Letters to the Editor

We are always pleased to have letters to the editor because this shows that people are reading our Journal seriously. However, due to space limitations, we ask that letters be kept under 500 words.

To the Editor:

I found the article "Give Credfit Where Credit Is Due: The Dutch Role in the Development and Deployment of the Submarine Schnorkel" by Mark C. Jones very interesting and informative. My only comment is that the use of breathing tubes probably goes back to the earliest days of submarine experimentation. In connection with more modern submarines, Simon Lake in particular made regular use of them. For instance, in his autobiography he refers to drawing air "through a hollow mast fifty feet long" in his early unarmed boat the Argonaut. Of course, its purpose was mainly to provide air for breathing, although Lake may have used it to run his engines on occasion while stationary on the bottom.

The concept of using the schnorkel for submerged ship propulsion is far more complicated than simply using it to supply ventilating air. The Dutch and Italian inventors cited in the article are fully deserving of the credit given them by Mr. Jones.

John D. AldenDelmar

N.Y.

To the Editor:

In the October 2005 JMH (69:1254-55), David T. Fuhrmann found Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan to be "balanced and thoroughly documented," and I'd originally approached the book in the hope that we now had an excellent Japanese account of the subject. Upon reading it, however, I was appalled at the unnerving regularity with which Hasegawa's copious footnotes implied that something exists in a document when it simply does not.

The author's charge that President Truman had embarked on a desperate race to defeat Japan with nuclear weapons before the Soviet Union could enter the Pacific War is based on a number of gross distortions of Truman's words through use of ellipses. For example:

Truman noted in his diary: "I asked [Stalin] if he had the agenda for the meeting [Potsdam]. He said that he had and that he had more questions to present. I told him to fire away. He did and it is dynamite—but I have some dynamite too which I am not exploding now. . . . He'll be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about.

Hasegawa then explains that "Truman took Stalin's announcement as 'dynamite.' It is clear that he saw Stalin not as an ally committed to the common cause of defeating Japan, but as a competitor in the race to see who could force Japan to surrender." But the fifty-two words replaced by the ellipsis demonstrated that the president was talking about something completely different. The excised portion reads:

He wants to fire Franco. To which I wouldn't object, and divide up the Italian colonies and other mandates, some no doubt that the British have. Then he got on the Chinese situation, told us what agreements had been reached and what was in abeyance. Most of the big points are settled.

[Emphasis added]

One hopes that Hasegawa just did not notice that he had utterly changed the meaning of Truman's diary entry.

In another passage, Hasegawa gives an account of Truman's "laconic" response on 8 August to the news that the Soviets had entered the war, and sums up by saying that his "terse statement reveals the profound disappointment Truman must have felt over the news." When one checks the sources Hasegawa cites, however (easily obtained eyewitness accounts by the New York Times's Felix Belair, Jr., and the Washington Post's Edward T. Folliard on 9 August), even the most casual reading reveals a relaxed, smiling president, and that Hasegawa's account is pure fiction. Indeed, a close examination of Hasegawa's sources throughout the book either do not support—or, in some cases, utterly demolish—his contention that Truman had been "racing...