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  • Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan
  • Marc Gallicchio
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa , Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005. 382 pp. $29.95.

In Racing the Enemy, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa reconstructs the triangular relationship between Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union in the final months of World War II. In doing so he provides historians with a valuable international history of one of the most controversial subjects in Cold War historiography. Drawing on Soviet archives, Hasegawa develops the most detailed and nuanced explanation of Soviet policymaking available in English. He also adds significantly to our understanding of the dynamics of Japanese decision-making during the final weeks of the war.

After a preliminary chapter that fills in the background of the triangular relationship, Hasegawa begins his narrative in April 1945. On 1 April, the United States invaded Okinawa. Four days later, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov announced that the Soviet Union would not renew its Neutrality Pact with Japan. The next week, on 12 April, the ailing Franklin D. Roosevelt suddenly died, making Harry S. Truman president. From that point on, according to Hasegawa, the Soviet Union raced against time to participate in the final stages of the war. At stake was the Soviet Union's claim to the Kurile Islands, Southern Sakhalin, and the former Tsarist concessions in Manchuria, all of which were pledged to the Soviet Union as part of the secret Yalta Far Eastern Protocol. But Josif Stalin also hoped to occupy Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island. The United States, for its part, commenced its own race to find a way to end the war before the Soviet Union could expand too far into northeast Asia.

Facing encirclement from within a shrinking empire, Japanese military leaders prepared for a climactic battle, hoping they could inflict such heavy losses on the invading Americans that they could force the United States to negotiate an end to the fighting on terms acceptable to Japan. At the same time, with the Japanese military's assent, Emperor Hirohito, Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro, and Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori sought Soviet mediation as a way out of the impending defeat. According to Hasegawa, Stalin deftly lulled Japanese officials into expecting Soviet help in reaching a negotiated settlement of the Asia-Pacific war. In the meantime, the Soviet dictator single-mindedly prepared for Soviet entry into the war.

The general outlines of this story are well known to historians. Hasegawa's contributions are in showing how the intensely secretive Stalin coordinated his diplomatic strategy with military preparations in the Far East. Hasegawa illuminates how the internal debate over preserving Japan's national polity (kokutai) stymied the surrender process. He also reveals how several second-tier bureaucrats in Tokyo intervened in the final surrender negotiations to push Japan toward peace.

Hasegawa is less persuasive in his treatment of U.S. political maneuvering during the final months of the war. He contends that the Americans were racing against time to end the war before the Soviet Union entered. But he fails to explain why Truman did not seek an early surrender by offering the Japanese a chance to keep the emperor. [End Page 168] Unlike many Cold War revisionists, Hasegawa doubts that such a pledge would have induced Japan to surrender. Nevertheless, he states that Truman was unwilling to modify unconditional surrender because he wanted to avenge the humiliation inflicted at Pearl Harbor.

Hasegawa shows that Truman referred to Pearl Harbor on several occasions, but otherwise the book does little to develop this point. As a consequence, the reader is left wondering why revenge for Pearl Harbor was supposedly more important to Truman than to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Admiral William D. Leahy, the president's representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of whom recommended modifying unconditional surrender. Secretary of State James Byrnes also opposed modification of unconditional surrender. Hasegawa's explanation of Byrnes's "diabolical" thinking is even more perplexing (p. 158). At one point Hasegawa states that "in order to drop the bomb, the United States had to issue the [Potsdam...

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