All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [405]
Some of those who are today most critical of the use of the bombs ignore the fact that every day the war continued, prisoners and slaves of the Japanese empire in Asia continued to die in thousands. Perversely, the Allies might have done more to confound Japan’s militarists by publicly announcing that they did not intend to invade the mainland, but instead to continue starving and bombing the Japanese people until they surrendered, than by preparing for Olympic. Truman’s greatest mistake, in protecting his own reputation, was failure to deliver an explicit ultimatum before attacking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Western Allies’ Potsdam Declaration, issued on 26 July, threatened Japan with ‘prompt and utter destruction’ if it failed to surrender forthwith. This phrase was pregnant with significance for the Allied leaders, who knew that the first atomic bomb had just been successfully tested at Alamagordo. But to the Japanese, it merely heralded more of the same: fire-bombing and eventual invasion.
By the high summer of 1945, Japan’s rulers wished to end the war; but its generals, together with some politicians, were still bent upon securing ‘honourable’ terms, which included – for instance – retention of substantial parts of Japan’s empire in Manchuria, Korea and China, together with Allied agreement to spare the country from occupation or war crimes indictments. ‘No one person in Japan had authority remotely resembling that of an American president,’ observes Professor Akira Namamura of Dokkyo University, a modern Japanese historian. ‘The Emperor was obliged to act in accordance with the Japanese constitution, which meant that he was obliged to heed the wishes of the army, navy and civilian politicians. He was able to take the decision to end the war only when those forces had invited him to do so.’ Even if this assertion was open to the widest variety of interpretations, as it remains today, it was plain that Hirohito could move towards surrender only when a consensus had evolved within Japan’s leadership. This was narrowly achieved in mid-August 1945, but not a day before.
Many modern critics of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demand, in effect, that the United States should have accepted a moral responsibility for sparing the Japanese people from the consequences of their own leaders’ obduracy. No sane person would suggest that the use of the atomic bombs represented an absolute good, or was even a righteous act. But, in the course of the war, it had been necessary to do many terrible things to advance the cause of Allied victory, and to preside over enormous carnage. By August 1945, to Allied leaders the lives of their own people had come to seem very precious, those of their enemies very cheap. In those circumstances, it seems understandable that President Truman failed to halt the juggernaut which carried the atomic bombs to Tinian, and thence to Japan. Just as Hitler was the architect of Germany’s devastation, the Tokyo regime bore overwhelming responsibility for what took place at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If Japan’s leaders had bowed to logic, as well as to the welfare of their own people, by quitting the war, the atomic bombs would not have been dropped.
When nineteen-year-old Superfortress gunner Joseph Majeski saw the B-29 Enola Gay arrive on Tinian, specially modified to carry only tail armament, and fitted with reversible-pitch propellers and other special equipment, he strolled over and asked one of its crew what they had come for. The