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(New York: St Martin’s, 1993; and Charles S. Maier, ‘Targeting the City: Debates and Silences about the Aerial Bombing of World War II’, International Review of the Red Cross, 87/859 (Sept. 2005). On Hamburg, see Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943, trans. Joel Agee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); for Dresden, see Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, the Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969); and Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). On the bombing of Tokyo, see the harrowing account of Robert Guillain, I Saw Tokyo Burning: An Eyewitness Narrative from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima, trans. William Byron (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981); Kenneth P. Werrell, Blankets of Fire: US Bombers over Japan during World War II (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); and Gordon Daniels, ‘The Great Tokyo Air Raid, 9—10 March 1945’, in W G. Beasley, ed., Modern Japan: Aspects of History, Literature and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975). On the endgame of the Pacific War, consult, in addition to Frank, Downfall, Robert Leckie, Okinawa: The Last Battle of World War II (New York: Penguin, 1995); Thomas W Zeiler, Unconditional Defeat: Japan, America, and the End of World War II (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Press, 2004); John Ray Skates, The Invasion of Japan: Alternatives to the Bomb (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994);

John D. Chappell, Before the Bomb: How America Approached the End of the Pacific War (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1997); Leon V Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); and especially the prize-winning volume by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). The question of how many Americans would die in a planned invasion of Japan, set to begin in November of

1946, is debated, on the one side, by Barton J. Bernstein in ‘Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory’, in Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38—79, and ‘Reconsidering Truman’s Claim of “Half a Million American Lives” Saved by the Atomic Bomb: The Construction and Deconstruction of a Myth’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 22/1 (Mar. 1999), 54—95; and, on the other, by D. M. Gian-greco, ‘ “A Score of Bloody Okinawas and Iwo Jimas”: President Truman and Casualty Estimates for the Invasion of Japan’, Pacific Historical Review, 72/1 (Feb. 2003), 93—132, and Michael Kort, ‘Casualty Projections for the Invasion of Japan, Phantom Estimates, and the Math ofBarton Bernstein’, Passport, 34/3 (Dec. 2003), 4-12.

Biographers have sought to analyze Truman’s thinking with regard to the atomic bomb. Three biographies that come out in two different places are David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), and Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1994), both of which argue that Truman had virtually no choice but to drop the bombs; and the far more critical Arnold Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945—1953 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Some of what Truman said himself is collected in Ralph E. Weber, ed., Talking with Harry: Candid Conversations with President Harry S. Truman (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Press, 2001); and three volumes edited by Robert H. Ferrell: Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910—1959 (New York: W W Norton, 1983), and Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991).

CHAPTER SIX. JAPAN: THE ATOMIC BOMBS AND WAR’S END

Dramatic stories of the atomic