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

In the beginning of the Pacific War the Allies heavily underestimated Japan. In 1945 they heavily overestimated it. The Japanese had tried with all their worth to persuade their enemy that they would fight to the last man, woman, or child, and they had succeeded. It appeared to the Allies that they were facing an enemy that resembled "a kind of a unnatural spirit that seemed to glorify cruelty and death." Joseph Grew, US ambassador to Japan for 10 years, warned in 1943, "I know Japan ... I know the Japanese intimately. The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or physically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face ... Only by utter physical destruction or utter exhaustion of their men and materials can they be defeated."
As countless examples demonstrated, the Japanese didn't show any mercy – Unit 731, the brutal bayonetting of 160 Australian prisoners in Rabaul, cannibalism – and the evidence of their warcrimes filled the Allied minds with strong hatred against all Japanese people. Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American consciences were settled: the atomic bomb had avenged Pearl Harbor (the fact that the Tokyo Raid had already "avenged" it apparently didn't matter) and other war crimes, saved hundreds of thousands Americans from a potential destructive invasion of Japan's Home Islands, and ended the war. The press repeatedly assured the public that the targets were "military." In a poll published on 26 August 1945 85% of Americans said they approved of the bombing.
Truman and the rest of the politicians also "stuck to their guns": War Secretary Stimson, for example, claimed that the USA used to the bomb as "our last abhorrent choice", suggesting that Washington and the Pentagon had "wrestled painfully with alternatives."

As Paul Ham reveals in his book, however, everyone involved in the decision-making process presistently dismissed all other possible courses of action, such as warnings, demonstrations, or an attack on actual military targets. The atomic strikes, he argues, were a desirable outcome, not a regrettable last resort, and the administration focused on how, not whether, to use nuclear weapons. Ham quotes Churchill's words: "The decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never an issue." If the Japanese had surrendered completely earlier, their surrender would have frustrated the plan to use the weapons, which was not the Pentagon's goal: the American leaders were absolutely determined to use the atomic bombs, and their policy was consistent with their decision. Truman had always been opposed to invasion of the Home Islands anyways. The mere thought of several hundred Okinawas on the shores of Nippon apalled him.
Another claim Stimson used to justify the attack was that the bombing ended WWII. Yet, as Paul Ham shows, there's no evidence that the Japanese leaders' surrender was a direct response to the nuclear attack. In fact, the staunch militarists in Tokyo barely acknoweledged the annihilation of the two cities, simply adding them to the list of 66 already destroyed. Bombed Japan didn't even stop clinging to its terms of "conditional surrender" – the retention of the Emperor – to the very end; a nation ready to sacrifice all its people could not be cowered with "a mushroom cloud in the sky", which wasn't even photographed. On the other hand, the Soviet Union's threats and subsequent invasion drove Japan to accept surrender much more effectively. As Ham explains, the Russians fought "iron with iron, battalion with battalion. This was a war Tokyo's samurai leaders understood, a clash they respected – in stark contrast to America's incendiary and atomic raids, which they saw as cowardly attacks on defenseless civilians".

Aside from proving his argument with meticulous research, Paul Ham offers insight into the "secret that would astonish the earth" from the aftermath of the meeting in Yalta, where Roosevelt and Churchill arrived already bound by a private agreement, signed on 19 September 1944 in Washington, not to share with the Soviet Union or the rest of the world the development of the atomic bomb, to the approvement of the bomb's development in 1939, after a letter from Einstein to Roosevelt, to the launching of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Ham paints vivid portraits of the project's leaders – Groves, tyrannical, unyielding, a master of of industrial engineering with extraordinary administrative and organisational skills that qualified him as "possibly the only man willing or able to attempt to build an atomic bomb in the time available [Stimson envisaged the production of 'a bomb a month' by 1 July 1944]" and Julius Robert Oppenheimer, tall, thin but with exceptional intellectual and admnistrative gift. The two men began what Ham pronounces "one of the oddest and most effective working pertnerships in American history."

An interesting part of the book was Ham's chronicle of the debate of the Target Committee, which met in Oppenheimer's office in Los Alamos, Mexico, the site of the bomb's laboratory. The committee focused on selecting the best military targets within Japan. Among the most suitable cities were – according to them – Kyoto, a large urban city with population of one million, and Hiroshima, an important army depot and port of embarkation. Remarkably, the committee barely discussed the possibility of targeting real military targets or even the two chosen cities' military attributes – Hiroshima's main industrial and miltary districts were actually located outside the city. Kyoto, which was recommended by Groves because of its beautiful wooden shrines and temples, had no significant military installations at all. In the end of the meeting, all members unanimously agreed that the bomb should be dropped on a large urban area, and the psychological impact should be "spectacular."

Paul Ham's book gives voice to Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's civillians before and after the raid, emphasizing that they were people, not faceless targets. For example, the diary of Yoko Moriwaki, a 12-year-old schoolgirl from Hiroshima who was among the youngest of the city's many mobilized children, is quoted. "Today, a new student called Adako Fujita joined our class," writes she in her diary. "She is an evacuee from Osaka. She was still in Osaka when 90 of those B-29s attacked the city and will be coming to school every day from Jogozen. I am going to be her friend ... Labor service began today, at last. Our job is to clear away 70 buildings, starting from the local courthouse. Most of the rubble has already been cleared away, but I am going to work hard and do the best job I can anyway."
This and similar accounts left a huge impact on me.

In summary, Paul Ham has done a great job both graphically chronicling the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and questioning the trustworthiness of its official rationale and its moral implications. Grippingly written and meticulously researched. Recommendable.