by Oliver Stone
Why, then, if Japan was not a nation of suicidal fanatics and its prospects for military victory had vanished, did its leaders not surrender and ease the suffering of their soldiers and citizens? The answer to that lies, in large measure, in the U.S. surrender terms, though the emperor and his advisors must bear their share of the blame.
At Casablanca in January 1943, President Roosevelt called for the “unconditional surrender” of Germany, Italy, and Japan.34 He later claimed to have done so spontaneously, catching even Churchill by surprise. In a letter to his biographer Robert Sherwood, Churchill supported that interpretation: “I heard the words ‘unconditional surrender’ for the first time from the President’s lips at the [news] conference.”35 Though “unconditional” had not been included in the official communiqué of the press conference, it had clearly been discussed beforehand and agreed upon by Roosevelt and Churchill. The ramifications of adhering to that demand would be enormous.
The Japanese assumed that “unconditional surrender” meant the destruction of the kokutai (imperial system) and the likelihood that the emperor would be tried as a war criminal and executed. For most Japanese, such an outcome was too terrible to contemplate. They had been worshipping the emperor almost as a god since Jimmu in 660 B.C. A study by MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command explained, “to dethrone, or hang, the Emperor would cause a tremendous and violent reaction from all Japanese. Hanging of the Emperor to them would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us. All would fight to die like ants.”36 Realizing that, many urged Truman to soften the surrender terms. Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew, who had previously served as ambassador to Japan and knew the Japanese better than any other top administration official, wrote in April 1945, “Surrender by Japan would be highly unlikely regardless of military defeat, in the absence of a public undertaking by the President that unconditional surrender would not mean the elimination of the present dynasty if the Japanese people desire its retention.”37 Grew joined with Stimson, Forrestal, and Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy in urging Truman to change the surrender terms. U.S. military leaders also felt strongly about the wisdom of giving the Japanese assurances about the emperor. Admiral Leahy told a June meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he feared that “our insistence on unconditional surrender would result only in making the Japanese desperate and thereby increase our casualty lists.”38
U.S. officials understood how critical the question of surrender terms was to the Japanese because they had broken Japanese codes even before the United States entered the war and were intercepting Japanese communications that repeatedly emphasized the surrender issue. In May, Japan’s Supreme War Council met in Tokyo. The council, also known as the Big Six, consisted of Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, Army Minister Korechika Anami, Army Chief of Staff Yoshijiro Umezu, Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, and Navy Chief of Staff Soemu Toyoda. They decided to solicit the help of the Soviet Union to get better surrender terms from the United States, offering the USSR territorial concessions in return. Japan’s initial contacts were enough to convince Soviet officials that the Japanese were looking for a way out of the war. That news did not please the Soviet leaders, who wanted to secure the concessions the Allies had promised in return for the Soviets entering the Pacific War, which was still a couple months off. On June 18, the emperor informed the Supreme War Council that he favored quick restoration of the peace. The council concurred, agreeing to ascertain the Soviet Union’s willingness to broker a surrender that would safeguard the emperor and preserve the imperial system.
A series of cables in July from Foreign Minister Togo in Tokyo to Ambassador Naotake Sato in Moscow made that crystal clear. On July 12, Togo cabled Sato, “It is His Majesty’s heart’s desire to see the swift termination of the war. . . . [However,] as long as America and England insist on unconditional surrender, our country has no alternative but to see it through in an all-out effort for the sake of survival and the honor of the homeland.”39 The following day, Togo cabled, “His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all the belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated.”40
Despite the mounting evidence that changing surrender terms could bring the war to a swift end, Truman listened instead to Byrnes, who insisted that the American public would not tolerate compromising surrender terms and warned the president that he would be crucified politically if he tried.41
Though dropping two atomic bombs on an already defeated nation in order to avoid domestic political repercussions would seem morally reprehensible under any circumstances, there was little reason to think that Truman would have had to pay a price for letting the emperor remain on the throne. In fact, Republican leaders had provided Truman all the political cover he needed. On July 2, 1945, Senate Minority Leader Wallace White, a Republican from Maine, addressed his Senate colleagues, urging President Truman to clarify what he meant by “unconditional surrender” in the hope of expediting Japan’s surrender. If Japan ignored or rejected the president’s offer to surrender on more favorable terms, he reasoned, “it will not have increased our losses or otherwise have prejudiced our cause. Much might be gained by such a statement. Nothing could be lost.” White’s Republican colleague from Indiana, Homer Capehart, held a press conference later that day to support White’s request. Capehart informed the press that the White House had received an offer by Japan to surrender solely on the grounds that Emperor Hirohito not be deposed. “It isn’t a matter of whether you hate the Japs or not. I certainly hate them. But what’s to be gained by continuing a war when it can be settled now on the same terms as two years from now?”42 In a June editorial, the Washington Post condemned “unconditional surrender” as a “fatal phrase” that was conjuring up such fears among the Japanese people that it was proving an impediment to ending the fighting.43
Changing the surrender terms was not the only way to expedite Japanese surrender without using atomic bombs. What the Japanese dreaded above all else was the Soviet Union’s entry into the war. In early April 1945, the Soviet Union informed Japan that it was not renewing the 1941 Neutrality Pact, raising Japanese fears that the Soviets would declare war. All parties understood what that would mean. On April 11, the Joint Intelligence Staff of the Joint Chiefs predicted, “If at any time the USSR should enter the war, all Japanese will realize that absolute defeat is inevitable.”44 In May, Japan’s Supreme War Council drew a similar conclusion: “At the present moment, when Japan is waging a life-or-death struggle against the U.S. and Britain, Soviet entry into the war will deal a death blow to the Empire.”45 On July 6, the Combined Intelligence Committee issued a top secret report on the “Estimate of the Enemy Situation” for the Combined Chiefs of Staff, who would be meeting at Potsdam. The section assessing the “Possibility of Surrender” described the effect Soviet entry would have on the already hopeless Japanese:
The Japanese ruling groups are aware of the desperate military situation and are increasingly desirous of a compromise peace, but still find unconditional surrender unacceptable. The basic policy of the present government is to fight as long and as desperately as possible in the hope of avoiding complete defeat and of acquiring a better bargaining position in a negotiated peace. . . . We believe that a considerable portion of the Japanese population now consider absolute military defeat to be probable. The increasing effects of sea blockade and cumulative devastation wrought by strategic bombing, which has already rendered millions homeless and has destroyed from 25% to 50% of the built-up areas of Japan’s most important cities, should make this realization increasingly general. An entry of the Soviet Union into the war would finally convince the Japanese of the inevitability of complete defeat. Although individual Japanese willingly sacrifice themselves in the service of the nation, we doubt that the nation as a whole is predisposed toward national suicide. . . . The Japanese believe, however, that unconditional surr
ender would be the equivalent of national extinction.46
The Japanese ketsu-go strategy entailed preparing for an Allied invasion, with the hope of inflicting such heavy casualties that the war-weary Allies would offer more lenient surrender terms. Japanese leaders had correctly identified Kyushu as the intended landing site and beefed up their forces. Civilians armed with sharpened bamboo spears were instructed to fight to the death along with the soldiers.
Clearly, U.S. leaders knew that retention of the emperor was the main obstacle to Japanese surrender and that the dreaded Soviet entry was drawing closer. Why, under those circumstances, would the United States use two atomic bombs against an almost helpless population? To make sense of that, one has to understand the moral climate within which that decision was made.
Americans felt a profound hatred toward the Japanese. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Allan Nevins wrote after the war, “Probably in all our history, no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese.”47 Whereas U.S. wartime propaganda took pains to differentiate between evil Nazi leaders and “good Germans,” no such distinction was made among the Japanese. As Newsweek reported in January 1945, “Never before has the nation fought a war in which our troops so hate the enemy and want to kill him.”48
Historian John Dower has shown that Americans thought of the Japanese as vermin, cockroaches, rattlesnakes, and rats. Simian imagery abounded. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, commander of the South Pacific Force, was notorious in this regard, urging his men forward to kill the “yellow monkeys” and “get some more monkey meat.” People questioned whether the Japanese were really human. Time wrote, “The ordinary, unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing . . . indicates it.” The British Embassy in Washington reported back to London that the Americans viewed the Japanese as a “nameless mass of vermin,” and the ambassador described Americans’ “universal ‘exterminationist’ anti-Japanese feeling.” When popular war correspondent Ernie Pyle was transferred from Europe to the Pacific in February 1945, he observed, “In Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.”49
Some of this sentiment can certainly be attributed to racism. But other powerful forces were also at work in producing this hatred of the Japanese. Even before the United States entered the war, Americans had heard about Japanese bombing, rape, and brutality toward the Chinese, especially in Nanjing. Americans’ rancor toward Japan soared with the “sneak attack” at Pearl Harbor. Then, in early 1944, the government released information about the sadistic treatment of U.S. and Filipino prisoners during the Bataan death march two years earlier. Soon stories about unspeakable Japanese cruelty—torture, crucifixion, castration, dismemberment, beheading, burning and burying alive, vivisection, nailing prisoners to trees and using them for bayonet practice—flooded the media. Hence, what had been anger toward the Japanese earlier in the war turned to abject hatred just as U.S. military action was heating up in the Pacific.50
Americans felt a profound hatred toward the Japanese. As Newsweek reported in January 1945, “Never before has the nation fought a war in which our troops so hate the enemy and want to kill him.” Whereas U.S. wartime propaganda took pains to differentiate between evil Nazi leaders and “good Germans,” no such distinction was made among the Japanese, who were portrayed as vermin, cockroaches, rattlesnakes, and rats. Simian imagery abounded.
But President Truman’s bigotry toward Asians long antedated reports of Japanese savagery. As a young man courting his future wife, he wrote, “I think one man is as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess.”51 Truman regularly referred to Jews as kikes, to Mexicans as greasers, and to other groups with equally derogatory names. His biographer Merle Miller reported, “Privately Mr. Truman always said ‘nigger’; at least he always did when I talked to him.”52
Truman’s racism notwithstanding, it is right to criticize Japan’s unconscionable behavior during the war. However, it is also worth noting that Americans often behaved wretchedly as well. U.S. Pacific war correspondent Edgar Jones detailed U.S. atrocities in a February 1946 article in The Atlantic Monthly: “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? 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
Racism also reared its ugly head in the treatment of people of Japanese descent living in the United States when the war broke out. Japanese Americans had faced discrimination in voting, jobs, and education for decades. The Immigration Act of 1924 denied Japanese who had settled in the United States after 1907 the right to become naturalized U.S. citizens and prohibited further immigration from Japan. Even before Pearl Harbor, some on the West Coast began conjuring up fanciful scenarios of Japanese-American sabotage in the event of war. One journalist wrote, “When the Pacific zero hour strikes, Japanese Americans will get busy at once. Their fishing boats will sow mines across the entrances of our ports. Mysterious blasts will destroy navy shipyards and flying fields and part of our fleet. . . . Japanese farmers, having a virtual monopoly of vegetable production in California, will send their peas and potatoes and squash full of arsenic to the markets.” Following Pearl Harbor, rumors and ugliness proliferated. One California barbershop offered “free shaves for Japs,” but added, “not responsible for accidents.” A funeral parlor announced, “I’d rather do business with a jap than an American.”54
California Attorney General Earl Warren led the charge to remove Japanese Americans from the western states. Warren warned that the Japanese in southern California might be “the Achilles heel of the entire civil defense effort.” 55 Lieutenant Colonel John L. DeWitt, commander of the Fourth Army and head of the Western Defense Command, who had worked on the 1921 War Plans Division strategy to intern all “enemy aliens” on the islands of Hawaii, seconded Warren’s efforts. On December 9, DeWitt announced that Japanese warplanes had flown over San Francisco the previous night and the city was in imminent danger of Japanese attack. DeWitt told a Civil Defense Council meeting, “Death and destruction are likely to come to this city any moment.” Rear Admiral John Greenslade informed the audience that they had been “saved from a terrible catastrophe” by “the grace of God.” “Why bombs were not dropped,” DeWitt admitted, “I do not know.” One reason might have been that the Japanese flyover never occurred, which might also explain why U.S. forces never shot down any of the planes and why the army’s and navy’s searches for the Japanese aircraft carriers came up empty. But DeWitt was furious with San Franciscans who did not take the blackout orders seriously enough, denouncing them as “inane, idiotic and foolish,” and threatened, “If I can’t knock these facts into your heads with words, I will have to turn you over to the police to let them knock them into you with clubs.”56
DeWitt’s mistrust of San Franciscans was benign. His mistrust of Japanese was pathological. DeWitt had initially characterized talk of large-scale evacuations as “damned nonsense.” But public pressure continued to mount, reinforced by the late-January release of a government report on the bombing of Pearl Harbor that was prepared by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. Espionage, the report alleged, had facilitated the attack. While most of the information was conveyed by Japanese consular agents, other Hawaiians of Japanese descent also played a role. The report reinforced public doubts about the loyalty of Japanese Americans. The resulting outcry apparently changed DeWitt into a passionate advocate of relocation. DeWitt argued that the fact that the
Japanese, citizens and noncitizens alike, had not engaged in sabotage proved that they were plotting a future assault. Others, including Stimson and McCloy, echoed his sentiments, pressuring Roosevelt to take action before it was too late.57
Defectors from the “Japs-can’t-be-trusted” line included one very unlikely individual: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover told Attorney General Francis Biddle that mass evacuations weren’t necessary. All known security risks had already been rounded up. Biddle informed Roosevelt that “there were no reasons for mass evacuations.”58
Roosevelt ignored their advice. Despite the fact that there was no evidence of Japanese-American sabotage, on February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which laid the groundwork for the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans from California, Oregon, and Washington, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens by birth. Although the executive order made no explicit mention of race or ethnicity, its intended target population was unmistakable.
