The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb

Michael Kort

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780231527583
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Few aspects of American military history have been as vigorously debated as Harry Truman's decision to use atomic bombs against Japan. In this carefully crafted volume, Michael Kort describes the wartime circumstances and thinking that form the context for the decision to use these weapons, surveys the major debates related to that decision, and provides a comprehensive collection of key primary source documents that illuminate the behavior of the United States and Japan during the closing days of World War II.

Kort opens with a summary of the debate over Hiroshima as it has evolved since 1945. He then provides a historical overview of thye events in question, beginning with the decision and program to build the atomic bomb. Detailing the sequence of events leading to Japan's surrender, he revisits the decisive battles of the Pacific War and the motivations of American and Japanese leaders. Finally, Kort examines ten key issues in the discussion of Hiroshima and guides readers to relevant primary source documents, scholarly books, and articles.

PART I

Historical Narrative

CHAPTER 1

The Debate Over Hiroshima

At 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945, a specially modified American B-29, Enola Gay, flying at 31,600 feet, dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The weapon, nicknamed Little Boy, the product of cutting-edge nuclear physics and an enormously expensive top-secret government project, was an incredibly complex 8,900-pound device fueled by the fission of Uranium 235. It had been finished only weeks before after three years of intensive scientific research and development conducted at breakneck speed. Hiroshima was Japan’s seventh-largest city, an important military center, and a major port on Honshu, the largest of Japan’s four main home islands. The massive bomb fell for forty-three seconds before detonating 1,870 feet above a hospital near the center of the city, only 550 feet from the bridge that was Enola Gay’s actual aiming point. It was the most cataclysmic event in the long and horrific history of human warfare. Little Boy exploded with the power of 12,500 tons of TNT, a colossal force that at the time would have required about 1,500 B-29s carrying conventional bombs to deliver. There was a blinding light, immediately followed by strong shock waves that shook the plane violently and drove it upward as pilot Col. Paul Tibbets, his shuddering, groaning aircraft less than twelve miles from the epicenter of the blast, urgently executed a sharp 150-degree right turn to get as far away from the awesome destructive power of his high-tech cargo as possible.

Below was a scene from hell. The temperature at the burst point instantaneously reached several million degrees. Then a fireball formed with a surface temperature hotter than the surface of the sun. Searing heat rays and radiation shot out in all directions, followed by devastating shock waves. Within ten seconds the fireball was gone, but smoking, flaming black clouds, which Enola Gay’s navigator compared to a pot of boiling black oil, completely hid the city as they coalesced into a monstrous mushroom that billowed upward toward the stratosphere. After a moment of stunned silence, everyone on Enola Gay began talking at once. Co-pilot Robert Lewis was pounding Tibbets’s shoulder and shouting, “Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!” Tibbets announced to his crew, “Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history,” and shortly thereafter ordnance expert Captain William S. Parsons, the man who had armed the bomb en route to Hiroshima, sent a message back to Enola Gay’s base, more than a thousand miles away on a Pacific island called Tinian, that the mission had “succeeded in all respects.” It had, but the “huge cloud” Parsons saw blanketing Hiroshima in some ways has not dissipated to this day. As a somber Lewis wrote in his log of the mission, “My God, what have we done?”¹

In an instant, Little Boy had destroyed an entire city. Five square miles were completely leveled. About 70,000 of Hiroshima’s 76,000 buildings were totally destroyed or damaged. We will never know how many people died from the bombing, in part because the exact population of Hiroshima, swelled by an influx of soldiers, wartime workers, and their dependents and then reduced by the evacuation of thousands of people during 1945, is not known, and in part because the bomb itself obliterated so much. A reasonable guess is that 350,000 people were in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, that almost 80,000 died that day, and that the death toll from burns and radiation reached 140,000 by the end of the year, including thousands of Korean forced laborers brought there by Japanese authorities.²

Three days later, at 11:00 in the morning of August 9, another B-29, Bock’s Car, hampered by cloud cover that limited visibility and dangerously low on fuel, dropped a second nuclear bomb on Japan, this one on Nagasaki, an important manufacturing city and major port on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost home island. The Nagasaki bomb, nicknamed Fat Man and about two thousand pounds heavier than Little Boy, was a plutonium-fueled device even more complex than its uranium cousin. It exploded 1,650 feet above the city with the force of 22,000 tons of TNT. Although it was released about a mile from the target and its blast was partially contained by nearby ridges that protected the city, Fat Man destroyed 40 percent of Nagasaki and killed more than 25,000 people on August 9, with at least 20,000 more dying from its effects by the end of the year.³

The next day, a stunned and bewildered Japanese government offered to surrender unconditionally, provided only that the Allies imposed no condition “which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler”⁴ (see Document E2), a qualification whose ambiguity and potential to permit the continuation of the current Japanese political regime threatened to derail an agreement. After several tense days of back-and-forth messages, punctuated by large-scale American conventional bombing raids on August 10 and 14, Japan officially announced its surrender on August 14. The formal ceremony took place on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

A day after the bombing of Hiroshima, Hansen Baldwin, the country’s leading commentator on military affairs among American journalists, wrote in the New York Times, “Yesterday we clinched the Pacific, but we sowed the whirlwind.” In Baldwin’s mind, that whirlwind consisted of “seeds of hate” that some day might provoke a catastrophic nuclear war, after which “we shall become—beneath the bombs and rockets—a world of troglodytes.”⁵ However, a second, albeit merely verbal whirlwind was sown on August 6, 1945: the debate over whether the United States was justified in using nuclear weapons to end the Pacific War with Japan. Most Americans strongly supported President Harry S Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against Japan. However, the first critics quickly made their voices heard, often but not exclusively arguing on the basis of pacifist or religious principles⁶ (see Document A56). In 1946, the first relatively lengthy analysis of the issue appeared that went beyond moral editorializing, accusing the United States of wrongly and without sufficient military justification resorting to atomic warfare against Japan. Countercritics who argued the opposite responded, the first comprehensive defense of the president coming in early 1947. The debate continued at a relatively low level into the 1950s but gathered strength in the mid-1960s and 1970s against the background of the divisive Vietnam War. But the whirlwind its heated words generated blew powerfully enough only to overturn support for Truman’s decision in some parts of a relatively limited though hardly unimportant sector of American life: the cloistered world of academia. In effect, although the debate over Hiroshima grew considerably in intensity, it remained largely confined to the ivory towers and ivied walls of academia and therefore was something of a tempest in a teapot.

That changed decisively in the early 1990s, by which time public opinion as a whole had shifted. That shift had less to do with what academics were saying than with broader changes in American society. By the early 1990s, the genuinely heroic memories of World War II were far less vivid. In their place, at least for the postwar generations, were lingering Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation and a legacy of mistrust of the government dating from the domestic turmoil that accompanied the unsuccessful Vietnam War. The public was increasingly skeptical of government claims, past as well as present. One result was that whereas in August 1945 about 85 percent of Americans had supported the atomic bombings, with only 4.5 percent opposed, by the 1990s one poll showed only 55 percent support for the bombings and 39 percent opposed.⁷

THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION AND THE ENOLA GAY

As the half-century anniversaries of the most dramatic final events of World War II approached—from D-Day in Europe to the atomic attack on Hiroshima in Asia to the respective surrenders of Germany and Japan—the debate over the American use of nuclear weapons against Japan burst the bounds of academia and became a regular feature of the mass media, generating a nationwide blizzard of articles, op-ed pieces, and letters to the editor. The immediate cause of the furor was a highly publicized proposed exhibit by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington, D.C. The exhibit would include Enola Gay’s forward fuselage (there was not enough room for the huge fully assembled plane), artifacts related to the plane and the crew that had flown the Hiroshima mission, and a “final major section” that would “treat the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves and the ensuing surrender of Japan.”⁸ This last part of the proposed exhibit, where NASM plunged into the debate over the justification of the bombings, caused a storm of controversy. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post carried letters debating the tone and contents of the exhibit; so did, among others, the Arizona Republic, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Rocky Mountain News, Phoenix Gazette, St. Petersburg Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Orlando Sentinel, Sacramento Bee, and Baltimore Sun.⁹

The NASM exhibit was so controversial because its message was widely viewed as presenting both the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan and the consequences of their use in an unfair and therefore unfavorable light. In September 1994, the U.S. Senate unanimously adopted a resolution critical of the exhibit. Supporters of the exhibit—there were prominent academic scholars on both sides of the debate—viewed the criticism as politically motivated censorship of serious, albeit uncomfortable, historical inquiry.¹⁰ Still, as historian Robert P. Newman’s meticulous tracing of the paper trail demonstrates, the script drew most heavily on scholarship that was critical of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Experts on the Pacific War, the functioning of the Japanese government during the last months of the war, the Truman administration, and other key subjects whose scholarship did not support a critical view of the bombings were not consulted, notwithstanding their outstanding credentials. To many people excluded from the process, the script was guilty of misrepresenting the circumstances that led to the use of the atomic bomb. Furthermore, it emphasized Japanese suffering to the point where a visitor would have left the exhibit believing Japan was more a victim than an aggressor that had caused enormous suffering across East Asia during the war. There also were complaints that the script wrongly implied that the atomic attacks on Japan had caused the post-war nuclear arms race, thereby also implying that the United States was to blame for that most dangerous development.¹¹

The NASM curators and their allies in the academic community who vigorously defended the planned exhibit as historically accurate—its script went through five different versions during 1994—could never quite overcome the damage caused by several controversial parts of the first script, two of which attracted particular ire from critics. The first was a statement slated for the introductory section (“Unit 1”) of the exhibit regarding the fundamental nature of the war. According to the script, “For most Americans, this war was fundamentally different than the one waged against Germany and Italy—it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism.”¹² The second lightning rod for critics was “Unit 4,” which a NASM planning document noted was to be the “emotional center” of the exhibit. In that part of the exhibit, said the planning document, “Photos of victims, enlarged to life-size, stare out at the visitor.”¹³ The problem with the NASM approach, critics responded, was not so much that the exhibit showed the horrific results of the bombings; that was to be expected. Rather, what was seriously wrong was that the exhibit as a whole emphasized Japanese suffering at the expense of the vital context: the brutality and destruction of Japan’s war of aggression in East Asia. According to an analysis by the Air Force Association (AFA), a group that vigorously supported the use of the atomic bomb to end the war, this bias could be seen in the exhibit’s visual displays, which would have the greatest impact on ordinary visitors. By the AFA’s count, the thirty-eight photos and artifacts in Unit 4 depicting Japanese suffering, especially of women and children at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stood in stark contrast to only three photos of American casualties during the war on display elsewhere in the exhibit. Critics pointed to similar imbalances in the written text. For example, more than sixteen times as many pages were devoted to “ground zero” at Hiroshima and Nagasaki than to Japanese atrocities committed throughout East Asia, which claimed millions of victims. The script also contained ten aggressive anti-Japanese statements by Americans versus only one anti-American statement by a Japanese.¹⁴ When NASM director Harwit sought an internal evaluation of the script from six museum employees dubbed the Tiger Team, its assessment likewise contained numerous criticisms. One member of the team, Colonel Donald Lopez, a retired Air Force officer and also a former NASM deputy director, told Harwit, “A visitor, expecting something honoring [the] 50th anniversary of WWII, either veteran, or with some connection to a veteran, will be appalled. . . . I would leave the exhibit with the strong feeling that Americans are bloodthirsty, racist killers who after beer parties and softball go out and kill as many women and children as possible.”¹⁵

After more than a year of turmoil, the exhibition was cancelled. In its place the NASM displayed only the forward fuselage of the actual Enola Gay, accompanied by a few other items and a small plaque. That truncated exhibit quickly became the most popular special exhibit in the history of the NASM, drawing more than a million visitors its first year and almost four million before it closed in May 1998. In December 2003, the entire, fully restored Enola Gay reappeared, along with a vast array of aircraft of all types, in a gleaming new National Air and Space Museum building as part of a permanent exhibit dedicated to the history of aviation. The fourteen-line plaque describing the airplane, similar in length to the others in the exhibit, simply informed visitors that Enola Gay was the B-29—“the most sophisticated propeller-driven bomber of World War II”—that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.¹⁶ Visitors were left to draw their own conclusions about that act.

That denouement must have satisfied Paul Tibbets. At a 1994 news conference where he called the proposed NASM exhibit a “package of insults,” the retired Air Force general had suggested that Enola Gay be displayed at the National Air and Space Museum with a one-line statement: “This airplane was the first one to drop an atomic bomb.” The man who piloted Enola Gay on its famous mission to Hiroshima added, “You don’t need any other explanation. And I think it should be displayed alone.”¹⁷

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF HIROSHIMA

Notwithstanding some early critical voices, the historiography of the bombing of Hiroshima originally was dominated by commentators who argued that the bomb’s use was militarily and morally justified, a viewpoint that over time has become known as the “orthodox” position on this issue. Henry L. Stimson, the secretary of war from 1940 to 1945, provided the most thorough and persuasive early defense in his article “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” which appeared in the February 1947 edition of Harper’s Magazine. In 1948 Stimson and coauthor McGeorge Bundy reinforced the argument for using the bomb in Stimson’s autobiography, On Active Service in Peace and War.¹⁸ Prominent historians Louis Morton and Samuel Eliot Morison did the same, respectively, in “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” (Foreign Affairs, January 1957) and “Why Japan Surrendered” (Atlantic Monthly, October 1960). Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Herbert Feis endorsed Stimson’s case in Japan Subdued: The Atomic Bomb and the End of the War in the Pacific (1961). To be sure, Feis accepted the 1946 conclusion of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), reached hastily and resting on problematic methodology, that blockade and bombing could have ended the war by November 1945. More fundamentally, he stressed that the decision to use the bomb was “governed by one reason . . . that by using the bomb, the agony of the war might be ended most quickly and many lives be saved.” Feis added that American leaders before August 6, 1945, worried that “if it proved necessary to carry out plans for an invasion, the [American] losses might amount to hundreds of thousands.” Further, the decision to develop the bomb had been military, “and the impelling reason for the decision to use it was military—to end the war victoriously as soon as possible.”¹⁹ Meanwhile, Robert Butow’s Japan’s Decision to Surrender (1954), the era’s landmark study of Japanese decision making during the last year of the war and an invaluable resource to this day, stressed the crucial importance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in breaking the political logjam in Japan and bringing about a surrender.²⁰

The umbrella term usually applied to the wide range of historical writing critical of the American decision to use atomic weapons against Japan is “revisionism,” that is, a revision of the “orthodox” view that the bomb’s use was militarily and morally justified. The term also refers more broadly to historical writing critical of postwar American foreign policy. Revisionism as it relates to the atomic bombing of Japan first emerged in 1946 when Norman Cousins and Thomas K. Finletter, in the pages of the Saturday Review of Literature, accused the United S...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Historical Narrative
• Part II. Key Questions and Interpretations
• Part III. Resources
• Part IV. Documents
• Notes
• Index