Media Lens tries history, yet again II

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the ventures of the Media Lens organisation in the historiography of the Pacific War. ML is a sub-Chomskyite pressure group that purports to expose right-wing bias in the liberal communications media. To read the organisation's output and endless email campaigns is to enter, as Peter Beaumont of The Observer described it, "a closed and distorting little world that selects and twists its facts to suit its arguments, a curious willy-waving exercise where the regulars brag about the emails they've sent to people like poor Helen Boaden [Director of News] at the BBC - and the replies they have garnered. Think a train spotters' club run by Uncle Joe Stalin."

My post recounted successive attempts by David Cromwell, co-founder and editor of Media Lens, to reveal the supposed deceit behind official accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Cromwell's efforts, which I noted here and here, were pitiful. If you're attempting to expose dubious propagandistic claims, then a minimal requirement is that you don't engage in that form of argument yourself. Cromwell was ill-placed in this respect, for his entire acquaintance with the historical debates on the A-bomb was a far-left polemical book by a man (Howard Zinn) whose notion of critical inquiry encompassed the "admirable and painstaking research" conducted by 9/11 conspiracy theorists. I concluded on each occasion, and with justification, that Cromwell was an ignoramus.

Cromwell was stung by the encounter. Last month, more than a year after his earlier contributions, he produced yet another attempt on the same subject, and at exhausting length. You can read it here. Of this, I wrote in my earlier post:

"It is in vain. Cromwell's third attempt is a farrago of nonsense. He hasn't understood or even digested the fruits of his superficial and painfully restricted inquiries. He has no conception of the difference between archival research and dogmatic assertion. He desperately gathers citations where he may, regardless of the use to which they're put or the coherence of the resulting assembly. In particular, he has alighted on Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, author of Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, 2005, to whom he clings as a talisman. He hasn't understood how Hasegawa's argument relates to the historical literature, and is apparently entirely unaware of the criticisms advanced by specialists in Soviet, Japanese and American history about Hasegawa's use of sources."

This post is the second and concluding part of my discussion of Cromwell's efforts. In his earlier attempts, Cromwell relied on the assertions of Gar Alperovitz, the principal populariser (though not originator) of the "atomic diplomacy" thesis. This proposition was initially advanced in the late 1940s by the physicist P.M.S. Blackett. Blackett was a brilliant scholar in his field (he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948). In politics, however, he was a Communist fellow-traveller of a type drearily familiar in British intellectual life in the 1930s. Of the benefits of a command economy, Blackett declared (quoted in David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, 1988, p. 272, my emphasis): "The advantages on the side of Soviet science are unlimited resources, the advantages of doing things on a big scale, the planning of the relation between industry and science, together with enormous enthusiasm."

In 1948, this gifted but titanically silly man wrote a book entitled Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy. He argued that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings had been the first acts of the Cold War rather than the concluding ones of the Pacific War. Japan had already been on the point of surrender; use of the A-bomb had in reality been intended by President Truman as an intimidatory signal to the Soviet Union. This, at much greater length but with essential consistency, is the proposition that Alperovitz has spent more than forty years expounding. (Blackett indeed supervised Alperovitz's thesis at Cambridge. Remarkably, Alperovitz was also supervised by the economist Joan Robinson - a brilliant scholar in her field as Blackett was in his, but of no obvious competence in the field Alperovitz was writing about.)

There are two fundamental problems with Alperovitz's argument that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were instruments of atomic diplomacy by the Truman administration against the Soviet Union. First, there is no evidence for it; and this is quite a serious drawback for a historical thesis. As the late Adam Ulam wrote in a contemporary review of Alperovitz's first publication (quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, Harry Truman and the Cold War Revisionists, 2006, p. 20):

"One would expect Alperovitz to adduce at least a single instance of an American negotiator saying in effect to a Russian during the period in question (1945-6), 'You ought to remember we have the bomb,' or 'If you go easy on the Poles we might share our nuclear know-how with you.' Or he might offer a public statement by an American official that 'the Russians ought to keep in mind before they go too far in Romania that we have this weapon.' Dr Alperovitz does not cite any such instances because there weren't any."

Secondly - and there's no way of putting this politely - Alperovitz is notorious for playing fast and loose with source material. As my correspondent Robert James Maddox states in his essay "Gar Alperovitz: Godfather of Hiroshima Revisionism" (included in a volume Professor Maddox has edited, Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, 2007, pp. 7-23): "The most salient feature of Alperovitz's work has been his unscholarly use of ellipses. Whereas most writers employ these to spare the reader extraneous phrases, Alperovitz uses them as tactical weapons to render documents more suitable for his purposes." Maddox gives some shockers as examples. On occasion, Alperovitz doesn't even bother with ellipses, but merely cuts sentences short in order to excise identifying references.

I said that Cromwell relied on Alperovitz, but even this is unreasonably flattering. I'm certain, from the fact that Cromwell wasn't able to spell Alperovitz's name right in his initial intervention on this subject, that he was relying instead on a garbled second-hand account - probably by the zany Zinn. (Cromwell is not alone in this. The chairman of CND, Kate Hudson, in her book CND - Now More than Ever: The Story of a Peace Movement, 2005, refers four times to Alperovitz - to whom she accords the obsequious honorific "eminent US historian" - and each time gets his name wrong.) If Cromwell hasn't read Alperovitz, then that might explain his incapability in distinguishing "atomic diplomacy" from Hasegawa's "racing the enemy" thesis.

Ludicrously, Cromwell claims to have given "necessarily a sketchy summary but [one that] captures the essence of divergent views on the end of the Pacific War". I'm sorry to disillusion him, but he literally doesn't know the first thing about Hasegawa's argument - namely that it is not a reassertion of Alperovitz's unsupported claims. Whereas Alperovitz erroneously maintains that the Japanese were ready to surrender, Hasegawa states (p. 291) "it is doubtful that Japan would have capitulated before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the Soviet Union entered the war”. Hasegawa maintains further (p. 295): "Without the twin shocks of the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese never would have accepted surrender in August."

If Cromwell is disinclined to read either of his claimed sources, he might at least have troubled to consult what I modestly claim to be a precise and pellucid encapsulation of Hasegawa's thesis, as conveyed to Times readers by me a couple of years ago (emphasis added):

"Unlike earlier revisionist historians, Hasegawa does not argue that a Japanese surrender might have been secured before the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb. But he depicts America’s development and use of the A-bomb as a race to secure Japan’s defeat before the Soviet Union entered the Pacific War. On this view, the Bomb was a way of countering Stalin’s regional ambitions. Hasegawa disputes that the Bomb was decisive in Japan’s surrender. He argues that Soviet entry into the war played a greater role. (The Soviet Union declared war on Japan between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.)"

Cromwell hasn't understood this debate, and heedless of his glaring inconsistency brandishes Hasegawa's metaphor as his vindication. It would be no such thing even if it were true. There was no "race", and Hasegawa's manipulation of source material to that end has been shredded by specialists in American, Japanese and Soviet history. In my previous post I cited the scathing judgement of Koshiro Yukiko (in The Journal of Japanese Studies 33.1, 2007) that "on the Japanese side of the story, archival research is Hasegawa's most critical weakness", but I omitted to mention her conclusion: "The fundamental problem with this book is that there is no new story. It is perhaps up to Russian scholars to evaluate the value of Hasegawa's contribution to the literature on the end of World War II."

So what do Russian specialists make of Hasegawa's "race" hypothesis? David Holloway of Stanford University regards Hasegawa's volume as "a significant contribution to our understanding of the end of World War II in the Pacific"; but he does not recognise a race between Truman and Stalin. In his contribution to Hasegawa's edited volume The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals, 2007, p. 184, Holloway states: "Contrary to Hasegawa's claim, there is no evidence that calculations about the bomb shaped Soviet policy on entry into the war before August 6." Given that the Soviet Union entered the Pacific War on 8 August, this doesn't leave much time for a "race" to have been conducted between Truman and Stalin.

It is thus little wonder that another of Hasegawa's reviewers, Sadao Asada of Doshisha University, has stated (in an exchange with Hasegawa in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3, June 2006):

"'Race' is a very unfortunate theme Hasegawa has chosen as an interpretive framework for the endgame of the Pacific War. It does not capture the rich complexities of 1945. The ‘race’ between Truman and Stalin, if it had taken place at all, lasted a mere two weeks, not long enough to sustain a whole book. When I pointed this out, Hasegawa retorted, ‘Whether a 100-meter dash, or a marathon, a race is a race, irrespective of the duration.’ Is this a scholarly response? The same question can be raised about his expression ‘the knock-out punch’ when referring to the atomic bomb that took more than a hundred thousand lives. Instead of arguing that there indeed was a race, he simply gives the background of the Potsdam Declaration and an extensive quote from Stimson’s statement to Truman on the atomic bomb. These are non sequiturs and do not constitute ‘evidence’ to support his arguments."

But it's in the English-language sources that Hasegawa's thesis is most vulnerable. I've already referred my readers to this review of Hasegawa by Michael Kort, author of the Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb. (I've drawn heavily on Professor Kort's work and his extensive correspondence with me, for which I'm most grateful.) I'd urge you in particular to look towards the end of the review, where Kort discusses the press conference Truman gave to announce Soviet entry into the Pacific War. Using the same contemporary reports that Hasegawa cites (from the New York Times and the Washington Post), Kort demonstrates that Hasegawa has exactly misrepresented those accounts. They in fact make clear that Truman, so far from being (as Hasegawa claims) disappointed by Soviet entry into the Pacific War, was elated by it. So what in that case happened to the "race" that Hasegawa keeps invoking? The same question clearly occurred to Hasegawa, because if you turn to his edited volume The End of the Pacific War, you find (p. 224) that Hasegawa makes the same claim about the press conference but removes the references to the NYT and Washington Post. No longer can readers check for themselves those eyewitness accounts. All we're left with as cited sources for Hasegawa's claim that Truman was disappointed are: a reference to Truman's memoirs, which in fact makes no mention of disappointment; the declaration of war; and, in an exquisitely Chomskyan manoeuvre, a reference by Hasegawa to his own book.

In summary, David Cromwell of Media Lens hasn't understood the arguments of his principal cited sources (though I acknowledge he has got as far as spelling their names right this time), or their respective places in the historiographical debates over the A-bomb. He doesn't see that Hasegawa is no support to him, and he is unaware of the scholarly evisceration of Hasegawa's footnotes. Hasegawa's own cited sources demonstrate that President Truman, so far from trying to keep the Soviets out of the Pacific War, was doing his utmost to draw them in. I should add, however, that while I'm critical of Hasegawa, it's clear that Cromwell has an incompetence all his own and is incapable of rendering accurately a complex thesis. Parts of his account are so garbled that, while he cites Hasegawa as his source, it's not easy to work out what he's referring to.

I make merely two additional observations about Cromwell's tract. First, as I mentioned in the previous post, it is flatly incompatible with his previous efforts on this subject. In his initial presumptuous hectoring of - so help me - a film critic who had dared to make some unexceptionable historical observations about the Pacific War, Cromwell cited his friend Howard Zinn thus:

"The most powerful reason given for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they saved the lives of those who would have died in an invasion of Japan. But the official report of the Strategic Bombing Survey, which interrogated seven hundred Japanese officials right after the war, concluded that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender and would “certainly” have ended the war by December of 1945 even if the bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even without an invasion of Japan."

In an earlier "Media Alert" (i.e. collective spam) to a BBC writer and director, in 2004, Media Lens sounded the same tone:

"I wonder if you are aware that the US Strategic Bombing Survey interviewed 700 Japanese military and political officials after the war, and came to this conclusion: 'Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.'"

Now look what Cromwell says, in his latest effort, after he's made initial, faltering efforts to contact academic historians:

"The ‘United States Strategic Bombing Survey’, based on postwar interviews with hundreds of Japanese military and civilian leaders, concluded that Japan would have surrendered before November 1 – the date set for the U.S. invasion of Japan - without the atomic bombs and without Soviet entry into the war. For years, this conclusion underpinned the arguments of revisionist historians who stated that the atomic bombs were not necessary for Japan’s surrender.

"However, some historians, notably Bart Bernstein, have argued that the survey’s conclusion is not supported by its own evidence. Bernstein has shown that the evidence is, in places, contradictory and cautions that the ‘Survey’ is “an unreliable guide.”[32] For example, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, Hirohito’s envoy to Moscow, had stated in his postwar interrogation that the war would probably have gone on throughout 1945 (i.e. beyond the anticipated U.S. invasion date of November 1) if the atomic bomb had not been dropped on Japan."

Run that one past me again, comrade. Did you say the survey's evidence has been shown to be "contradictory"? Well, you can say that again. One of Bernstein's students, Gian Gentile, assessed that evidence in two important articles and a book, How Effective Is Strategic Bombing? Lessons Learned from World War II to Kosovo, 2000. His findings were damning and conclusive. The civilian directors of USSBS - notably Paul Nitze - were intent on making a case for an independent air force. That case would have been undermined by acknowledging the patent fact that Japanese surrender had been forced by the A-bomb. So Nitze wrote the answer he'd first thought of, regardless.

In acknowledging the unreliability of USSBS, Cromwell has thus casually knocked away the "evidence" he previously relied on. I'm not clear if he even realises what he's done, so I'll helpfully point out to him that he's just destroyed every previous comment made by Media Lens on this subject. If Cromwell were possessed of a modicum of intellectual honesty, he would immediately write a letter of apology to the film critic he so impudently lectured. Will Media Lens also be issuing an "alert" withdrawing the claim that Cromwell no longer wishes to advance? Reader, you know the answer as well as I do.

My final observation is on an aspect of the scholarly literature that Cromwell - once again - hasn't understood yet was his point of departure. A little more than a year after he started this exchange, he is a little more cautious than in his initial missives. No longer does he rage against "the propagandistic basis for western leaders' claim of 'half-a-million' allied lives being saved by dropping atomic bombs on Japan", or cite in his support - of all the available scholarly resources - Wikipedia. But he still maintains that "it is known that the predicted number of U.S. combat deaths in the planned invasion escalated enormously among pro-bomb commentators from the U.S. War Department's 1945 prediction of 46,000 dead".

It's a measure of Cromwell's respect for scholarly precision that he won't date this with a month. Does he have any idea how much this question was discussed in 1945, and of the enormous uncertainties that accompanied it? What he is alluding to, whether he knows it or not, is a study by the Joint War Plans Committee, prepared on 15 June, which gave three sets of estimates according to various scenarios. These, however, did not include naval casualties and were subject to disclaimers that casualties were "not subject to accurate estimate" and were "admittedly only an educated guess". Again, I'm unable to tell whether this is dishonesty or incompetence on Cromwell's part, but he gives the impression that war planners had settled on a relatively low (but still horrific) estimate of battle casualties in 1945 (with no month specified), and that higher counterfactual estimates were a postwar invention. This is wrong.

The June estimates were speedily outdated by intelligence showing a huge build-up of Japanese troops on Kyushu - far in excess of what US military planners had been assuming. There were differing estimates made on the issue of potential casualties. One significant recent find is a report dated 21 July 1945 by William B. Shockley, later a Nobel laureate in Physics. The report was commissioned by one of the top aides of the Secretary for War, Henry Stimson. Using classified Pentagon data, Shockley concluded (quoted in Kort, op. cit., p. 102):

"If the study shows that the behavior of nations in all historical cases comparable to Japan's has in fact been invariably consistent with the behavior of troops in battle, then it means that the Japanese dead and ineffectives at the time of defeat will exceed the corresponding number for the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least 5 to 10 million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 to 4 million casualties including 400,000 to 800,000 killed."

We don't know if this report went to Stimson. But the sheer scale of the projections makes it plausible that it did, and it is a fact that projections of this order were known to the administration. We can't know what the human costs of a conventional invasion would have been; but there is strong evidence that the reason for President Truman's decision to use the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the one stated and widely understood at the time. This was to bring a speedy end to a war that was costing huge and sickening loss of life. Even a delay of a few weeks would have cost more lives - of US troops, Japanese civilians, and most especially the captive peoples of the Japanese empire - than were lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That does not resolve the ethical debate over the A-bomb, but nor is it a factor that any responsible commentator would ignore. Only an aggressively unlettered commentator, moreover, would ascribe it to official propaganda.

The arguments I've touched on here concern one of the most significant episodes in human history, and possibly the most important of all. I hope that some of the points I've made at least transcend the personality and organisation who elected to make a public campaign out of this issue in the first place. It's notorious that Media Lens, which makes much of holding journalists and media organisations to account, refuses to subject its own claims to scrutiny and debate, and you may form your own judgement on why this should be. At a minimum, however, as a matter of fact and not of opinion, we may conclude once more that David Cromwell, co-founder and editor of Media Lens, is an ignoramus.

Comments

[Nick]

Come now, Oliver, this is transparent. You are worse than the visitors to Bedlam who used to shake the chains of the lunatics to provoke a reaction.

[Ian Deans]

In the paragraph beginning 'So what do Russian specialists make of Hasgawa's "race" hypothesis?', a letter has been omitted from Hasegawa's name.

[szeni]

Shooting fish in a barrel. Kamm was less impressive writing last November that '(WWI)... was not
unnecessary at all'. I am still puzzled why Niall Ferguson's 'The pity of war', which debunks Kamm's mentor on the subject Fritz Fischer, was totally ignored.

[Ben Sixsmith]

How dreadful to claim that an ignoramus is not qualified to engage in complex historical debate. In the esteemed words of Medialens, 'That’s elitism and we reject it totally'.

[Oliver Kamm]

Nick and Ben, it's difficult to argue against the points you make.

Ian, thank you for pointing out the typo, which I'll correct.

Szeni, I'm sorry you were unimpressed with my comments about WWI, but so far from disregarding Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War, I much admire it. Ferguson argues briskly that (p. 421): "The real problem with the peace [i.e. with Versailles] was not that it was too harsh, but that the Allies failed to enforce it: not so much 'won't pay' as 'won't collect'." He rejects the notion that Germany bore only equal responsibility for the war with the Allies, still less that it was an aggrieved party. But his criticism of Fischer (who is not my "mentor" but is a seminal figure in the historiography of WWI) is (p. 169) "the assumption that Germany's aims as stated after the war had begun were the same as German aims beforehand". From this criticism, Ferguson maintains that British strategy was in error, and that (p. 461): "By fighting Germany in 1914, Asquith, Grey and their colleagues helped ensure that, when Germany did finally achieve predominance on the continent, Britain was no longer strong enough to provide a check to it."

That is a highly unorthodox view, and is difficult to reconcile with, among other things, the patently imperialist programme advanced by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in September 1914, only a month after the outbreak of war.

I naturally agree that Niall Ferguson is a more formidable historical analyst than David Cromwell of Media Lens. But this is my blog and I'm at liberty to choose the softest of targets if I want.

[SteveF]

Excellent critique Oliver. I spotted a copy of the Media Lens book in Foyles the other day. According to the blurb on the front, one J Pilger calls it "The most powerful book about journalism I can remember." A ringing endorsement.

Anyway, you might be interested in this article in the journal International Security. It argues that the bomb did not influence Japansese surrender and I'd be interested in your thoughts.

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/is3104_pp162-179_wilson.pdf

Also, if you haven't read it already, you might like to read this review of recent debates between "traditionalists" and "revisionists":

Walker, J.S. (2005) Recent literature on Truman's atomic bomb decision: A search for middle ground. Diplomatic History, 29, 311-334.

I can send you a copy if necessary.

[Nicholas]

Whilst we're on the subject, I was pleasantly surprised when Mr. Kamm gave the argument that Versailles could be considered too lenient on Germany. This was the argument, when the treaty was signed, of the Die Hard right of British politics (Leopold Maxse, Henry Page Croft, etc.) and I was surprised that someone on the left argued the point. It is refreshing when this argument is put forward, and it is in my view the correct one when you look at the situation rationally.

[Sean Pelette]

Ahh, Ward Wilson's article. He uses an interesting approach. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are mentioned together in both the beginning and end while the body of the essay carefully avoids any discussion of the Nagasaki bombing.

[Hip Gnosis]

This blog post was too long. I was sober when I started reading it, and completely drunk before I got halfway through. I think blog posts should never be more than about a foot long.

[Newmania]

Off topic here , quite interesting although what you say about Boris is mean spirited and somewhat shallow .

Oona King`s appearance of vaccuous fraud may be a pose but not all poses are without truth...blah blah

[Friedrich M.]

"There are two fundamental problems with Alperovitz's argument that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were instruments of atomic diplomacy by the Truman administration against the Soviet Union. First, there is no evidence for it"

You know well that there is evidence for it, Oliver. But you (or, more exactly, your handful of crank rightwing correspondents on the issue, as it is obvious that you enjoy no mastery of this subject yourself beyond what you are spoon-fed by aforementioned cranks) systematically suppress any mention of it and rantingly misrepresent the complex scholarship on the matter at every opportunity. With this cynical pretense of thorough reading, you manage to fool a decent proportion of your worshipful commenters and readers. Bravo!

It is as plain as day however to at least some readers that you are no more expert on this subject than the amateurish Medialens crowd, and just as ideologically driven - but in the opposite (and coincidentally uglier) direction.

[antrastan]

I think Mr Kamm's position is born of a leftwinger's horror of morally porous killing & enforced suffering. Which is not to imply partiality. It would be hard for him to think that America had killed over 200 000 people without excellent moral grounds & practical reasons (that is, crucially, the preservation of many more lives than were destroyed), because if it had not, his principles would enjoin him to abhor the acts. For me, I find it hard, with counterfactuals in play*, to achieve the sureness which Mr Kamm's tone rather brandishes -- but that is -his- tone; I don't know he can write otherwise.

If Friedrich has evidence, why doesn't he cite it?

*I have written a blogpost on this very question, but I won't link to it: I've a feeling that'd be rude.

[Oliver Kamm]

Friedrich M, you're right that I enjoy no mastery of this subject; I go purely by the secondary literature. But beyond that point, I'd be obliged if you would think hard before posting this sort of contribution to my site in future.

I have many correspondents, and some of them are cranks; but the historians I have quoted in this post and others are not cranks. They are leading scholars in fields relevant to this subject. I have no idea what political views are held by, e.g., my correspondent Michael Kort of Boston University, nor would they tell me anything about his research in the primary sources if I did know them. It might, however, interest you to know that another historian I've cited periodically, Robert Newman of Pittsburgh University (who discovered the Shockley report in the Library of Congress), is a veteran campaigner in the American anti-war and anti-nuclear movements. In his book Enola Gay and the Court of History he writes scathingly of US nuclear overkill, Truman's decision to develop the H-bomb, the Vietnam war, and US interventions in Chile and elsewhere. Prof Newman is not a right-winger by any standards. But what is important for this discussion is that he is a scrupulous historian who follows where the evidence leads him. I take strong issue with the ignorant and abusive contribution you have posted here, and hope that anything further from you will be more constructive.

If you find Alperovitz's contribution compelling, incidentally, you might wish to ask yourself why it avoids using Japanese sources, ignores the work of Truman's biographers, makes no mention of the literature on the Soviet nuclear programme, and evinces no curiosity let alone scepticism concerning Nitze's USSBS conclusions.

[Seymour Paine]

In Volume VI of the Second World War, Chapter 38 "Potsdam: The Atomic Bomb," Churchill discussed many of the points you mention. According to him, after the successful test ("Babies satisfactorily born") Churchill, along with General Marshall, Admiral Leahy, and President Truman conferred while in Potsdam with Stalin about using it. "To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number of British...Moreover, we should not need the Russians. The end of the Japanese no longer depended upon the pouring in of their armies for the final and perhaps protracted slaughter. We had no need to ask favours of them. A few days later I minuted to Mr. Eden: "It is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan.""

(I invite you to read the chapter to acertain the elided portion does not distort Churchill's words.)

[Putzi]

Oliver Kamm to Friedrich M: "I take strong issue with the ignorant and abusive contribution you have posted here"

OO-er! Do I catch a whiff of fiery indignation there?

If this were a comment made by an opponent, Mr K would perhaps describe it as "anguished bleating", or something like that..?

[Seymour Paine]

Opps: My syntax implied incorrectly that Churchill, Truman and Stalin were conferring in Potsdam about using the atomic bomb. Stalin wasn't part of that discussion (according to Churchill, Truman privately disclosed it to him shortly afterward, although I imagine his spies already knew about it).

[Diogenes]

Alperovitz, in his zeal to assign Hobbesian motives to the American leaders and high command (i.e., Truman mesmerizing Stalin and the world with his fissionable Leviathan) seems to ignore inductive logic. Yes, induction will only give probabilities, whereas deduction--as long as the major and minor premise are sound--will give absolute conclusions. However, life requires us to make inductive leaps. The purity of absolute knowledge is an elusive luxury, especially during periods of raw violence.

Several years ago, I saw Admiral Tibbets give a lecture on the Enola Gay, where he told the audience that after the war, he met with his former adversaries and counterparts in the Japanese military. Tibbets claimed that these men confirmed in private that America had no choice except to use the Bomb, because without it, Imperial Japan would have fought to the death. Well, is this true? Would there really have been mass suicides and Kamikaze attacks? Would Japanese teenagers with sharpened bamboo sticks really have fought U.S. Marines on the beaches?

Gore Vidal (a brilliant novelist, but a doctrinaire iconoclast if there ever was one) breezily dismisses the estimated million-American casualty rate, saying, if I remember correctly, that General George C. Marshall pulled this number out of thin air. Well, once again, is this true? Did the American leadership have any reason to believe--through the use of inductive logic, which is a probable outcome based on consistent observations--that a conventional invasion of Japan would have been a mutual slaughterhouse, or were the August mushroom clouds merely the product of racial propaganda or Machiavellian realpolitik? I am no jingo; I come from a war-traumatized family, so I have no special love of vicarious historical violence; however, let us look honestly at the mutual casualty rates in the Pacific Theater. Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Truk, Kwajalein, Okinawa--the death tolls, the details of the close-combat savagery horrify the mind. However, over and over again, we see a grim pattern repeated: Japanese soldiers repeatedly fought to the death. (This, by the way, is the central claim made by John Connor's short essay on this very subject, "The U.S. was Right.") Indeed, the source of this death-before-surrender mentality is debatable, but Connor makes an important point: the high body count exists, and we have a right to make conclusions based on that evidence.

Now consider some of the weapons in the Japanese arsenal: the Lunge AT Mine (an anti-tank bomb on the end of a bamboo pole); the infamous Kamikaze plane; the Kaiten ( a suicide submarine); the Ohka (an experimental suicide rocket plane). Now consider the romanticized death charge of the Yamato, Japan's last great battleship, in Operation Ten-gō. Without air cover and with only enough fuel for a one-way trip, the crew of the Yamato steamed into battle expecting to die.

I am not debating the ethics of dropping the Bomb: I leave that subject to better scholars than me. However, I ask this question of Kamm's critics: Did the American military have good reason to believe that a conventional invasion of Japan would have invoked staggering losses? If the Japanese militarists were willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of men to defend volcanic islands and atolls in the Pacific, how many would Imperial Japan be willing to sacrifice in the defense of Nippon itself?