The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

May I first of all compliment David Joravsky on an excellent and deeply interesting essay on Robert Oppenheimer? [NYR, July 17] But may I add a protesting comment on what Joravsky has to say about Oppenheimer’s connection with the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima? Joravsky holds, in effect, that Robert Oppenheimer’s reluctant assent¹ to the bomb’s being dropped was wrong to the point of being wicked. By now, of course, this is the universally fashionable view of the matter. The trouble is that like so many fashionable views nowadays, it will not stand up to modest testing against the historical facts.

When considering any great political-military decision, and especially any great wartime decision potentially involving countless human lives, the only rational point of departure is the nature of the data available to the man who really made the decision—in this case, President Harry S. Truman. The main datum President Truman had to consider was the intelligence estimate by General Douglas MacArthur and his staff, that landing on the Japanese islands and eliminating armed resistance thereafter would cost quite literally hundreds of thousands of American soldiers dead or disabled by wounds. If I recall correctly—such estimates were circulated in wartime to the inner staffs of other related Theaters—I first saw the estimate in China. At any rate, the total of Americans to be killed or disabled was put at half a million and, later on, I am told, even higher. Long, long before the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, furthermore, the MacArthur estimate had helped to shape the Far Eastern clauses of the Yalta agreement.

Curiously enough, this MacArthur contribution to the Yalta agreement can even be checked from the Congressional record covering the period just before Yalta. General MacArthur, with his perpetual itch to make higher policy, had urged President Roosevelt to pay any price to secure Soviet participation in the final assault on Japan, thereby minimizing the expected total of American casualties² Before President Roosevelt left for Yalta, Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, then an important Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee, made a hectoring speech loudly warning the President not to hesitate to pay the Soviets’ requested price, in order to get Soviet help and thus to spare “American boys” in the last phase of the war in the Far East.

I read a report of the Wiley speech in China, and immediately suspected that General MacArthur, in his usual way, had somehow communicated to the senator the substance of his estimate, plus a request for the kind of speech Wiley made. I checked this with Senator Wiley, a kindly, generally truthful although ferociously reactionary old gentleman, when he was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee after the war. He fully confirmed my wartime guess. As to the original MacArthur estimate, it can no doubt be found in the National Archives, and those who make this further search will find the estimate had not been qualified (and reportedly had been made even more unpalatable) when President Truman gave the order to drop the bomb.

Furthermore, MacArthur’s estimate of the cost of subduing the Japanese islands had an alarmingly strong chance of proving correct—and very nearly did exactly that. In order to see how this can possibly be true, however, one must first understand certain key characteristics of the Japanese polity and constitutional practice as re-organized in the nineteenth century during the early years of the Meiji Restoration. Before 1945, to begin with, what is now deplorably called “consensus decision making” had an even greater role in Japan than it does today. This is the way of reaching decisions which requires formal unanimity before national, business, or other decisions could be taken and carried out.

This way of reaching a national decision was directly enshrined in the Japanese Constitution adopted after the Meiji Restoration, which also had a strong military bias. The Constitution provided that the war and navy ministers must be drawn from the two armed services. Thus no Japanese Cabinet could be formed if either armed service refused to supply a minister, and any Japanese Cabinet could be brought down instantly, if either service withdrew its minister. In addition, time-hallowed constitutional practice forbade any Cabinet to offer advice to the divine emperor without first reaching total unanimity, and it was unheard of for the emperor to reject a Cabinet’s unanimous advice. These were the basic factors which had permitted the army to drag the Japanese government along the course which finally led to war with the United States—although the army was of course aided by occasional coups and attempted coups by leaders of its more extreme factions, by intimidating assassinations that were perpetrated by right-wing extremists, and by considerable sympathy within the Japanese navy—although the navy was always the army’s rival and thus distinctly independent.

One more feature of the former Japanese polity deserving notice, finally, was the Supreme War Council set up in wartime and composed of the prime minister, the foreign, war, and navy ministers, and the respective chiefs of staff of the two armed services. Fairly early, the real power over decisions about the conduct of the war had passed to the Supreme War Council, but the Council was again governed by the iron rule of unanimity in advising the emperor. There was only one means of escape from the rule, moreover, and it had never been used. The authorities in the two armed services had been induced, almost by a trick, to agree to a document³ permitting special meetings of the Supreme War Council to be called in cases of extreme emergency, in the presence of the emperor, and without delay for prior discussion.

This did not mean that anything remotely resembling true unanimity prevailed in the last months of the war, in the period of the final wartime Cabinet, whose prime minister was the aged Baron Suzuki Kantaro. To begin with, the emperor had grown so anxious for peace that he was already tentatively reaching out from his cloister, as it were, and the most important peace advocate was Hirohito’s chief adviser among the court officials, the lord keeper of the Privy Seal, Marquis Koichi Kido. Under the surface, moreover, the Supreme War Council itself was now evenly split. The foreign minister, Togo Shigenori, was already coming close to open advocacy of peace on any terms, with the sole proviso that the emperor remain on his immemorial throne. In agreement with Togo, but far more timid about it, were prime minister Suzuki and the navy minister, Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa. Violently opposed to the peace advocates, meanwhile, were the war minister, General Anami Korechika, and the two service chiefs of staff, General Umezu Yoshijiro and Admiral Toyoda Soemu.⁴

The official program of the war party was a fight to the last ditch by the entire Japanese nation, and then a fight in the last ditch with bamboo spears if need be.⁵ There are indications, to be sure, that War Minister Anami understood the need for peace. The principal indication was, quite simply, that he refrained from resigning and thereby bringing down the whole Suzuki Cabinet. But his minimum program was to satisfy the national honor with a gigantic final bloodbath, which would also force the US to accept retention of something resembling Japan’s prewar political system when the time came to talk peace. The dimensions of the proposed slaughter can be judged from the forces that were being mustered to resist an American landing: 2,350,000 soldiers of the regular army my backed up by 250,000 garrison troops; the entire remnants of the navy and all the airplanes in Japan, including training planes and numbering about seven thousand; 4 million civilian employees of the two services; and the whole civilian militia of 28 million men, women, and boys.⁶

I know of only two works, the ones already cited in my notes, which give a detailed account of the strange final crisis in Tokyo. The first is Japan’s Longest Day, compiled by a group of young Japanese researchers calling themselves “The Pacific War Research Society” under the leadership of Oya Soichi, and published in 1965 in Japanese and then in rather lame English in 1968. The second is John Toland’s The Rising Sun, an ironical title since the subject is Japan’s war effort and ultimate defeat. Toland’s book came out in 1970, and the relevant pages are 834-932 in the paperback edition. Neither book could be written today, for besides more normal research, both books are based on personal interviews with most of the surviving key actors in the events described—nearly all of whom are now dead except the emperor. Although neither book can be called a profound scholarly work, both contain great numbers of deeply significant facts, and these two quite independent accounts of the same events do not diverge from each other in any important way. I am further informed that the books main accounts and their major facts have never been controverted by any subsequent work with higher scholarly pretensions. But this may have happened without my knowledge, particularly in Japan; so I stand open to correction on this latter point.

The facts set out in these two works force the conclusion that Japanese surrender could never have been obtained, at any rate without the honor-satisfying bloodbath envisioned by War Minister Anami, if the hideous destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki⁷ had not finally galvanized the peace advocates into tearing up the entire Japanese book of rules. As to the previous developments, only two need mention. In June, the split at the highest level of the Japanese government, plus Japan’s gravely deteriorating situation, had led to a low-level approach to Moscow, through the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo,⁸ seeking Soviet mediation of a peace that would be acceptable to Japan. On July 26, the Potsdam Proclamation, demanding immediate, unconditional Japanese surrender, was then promulgated in Berlin by the US, British, and Chinese Nationalist governments. This reached Tokyo on July 27. It was publicly dismissed by Prime Minister Suzuki,⁹ and led only to intensification of the efforts to secure Soviet mediation, which were now being made in Moscow.¹⁰

Even the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 failed to produce any positive political result worth noting. The Supreme War Council was in fact just as far away as ever from the needed unanimity to advise peace to the emperor when the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki on the morning of August 9. The impossibility of a decision for peace under the old rules was proven that morning by a long meeting of the Supreme War Council, which received the news from Nagasaki but got nowhere. An equally fruitless and interminable Cabinet meeting was held that afternoon. With the emperor’s knowledge and approval, the special device which had been prepared in advance was therefore brought into use for the first time. In other words, a special emergency meeting of the Supreme War Council in the emperor’s presence was called for just before midnight of August 9 in the imperial air-raid bunker in the palace grounds.¹¹