Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [218]
The result of this polemic, as is often the case, was a postrevisionist ‘middle ground’ (as J. Samuel Walker has termed it) in which scholars found a more nuanced position between the extremes. Walker’s Prompt and Utter Destruction is perhaps the best example of this. But see also the multiple and insightful essays by Barton J. Bernstein. Two—‘The Atomic Bomb and American Foreign Policy: The Route to Hiroshima’ and ‘Atomic Diplomacy and the Cold War—are printed in Bernstein’s edited volume The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 94—120, 129—35. Other revealing essays by Bernstein include ‘Why We Didn’t Use Poison Gas in World War II’, American Heritage, 36 (Aug.—Sept. 1985), 40—5; ‘America’s Biological Warfare Program in the Second World War’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 11 /3 (Sept. 1988), 306—17; ‘Ike and Hiroshima: Did He Oppose It?’ Journal of Strategic Studies, 10/3 (Sept. 1987), 377-89; ‘Writing, Righting, or Wronging the Historical Record: President Truman’s Letter on his Atomic Bomb Decision’, Diplomatic History, 16/4 (Winter 1992), 163—73; ‘Compelling Japan’s Surrender without the A-Bomb, Soviet Entry, or Invasion: Reconsidering the US Bombing Survey’s Early Surrender Conclusions’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 18/2 (June 1995), 101—48; ‘Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History’, repr. in Bird and Lifschultz, Hiroshima’s Shadow, 163—96; ‘Truman and the A-Bomb: Targeting Noncombatants, Using the Bomb, and his Defending the “Decision”’, Journal of Military History, 62/3 (July 1998), 547—70; and ‘The Alarming Japanese Buildup on Southern Kyushu, Growing US Fears, and Counterfactual Analysis: Would the Planned November 1945 Invasion of Southern Kyushu Have Occurred?’ Pacific Historical Review, 68/4 (Nov. 1999), 561— 609. Sherwin, A World Destroyed, rests comfortably on the middle ground. Also there, if shaded slightly toward the orthodox pole, is Richard B. Frank’s deeply informed Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Random House, 1999).
The Second World War is well handled—it cannot be altogether covered— in Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also William O’Neill, A Democracy at War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). The Pacific Theater is treated in Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931—1945: A Critical Perspective on Japan’s Role in World War II (New York: Pantheon, 1978); John W Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific Wjr (New York: Pantheon, 1986); and Ronald H. Spector, Eagle against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Free Press, 1985); eyewitness accounts include E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Francis B. Catanzaro, With the 41st Division in the Southwest Pacific: A Foot Soldier’s Story (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002); and Patrick K. O’Donnell, Into the Rising Sun: In their own Words, World War II’s Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat (New York: Free Press, 2002). For the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan, see, in addition to titles by Sherry, Biddle, and Schaffer, General Curtis E. LeMay, with MacKinley Cantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1965); Conrad Crane, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1993); W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2004); Jorg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940—
1945, trans. Allison Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan (New York: Walker, 2006); Stephen A. Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities