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By Root 1135 0

armed for an August descent on Manchuria, however, American enthusiasm for their participation began to falter. Even if U.S. military leaders were eager to see the Red Army committed, politicians and diplomats were much more equivocal. European experience suggested that whatever Stalin’s armies conquered, they kept. It seemed rash to indulge further Russian expansionism in Asia. By April 1945, some important Americans would have been happy to break the bargain made with Stalin in February, if they could justify doing so. The Russians, conscious of this, thenceforward possessed the strongest possible interest in ensuring that the Japanese kept fighting. If Tokyo made peace with Washington before Stalin had shifted his armies eastwards and was ready to declare war, the Americans might renege on the rewards promised at Yalta.

Japanese politicians, with extraordinary naïveté, acted in the belief that wooing neutral Russia would serve them better than addressing belligerent America. In reality, there was more willingness among some Western politicians than in Moscow to consider concessions in return for an early end of bloodshed. Winston Churchill was the first and most important Allied leader to propose qualifying the doctrine of unconditional surrender in respect of Japan. Before the combined chiefs of staff in Cairo on 9 February 1945, he argued that “some mitigation would be worthwhile, if it led to the saving of a year or a year and a half of a war in which so much blood and treasure would be poured out.” Roosevelt dismissed the prime minister out of hand. British influence on this issue, as indeed upon everything to do with the Pacific war, ranged between marginal and non-existent. The decisions about how to address the Japanese, whether by force or parley, rested unequivocally in Washington.

A strong party in the State Department, headed by former Tokyo ambassador Joseph Grew, now undersecretary of state, favoured a public commitment to allow Japan to retain its national polity, the kokutai, of which the most notable feature was the status of the emperor. Grew and his associates believed that the kokutai mattered vastly more to the Japanese than it should to anyone else: if assurances on this point would avert a bloodbath in the home islands, they should be given. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Navy Secretary James Forrestal agreed, as did some media opinion formers. The British embassy in Washington reported to London on 13 May: “There are notes834…not merely in the ex-isolationist press but eg the Washington Post, of the possibility of some modification of unconditional surrender in [Japan’s] case and optimistic speculation of likelihood of her early surrender when she perceives the hopelessness of her case, and woven into popular desire for Russian participation in the Pacific War there runs a thin but just perceptible thread, the thought that an American settlement of that area would best be made if USSR were kept out of it.”

Yet the White House and its most influential advisers believed that American public opinion would recoil from concessions to the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor, among whom the emperor was symbolically foremost; and that generosity was anyway unnecessary. Japan’s predicament was worsening rapidly. The principal uncertainty focused upon whether it would be necessary to invade the home islands. Among U.S. chiefs of staff, Admiral Ernest King, for the navy, and Gen. “Hap” Arnold of the USAAF opposed a ground invasion. While their desire to avoid another bloody campaign was no doubt sincere, both men also had partisan agendas, well understood in Washington. King wanted the world to see that Japan had been defeated by the U.S. Navy and its blockade. Arnold sought recognition of strategic bombing’s decisive contribution, in pursuit of his crusade to make the Army Air Forces an independent service. King and Arnold could invoke important opinion in support of their case. Early in April, the U.S. Joint Intelligence Committee predicted that “the increasing effects of air-sea blockade, the progressive