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VJ
Day: Remembering the Pacific War: Shalom
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Z magazine, July-August 1995, footnotes added]
VJ Day: Remembering the Pacific War
The Origins of the Pacific War
The only non-colonies attacked by Japan
were Thailand and China. When Tokyo demanded that Thailand allow Japanese
troops permission to use Thai soil for attacks on Burma and Malaya, Bangkok
leaders allied their country with Japan and declared war on the United
States and Britain, but they didn't mind the opportunity to regain Thai
territory that France and Britain had taken at the beginning of the century
and given to their Southeast Asian colonies.3 China was truly the main
victim of Japanese aggression, but that aggression had been going on for
ten years before Pearl Harbor with great brutality, though evoking little
reaction from Washington and London, a subject that will be discussed in
more detail below.
Now it is not nice to seize the colonies
of another country, but from the point of view of the colonial peoples
the moral distinction between seizor and seizee are not so obvious. Indeed,
in much of Asia there was considerable sympathy for Japan, which was ousting
the western colonialists. In the East Indies a nationalist leader acknowledged
that a majority of his compatriots "rejoiced over Japanese victories."
Before Japan had complete control, many Dutch planters had to "flee for
their lives from natives who had been their servants for 100 years or more"
in the words of a British officer on the spot. Even Nehru told Edgar Snow
privately of his emotional sympathy for Japan.4
To many Asians it was tremendously inspiring
to see other Asians decisively defeating and humiliating their arrogant
European and American masters.5 When Japan had first moved to take over
Manchuria in 1931-32, an internal U.S. State Department memorandum expressed
concern:
Should Japan succeed in getting her way
over the protests of the League of Nations and the United States and despite
the admitted interests of Soviet Russia, white prestige throughout Asia
would be dangerously shaken; the 'Asia for the Asiatics' movement would
be intensified; and the difficult position of the British in India would
be rendered still more difficult of solution.
The United States, the Dominions and the
British ruling classes are alike race-conscious, and the underlying instinct
of the Anglo-Saxons is to preserve the Anglo-Saxon breed intact against
the rising tide of color. Despite emotional appeals and jingo talk, the
common British and American attitude towards the people of other colors
is a fundamental factor in the present situation.6
U.S. racism applied to the Chinese too,
who were also excluded from U.S. shores (though as a gesture of friendship
to our wartime ally, the immigration laws were revised in December 1943
to allow 105 Chinese to enter per year, over the protests of the American
Federation of Labor, the American Legion, and others).13 And white racism
was on display throughout Asia. So Japan's humbling of the white overlords
struck a responsive chord among the colonial peoples of Asia. Of course,
Asian hopes that Japan had come to liberate them were soon cruelly shattered.
The Japanese were no more interested in Asian self-determination than were
westerners, and Japanese racism toward other Asians was also quite vicious.
But if there was no reason to welcome the Japanese, nor was there much
reason to prefer their predecessors.
Distinctions are sometimes made between Japanese colonialism and that of the other western countries. To be sure, Japan came late to colonialism, and so its conquests had to be more recent than those of the other powers. As Britain's First Sea Lord privately acknowledged in 1934, the western powers had "got most of the world already, or the best parts of it" and they sought to "prevent others taking it away."14 Japanese conquests, however, were no more ferocious than those of the earlier colonizers. The U.S. war of conquest in the Philippines at the turn of the century, for example, was particularly brutal, where General Jacob Smith ordered "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me" and where many Filipinos were killed for each one wounded because, as General Arthur MacArthur (the father of the World War II general) explained, "inferior races" succumb to wounds more readily than Anglo-Saxons.15 The Japanese held their World War II conquests
for fewer than four years, and all of these were years of global war, so
it is not really fair to compare their record of colonial rule in these
countries with those of the West. However, if one looks at those colonies
that Tokyo held for a considerable length of time (Formosa and Korea),
Japan's record in terms of economic development is quite impressive, while
its political record is poor. Americans are especially proud of their colonial
record in the Philippines in terms of education. Few note that when the
United States acquired the Philippines, the islands already had the most
extensive system of education in Southeast Asia, and that by 1938 they
had about the same fraction of the population in school as Japanese Formosa
and independent Thailand; fifty percent more was spend per capita on education
in Formosa than in the Philippines.16
The United States, of course, promised
in 1934 to give the Philippines its independence ten years hence, and in
1946 it did so. But Tokyo announced in 1943 that it was giving independence
to the Philippines, as well as to Burma and Indonesia. Of course, it didn't
take a genius to note that the independence was phony: secret agreements
gave Japan the right to exploit Philippine resources and the Japanese military
based its forces in the islands.17 But Washington obtained these same privileges
from an "independent" Philippines too. As a U.S. political scientist remarked
a few months after formal Philippine independence, both economically and
militarily "the United States is actually in a stronger position in the
Philippines although the islands are independent now."18
At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials following
the war, the U.S. prosecutor Joseph Keenan asked former Japanese prime
minister Tojo Hideki whether all people had a right to self-determination.19
But if this were the basis for deciding who was a war criminal, the dock
would have been rather more multinational in composition. In 1932, at the
same time that Secretary of State Henry Stimson (later to be FDR's Secretary
of War) was calling for the non-recognition of Japan's colonial aggrandizement
in Manchuria, he opposed Philippine independence.20 In 1933, Roosevelt's
Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, signed a hemisphere pledge declaring
that no state had the right to intervene in the affairs of another; privately,
however, he considered the proposition "more or less wild and unreasonable."21
And when the United States decided to give the Philippines independence,
it was not because of a commitment to self-determination, but out of a
desire to end Philippine immigration and eliminate Philippine exports which
competed with U.S. agricultural interests.22
Radhabinod Pal, the Indian justice at the
Tokyo trial, asked why, if colonial seizures were now improper according
to the western powers, they were permitted to retain and profit from the
acquisitions of their misguided past?23 No good answer was provided.
Our "White Hope" in the East
In 1932, the United States announced that it would not recognize Tokyo's conquest of Manchuria and the Manchukuo regime it established there. At the same time, however, Secretary of State Stimson told the Chinese ambassador in Washington that he "had no quarrel with any of Japan's rights in Manchuria" and hoped to see the two countries settle their differences in ways which did not "impair our rights in China." A few months later when Japan took military action at the Shanghai international settlement -- claiming to be maintaining order -- Stimson advised the Chinese that other nations would follow Japan's example unless the Nationalist government changed the "picture of various Chinese factions cutting each other's throats and tearing each other to pieces...."26 When the Japanese government in 1933 expressed
its interest in improving relations with Washington, Secretary of State
Hull instructed the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo to point out the "increasing
evidence of discrimination, actual or likely to develop, by the authorities
of Manchukuo against American and other foreign commercial interests in
Manchuria, and of acts by these authorities prejudicial to the treaty rights
of the United States." Making no reference to any Chinese rights, Hull
stated that "if the Japanese authorities could discourage successfully
the discriminatory and other objectionable practices in Manchukuo, it would
contribute substantially to maintaining and promoting good will between
the United States and Japan...."27
Before the Japanese attack on China proper in 1937, the U.S. Department of State berated China for restrictions on foreign capital.28 After 1937, in U.S.-Japanese talks it was "the treatment of American business in China" that "engaged as much of the time of the negotiators as any other, and absorbed a great amount of drafting energy," in the words of mainstream diplomat/historian Herbert Feis.29 Other U.S. protests to Tokyo related to the Japanese bombing of civilians, but the U.S. interest in these atrocities was well indicated by the subject heading used in the published collection of these protests: "Bombing of Civilians by the Japanese and Other Acts Endangering the Life and Welfare of American Citizens in China."30 Needless to say, the preservation of Chinese
democracy was not an issue, for, as British historian Christopher Thorne
notes, "if the term 'fascist' is to be employed in a non-European context
for the 1930s, to no regime is it more appropriate to attach it than that
of the Kuomintang (KMT) in China. 'Fascism' declared Chiang Kai-shek to
a gathering of his Blue Shirts in 1935, 'is a stimulant for a declining
society.... Can fascism save China? We answer: yes.'"31 But domestic Chinese
politics did figure in U.S. thinking in one respect. To quote Feis (for
whom the word "China" refers to Chiang Kai- shek by definition):
Decisive success in the use of compulsion
might have some undesired results. If Japan were brought to sudden collapse
it might no longer be an effective opponent of Communism in Asia. Unless
the retreat from Manchukuo were well- managed, the Communists might win
control of the land, not China. This gave cause for wishing a settlement
by consent, rather than coercion.32
There was undoubted Japanese aggression in China and the United States claimed to be especially concerned that Tokyo's behavior violated the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international agreement outlawing aggressive war. But all the major parties to the Pact had specified that their concurrence in no way curtailed their right of self-defense and their right
-- in the words of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- to be
"the sole judge of what constitutes the right of self-defense and the necessity
and extent of the same." The United States, noted the Committee, "regards
the Monroe Doctrine as a part of its national security and defense."36
Thus, in Washington's view, the deployment of U.S. military forces to the
Caribbean was no violation of the Kellogg-Briand agreement.
Colonialism is unjustifiable. Many Japanese
believed, however, that they had as good a claim to it as the western powers.
The Depression hit Japan with great severity. The major powers had responded
to the economic crisis of the world capitalist system by imposing high
protective tariffs around their colonial empires. The huge U.S. market
was placed behind the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930. Between 1929 and 1931
Japanese foreign trade was cut in half.37 As a State Department official
noted, "all over the world various obstacles to the free and natural flow
of Japanese exports" had been raised.38 Among these obstacles were special
preferences that the United States maintained for its own business interests
in the Philippines and Cuba.
Given this situation, it is not surprising
that Japan sought to emulate the other colonial powers and establish a
self-sufficient economic empire of its own. In last minute negotiations
between Tokyo and Washington in 1941, the Japanese indicated that they
would support the Open Door in Asia if this principle were applied world-wide.
Washington's reply ignored its own departures from the Open Door principle.39
Probably U.S. agreement on this point would not have been sufficient to prevent war, but what is clear is that Washington rejected the principle that it had to behave as it wanted others to do. The United States was entitled to its Monroe Doctrine for Latin America, but the Japanese could not have their Monroe Doctrine for Asia. Indeed, a key State Department official had noted many years before that Japan's Asian Monroe Doctrine posed a threat not just to the Open Door, but to the U.S. Monroe Doctrine as well because Europeans excluded from Asia would inevitably seek markets in South America.40 The Far East, Henry Stimson declared, is "our part of the world"41 and yet regarding Latin America he commented: "I think that it's not asking too much to have our little region over here that never has bothered anybody."42 Other issues divided Washington and Tokyo
aside from commercial policy. The United States wanted Japan to break its
Tripartite alliance with the Axis Powers. Japan gave assurances that the
alliance would not compel it to declare war on the United States in the
event that the latter got involved in the war in Europe (just as Japan
had maintained its neutrality vis-a-vis the Soviet Union), and there were
quite a few Japanese actions that indicated that the Tripartite pact was
not really operative. But Washington insisted that the pact be abrogated,
probably judging that the Axis alliance would help sell the coming war
to the American public.43 Japan offered to remove most but not all of its
troops from China as soon as a peace agreement was reached, but this too
Washington rejected. To U.S. policy makers, each soldier removed from China
without making Japan suffer humiliating defeat would simply mean "one more
soldier available to Japan to use elsewhere." Indeed, without fundamental
changes in Japanese foreign policy it "may well be doubted whether any
advantage to the United States (or to the world at large) would flow from
a termination now" of the Sino-Japanese war.44
The United States, along with Britain and
the Netherlands, placed a total embargo on oil to Japan, leaving it with
no alternative sources. To Japanese leaders war to seize its own supplies
of oil seemed essential. But Japanese officials calculated that an attack
on the oil- rich East Indies would necessarily involve them in a war with
the United States. In this estimation they were correct, for U.S. officials
had determined to go to Congress for a declaration of war not just if U.S.
colonies were attacked, but if those of Britain or the Netherlands were
either.45 In these circumstances Tokyo concluded that it made sense to
try to strike the first blow.
Much has been made in the United States
of Japanese treachery in attacking Pearl Harbor without warning. Many anti-FDR
pundits have even concluded that Roosevelt knew of the impending attack
but did nothing so as to have a major casus belli. Little noted, though,
is the fact that U.S. military officials in the Philippines under General
Douglas MacArthur had 9 hours notice and still managed to have their entire
air force destroyed on the ground.46 So it is not clear that a formal Japanese
declaration of war arriving before the attack on Pearl Harbor would have
made any practical difference.
44 Months That Will Live in Infamy
In an internal memorandum in January 1942,
Admiral William D. Leahy, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote that
"in fighting with Japanese savages all previously accepted rules of warfare
must be abandoned."49
One rule, much insisted upon by the United
States in the past, condemned the use of unrestricted submarine warfare.
In 1930, Japan, Britain, and the United States had signed an agreement
that submarines would not sink merchant vessels without having first placed
passengers and crew in a place of safety. Nevertheless, a few hours after
Pearl Harbor Washington instructed naval commanders in the Pacific: "Execute
Unrestricted Air and Submarine Warfare Against Japan." This order broke
the 1930 agreement and preceded any unrestricted submarine warfare on the
part of Japan.50
A 1943 Japanese document was submitted at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal ordering the "complete destruction of the crews of the enemy's ships."51 But when a U.S. submarine commander sank a transport and then machine-gunned hundreds or thousands of survivors, he was commended and publicly honored.52 Japanese cruelty was horrendous, but it
cannot justify the behavior of U.S. forces. One American war correspondent
later wrote: "We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed
lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy
wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific
boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts,
or carved their bones into letter openers."53 On Okinawa, for example,
"killing of prisoners was widespread in some [U.S.] units," and many civilians
were raped and murdered.54
The most serious U.S. atrocities, however,
were inflicted from the air. Again, it is worth recalling the "previously
accepted rules of warfare." In 1938, the U.S. Department of State announced
that aerial bombardment of civilians was "in violation of the most elementary
principles of those standards of humane conduct which have been developed
as an essential part of modern civilization."55 And Secretary Hull had
particularly condemned air attacks using incendiaries which "inevitably
and ruthlessly jeopardize non-military persons and property."56
Nevertheless, a poll on December 10 1941 found 67% of the U.S. population favoring unqualified and indiscriminate bombing of Japanese cities.57 And U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall had called on his staff to draw up plans for "general incendiary attacks to burn up the wood and paper structures of the densely populated Japanese cities" in November 194158 -- before Pearl Harbor, before the Bataan Death March, before any U.S. casualties were suffered. In the European theater, the United States (in contradistinction to Britain) had a reputation for "precision" bombing. The evidence seems clear, however, that policy makers -- from the president on down -- favored terror bombing when it could be appropriately disguised. Back in 1941 Roosevelt had confided that the way to beat Hitler was to send a hundred planes over Germany for military objectives, but that ten of the planes should bomb smaller towns that hadn't been bombed before. "There must be some kind of factory in every town. That is the only way to break German morale." In other words, factories would be the ostensible target, but civilian morale the real target.59 And in practice, U.S. planes participated in numerous raids that were basically terrorist in nature.60 By refraining from explicitly announcing a policy of terror bombing in Europe, the U.S. Air Force encountered none of the postwar criticism that the British Bomber Command experienced.61 But in the Pacific, the United States made the British look like saints. Although Japan had only one eighth the tonnage of bombs dropped on it as Germany, its civilian death toll from bombing far surpassed Germany's 300,000.62 Urban area bombing received three quarters of the tonnage, almost entirely in the form of incendiary attacks on densely populated areas. Only a quarter of the tonnage was devoted to aircraft factories, oil refineries, arsenals, or other industrial targets.63 On the evening of March 9-10, 1945, over
three hundred B-29 Superfortresses loaded with 2,000 tons of napalm and
jellied gasoline flew over Tokyo.64 The resulting inferno totally overwhelmed
the Tokyo fire department. (A few explosives had been mixed in with the
incendiaries, recalled Gen. Curtis LeMay, the commander of the operation,
in order to demoralize firefighters.65) A quarter of a million buildings
were destroyed and a million people rendered homeless.66 Probably 100,000
people died.67 One doctor recorded:
In the black Sumida river countless bodies
were floating, clothed bodies, naked bodies, all as black as charcoal.
It was unreal. These were dead people, but you couldn't tell whether they
were men or women. You couldn't even tell if the objects floating by were
arms and legs or pieces of burnt wood.68
The attack area was 87.4 percent residential70 and contained only "a few individually designated strategic targets." The burned out area included 18 percent of the city's industrial area, 63 percent of its commercial area, and "the heart of the congested residential district," indicating the main objective of the U.S. bombs.71 According to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any [equivalent period of] time in the history of man."72 The head of the Army Air Forces telexed LeMay after the raid: "Congratulations. This mission shows your crews have got the guts for anything."73 For the next five months, these fire raids
were continued, hitting some 66 Japanese urban centers, including multiple
return attacks on Tokyo.74 One GI in Japan after the war reported that
firebombs "seemed to have destroyed everything but the obvious military
targets."75
That civilians were the primary target was no post-war discovery. U.S. plans for the fire raids had estimated that they would kill more than 500,000 people, but do little immediately to reduce Japanese front-line military strength since they would destroy only a few of the highest priority war plants, and other factories and stocks would replenish losses.76 U.S. officials rationalized their policies of total war by pointing to the fact that the Japanese government had set up a Volunteer Corps, making all men aged 15-60 and women 17-40 liable for defense duties; thus, concluded an air force officer, "the entire population of Japan is a proper Military Target." "For us, THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN."77 An air force operations analyst (presumably attuned to class analysis from his pre-war position as a professor of physiology at Harvard) recommended that in order to emphasize social cleavages, American planes should avoid hitting upper class areas while destroying the homes of workers.78 "I suppose if I had lost the war," LeMay later commented, "I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately we were on the winning side."79 Brig. General Bonner Fellers, a key MacArthur
aide, in a confidential memo of June 1945, called the incendiary raids
"one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all
history."80 But civilian policy makers seemed to have no qualms about what
they were doing, except for Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Stimson told
Truman he was concerned about area bombing
for two reasons: First, because I did not
want to have the United States get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in
atrocities; and second, I was a little fearful that before we could get
ready, the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the
new weapon [that is, the atom bomb] would not have a fair background to
show its strength81
"The Greatest Thing In History"
In examining whether dropping the atomic bombs was militarily necessary, a number of points need to be kept in mind. First, the real issue is not whether the atom bombs were preferable to an invasion or other forms of warfare, but whether the war could have been ended before August 1945 without resorting to either atomic weapons, invasion, or anything else. The United States had broken the Japanese code and therefore knew what Japanese leaders were holding out for: they wanted to be assured that they could retain the emperor. Washington, however, was insisting on unconditional surrender, which, as Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori cabled to his ambassador in Moscow in July 1945, "is the only obstacle to peace."84 Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew, the former U.S. envoy to Tokyo, recommended that the Japanese be told that they could maintain the emperor, but Truman rejected the advice. The Potsdam declaration which called on Japanese forces to surrender unconditionally said nothing about the emperor.85 And the U.S. made no effort to contact Japanese diplomats privately to convey that the emperor could be retained. A plausible argument can be made for demanding
unconditional surrender: only by eliminating Japanese militarism root and
branch could there be peace in Asia for the long term. This view, however,
naively assumes that the victors in the war were not themselves going to
be an impediment to peace in Asia, but in any case whoever else might be
able to advance this argument, the U.S. government could not do so. For
in fact, after dropping two atom bombs, and exterminating a few hundred
thousand people, the Japanese offered to surrender on the condition that
they could retain their emperor. And the United States agreed, not because
it was feeling sorry for the victims of its nuclear attacks, but because
U.S. officials believed that it would assist the post-war occupation of
Japan if the emperor were allowed to remain. So, with macabre irony, the
United States wiped out two cities in order to get the Japanese to accept
terms they had probably been willing to accept before. "It is possible,"
Henry Stimson later wrote, "in the light of the final surrender, that a
clearer and earlier exposition of American willingness to retain the Emperor
would have produced an earlier ending to the war...."86
If this approach had been tried and found wanting, what other methods would there have been for ending the war? The social scientists at the Office of War Information knew that Japanese resolve was not as strong as commonly thought, but their studies were ignored.87 The British Foreign Office believed that "a propaganda of violent social revolution would undoubtedly have a great effect in Japan," but "this kind of political warfare is presumably not open to Britain" -- nor, presumably, to the United States.88 U.S. officials knew that the Russians were going to be entering the war against Japan in early to mid-August and they anticipated that this would have a devastating effect on Japanese leaders, less for its military impact than because Soviet belligerence would close off Tokyo's one hope for a mediated settlement. U.S. intelligence reported that "the entry of the USSR into the war would ... convince most Japanese at once of the inevitability of defeat."89 Stalin will "be in the Jap War on August 15th," Truman recorded in his diary on July 17. "Fini Japs when that comes about."90 But the next day Truman learned that the test of the atom bomb was successful. "Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in," Truman wrote, certain that the atom bomb would force a surrender.91 Instead of relying on the Soviet declaration of war (or even asking Stalin to join in issuing the Potsdam declaration) to make the atom bombs unnecessary, Truman hoped that the bombs could end the war before Moscow gained too much influence in Asia. In another cruel irony, a top-secret U.S. study concluded in 1946 that it was the Soviet entry into the war, not either of the atom bombs, that was the decisive factor in obtaining the Japanese surrender.92 Admiral Leahy considered the atom bombs
"an inhuman weapon to use on a people that was already defeated and ready
to surrender... [We] had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians
of the Dark Ages."93 Curtis LeMay defended their use, commenting:
We scorched and boiled and baked to death
more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.94
Some of the scientists who worked on the bomb recommended that the United States carry out a demonstration explosion for the Japanese, rather than dropping it unannounced on a civilian target.97 There are two often-heard arguments against such a proposal: that the demonstration might turn out to be a dud and that there weren't enough bombs to "waste" one on a demonstration. But the bomb of the type dropped on Hiroshima was considered by all those who worked on it to be a sure thing.98 And it is hard to see how ecstatic the Japanese could get if the bomb failed, for they hadn't been doing so well in the war even without the bomb. As for the scarcity of bombs, a third one was ready for later in August, with several expected to be available in September.99 Surely, whether there were six bombs or five bombs dropped in a two month period would not have made very much difference. In any event, Truman rejected the demonstration idea and ordered that the first bomb be dropped on Hiroshima. It has been suggested that to policy makers the bomb was just another weapon. But Truman didn't think so: "This is the greatest thing in history," he commented after Hiroshima was incinerated.100 And Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King expressed his relief that the bomb had been dropped on Asiatic people, not on "white races" in Europe.101 Truman recorded in his diary that he and
Stimson agreed that the bomb should be dropped on a "purely military" target.102
This is either a lie inscribed for posterity or self-delusion of a high
order. Hiroshima had some military facilities, but there were more than
six times as many civilians as soldiers in the city.103 The government's
Target Committee advised that no effort be made to pin point the attack
on industrial areas in any of the three potential target cities "since
on these three targets such areas are small, spread on fringes of cities
and quite dispersed."104 And, sure enough, in Hiroshima "the large factories
-- with most workers already in place -- suffered less than the heart of
the city."105
The bombing of Nagasaki had even less military
justification than that of Hiroshima. Two days after the first bomb, Moscow
declared war on Japan. Surely these were two severe jolts to the leaders
in Tokyo, but the United States didn't wait to see what their impact might
be and dropped the next bomb twenty-four hours later, on August 9. Marshall
was at first surprised that the Japanese did not sue for peace after Hiroshima;
he concluded that because the destruction had been so complete in that
city, it took longer for word to get out and for an assessment to be made.
Marshall ordered a crash propaganda campaign to inform the Japanese public
about the bomb in order to get them to press for surrender. Propaganda
leaflets were dropped on many cities, but Nagasaki did not get its full
quota of leaflets until August 10, the day after it was obliterated.106
Japan now announced that it was willing
to surrender if it could keep its emperor. Washington replied that the
emperor would have to be under the authority of the U.S. occupation authorities,
and on August 14, Japan accepted these terms. But before the Japanese acceptance
was officially received Washington ordered a final raid. The official history
reports that the air force chief "wanted as big a finale as possible,"
hoping that the Tokyo area could be hit in a 1,000-plane mission. The head
of the strategic air forces disagreed; he "still wanted to drop the third
atom bomb on Tokyo but thought the battered city a poor target for conventional
bombing." Ultimately, 1,014 planes bombed the Tokyo area on the 14th. "...before
the last B-29 returned President Truman announced the unconditional surrender
of Japan."107
Uncle Sam Does the Talking
In the Atlantic Charter of August 1941,
FDR and Churchill proclaimed a set of basic principles for a better world.
First was "no aggrandizement, territorial or other." Second was "no territorial
changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples
concerned."109 But U.S. officials were determined to take over all the
Pacific island territories of Japan for the exclusive military use of the
United States. The principle of self-determination, the New York Herald
Tribune declared, was irrelevant where "the security of the United States
and the stability of the Pacific world" were at stake."110 Britain's Colonial
Secretary protested that the United States was trying to "get away with"
the acquisition of Pacific island territories while employing "a rather
diaphanous cover of the usual idealism."111 And the British Foreign Secretary
complained to Secretary of State James Byrnes that the Soviet Union wanted
a huge land mass, the United States had its "Monroe sphere on the American
continent and were extending it into the Pacific." What would that leave
the Europeans? Byrnes insisted that Washington did not seek empire in the
Pacific, only scattered bases and islands with few inhabitants.112 And
thus some 60,000 Pacific islanders became part of an extensive network
of U.S. military bases, where their rights and well-being became hostage
to the Pentagon's military priorities and nuclear weapons testing.
If the self-determination of these island
inhabitants could be subordinated to the interests of the war's winners,
so it was in Southeast Asia. At the San Francisco Conference setting up
the United Nations, the United States had joined the European colonial
powers in deciding that former colonies would become trusteeships of the
international body only with the agreement of the metropolitan power.113
As early as February 1944, the Department
of State had endorsed the idea that the East Indies should be given back
to the Netherlands.114 The Indonesian people, however, were not inclined
to accept continued colonial rule, so when British troops arrived -- designated
by Washington as responsible for disarming the Japanese forces there --
they found an armed independence movement. Journalist Harold Isaacs described
how the British dealt with this problem:
Japanese troops, kept under arms, were
ordered into action against the insurgents. At Semarang and Bandung, where
bitter battles were fought to take those cities away from the Indonesians,
Japanese infantry and tanks carried the main brunt. In his official report
on the fighting at Semarang at the end of November, the local British commander
... gave the late enemy his enthusiastic accolade: "The Japanese were magnificent!"
he wired.115
When the Dutch returned, they were armed
with weapons purchased with U.S. financial aid. The United Nations worked
out a compromise between the Indonesian nationalists and the Dutch, but
the Dutch refused to abide by it and Washington failed to enforce its implementation.
In defiance of the UN, the Dutch imposed a strict economic blockade on
Indonesia, cutting off supplies of food and medicine and causing great
suffering. Then, in 1948, Indonesian leftists (with no backing from Moscow)
tried to take power and when Sukarno and the other moderate nationalists
crushed them, Washington did some rethinking. Because Sukarno seemed firmly
anti-communist, and to forestall any further radicalization of Indonesian
nationalism, the United States now pressed the Netherlands to settle. But
Washington did support the Dutch in their demand that Indonesia shoulder
the entire burden of its internal debt, 42% of which had been incurred
by Dutch military operations to prevent Indonesian independence.117 Over
the next decade independent Indonesia would be subject to a massive U.S.
campaign of subversion.118
In Indochina, too, Japanese troops and U.S. arms were used to try to restore colonial rule over a nationalist movement that was prepared to declare independence. When the British landed in Vietnam, the first thing they did was free the French forces who had been imprisoned by the Japanese. Then, the British and French, with Japanese troops assisting, went out to crush the Vietnamese.119 A British spokesperson had the "highest praise" for the cooperation shown by the Japanese commander. Eight weeks after the British arrived, fewer than 5% of Japanese troops had been disarmed.120 Because the nationalists in Vietnam were
communist led, the United States did not push the French to agree to independence.
Over the next eight years, the French war to reassert its colonial rule
over Indochina would be four- fifths funded by Washington. Thus, even though
it had been the Japanese advance into Indochina that precipitated U.S.
sanctions in 1940-41, ultimately leading to the Pacific War, the self-determination
of the people of Indochina was of no consequence to the United States.
Indeed, as the next two decades would show, the very lives of the people
of Indochina mattered little to U.S. policy makers.
In the Philippines, the bulk of the pre-war
elite had collaborated with the Japanese, while many Filipinos fought in
guerrilla units against the Japanese occupation. Some of these guerrillas
were American led, but the largest grouping was the left-wing Hukbalahap
(Huks) which drew its strength from the radicalized peasantry of Central
Luzon. When U.S. troops reconquered the islands, they re-installed the
old elite and secured from them vast military bases and economic privileges.
In return, the elite obtained preferential access to the U.S. market and
military aid to help them reassert their control in the countryside against
the Huks.121
Matters were no better in East Asia. Korea had been a Japanese colony since the early years of the century and the popular desire there for independence was intense. Herbert Hoover, the former president welcomed as an adviser by Truman, privately proposed in 1945 that Japan be allowed to retain Korea and Formosa, making Japan a bulwark against communism,122 but no U.S. official could endorse the idea of maintaining Japanese colonialism. (When the Korean war began in 1950, however, Truman suggested declaring Taiwan part of Japan,123 and in 1966 historian Herbert Feis wrote that it would have been better to allow Japan to keep Formosa.124) Nevertheless, when U.S. troops moved into the southern half of Korea -- as per their agreement with the Soviet Union, whose troops occupied the north -- they preserved the old regime. At first Koreans were told that the colonial government would continue to function with all of its Japanese and Korean personnel, including the Japanese Governor-General.125 Japanese soldiers wearing armbands that said "USMG" -- United States Military Government -- patrolled the streets.126 Amidst Korean outrage, Washington and MacArthur soon ordered the U.S. commander on the spot to remove the Japanese officials, which he did,127 but U.S. personnel then called on the Japanese officials as informal advisors.128 Many Koreans who had served in the colonial bureaucracy were retained. Every Korean who worked for the Japanese Bureau of Justice was kept on,129 and the national police -- a particularly oppressive institution under the Japanese -- continued to be led by officers who had served in the colonial force.130 U.S. officials admitted that there was enough evidence to hang the two top leaders of the national police several times over, but they were not removed. A measure of the popularity of the U.S. occupation was that more police were needed to keep order in southern Korea than in the whole of Korea under Japanese rule.131 Utilizing the Japanese colonial structures was not an oversight on the part of the United States. It was the only way to block the emergence of a left-wing government in the south, which had the backing of a majority of the population.132 The result, of course, was the establishment of a reactionary dictatorship in the south, leading to civil war in the south and then war/civil war with the north with casualties in the millions. In China, the defeat of Japan left a raging civil war between Chiang Kai- shek's "Nationalist" government and the Communists. The United States promptly determined to intervene in this civil war. Truman instructed Japanese troops outside of Manchuria to surrender only to Nationalist forces and not to the Communists. U.S. aircraft and ships then ferried KMT troops to the north of China as rapidly as possible.133 Some Japanese units joined the KMT in its battle with the Communists; most were repatriated during 1946, but a few fought with Chiang until the end of China's civil war in 1949.134 Washington deployed more than 50,000 of its own marines to China, ostensibly to deport Japanese troops and civilians back home, but in fact to hold key communication and transportation routes while Chiang consolidated his hold.135 The last U.S. marines didn't leave China until mid-1949, and a 1000-strong U.S. army unit provided training to Chiang's forces until the end of 1948.136 In addition, vast amounts of U.S. economic and military aid flowed to the KMT until they were driven from the mainland by Mao's armies. George Marshall told Truman that if the
U.S. withdrew support from Chiang, there would be a divided China and the
Soviet Union would obtain power in Manchuria "resulting in the defeat or
loss of the major purpose of our war in the Pacific."137 The Soviet bogey
was nonsense -- Russian troops were now remaining in Manchuria at Chiang's
request until he could take over from them. But the rest of Marshall's
comment is quite revealing, for it acknowledges that what the Pacific War
was about was not self-determination for the Chinese people -- for they
certainly didn't support Chiang Kai-shek -- but maintaining U.S. interests
in China.
The most valuable prize in Asia, however,
was none of these countries, but Japan itself. U.S. officials decided early
on that they would administer Japan on their own: other countries might
be given a position on a meaningless committee, but ultimate authority
would rest with the United States. Neither China, nor Britain, nor the
Soviet Union, nor any of the countries that suffered from Japanese conquest
would play any role in the occupation of Japan. U.S. officials acknowledged
that this U.S. domination placed the United States "in an embarrassing
position" because this was precisely the way the Soviet Union behaved with
regard to the enemy states it occupied in the Balkans.138
U.S. policy makers decided to use the authority of the emperor to enhance their own control over Japan and to make sure that they determined the pace and extent of change. This meant that any criticisms of the emperor had to be suppressed. Thus, a left wing film critical of the emperor was banned by American officials in 1946.139 And anything negative about the emperor had to be kept out of the Tokyo war crimes trial. Witnesses and defense lawyers were privately told to make sure that nothing blemished the emperor's reputation.140 Whether or not the emperor should have been punished is not the issue. It is obviously hard to construct a vibrant democracy on the foundation of censorship and serious historical distortion. Though the new Japanese constitution outlawed censorship, the Occupation authorities engaged in other censorship as well. Among other examples, they banned films which showed "the destruction and human misery which resulted from the atom bomb,"141 and a book critical of a dubious war crimes trial held by MacArthur in the Philippines.142 At the Tokyo war crimes trial the U.S. suppressed all evidence of the Japanese biological warfare program in China and of the horrific atrocities committed as part of that program since the Pentagon wanted to keep the Japanese findings for its own use. The chief perpetrators of the crimes were protected by the U.S. government in return for their cooperation.143 Nevertheless, in the first few years of
the occupation, some genuine democratic reforms were introduced in Japan:
there was a land reform, unions were promoted, the new constitution included
a "no war" pledge, some right-wing militarists were purged, and some of
the zaibatsu, the corporate behemoths of the Japanese economy, were broken
up. But by 1948, as Washington came to realize that China was not going
to become an anti-Communist bastion and that a powerful alternative needed
to be constructed, U.S. policy underwent a "reverse course." Japanese economic
power would now be rebuilt as part of an anti-Soviet alliance, and many
of the early reforms would be weakened or repealed.144
At the end of December 1948, seven Japanese war criminals were executed; the next day MacArthur announced the release of all other class A war criminal suspects.145 Thus Kishi Nobusuke, a class A war criminal who served as Vice Minister of Industry and Commerce in 1930s and Vice-Minister of Munitions during the war (a sort of Japanese Albert Speer) was released and later became an enthusiastically pro-American prime minister.146 A German diplomat reported in 1951 that "Because of their superior discipline, a large number of our old friends will once again be taking up leading positions."147 (Forgiveness of useful war criminals worked the other way too: in 1964 the Japanese government awarded Curtis LeMay the First Class Order of the Rising Sun for his contribution to the postwar development of the Japanese air force.148) Americans express great frustration with
Japanese politicians who can't seem to fully apologize for their country's
wartime atrocities. But the Japanese left has always been eager to expose
the record of Japan's aggression in Asia.149 Opposition to acknowledging
the truth has come from the country's dominant conservative politicians
who were allowed to maintain their grip on power by the U.S. Occupation
authorities and who have been secretly bankrolled by the CIA.150 While
the Occupation was tolerant toward war criminals and the conservatives
more generally, MacArthur banned a threatened general strike in 1947, and
over the next three years imposed laws severely weakening the labor movement.151
In 1949, there was a mass purge of Communists, using regulations originally
designed for ultra-right militarists.152
Before ending the occupation in 1952, U.S.
officials took two further major steps to consolidate Japan as Washington's
key ally against communism in Asia. First, the U.S. obtained military bases
in Japan. Second, they got Tokyo to agree that it would not trade with
the Chinese mainland.153 For the latter to be feasible, U.S. policy makers
determined that Japan would need to seek what State Department planner
George Kennan called "an empire to the south."154 Officials in the State
Department, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council frankly
spoke of sponsoring a new "Co-Prosperity Sphere."155 This meant U.S. subversion,
counter- insurgency, and massive attack to keep Southeast Asia in Washington's
global economic system. Thus, the war purportedly fought to defeat aggression
and militarism in Asia led directly to U.S. policies of aggression and
militarism in Asia.
In a recent column, William Safire expressed
the hope that V-J Day would not be wasted on commemorations of this or
that atoll being seized. Instead, he urged, we should attend to the "great
moral purpose" of the war: the victory of democracy over tyranny.156 Safire's
suggestion to dispense with the military pageantry makes good sense. But
any serious reflection on the war must raise profound questions about whether
it really was democracy that achieved victory.
Notes
Remarks by the President to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Dallas, April 7, 1995. There was only one official apology offered relating to Hiroshima: from the director and curator of the Smithsonian, who prostrated themselves before Congress, confessing that their exhibit lacked balance. Reuters, "Smithsonian 'sorry' on Enola Gay," Newark Star Ledger, 19 May 1995, p. 4. [back] Press Conference by the President, April 18, 1995. [back] David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History, New Haven: Yale, 1984, pp. 206, 256-57. [back] Christopher Thorne, The Issue of War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 6, 154, 156. [back] In most of their early conquests, Japanese forces were outnumbered, yet in record time and with minimal casualties of their own, they were able to take vast territories, including the supposedly invulnerable Singapore ("the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history," in Churchill's words). Jon Halliday, A Political: History of Japanese Capitalism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, 1978, p. 143. Halliday notes that many of the colonial Indian troops at Singapore rallied to the Japanese (pp. 150-51). [back] Quoted in Thomas A. Breslin, "Mystifying the Past: Establishment Historians and the Origins of the Pacific War," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 8, no. 4, Oct.-Dec. 1976, p. 33. [back] Thorne, p. 30. [back] Robert Francis Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism: The Influence of Racial Assumptions on U.S. Foreign Policy, 1893-1946, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972, pp. 33-34, 74. [back] Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967, pp. 151-53. For general discussion of U.S. domestic policies during the war and why they lead to the conclusion that this was not a war against racism or for democracy, see Howard Zinn, Declarations of Independence, New York: Harper Perennial, 1991, pp. 87-92. [back] Joseph C. Grew, Ten Years in Japan, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944, p. 153. [back] William H. Honan, "War Decoding Helped U.S. To Shape UN," NYT, 23 April 1995, p. I:4. [back] Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, New York: Macmillan, 1948, vol. I, p. 289. [back] John W. Dower, War Without Mercy, New York: Pantheon, 1986, p. 170. [back] Thorne, p. 33. [back] Stuart Creighton Miller, "Benevolent Assimilation": The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982, pp. 220, 189. [back] J. S. Furnivall, Educational Progress in Southeast Asia, New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1943, pp. 44, 106-07, per capita spending calculated from p. 112. [back] Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965, p. 241. [back] Stephen R. Shalom, The United States and the Philippines: A Study of Neocolonialism, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981, p. 67. [back] Arnold C. Brackman, The Other Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, New York: William Morrow, 1987, p. 352. [back] Friend, p. 80. [back] William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, New York: Delta, 1962, pp. 173-74. [back] See Grayson V. Kirk, Philippine Independence, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936. [back] Thorne, pp. 45-46. [back] U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Japan: 1931-1941, Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943, vol. 1, p. 430 (hereafter cited as Dept. of State, Japan). [back] Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941- 1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 98-100, 107. [back] Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy, Boston: Beacon, 1964, p. 70. [back] Dept. of State, Japan, p. I:125. [back] Gardner, p. 73. [back] Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, p. 272n5. [back] Dept. of State, Japan, p. I:485. [back] Thorne, p. 60. [back] Feis, Pearl Harbor, pp. 6-7. [back] Cited in Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1941-45, New York: Macmillan, 1971, p. 183. [back] Thorne, pp. 20, 259. [back] Thorne, p. 205. [back] Quoted in Richard H. Minear, Victors' Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, pp. 51-53. [back] Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, New York: Harper & Bros., 1948, p. 225. [back] U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations
of the United States, 1936, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office,
vol. IV, p. 265 [series hereafter cited as FR with year indicated]. The
Japanese were willing to play the "free trade" game: as U.S. diplomats
reported from Tokyo in 1934, "it has not been possible to discover any
instances where American products in Japan are meeting with the opposition
that is being made in the United States to such Japanese products as tuna
fish, toys, porcelain and pottery, matches et cetera" (FR 1934, p. III:816).
Hull noted in his memoirs that "Japan's exuberant trade expansion with
cheap goods created difficulties between our two countries then [1934]
and in the years to follow. We ...were forced to put increased duties on
some Japanese products" (Hull, p. I:286).
The British have set up an Empire preferential
system which makes it difficult for Japanese goods to obtain access to
markets comprising a large part of the world's area and population. The
British have used their import position to negotiate clearing and payment
agreements which affect Japanese trade adversely in other markets. The
French obtained preferences for themselves at Japanese expense whenever
possible, including French colonies which are neighbors of Japan in the
Far Eastern area. Other countries have pursued similar policies at Japanese
expense. The United States itself has obtained preferences to the disadvantage
of Japan in the Philippines, a Far Eastern neighbor of Japan's. We have
obtained preferences for our trade in Cuba, to the detriment of Japanese
exporters of textiles and other products. Most countries which negotiate
commercial agreements involving reductions and tariff and other trade barriers
have either discriminated overtly against Japan by not extending the reductions
to Japanese products or covertly through thinly-disguised discriminations
in the form of highly specialized tariff classifications. (FR 1941, pp.
IV:577-78)
Dept. of State, Japan, pp. II:730, 734-37. One historian has dismissed the Japanese offer on the grounds that "It was impossible to extend liberal commercialism to the entire world in the best of times, and certainly not while a war raged through Europe" (Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War With Japan, 1937-1941, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985, p. 167). But in fact, Tokyo was quite explicit that the deal they were offering only required the United States to endorse the Open Door everywhere, not that other nations had to do so as well (Dept. of State, Japan, p. II:730). [back] James C. Thomson, Jr., "The Role of the Department of State," in Pearl Harbor As History, ed. Dorothy Borg & Shumpei Okamoto, New York: Columbia University Press, 1973, p. 89. For further comparison of the U.S. and Japanese Monroe Doctrines, see Noam Chomsky, "The Revolutionary Pacifism of A. J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War," in American Power and the New Mandarins, New York: Pantheon, 1969, pp. 205-07. [back] Thorne, p. 36. [back] Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War, New York: Norton, 1979, p. 47. In August 1941, Alben Barkley, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate explained that the Monroe Doctrine "now applies to Asia with equal force" (Paul W. Schroeder, The Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations, 1941, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958, p. 185). [back] Schroeder makes a convincing case in this regard: pp. 73-107. [back] FR 1941, pp. IV: 191-93, 124-25; see also Utley, p. 178. [back] Stimson & Bundy, p. 390; Raymond A. Esthus, "President Roosevelt's Commitment to Britain to Intervene in a Pacific War," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 50, no. 1, 1963, pp. 32-34. [back] D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975, vol. 2, pp. 3-15. [back] Thorne, p. 273. [back] Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 4. [back] Dower, War Without Mercy, pp. 141-42. [back] Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun, New York: Vintage, 1985, pp. 478-80. Ironically, the commander of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet at the outbreak of World War II, Thomas C. Hart, had told students at the Naval War College in 1920: "I shall pass over the inhumane features of German submarine warfare because their ways were characteristic of the race. Any nation that attempts commerce destruction by submarines will tend toward certain of the same practices that the Germans arrived at; how far it will go depends on its racial characteristics and, very likely, by how hard it is pressed." [back] Brackman, p. 262. [back] Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 66. [back] Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 64. [back] George Feifer, Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb, New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992, pp. 485, 497, 499. Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook (Japan At War: An Oral History, New York: New Press, 1992, p. 357*) note that "There are Okinawan references to the use of poison gas by the American forces during the battle of Okinawa. ...the way the victims died points to the use of an agent which caused asphyxiation." [back] Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 38. And President Roosevelt declared in September 1939: "The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and death of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children, has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity" (p. 39). When Japanese officials tried to justify their bombing in China in 1938 by pointing out that aim from the air was necessarily poor and that common sense would dictate to non-combatants living near military objectives that they should withdraw to less dangerous zones, the United States found their rationalizations "in no way convincing" (Dept. of State, Japan, p. I:601). [back] Spector, p. 487. [back] Conrad C. Crane, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II, Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 1993, p. 29. [back] John Costello, The Pacific War, 1941-1945, New York: Rawson Wade, 1981, pp. 105-06. [back] Crane, p. 32. [back] See Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. See also Max Hastings, Bomber Command, New York: Dial Press, 1979. [back] Crane, p. 147. [back] Thomas R. H. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War II, New York: Norton, 1978, p. 176. [back] Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 5, The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki, June 1944-August 1945, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 750-51. [back] Craven & Cate, pp. 614-15. [back] Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, New York: Touchstone, 1986, p. 597. LeMay's memory may be incorrect. Another source indicates that "the addition of delayed-action bombs meant to hinder fire-fighting efforts and to leave behind a fear of further explosions even after the bombers had departed" was a tactical refinement added later. See Cook and Cook, p. 341. [back] Craven & Cate, p. 617. [back] Rhodes, p. 599. [back] Havens, p. 179. A Home Affairs Ministry official later reported: "Peoplewere unable to escape. They were found later piled upon the bridges, roads, and in the canals, 80,000 dead and twice that many injured. We were instructed to report on actual conditions. Most of us were unable to do this because of horrifying conditions beyond imagination" (Craven & Cate, p. 617). [back] Crane, p. 132. [back] Rhodes, p. 596. [back] Craven & Cate, pp. 615-16. [back] Rhodes, p. 599. General Thomas Power called the raid "the greatest single disaster incurred by any enemy in military history.... There were more casualties than in any other military action in the history of the world" (Schaffer, p. 132) -- conveniently using the terms "enemy" and "military action" to hide the fact that this unprecedented human catastrophe was inflicted upon civilians. [back] Rhodes, p. 599. [back] Future casualties never approached the level of the March 9-10 raid because civilians learned that they should flee as soon as they heard the air-raid warnings rather than trying to stay to extinguish the fires. Cook and Cook, p. 341. [back] Schaller, p. 26. [back] Schaffer, p. 116. [back] Craven & Cate, pp. 696-97*; Schaffer, p. 142. [back] Schaffer, p. 122. [back] Peter Hayes, Lyuba Zarsky, and Walden Bello, American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific, New York: Penguin, 1987, p. 18. [back] Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 41. [back] Rhodes, p. 650. [back] Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 53. [back] Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 55. [back] Rufus E. Miles, Jr., "Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved," International Security, vol. 10, no. 2, Fall 1985, p. 127. [back] Iriye, Power & Culture, pp. 252, 256, 263. [back] Miles, p. 129. The Japanese response to the Potsdam declaration, incidentally, was to issue a statement saying they were "ignoring" it and the exact English translation of the Japanese word has been the subject of some debate. The British Foreign Office, however, regarded the Japanese statement as something intended for domestic consumption, not a rejection. Akira Iriye, "Continuities in US-Japanese Relations, 1941-49," in The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, ed. Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, pp. 395-96. [back] Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 138. [back] Thorne, p. 140n60. [back] Gar Alperovitz, "Did We Have to Drop the Bomb?" NYT, 3 Aug. 1989, p. A23. [back] Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, New York: Penguin, 1980, p. 53. [back] Ferrell, pp. 53-54. [back] Alperovitz, p. A23. [back] Feifer, p. 581. [back] Mark Selden, "The United States, Japan, and the Atomic Bomb," in Kyoko and Mark Selden, eds., The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Armonk, NY: East Gate, 1989, pp. xxvii-xxviii. [back] Rhodes, pp. 734, 740-42. [back] Crane, p. 141. [back] The scientists who worked on the bomb had been duped by the government into thinking they were making a weapon to forestall Hitler's getting it first. Evidence is now available showing that high officials always intended Japan to be the primary target. William J. Broad, "Japan Was Always Atom Bomb Target," NYT, 18 Apr. 1995, p. A12. [back] Rhodes, p. 651. [back] Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed, New York: Vintage, 1977, p. 231. [back] Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Years of Decision, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955, p. 421. [back] Stephen Salaff, "The Diary and the Cenotaph: Racial and Atomic Fever in the Canadian Record," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 10, no. 2, 1978, p. 38. Salaff discusses the Canadian role in the atomic bomb project and Canada's anti-Japanese racism more generally. [back] Ferrell, p. 56. [back] Rhodes, p. 713. [back] Rhodes, p. 639. [back] Craven & Cate, p. 723. Air force General Lauris Norstad noted enthusiastically on August 8 that the release of a map of Hiroshima at a press conference the next day would show how the aiming point corresponded with "the general area of greatest damage," thus countering the thought that nuclear weapons involved "wanton, indiscriminate bombing" (Crane, pp. 141-42). This was precision bombing with a vengeance. [back] Rhodes, pp. 736-37. [back] Craven & Cate, pp. 732-3. [back] Thorne, p.25. [back] U.S. Dept. of State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931- 1941, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943, p. 112. [back] Thorne, pp. 195-96. [back] Paterson, p. 48. [back] Herbert Feis, Contest Over Japan, New York: Norton, 1967, p. 90. [back] Thorne, p. 190. [back] Iriye, Power & Culture, p. 192. [back] Harold R. Isaacs, No Peace for Asia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967, p. 131. See also George McT. Kahin, "The United States and the Anticolonial Revolutions in Southeast Asia, 1945-50," in The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, ed. Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, p. 341. [back] Isaacs, p. 132. In December 1945 at Tjibadak, according to the Royal Air Force announcement, 6 Mosquitos and 6 U.S.-provided P-47s "dived low, sending their missiles ripping through dozens of buildings lining the main streets....Roofs were tossed into the air, walls collapsed, and only skeletons of many houses remained when the fighter-bombers struck with their guns, making five attacks" (p. 132). [back] Kahin, pp. 344, 359n13, 352, 356. [back] See Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy, New York: New Press, 1995. [back] Isaacs, p. 154. When reporters found out
that Japanese patrols were operating far beyond their assigned positions,
a British military officer explained:
Isaacs, pp. 158-59. See also Kahin, pp. 340, 356. [back] See Shalom. [back] Schaller, p. 12. [back] Schaller, p. 284. [back] Herbert Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 107. [back] Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 138. [back] Isaacs, pp. 94-95. [back] Cumings, p. 139. [back] Cumings, pp. 140, 152. [back] Cumings, p. 159. [back] Cumings, pp. 139-140, 152, 159, 166. [back] Cumings, p. 166; Mark J. Scher, "U.S. Policy in Korea 1945-1948: A Neo- Colonial Policy Takes Shape," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 5, no. 4, Dec. 1973, p. 23. [back] Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992, p. 89. [back] Leffler, p. 85. [back] Schaller, p. 27. [back] Leffler, pp. 85-86. [back] Joyce Kolko & Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, p. 252. [back] Leffler, p. 87. [back] Paterson, p. 49. As Joseph Harsch wrote
in the Christian Science Monitor in January 1946:
Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994, p. 176. [back] Buruma, p. 175-76; Brackman, p. 354. On three separate occasions, MacArthur had to dissuade the emperor's advisers and even the emperor himself from pursuing the option of abdication. See John W. Dower, Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays, New York: New Press, 1993, p. 3. [back] Buruma, p. 100. [back] Halliday, p. 363n13. [back] Brackman, pp. 196-200; John W. Powell, "Japan's Germ Warfare: The U.S. Cover-up of a War Crime," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 12, no. 4, Oct.-Dec. 1980; John W. Powell, "Japan's Biological Weapons: 1930-1945," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 37, Oct. 1981; Nicholas D. Kristof, "Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity," NYT, 17 March 1995, pp. A1, A12. [back] Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945-1952, Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989, pp. 161-197; Schaller. [back] Brackman, p. 405. [back] Buruma, p. 61. [back] Buruma, p. 62. See also Dower, Japan in War and Peace, pp. 10-11, and the sources cited on p. 29n2. [back] Selden, p. xvi*. [back] See, e.g., Buruma, pp. 106-07. [back] Tim Weiner, "CIA Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50's and 60's," NYT, 9 Oct. 1994, pp. I:1, 14. Leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party "regularly defended" comments denying Japanese responsibility for wartime atrocities "during the party's 38-year rule over Japan." David Sanger, "Japanese Aide Apologizes for Calling Nanjing Massacre a Fabrication," NYT, May 7, 1994, p. I:8. See also Nicholas D. Kristof, "Many in Japan Oppose Apology to Asians for War," NYT, 6 Mar. 1995, p. A9; AP, "Japanese leaders can't decide on war apology," Newark Star Ledger, 3 June 1995, p. 2. [back] Schaller, pp. 44-45, 51. [back] Schaller, pp. 267-68. [back] See Dower, Japan in War and Peace, pp. 156. Part of Japan remained occupied for two more decades, however: Okinawa, which had been part of Japan proper, was turned into the key U.S. nuclear base in the western Pacific and did not revert to Japanese sovereignty until the early 1970s (pp. 156, 171 174, 235). Washington also hoped to push rapid Japanese rearmament, but Japanese conservatives blocked the attempt. By the mid-1950s, ruling Japanese politicians favored a revision of the constitution's "no-war" article, but strong public sentiment has prevented any amendment from being enacted (pp. 27, 161, 230-31). [back] Schonberger, p. 282. [back] Schaller, p. 205. [back] William Safire, "Not Just Memories," NYT, 29 May 1995, p. 21. [back]
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