Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan (review)

Several years after it happened, it is clear that the debacle over the proposed Smithsonian exhibition on the dropping of the atomic bomb was a watershed moment in the relationship between historians and the American public. Those who had studied, even secondhand, the decision to drop the bombs, were astonished to discover that many Americans believed the decision to have been uncomplicated and beyond reproach. By 1995 it was too late to persuade them otherwise. Veterans’ groups and conservative politicians generated a wave of public indignation that washed away the museum’s ambitious plans, eroded the provocative edges of the exhibition, and drowned its complexity in a quiet, anodyne sea. What was left was a room containing part of the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima. It was accompanied by labels and recordings described blandly by the museum’s director as “factual.”

Let us propose to try again in the year 2000, a reasonable vantage point from which to look back on one of the most profound events of the 20th century. Between now and then, the Department of Education should require every high-school U.S. history teacher to assign J. Samuel Walker’s Prompt and Utter Destruction. (It will mean some arguments at home, especially with grandparents, but it will be worth it.) So intelligent is Walker’s book, so balanced, economical, lucid, and deeply informed, that those reading it will never again believe that the decision to drop the bomb was uncomplicated.

The public outcry over the plans of the Smithsonian’s curators sprang from the assumption that President Harry S Truman faced a simple choice in August 1945: he could use the bomb to end the war, or he could authorize instead an American invasion of the Japanese home islands, which would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. Walker demonstrates that Truman and his advisers never posed the options this starkly. To use the bomb was tempting, for it was the awesome and dreadful apotheosis of technological development that would “shock the Japanese people and government officials with [its] fearful power and terrifying visual effects” (p. 15). But there were three alternatives to the bomb or an invasion: continue the conventional bombing campaign and add to it a naval blockade; await Soviet entry into the Pacific War; and modify Franklin D. Roosevelt’s commitment to seek the unconditional surrender of Japan by allowing the emperor to remain in place following the war, albeit with diminished powers. Truman and others concluded that the first would take too long, and the second was necessary in the absence of the bomb but insufficient to end the war. On the guarantee to the emperor Truman waffled. Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew and Secretary of War Henry Stimson supported the idea, but Secretary of State designate James Byrnes thought it politically hazardous. In the end, unconditional surrender was softened only after the bombs had been dropped and the Red Army had marched into Manchuria. The popular belief that an invasion would produce between a half million and a million American casualties was a postwar invention. The only estimate Truman had before him that summer was made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June: an invasion of the island of Kyushu, scheduled for early November, would yield no more than thirty-one thousand casualties in its first thirty days. Even that figure, of course, would have struck the president as appalling.

Would Japan have surrendered in the absence of the atomic bombings? The Japanese were certainly beaten by the spring of 1945. Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo tried to solicit Soviet help to end the war in July, but other members of the cabinet resolved to fight on. Emperor Hirohito remained ambivalent for months, and Walker...