Ending the Pacific war: Warry Truman and the decision to drop the bomb.

• Author: Abrahamson, James L.

Speaking on Teaching the Nuclear Age as part of the Wachman Center's History Institute for Teachers, attorney and military historian Richard B. Frank used his own research and the most recent information from intelligence sources and Japanese historians to clear away much of the controversy regarding the dropping of the atomic bombs and the surrender of Japan. That debate had emerged in the mid-1960s when revisionist historians challenged the notion that the use of the bombs was justified, that they ended the war, and had saved lives.

After some brief background on "unconditional surrender" as the U.S. war aim--adopted in order to facilitate remaking postwar Japanese society--Frank first rejected the revisionists' contention that the Japanese were eager to surrender even before use of the Hiroshima bomb. Though Japan's situation might look hopeless to later and outside observers, the Japanese government did not share that view. Prior to the atomic bombs, it sought not surrender but a negotiated end to the war that would leave Japan independent and in possession of all territory still under its control in the summer of 1945.

To convince the United States to negotiate such a peace, Japan had mobilized its civil population in support of the armies in its Home Islands. Thus armed and prepared, the Japanese government determined to "Fight to the Finish" in expectation that Allied forces landing on Kyushu would suffer such bloody losses as to break the perceived-to-be-fragile American morale. Excepting the private exchanges between Japan's foreign minister and his ambassador to the Soviet Union, the "peace feelers" the revisionists used in making their case were unofficial and advanced prior to the use of the atomic bomb. Nor, prior to August 6, did the eight individuals who controlled Japanese policy regard their situation as hopeless. They neither approved those initiatives nor contemplated surrender on Allied terms.

The use of the two atomic bombs caused Japan's leaders to reconsider their terms for peace, which they narrowed to include preservation of the imperial institution, Japan to disarm itself and control its own war crimes trials, and rejection of Allied occupation of the Home Islands. After the Nagasaki bomb, the emperor overruled other policymakers and agreed to settle for only the first of those four, though he initially sought to place himself over the Allied commander of occupation forces. In the end, however, he had to accept a...