In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, and: The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals
  • James J. Orr (bio)
Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism. Edited by Robert James Maddox. University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 2007. vi, 213 pages. $34.95.
The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals. Edited by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2007. xvi, 331 pages. $60.00.

Few events have elicited as much passionate scholarship as the atomic bombings at the end of World War II. And perhaps few areas of scholarship [End Page 521] have caused as much frustration, because the reader finds himself either at the opposite end of a polarized debate or somewhere in the middle wishing for less vitriol and more dispassionate analysis or at least an appreciation of nuance. Typically the American scholarship is divided between those who more or less accept the orthodox view that the bombings were necessary to end the war sooner and thus ultimately saved lives and those who insist they were unnecessary since Japanese leaders knew they had already been defeated by the summer of 1945 and other means existed to compel the Japanese leadership to surrender. Extreme adherents to this latter, critical or, as it is usually labeled, revisionist view impute less than honorable motives to the administration of President Harry Truman, arguing that the bombs were dropped in order to intimidate the Soviets in the opening stages of the cold war. In the same passionate vein, the more extreme defenders of orthodoxy barely conceal resentment toward what they perceive to be divisive revisionism born of Vietnam-era, antiestablishment, anti-American attitudes. There are other dividing lines, but the primary one dwells on the morality of using nuclear weapons on cities, whether bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was truly, as former Secretary of War Henry Stimson stated in his 1947 Harper’s article that established the American orthodoxy, the “least abhorrent choice.”

Other questions and their variants arise from this principal fixation: Would the Japanese have surrendered with only Soviet intervention? Could the Japanese have been convinced with a demonstration blast? What if the Allies had softened their insistence on unconditional surrender, assuring the continuity of imperial rule? Would the Japanese have surrendered anyway before the planned November 1 Allied assault on Kyushu? Were the pre-invasion casualty estimates as high as a full million as Truman frequently stated, or were those numbers simply postwar self-justification by an angstridden man?

Distressingly enough for readers of this journal, until recently much of the American scholarly and public debate has centered on decision making in the United States, relying on evidence gleaned from American war records and postwar American memoirs to conjecture one way or the other about decision making in Japan. Within the Japan studies community in the United States, of course, Robert J. C. Butow’s 1954 Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Stanford University Press) long provided the basis for our understanding of realities in Japan: that while Japan’s defeat was self-evident by summer 1945, both the atomic bombings and the Soviet entry into the war provided the crisis atmosphere that enabled the Showa emperor’s desire for peace to prevail over the diehard war faction. Herbert Feis’s Japan Subdued (Princeton University Press, 1961) indicated that the atomic bombs at the least helped end the war sooner, thus saving American lives. In 1965, Gar Alperovitz stirred debate with his suggestion of atomic diplomacy, originally [End Page 522] articulated in the 1940s by British physicist P. M. S. Blackett: Truman and his Secretary of State James Byrnes dropped the bomb to intimidate Josef Stalin. This viewpoint has been popularly accepted in Japan, even becoming the default interpretation in school textbooks. In the United States, this revisionist position was refined without rancor by scholars of atomic diplomacy, more or less outside the public spotlight, until the debacle of the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in the mid-1990s. Spurred on by the controversial exhibit drafts and armed by the release of important Joint Chiefs of Staff papers and unredacted radio intelligence intercepts from the U.S. code-breaking operation known as MAGIC, defenders of the orthodox view have...

pdf