Biggest Decision (Hiroshima) the Biggest Decision: Why

¶ … Biggest Decision" (Hiroshima)

"The Biggest Decision: Why We Had to Drop the Atomic Bomb" presents a number of nuanced reasons as to why President Truman ultimately gave the order for the atomic bombs dropped onto the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Robert James Maddox offers a number of persuasive reasons as to how Truman's decision was justified, mostly dealing with an examination of the Japanese side of the evidence. Japanese military policy seems to have necessitated the American military policy, in this case, as various facts on the public record will indicate.

Maddox notes first of all that the Japanese were in a position to continue hostilities for a relatively long time: he notes that in 1945 "the Japanese had more than 2,000,000 troops in the home islands, were training millions of irregulars, and for some time had been conserving aircraft that might have been used to protect Japanese cities against American bombers." In other words, they were preparing for an American invasion which they intended to repel with as much force as could be mustered. On June 8, 1945, a the Japanese government's conference adopted a document entitled "The Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War" its stated policy, as quoted by Maddox, was that the Japanese would "prosecute the war to the bitter end in order to uphold the national polity, protect the imperial land, and accomplish the objectives for which we went to war." As Maddox notes darkly "Truman had no reason to believe that the proclamation meant anything other than what it said."

Truman's own justification given in his memoirs, as reported by Maddox, was that 500,000 American lives would have been lost in an invasion of Japan, so the use of nuclear weaponry was justified in preventing that. Truman's figures here have been criticized as self-serving, and critics have pointed to a report from the Joint War Plans Committee which estimated a figure around 40,000 potential American deaths (but a total of almost 200,000 "casualties" in the military definition when the wounded and M.I.A. were accounted for). Yet these seems like a mere quibble because, as Maddox notes, "when the bombs were dropped, fighting was still going on in the Philippines, China, and elsewhere." With America war-weary, even the lower estimate may have been too much for Truman to ask the public to bear, especially if he planned to seek re-election.

There was an additional strategic issue to be considered, which would prove to be more important later in Truman's presidency. Allied intelligence had predicted that, in the event of a potential invasion, Japan would ultimately pressure the Soviet Union to intervene. At this moment, the Soviet Union was still a somewhat uneasy military ally of the United States, although the astonishing losses suffered by the Soviets on the German front tends to obscure the fact that the eastern border of Russia, near the Russian possession of Sakhalin Island, lies close enough to Japan that the two countries had engaged in hostilities early in the 20th century, prior to World War II. Indeed, as Truman and Stalin left to meet at the Potsdam Conference, the Japanese Foreign Minster Shigenori Togo contacted the Soviets about a desire to "restore peace." To some degree, a prolonged conflict would leave Japan within the Soviet sphere of influence, which Truman was little inclined to do -- after all, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor proved it was a strategic necessity.