The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  A mushroom cloud rises over the Japanese city of Hiroshima following the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945. The view from the ground was very different and far more harrowing. At the hypocenter, where temperatures reached 5,400° F, the fireball roasted people “to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away.”

  Injured and burned survivors suffered immensely. Hibakusha (bomb-affected persons) described it as walking through Hell. The streets were filled with an endless ghostlike procession of horribly burned, often naked people, whose skin hung off their bones. Desperately seeking help for their wounded bodies, searching for family members, and trying to escape from the encroaching fires, they tripped over dead bodies that had been seared into lumps of charcoal, often frozen in midstep. Hiroshima’s most renowned atomic bomb poet, Sankichi Toge, who died in 1953 at age thirty-seven, wrote a poem titled “August Sixth” that reads in part:

  How could I ever forget that flash of light!

  In an instant thirty thousand people disappeared from the streets;

  The cries of fifty thousand more

  Crushed beneath the darkness. . . .

  Then, skin hanging like rags,

  Hands on breasts;

  Treading upon shattered human brains. . . .

  Crowds piled on the river bank, and on rafts fastened to the shore,

  Turned gradually into corpses under the scorching sun. . . .

  The conflagration shifts . . .

  Onto heaps of schoolgirls lying like refuse

  So that God alone knew who they were. . . .

  How could I forget that quiet

  Which descended over a city of three hundred thousand?

  The calm

  How could I forget those pleas

  Of a dying wife and child

  Emitted through the whiteness of their eyes,

  Piercing our minds and souls!120

  Injured and burned survivors suffered immensely. Hibakusha (bomb-affected persons) described it as walking through Hell.

  These before and after photos from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey help demonstrate the magnitude of destruction leveled on the city of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb.

  The crew members sat silently on the flights back to Tinian. Some took solace in the belief that what they had witnessed was so horrific that it would definitely end the war. Great Artiste tail gunner Al “Pappy” DeHart said he wished he hadn’t seen what he had just witnessed, adding, “I won’t be mentioning it to my grandchildren. Not ever. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing to be telling kids. Not what we saw.”121

  Truman was dining on board the USS Augusta on his way back from Potsdam when he learned of Hiroshima. He jumped up and exclaimed, “This is the greatest thing in history.”122 He shortly thereafter said that announcing the news of Hiroshima was the “happiest” announcement he had ever made.

  Truman’s reported jubilation made some uncomfortable. One Democratic committeeman admonished him by telegram two days later: “no president of the United States could ever be jubilant over any device that could kill innocent human beings. Please make it clear that it is not destruction but the end of destruction that is the cause of jubilation.”123

  Soviet leaders were anything but jubilant. Knowing that the bomb was not needed to defeat a nation already on life support, they concluded that the Soviet Union was the real target. The Americans, they figured, wanted to speed the Japanese surrender in the hope of preempting Soviet gains in Asia. Even more disconcerting, they concluded that the Americans, by using it on Hiroshima when it was clearly not necessary, were signaling that the United States wouldn’t hesitate to use it against them too if they threatened U.S. interests.

  The Russians got the message. Sunday Times correspondent Alexander Werth, who spent 1941 to 1948 in Moscow, observed, “the news [of Hiroshima] had an acutely depressing effect on everybody. It was clearly realized that this was a New Fact in the world’s power politics, that the bomb constituted a threat to Russia, and some Russian pessimists I talked to that day dismally remarked that Russia’s desperately hard victory over Germany was now ‘as good as wasted.’ ”124

  It was precisely the gratuitous nature of the bombings that haunted Marshal Zhukov’s memories twenty-six years later and made clear to him what their real intention was. He reflected, “It was clear already then that the U.S. Government intended to use the atomic weapon for the purpose of achieving its Imperialist goals from a position of strength in ‘the cold war.’ This was amply corroborated on August 6 and 8. Without any military need whatsoever, the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on the peaceful and densely populated Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Other military leaders were also aghast. Gromyko’s son Anatoly recalled his father telling him that Hiroshima “set the heads of the Soviet military spinning. The mood in the Kremlin, in the General Staff was neurotic, the mistrust towards the Allies grew quickly. Opinions floated around to preserve a large land army, to establish controls over extended territories to lessen potential losses from atomic bombings.”125

  Political leaders, including Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, were equally alarmed. Physicist Yuli Khariton recalled that “The whole Soviet government interpreted [Hiroshima] as atomic blackmail against the U.S.S.R., as a threat to unleash a new, even more terrible and devastating war.” Nuclear physicists were summoned to the Kremlin for daily reports on their progress. Within days, Stalin had launched a crash program to build a Soviet bomb.126

  Following Hiroshima, Japanese leaders pressed for a quick response from the Soviets on their willingness to mediate. They received a clear answer, when, in the early hours of August 9, the powerful Red Army smashed through Japan’s forces in Manchuria, Korea, Sakhalin, and the Kurils, encountering little resistance.

  On the morning of August 9, the four top Foreign Ministry officials went to Prime Minister Suzuki’s residence to deliver the bad news. “What we feared has finally come,” Suzuki responded.127

  Later that morning, before Japan had time to react to the Soviet invasion, the United States dropped an implosive plutonium bomb, nicknamed Fat Man, on the city of Nagasaki. Poor visibility over the primary target—Kokura—forced the pilot, Charles Sweeney, to switch to downtown Nagasaki. The bomb landed two miles off target in the Urakami district, exploding over the largest Catholic cathedral in Asia with a force of 21 kilotons. Forty thousand people died immediately, including about 250 soldiers. Seventy thousand died by the end of 1945, perhaps 140,000 in five years. Spitzer said that he and other crew members of the Great Artiste, after watching Hiroshima disappear, could not believe that a second city had been wiped off the face of the earth: “There was no need for more missions, more bombs, more fear and more dying. Good God, any fool could see that.”128 Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, observed, “The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable, but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki,” which he considered a war crime.129

  Japanese officials, despondent over the Soviet attack, held an emergency cabinet meeting at which they learned about Nagasaki. Neither that announcement nor Army Minister Anami’s fallacious report that the United States had a hundred more atomic bombs and Tokyo was the next target moved the participants closer to surrendering unconditionally. Most saw little difference between the United States wiping out entire cities with three hundred planes and thousands of bombs or doing so with one plane and one bomb. That the United States could and would burn down Japanese cities was an established fact. The Soviet invasion, however, totally demoralized the Japanese leaders. It proved the absolute bankruptcy of both Japan’s diplomatic approach to the Soviet Union and its ketsu-go strategy of fiercely resisting a U.S. invasion. For Japanese leaders contemplating surrender, the atomic bombs provided an added inducement but not the decisive one, although some of them latched on to them as a convenient excuse. The emperor announced his willingness to surrender, accepting the Potsdam Declarati
on, but only as long as it “does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”130

  Suzuki recognized that there was no choice: Japan must surrender immediately, he declared, or “the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto, but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States.”131 Once the emperor’s decision was clear, the three recalcitrant members of the Big Six, who had been holding out for three additional demands—self-disarmament, no war crimes trials, and no occupation—dropped their opposition to surrender. Thus, with the Red Army rapidly approaching the Japanese mainland, the Japanese leaders decided to surrender to the Americans, whom they viewed as much more likely to allow them to keep the emperor. They also feared that the advancing Red Army would trigger pro-Communist uprisings inside Japan, as they had in parts of Europe.

  Ruins in Nagasaki, where 40,000 people died immediately during the atomic bombing; 70,000 died by the end of 1945 and 140,000 in five years. Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, observed, “The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable, but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki.”

  Truman and his advisors weighed the Japanese offer to surrender. Byrnes warned that retaining the emperor would lead to “crucifixion of the President.” Stimson disagreed, arguing that “even if the question hadn’t been raised by the Japanese we would have to continue the Emperor ourselves . . . in order to get into surrender the many scattered armies of the Japanese who would own no other authority and . . . to save us from a score of bloody Iwo Jimas and Okinawas.” In his diary, Stimson expressed his frustration with Byrnes: “There has been a good deal of uninformed agitation against the Emperor . . . by people who know no more about Japan than has been given them by Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado,’ and I found today that curiously enough it had gotten deeply embedded in the minds of influential people in the State Department.”132 After further debate, they compromised on a vague statement that promised, “The ultimate form of government shall, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”133

  After the war, Japanese leaders attributed the surrender to both the atom bombs and the Soviet invasion. Although the interviews were carried out by U.S. occupation authorities, several still gave primacy to the Soviet invasion—not the atomic bomb or other U.S. actions. Deputy Chief of Staff General Torashiro Kawabe explained:

  It was only in a gradual manner that the horrible wreckage which had been made of Hiroshima became known. . . . In comparison, the Soviet entry into the war was a great shock when it actually came. Reports reaching Tokyo described Russian forces as “invading in swarms.” It gave us all the more severe shock and alarm because we had been in constant fear of it with a vivid imagination that “the vast Red Army forces in Europe were now being turned against us.”134

  Admiral Toyoda agreed: “I believe the Russian participation in the war against Japan rather than the atom bombs did more to hasten the surrender.” Lieutenant General Sumihisa Ikeda, the director of Japan’s General Planning Agency, said that “upon hearing of the Soviet entry into the war, I felt that our chances were gone.” The Army Ministry responded similarly to a direct question from General Headquarters, stating, “The Soviet participation in the war had the most direct impact on Japan’s decision to surrender.”135 A study conducted by the U.S. War Department in January 1946 came to the same conclusion, finding “little mention . . . of the use of the atomic bomb by the United States in the discussions leading up to the . . . decision . . . it [is] almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.”136

  Erroneously convinced that the bombs had ended the war, 85 percent of the American public approved of their use. Almost 23 percent wished that the Japanese hadn’t surrendered so quickly, so that the United States could have dropped more atom bombs on them. But unknown to most of the public, many U.S. top military leaders considered the bombings either militarily unnecessary or morally reprehensible. Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, who chaired the meetings of the Joint Chiefs, was the most impassioned, classifying the bomb with chemical and bacteriological weapons as violations of “every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all of the known laws of war.” He proclaimed that the “Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. In being the first to use it we adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion and wars can not be won by destroying women and children.”137 Leahy angrily told the journalist Jonathan Daniels in 1949, “Truman told me it was agreed that they would use it . . . only to hit military objectives. Of course, then they went ahead and killed as many women and children as they could which was just what they wanted all the time.”138

  General Douglas MacArthur always maintained that the war would have ended months earlier if the United States had modified its surrender terms. In 1960, he told former President Hoover that if Hoover’s “wise and statesmanlike” memo to Truman of May 30, 1945, advocating change in surrender terms, had been acted on, it “would have obviated the slaughter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in addition to much of the destruction . . . by our bomber attacks. That the Japanese would have accepted it and gladly I have no doubt.”139

  General Henry “Hap” Arnold wrote, “it always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”140 Shortly after the war ended, General Curtis LeMay argued, “Even without the atomic bomb and the Russian entry into the war, Japan would have surrendered in two weeks.” “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war.”141 General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, wrote in his diary two days after the bombing of Nagasaki, “When the atomic bomb was first discussed with me in Washington I was not in favor of it just as I have never favored the destruction of cities as such with all inhabitants being killed.”142

  Many Naval officers agreed with the air chiefs. Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Navy, told his aide, “I don’t think we should do it at this time. It is not necessary.” He told an interviewer, “I didn’t like the atom bomb or any part of it.”143 Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, told a gathering at the Washington Monument shortly after the war, “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and before the Russian entry into the war.”144 Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, commander of the South Pacific Fleet, said the following year, “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before.”145

  As Brigadier General Carter Clarke, who was in charge of preparing summaries of intercepted diplomatic cables, stated, “we brought them down to an abject surrender through accelerated sinking of their merchant marine and hunger alone, and when we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”146

  Six of the United States’ seven five-star officers who received their final star in World War II—Generals MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Arnold and Admirals Leahy, King, and Nimitz—rejected the idea that the atomic bombs were needed to end the war. Sadly, though, there is little evidence that they pressed their case with Truman before the fact.

  But Groves knew their views. Before Hiroshima, Groves had prepared an order requiring U.S. commanders in the field to first clear all statements on the bombings with the War Department, because, as Groves admitted, “We didn’t want MacArthur and others saying the war could have been
won without the bomb.”147

  In late August, even Jimmy Byrnes admitted that the bomb wasn’t needed to end the war. The New York Times reported that Byrnes had “cited what he called Russian proof that the Japanese knew that they were beaten before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.”148

  The Vatican quickly condemned the bombing. Catholic World described the bombs’ use as “atrocious and abominable . . . the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law.” Federal Council of Churches leader John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s future hawkish secretary of state, worried, “If we, a professedly Christian nation, feel morally free to use atomic energy in that way, men elsewhere will accept that verdict. Atomic weapons will be looked upon as a normal part of the arsenal of war and the stage will be set for the sudden and final destruction of mankind.”149

  Others also deplored the bombings. University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins participated in a University of Chicago Round Table discussion on “Atomic Force—Its Meaning for Mankind” broadcast on NBC on August 12, just three days after the bombing of Nagasaki. Hutchins declared: “This is the kind of weapon that should be used, if at all, only as a last resort and in self-defense. At the time this bomb was dropped, the American authorities knew that Russia was going to enter the war. It was said that Japan was blockaded and its cities burned out. All the evidence points to the fact that the use of this bomb was unnecessary. Therefore, the United States has lost its moral prestige.”150