- Thread starter
- #1,161
It is revealing that you would pretend as though Hasegawa differs markedly from my position, and/or that I have cherry-picked my quotes from him, and/or that he somehow supports your position to any substantial degree. Let us see what one of the scholars who reviewed Hasegawa’s book says about Hasegawa’s arguments. This comes from Dr. John McNay, a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, who reviewed the book on the academic website H-Net:
Racing the Enemy is a new look at an old question and, as Hasegawa intends, it should cause many historians to reconsider their views on why the Japanese surrendered when they did and how they did to end the Pacific War. . . .
More importantly, Hasegawa argues that the Soviet Union's entry into the war had a much greater impact on Japan's surrender than many historians have previously assumed. No longer, Hasegawa argues, should historians believe that it was primarily the shock of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought the end of the war. Instead, the Soviet attack played an essential role in bringing the Japanese leadership to that decision.
As Hasegawa explains, the central issue almost obsessively occupying Japanese diplomacy in the final months of the war was the effort to keep the Soviet Union neutral in accordance with the 1941 Neutrality Pact and to bring about a negotiated peace through its approaches to the Allies via Moscow. . . . "Soviet entry into the war shocked the Japanese even more than the atomic bombs because it meant the end of any hope of achieving a settlement short of unconditional surrender," Hasegawa writes (p. 3).
Another area where Hasegawa's argument is intriguing is in regard to the concept of kokutai, which is the mythical notion that the Japanese emperor, as a living God united with the creator of the imperial system, is the eternal essence of his subjects and imperial land. Hasegawa traces the evolution of this thought to its rather late culmination in a Japanese Ministry of Education publication called The Essence of Kokutai in 1937, which had appeared after a controversial debate over the matter. Central to this notion was the emperor's monopolistic power over the military command. All of this emphasized the centrality of the emperor to Japanese national identity. Part of the peace party's work in the final days of the war was to redefine kokutai much more narrowly to include just the preservation of the imperial house. . . .
This threat to the imperial house, Hasegawa reveals, was made more severe in the emperor's eyes because of the Soviet invasion. With Japan's whole diplomatic framework geared in the final weeks and months toward maintaining Soviet neutrality so that Japan could arrange a negotiated peace, the Soviet declaration of war had a devastating impact. The Soviet attack emboldened the peace party in Tokyo, whose members had been diligently, but with inadequate force, working toward a negotiated peace. Still, despite the shock, Japanese army officers insisted on the need to fight on. Elsewhere reality began dawning.
The Hiroshima bombing did inspire greater urgency on the part of officials and the emperor to seek the negotiated peace, Hasegawa shows, but did not produce a rush to embrace the Potsdam terms of unconditional surrender. The author maintains that "[a]s long as they still felt they might preserve the kokutai or negotiate with the Allies with Moscow's help, they would press on" (p. 185).
In an interview on the morning of August 9 (before the emperor had heard or digested news of the bombing), Hirohito had a meeting with Koichi Kido, keeper of the privy seal. During the meeting the emperor said, "The Soviet Union declared war against us, and entered into a state of war as of today. Because of this it is necessary to study and decide on the termination of the war" (p. 198). Similarly Ambassador Sato received the Soviet declaration of war from Vladimir Molotov and, while en route back to the embassy, glumly told an aide, "The inevitable has now arrived" (p. 191). With Japan's diplomatic strategy in ruins as Soviet troops attacked, word came of yet another atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Again, Hasegawa contends, the bombing seems to have had little impact on the negotiations between the peace and war parties.
There is an explanation, this reader believes, for the apparent lack of impact the atomic bombings may have had on Japanese leaders, especially the military. We should keep in mind that American forces had been bombing Japanese cities with impunity for months. On both the American and Japanese sides, the fact that American bombers were incinerating Japanese cities before Hiroshima lessened the impact of destroying that city. Just as the mounting destruction of Japanese cities reduced American reluctance to destroy civilian targets, it also reduced the shock value to the Japanese. Surely, there were significant differences with the Hiroshima bombing but the line had long been crossed on the destruction of cities. The tens of thousands of civilians killed in the conventional bombings were no less dead because the instruments of their deaths were high-explosive bombs and incendiaries rather than atomic weapons. While there is some mention of the scale of the conventional bombings, Hasegawa could have sharpened his argument by incorporating this destruction and its inevitable affect on both the Japanese and the American decision-making processes.
This brings us to a further important contribution of Hasegawa's study, because his argument adds to the debate over the effectiveness (and justness) of the atomic bombings. If the Hiroshima bombing did not induce surrender, and if the Soviet action was so central, and if the decision to surrender was reached before the Nagasaki bombing, as Hasegawa argues, then the case for the usefulness of the bombs is seriously undermined.
Hasegawa is critical of the American decision-making process but he goes beyond previous criticisms of Truman's decision, such as Martin Sherwin's faulting Truman for making a single decision to drop both bombs rather than two separate decisions. Hasegawa cites a cryptic response by Truman to Secretary of War Stimson, "Suggestion approved. Release when ready but not sooner than Aug. 2" (p. 175). Hasegawa argues that this document has been misidentified. For example, in Truman (1992) historian David McCullough contends that this is the presidential order to drop the bomb. Instead, Hasegawa argues, this document is really a response to Stimson's inquiry whether a statement about the bomb should be prepared and released when necessary. Hasegawa goes on to argue that despite Truman's later claims "that he issued the order to drop the bomb on his voyage back to the United States somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, the president never issued such an order. The fact is that the atomic bomb was dropped without Truman's explicit order" (p. 176). Instead, the only explicit order to drop the bomb was almost entirely within military channels. According to Hasegawa, General Lesley Groves drafted the order, George Marshall and Henry Stimson approved it, and General Thomas Handy delivered it to General Carl Spaatz, commander of the Army Strategic Air Forces. Truman "was not involved in this decision but merely let the military proceed without his interference" (p. 152). . . .
Acknowledging that Truman's objectives were twofold (to impose unconditional surrender and to save American lives), Hasegawa argues that the Soviet entry played an important part in speeding up the use of the weapons. "Truman was in a hurry. He was aware that the race was on between the atomic bomb and Soviet entry into the war" (p. 183). Part of this rush resulted in what Hasegawa calls the "concocted" story that Japan had promptly "rejected" the Potsdam Proclamation. Instead, Hasegawa cites Magic decrypts and Swiss sources that the Japanese government believed the Potsdam documents could be used as a basis for surrender. Hasegawa admits that the Japanese appear to have publicly ignored the proclamation but maintains that that is quite different from rejecting the surrender conditions. Hasegawa's conclusion is that "even in the face of what was known, and should have been known to Truman, Byrnes, and Stimson, one cannot escape the conclusion that the United States rushed to drop the bomb without any attempt to explore the readiness of some Japanese policymakers to seek peace through the ultimatum" (p. 173). (McNay on Hasegawa, 'Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan' | H-War | H-Net)
You seem unaware of the fact that the tiny band of historians who defend Truman’s atomic-bomb decision vigorously attacked Hasegawa’s book when it was published. Here is one of Hasegawa’s replies to their criticisms:
Response to Critics of My Book | History News Network
It is also revealing, and rather curious, that you assumed that I didn't have Hasegawa's book because I first quoted from his 2007 article in The Asia-Pacific Journal, which he wrote years after his book was published. I quoted from his article first because most people do not have his book and because his article is available online.
