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By Richard J. Samuels
The Japanese surrender of World War II through Marc Gallicchio
Every August, newspapers are peppered with stories about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, accompanied by a well-chosen but never resolved debate about whether atomic bombs were needed to end the Asia-Pacific war in American terms. What remains to be reported after 75 years (and with so much ink spilled)? For Mark Gallicchio, the answer lies in the domestic politics of the United States and Japan, which animates a narrative that unfolds less as a debate than as a geopolitical thriller.
“Unconditional” gives a new attitude about how the resolve to insist on “unconditional substitute” is not just a choice between pressuring the Japanese to submit or negotiate the end of the conflict. He also draws ideological lines of war that remained visual in the atomic age when the enemy moved from Tokyo to Moscow.
President Harry Truman believed that the unconditional would keep the Soviet Union concerned while assured the American electorate and infantrymen that their sacrifices in an all-out war would be offset by a general victory. Disarmament of enemy armies was the beginning; The aim is to consolidate democracy abroad. Only by refusing to deal with dictators can Germany and Japan be rethought from root to branch.
But Truman faced strong opposition from the Republican establishment, adding former President Herbert Hoover and Henry Luce, whose Time/Life media empire today foreshadowed Fox News. Republicans fought Truman on two fronts: first, they sought to undo the New Deal’s social and economic reforms; second, they argued that giving Japan a respectable solution to the clash would save lives while blocking Soviet ambitions in Asia. Conservatives believed that the left in the United States was more determined to use unconditional surrender to destroy Japanese feudalism than to confront Soviet ambitions: the long-term providence of heaven for postwar redbaiters like Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Gallicchio calls the “hands of Japan” of the conciliating deceptions of the decomposing state of cosmopolitan Japanese who convince them that the Emperor of Japan, in fact, is a progressive who would help the United States build a strong, anti-communist East Asia. But the idea of the New Try Democrats that those experts didn’t know what they didn’t know about Japan. And foreshadowing the neoconservatives of a later era, they insisted that only the emperor’s deposition, as a component of a complete transformation of the country’s political culture, would make Japan a non-violent web of postwar nations.
Left-wing journalist I. F. Stone joined the fray. He denounced the “reactionaries” who, according to him, were determined to sow a red concern to reverse reforms in the United States, purge progressive officials, and hand over unconditional conditional surrender to their friends in Tokyo. Gallicchio, the writer of several army history books, ranks these actors, and many others, with wonderful clarity, and notes that Truman played timidly with both sides as the war moved decisively in favor of the Allies.
Convinced that the Japanese would not expect a final and decisive war, or (once the atomic bomb was available) a definitive incidental occasion, Truman did not need to recompose that the US solution was weakening. He used the July Potsdam Declaration to remind the Japanese that additional devastation was expected only if they stood firm. He understood that imperial cooperation would facilitate the difficult task of disarming 5.5 million Japanese infantry soldiers, and ultimately avoided Hirohito, but would not guarantee the emperor’s prestige until the end of the war.
The Japanese leaders felt no urgency. The Imperial Army had amassed an astonishing number of troops for a desperate defense of the homeland, while politicians fantasized about a peace negotiated through the Soviets. Unable to guarantee his safety, the emperor supported the effort to succeed in Moscow and took care of the coverage of the sacred relics. Even after the first atomic bomb incinerated Hiroshima, he asked the government to seek allied concessions, noting Gallicchio’s statement that Japanese officials “seemed insecure about what they were doing.”
With the Red Army suddenly deep in Manchuria, Japanese leaders were weighing the evaporation characteristics when the time the bomb incinerated Nagasaki. What had been chimeric now obviously delusional.
The emperor in spite of everything intervened. Overthrowing his generals, he issued a decree Gallicchio described in a sardonic tone of “evasive comic almaximum” because he ignored the words “reddition” and “defeat”. While many Japanese were sad, they accepted the emperor’s maximum decree to “support the unbearable.” However, some army officers committed suicide after a failed riot in what is now called “Japan’s longest day.”
Gallicchio deftly recounts how the debate over Truman’s resolution persisted long after the surrender. In Japan, the competitive reforms of the first profession met with opposition from the same Western-educated Japanese who had influenced the Japanese hands of the United States. These elites sought to defuse the Japanese army, but tried to block the land, hard work, and electoral changes.
“Unconditional” documents of how the country’s conservatives attacked the New Merchants within the profession as communist sympathizers and plotted revisionist stories of Truman’s motives, exaggerating the emperor’s anti-militarism. Its revisionism replaced by a New Left logo in the 1960s. According to some, Truman introduced the Cold War seeking to intimidate the Soviet Union with American nuclear power.
In 1995, part of a century after the war, the debate was re-ignited when Smithsonian Institution curators unsuccessfully attempted to use this account of the Aggression of the United States to frame an exhibition in which the Enola Gay, the plane that launched the A-bomb on Hiroshima, the main artifact. “Unconditional” is a clear reminder of the power, imperfection, and politicization of the ancient narrative, and how debates can continue long after witnesses in history have left the scene.
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