want to look afresh at some of the elements that fed into Truman’s decision. I do not attempt to decide whether Truman should have authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although I may help some readers think about it.
One of the important elements affecting the decision was the American demand that the Japanese accept unconditional surrender. Another was the changing role of Stalin and his armies as the war neared its end (would they be a help or a danger?). Third, Harry Truman became president late in the war, long after the atomic bomb project had been started; his decision may, in fact, have been impelled by earlier forces.
This post addresses the third element: Truman’s late arrival as president to a war approaching its end. The reason I emphasize this is that I’ve been struck by the number of presidents who, upon inauguration, have come upon military projects already in the works, usually secretly. For example:
-
-
-
- Two military coups were in the gestation stage when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953.
-
-
One was a CIA-engineered coup in Iran. Discussions between John Foster Dulles, who became Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and his brother, Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA, began as soon as Eisenhower was elected in 1952. By February 1953, U.S. and British officials had agreed to overthrow the existing prime minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq.[2] It happened in August 1953, seven months into Eisenhower’s presidency.
The other CIA operation was in Guatemala in 1954. It ousted a democratically elected president who may have been a communist.
We don’t really know why Eisenhower went along (in his memoir he doesn’t even mention the role the CIA played). But he was new to the job, he was told he was fighting communism, and he didn’t want any more world wars.
-
-
-
- Similarly, when John F. Kennedy became president, the Bay of Pigs operation to overturn Castro’s government in Cuba was in the late planning stages. Writes Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, “[T]he CIA conceived a plan in the middle of 1960 to topple Castro, submitted it to the president [Eisenhower], and received authorization to proceed with the preparations.” According to Vandenbroucke, when Eisenhower left office he had not actually decided whether to go ahead but “by the time John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961 the plan had acquired a momentum of its own.”[3] The fledgling president went along, and the landing on April 17, 1961, failed.
-
-
-
-
-
- Into this category of military legacies we can place Joe Biden. His “Bay of Pigs” was the departure of the military from Afghanistan in August 2021, during his first year in office. Withdrawal was already planned as a result of a decision by Donald Trump—and that was public, not secret. But Biden’s handling was chaotic and left many Afghan allies unprotected from the Taliban. It is widely considered another disaster.
-
-
Truman’s Initiation
Now, to Truman. He knew nothing about the bomb when he became president upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt on April 12, 1945. After a short cabinet meeting that day, Secretary of War Henry Stimson told him quietly of a new weapon of “almost unbelievable destructive power.”[4]
The Manhattan Project had been underway for years, started partly because of fear that Germany was developing such a weapon. But it was known only to a few. Had Roosevelt intended to use it? No one can know. Lloyd C. Gardner says that “FDR’s final legacy was an ambiguous mixture of public pronouncements and private reservations.” He often “put off decisions until his hands were forced—and now he was gone.” [5]
Yet the project was nearing its climax. According to Barton Bernstein, at a Sept. 1944 meeting Winston Churchill and Roosevelt had signed a joint memorandum indicating that the bomb would be dropped on Japan, not Germany. But, says Bernstein, “Their phrasing suggested that, for the moment anyway, they might have had some slight doubts about actually using the bomb, for they agreed that ‘it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese.’”[6]
In his memoirs, Truman takes responsibility for the decision.
But Michael S. Sherry, who has written a classic book about the use of air power, departs somewhat from Truman’s own conclusion. He quotes General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, as saying that yes, the responsibility was Truman’s, but “as far as I was concerned, his decision was one of noninterference, basically a decision not to upset the existing plans.”
Sherry goes on to agree. “Decisions had to be made, yet if no final orders had to be signed [and they didn’t], they could be made incrementally and felt to flow from the logic of events.” [5] Thus, the “logic of events” led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
My next post will address unconditional surrender.
Notes (Comments follow notes)
[1] Tsoyushi Hasegawa, Introduction. The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals, edited by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2007, 1–7, at 2. There are also postrevisionists who see the role of Stalin as an important but not determinative factor.
[2] Mark Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup D’état in Iran.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 19, no. 3 (Aug., 1987): 261–286.
[3] Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, “Anatomy of a Failure: The Decision to Land at the Bay of Pigs,” Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 3 (Autumn, 1984): 471–491.
[4] Lloyd C. Gardner, “Unconditional Surrender: The Dawn of the Atomic Age.” In War and Cold War in America Foreign Policy, edited by Dale Carter and Robin Clifton. (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 49–80, at 50.
[5] Gardner, 49.
[6] Barton J. Bernstein. “The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb., 1995:) 135–152, at 136.
[7] Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 341.
The image above is from WikiImages on Pixabay. It presumably is the bomb test on Bikini Island in July 1945.