Laurie Bryce's Reviews > Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath

This is a fascinating book with a powerful premise. Americans are brought up believing we dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki only because we felt forced to, and that Japan would never have surrendered otherwise. After absorbing this controversial book, I still think that's partially true, but not the whole truth.

Paul Ham meticulously presents a different view that makes the chaotic end of the war and the race for the bomb feel much more nuanced than that standard history. Some of the things I learned were surprising and upsetting. According to Ham, we were eager to test the bombs, and actually in a bit of a hurry to do so before the war ended. There were military targets we could have chosen, but we deliberately targeted city centers full of civilians. Mistakenly, we thought that would send a stronger message to Japan, but Japan's military and political leaders were so far removed from reality at that point, and so generally unconcerned with civilian casualties, that Hiroshima and Nagasaki barely registered in their discussions near the end of the war. We also failed to understand that Japan wasn't a democracy and no amount of harming civilians could cause them to rise up and demand an end to the war -- they were truly helpless targets. And no one in Japan knew what an atomic bomb was or how it was different than the firestorms that had been raging through its other cities. Japan's leaders never got the message of shock and awe of the bombs were supposed to deliver.

More surprises (for me anyway): Russia invading Japan was really the catalyst that pushed Japan to surrender. That happened after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki, making a good argument that the second bomb was really extraneous. The people of Hiroshima may have suffered for little reason, but the people of Nagasaki suffered for no reason.

I thought it was interesting how removed Truman was from the creation and delivery of the bombs. He was gung-ho about doing it, but very hands off. He didn't even know about Nagasaki until afterwards. Imagine in this day and age, dropping a bomb on civilians in another country and the President not being directly involved?

The randomness of the cities chosen was chilling to read about -- Kyoto was spared from the list of targets because someone in the military group who was choosing the cities had been there and had fond memories of it. The weather dictated where the bombs were dropped; Nagasaki was literally a last-minute choice when the actual target city nearby was too obscured by clouds.

After the war, we sent American doctors to study the horrendous effects of radiation on the survivors. They examined countless suffering patients, but they were not permitted to help them in any way, or even share their knowledge with the Japanese doctors, who were mystified and utterly helpless in the face of this strange new illness. The suffering of the Japanese people was extended long after the war by this heartless US policy.

Ham's work has been castigated as revisionist, by those saying he's applying liberal modern thinking to a very different time and place. I can see threads of that in the book, and obviously he's presenting a very uncomfortable look at US behavior at the end of the war so people will react to that.

I think both viewpoints can be true, however -- Ham is convincing in his argument that the bombs weren't the major reason that Japan finally surrendered, and therefore we have to accept that it's possible we did not need to do what we did. But while Japan's leaders could live with civilian defeat, their death-before-loss-of-honor culture would never permit them to accept military defeat. Faced with the invasion by Russia and out of options, Japan used the bombings as a convenient "excuse" (in their view) to surrender. That means the bombings served a purpose in ending the war, even if it wasn't quite the way we intended.

What a powerful book about a terrible time in world history.