A Commentary on Choices Under Fire

March/April 2008 Historically Speaking 43 head of the NASM finally consulted a leading military historian, months after the disastrous original script became public knowledge, he was informed diat "your history is bad: unbalanced, skewed, misapplied ."3 As die NASM exhibit was being cancelled, one of its defenders opined that the dispute over Hiroshima was between "memory and history," the former being the flawed recollections of aging veterans and the latter unbiased and reliable research of upto -date scholars. Whatever its self-serving pretentiousness , the comment became a rallying cry in revisionist circles. But by then the tide had turned decisively against revisionism and Truman's critics regarding Hiroshima. During the 1990s a succession of scholarly publications demonstrated convincingly that those who allegedly had relied on "memory" during the Smithsonian debate possessed accurate recall after all. Some of those works came from academics , including Robert H. Ferrell's and Alonzo Hamby's respective biographies of Truman and the Maddox and Newman monographs mentioned above. Others were pathbreaking works by military historians such as EdwardJ. Drea, D. M. Giangreco, and, of course, Richard B. Frank.4 These and subsequent works demonstrated that the real fracture in remembering Hiroshima was not what Bess calls "the rift between popular culture and academic culture " but the gap between revisionist scholarship and so-called orthodox scholarship. Fortunately, in Choices Under Fire Bess almost always comes down on die latter side. MichaelKort isprofessor of socialscience at Boston University's College of GeneralStudies. In 2006 M.E. Sharpepublished the 6th edition of his textbook , The Soviet Colossus: History and Aftermath . His most recent book is The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (Columbia University Press, 2007). 1 See Robert P. Newman, Truman andthe Hiroshima Cult (Michigan State University Press, 1995), one of the essential studies on the bombing of Hiroshima that Bess unfortunately overlooks, and my The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima andthe Bomb (Columbia University Press, 2007). 2 RobertJames Maddox, The New Left andthe Origins of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 1973), chapter 3; Maddox, Weaponsfir Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later (University of Missouri Press, 1995), 2, 3, 49, 120-21, 153-54, 183,191. See also Maddox, "Gar Alperovitz: Godfather of Hiroshima Revisionism," in RobertJames Maddox, ed., Hiroshima in History:Myths of Revisionism (University of Missouri Press, 2007), 7-23, which was published too late for Bess to consult 3 Robert P. Newman, The Enola Gay and the Court of History (Peter Lang, 2004), xiii-xv, 97-133. The quotation, from military historian Richard Kohn, is on page 122. On page 120 Newman writes that overlooking Ronald Spector "has to be called obscurantism ." * See Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (University of Missouri Press, 1994); Alonzo Hamby, A Man of the People:A Life of Harry S. Truman (Oxford University Press, 1995); Edward J. Drea, MacArthur's Ultra: Codebreaking andthe WarAgainstJapan, 1942-1945 (University of Kansas Press, 1992); DM. Giangreco, "Casualty Projections for the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1946: Planning and Policy Implications,"Journal of Military History 61 (1977): 521-581. I would add all of these scholars to the list of historians whose insights would have enriched Bess's discussion of the Hiroshima decision. A Commentary on Choices Under Fire Harry S. Stout No 20di-century American war looms larger in moral and mythic grandeur than World War II. In the course of vanquishing fascism and tyranny in Europe and Asia, World War II stands in American history as the emblem of American values and deep nobility. World War II established die "Greatest Generation" in American history according to Tom Brokaw, and most Americans would agree with him. So why, in his provocative book Choices Under Fire, isn't Michael Bess cheering? In this deeply researched and extraordinarily well-written moral analysis of World War II, Bess offers a nuanced and complicated account of British and American behavior in World War II. He doesn't hesitate to praise American and British behavior where praise is due, but at the same time he raises hard questions diat will compel Anglo-Americans to hold the accusing mirror upon themselves as well as their vanquished enemies. Other historians, most notably David Kennedy...