Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [105]
The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his [American] captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly.
Compassion for Japanese was rare, Sledge noted, and scorned by most American soldiers as ‘going Asiatic’.55
The men who made the decision to drop atomic bombs and decided where to drop them shared the sharply racialized sentiments of their officers and fighting men. ‘Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time,’ recalled Curtis LeMay. ‘So I wasn’t worried particularly about how many people we killed in getting the job done.’ The South Carolinian Byrnes routinely referred to ‘niggers’ and ‘Japs’. Discussing the Hiroshima bombing with Leslie Groves on the day after it had happened, Chief of Staff George Marshall cautioned against ‘too much gratification’ because the attack ‘undoubtedly involved a large number of Japanese casualties’.
Groves replied that he was not thinking about the Japanese but about those Americans who had suffered on the Bataan ‘Death March’. Truman himself was a casual user of racial epithets for African Americans, Jews, and Asians. The Japanese, in his lexicon, were ‘beasts’, ‘savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic’.56
While there is no question that white Americans, at least, exhibited anti-Japanese racism, it is unlikely that racism explains why the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though perhaps it helped policymakers justify the decision to themselves after it had been made. The coarsening of ethical standards concerning who got bombed and how was virtually universal by 1945. Americans hated Japanese more than they hated Germans, but that did not prevent them from attacking Hamburg and Dresden with firebombs, targeting the citizens of these cities just as surely and coldly as those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targeted— or, for that matter, the citizens of London and Shanghai. There is no evidence to suggest that the Americans would have foregone use of the atomic bomb on Germany had the weapon been ready before V-E Day. If Berlin or Bonn or Stuttgart had been the a-bomb’s target, Groves could not have satisfied himself afterwards that Bataan had been avenged, but he might instead have mentioned Rotterdam, the Battle of the Bulge, or even Auschwitz, as he put aside all possible remorse. Or he and the others could have said that the atomic bomb had ended the European war more quickly and thus saved lives, American and enemy, as they would say about the atomic bombings of Japan. The war on both fronts had by 1945 reached a level of savagery that matched even the poison of anti-Asian racism.
A rather stronger case can be made for the American use of atomic bombs as a way of compelling the Soviets to behave more cooperatively in negotiations concerning especially Eastern and Central Europe, and as a way of ending the war quickly and thus foreclosing a major role for the Soviets in the occupation of Japan. The argument for ‘atomic diplomacy’, as this is called, has been made most forcefully down the years by Gar Alperovitz, though others have put forward their own versions of it. The case made by these ‘revisionists’ relies on establishing that Japan was militarily defeated by the summer of 1945, that the ‘peace faction’ of the Japanese government was assertively pursuing terms