Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, and: The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals (review)

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy is a splendid book—the first to examine the end of the Second World War in the Asia Pacific from a comprehensive, international perspective. Based on archival and published materials in Russian, English, and Japanese, it provides a gripping account of the complex diplomatic maneuvers and political battles that culminated in the tumultuous events of August 1945. The book (including its Japanese version) has won four prizes in the United States and Japan. Riding on this wave of success, Hasegawa has also published an edited volume on the same subject. Together, these two books redefine the contours of the debate on the end of the Pacific War and significantly advance our knowledge of how that historic event came about.

Much of the Japanese-language literature dealing with Japan's surrender focuses on domestic politics and does not pay much attention to decision-making processes in the United States or the Soviet Union. Such accounts fail to examine the international context surrounding the end of the war. As a result, it appears that the dropping of the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war just happened to follow one after another. In popular historical accounts, moreover, the emperor has often been depicted as a pacifist deus ex machina who suddenly emerged at the last moment to end the war. Disturbing questions about why the war dragged on so long, and the emperor's role in letting that happen, often remained unaddressed.

In the United States, the debate on the end of the Pacific War has focused on the atomic bomb—was it dropped to minimize American losses, or was the bombing driven by extraneous goals, such as impressing the Soviets with U.S. might? A key underlying theme in this debate has been the question of America's identity—did U.S. actions live up to America's self-image of a "knight in shining armor" who came to rescue the oppressed and the downtrodden in Europe and Asia? The political infighting in Japan or the role of the USSR in Japan's surrender have remained secondary themes in this essentially American debate.

In Racing the Enemy, Hasegawa, an expert on Russian history and on Russo-Japanese relations, succeeds in synthesizing these debates by bringing in the Soviet factor and by focusing on the "race" between Stalin and Truman over Japan's surrender. Centering his interpretation on this "race," Hasegawa presents a more comprehensive view of the end of the Second World War in the Asia Pacific than has been previously available. In the process, he advances an impressive array of arguments on some controversial issues, including Truman's motives for dropping the bomb, Stalin's plans for postwar Japan, and the decisive factor that induced Japan to surrender.

Hasegawa argues that from an early stage in the Pacific War, Stalin intended to eventually enter the war against Japan. His objective: to enhance national security through expansion in the Far East. For Stalin, the Yalta agreement was just a piece of paper unless Soviet troops took control of the territories promised to him. Soon after Yalta, he began careful preparations, playing on Japan's hope of achieving a negotiated peace through Soviet mediation while seeking to join the hostilities before Japan surrendered to the United States. He intended, Hasegawa shows, to become a party to the war by signing the Potsdam Declaration, but Truman issued the declaration without consulting him. Outmaneuvered, Stalin rushed to make the USSR a combatant before the war ended. After Hiroshima, he assumed that he had lost his chance. But the delay in Japan's surrender allowed him to enter the war and to secure what had been promised at Yalta—although stiff U.S. opposition frustrated his attempt...