Racing the Enemy: A Critical Look

22 Historically Speaking · January/February 2006 Racing the Enemt. A Critical Look Michael Kort Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University press, 2005) has received a great deal of favorable press since its publication last year. Reviewers in leading newspapers have called it "brilliant and definitive," "a landmark book," "the definitive analysis" of the American decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, etc. Hasegawa's extensive use of Japanese and Russian sources has added to the book's luster. His multilingual source base is what presumably gives his book the vital "international context" allegedly missing from earlier volumes on the American use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender that finally put an end to World War II. Racing the Enemy is an opportune arrival for the increasingly beleaguered critics of the American use of atomic weapons against Japan, who, in the historians' debate over the bomb, usually have been classified as "revisionists " (as opposed to "orthodox" or "traditional " historians who have evaluated the atomic bomb decision as necessary to end the war). As made by Gar Alperovitz more than forty years ago, the original revisionist argument maintained that the atomic bomb was used primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union in order to gain the upper hand in Eastern Europe and to keep Moscow out ofthe war in the Far East. While the whole cloth of this "atomic diplomacy" thesis was too extreme for most revisionists, they wove bits and pieces of it into their own critiques of the bombing ofHiroshima. Revisionism's heyday lasted until the 1990s. Then the historiographical ground began to shift. A new body of scholarly work emerged, often based on hitherto unavailable documents, which countered revisionist arguments that the atomic bomb was primarily a diplomatic weapon in 1945, that Japan would have surrendered prior to the planned U.S. invasion had the bomb not been used, and that projected casualty figures for the anticipated invasion of Japan were far lower than those cited by supporters of the decision to use the bomb. The scholars producing these books and articles provided powerful support for Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan. Thus Edward Drea's MacArthur's Ultra: Codebreaking and the War against Japan (1992) chronicled how Allied intelligence tracked the Japanese military buildup on the southernmost home island ofKyushu in the months prior to Hiroshima, a buildup that demonstrated Tokyo's intent to fight to the bitter end and rendered all "low" casualty estimates dating from the spring and early summer of 1945—the estimates relied upon by revisionist historians—obsolete and irrelevant months before American soldiers were scheduled to land in Japan. In 1995 Robert P. Newman's Truman and the Hiroshima Cult demolished the credibility of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey's claim that Japan would have surrendered in the fall of 1945 absent both the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war, while Robert James Maddox's Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later effectively dismantled what was left ofthe "atomic diplomacy" thesis. Two years later, in "Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasion of Japan, 1945-1946: Planning and Policy Implications" (The Journal of Military History, July 1997), D. M. Giangreco conclusively documented the existence of enormous casualty projections, some of which undeniably reached Truman and his top advisors. The next year, in "The Shock ofthe Atomic Bomb and Japan's Decision to Surrender—A Reconsideration" (Pacific Historical Review, November 1998), Sadao Asada, relying on a thorough review of Japanese-language sources, exposed as untenable the contention that Japan was prepared to surrender before Hiroshima or that a modification of the Potsdam Declaration guaranteeing the status of the emperor would have produced a Japanese surrender. These and other works culminated in Richard B. Frank's Downfall: The End ofthe Imperial Japanese Empire, published in 1999. Frank brought together the evidence already mentioned and a great deal more, including crucial Japanese-language sources, leaving virtually every aspect ofthe revisionist case in tatters. It was not long before Downfall gained widespread recognition as the definitive work on the subject. Against this background...