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The bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later, was a tragedy of the highest magnitude. The United States at war, looking forward to certain victory, wiped out two enemy cities in hopes of shortening the war.
This column addresses two questions. One, what if the goal of a speedy victory could have been achieved without a slaughter of 150,000 innocent civilians? And, next, how did Korea figure in this drama as it was about to be liberated?
After returning from his trip to the Big Three conference at Potsdam on Aug. 7, U.S. President Harry Truman told his nation, “We have spent $2 billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history and won.” In trying to understand Truman’s motivation in ordering the bomb, many scholars have speculated that he simply lacked the courage not to use it.
The bomb was dropped on an enemy in retreat, perhaps on the brink of collapse, though no one knew for certain how soon the collapse would come. If an all-out ground invasion of Japan’s main islands were to have cost no more than a few thousand additional American lives ― some put the figure at hundreds of thousands ― how could the American president have faced his public, demanding to know why their sons had to die if the country had a weapon with which he could have ended the war.
After issuing the order did Truman lose sleep over it? He went out of his way to say he had not. Did he have any further reflections as a former president? When he was asked that question, well into the twilight of his life, he was angry. Staring straight into the television camera, he said, “A bunch of cry babies!”
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, had opposed the idea of a demonstration bomb, insisting that for the desired effect, the bomb had to be dropped on a city. The Japanese had been beaten so badly by then that a lumbering four-engine B29 was able to get the job done unmolested, without a fighter escort.
As the reality of the carnage began to sink in, Oppenheimer became a haunted man. On Oct. 25, he went to see Truman. “Mr. President,” he told him, “I feel I have blood on my hands.” It is not known what Truman told him in reply, but he is said to have shown his visitor the door. Later Truman told his secretary of state, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office again.”
As it turned out, the bomb may have been completely unnecessary. The Japanese were all too ready to call it quits for weeks, some say for months. But the Allies weren’t listening, or not interested, because they only wanted an “unconditional surrender.”
Then-Secretary of State James Byrnes, who was with the president at Potsdam, insisted that the Allies should press forward with this demand, as agreed to between Roosevelt and Churchill. He also told his president that a sizeable minority of the American public wanted to see the emperor executed as a war criminal.
In the end, Truman went over the head of his secretary of state and took the advice of the second man in charge, Joseph Grew, the under secretary of state, who had counseled a modified “unconditional surrender,” wherein the Japanese would be allowed to keep their emperor as a figurehead. So it was agreed, and the supreme commander of the Allied powers, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, oversaw Japan’s transition to a functioning democracy.
But several days before the diplomatic back-and-forth, which led to this qualified unconditional surrender, and two days after Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. This was exactly as Stalin had promised FDR back in February when they met at Yalta.
Truman had gone to Potsdam in July with nagging doubts about his own fitness as a leader, about to play a game of chess alongside grand masters like Churchill and Stalin. But everyone there could see that the gentleman was a quick study. Just as importantly, Truman was taken with Stalin, someone his predecessor had fondly referred to as “Uncle Joe.” “And I liked the little son of a bitch,” so he would later write.
All indications are that Stalin liked Truman too. The Russian dictator was never sparing in displays of respect for this hitherto untested quantity, a former high-school dropout. And that touched Truman. But it was learned years later, through Khrushchev, that Stalin took a pretty dim view of the man.
On Aug. 10, as the Red Army was rumbling down the plains of Manchuria from different points over a 2,000-mile frontier, apparently encountering little resistance from the yet-undamaged Kwangtung Army, the Americans were suddenly realizing that they had to do something about Korea. Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang had singled out Korea at their Cairo meeting, back in November of 1943, as a peace dividend. “In due course,” so they agreed, “Korea shall become free and independent.”
Late that night, now the 11th in the Far East, a bunch of senior uniformed war planners convened in the Executive Office Building and decided, among other things, to cut up the Korean Peninsula at the 38th Parallel, so the Red Army wouldn’t take all of it, and, afterwards, Stalin went along. But, unbeknown to these planners, Tokyo announced that the Russians had just invaded Korea and had retaken the southern half of Sakhalin.
The atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not needed to secure a speedy surrender in the Pacific War. But it may have had an unintended benefit for the country that had to endure the heartbreak of a national dismemberment.
Had it not been for the atom bomb, which then established an American nuclear monopoly, Stalin may have rejected the division proposal. He may have been tempted to push all the way down to Busan while the United States was preoccupied with the final assault on Japan, scheduled for Nov. 1.
With the Russians looking on menacingly from Sakhalin, the Supreme Allied Command would not have diverted its assets from Japan by rushing to Korea’s rescue, thereby entangling the Red Army on the continent and recklessly exposing Japan to Russian temptations.
The writer is a professor emeritus of political science at Hartwick College. After living half-a-century in the U.S., Kang returned to Korea in the fall of 2008 as a Fulbright senior scholar, teaching political science at Sogang University. In 2009-10, he was a visiting professor of American history. He can be reached at kangs@hartwick.edu.
