Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [312]
The president adopted in the case of “Little Boy” precisely the same mechanism employed throughout the war by the democracies to implement strategic decisions. He, the politician, approved the concept, then left its execution in the hands of the military—which meant Groves. The dispatch of Enola Gay and Bock’s Car, in common with all bomber operations, required a sequence of orders, aircrew training, logistical preparation, which was now rolling. In recent years, immense scholarly attention has focused upon the decrypted Japanese diplomatic communications, notably with Moscow, which became available to the Americans between June and August 1945. Yet the salient aspect of these is readily summarised: the Japanese government wanted to end the war, but privately as well as publicly rejected unconditional surrender. Japan’s most notable pragmatist, Ambassador Sato in Moscow, vividly articulated in cables to Tokyo his conviction that nothing the Japanese government was minded to propose would prove acceptable to the Allies.
If Sato held this opinion, why should Americans intercepting his messages have been any more impressed? In 1945, the distant chirrups of Morse between Tokyo and Moscow were nowhere near explicit or humble enough to halt the earth-shaking juggernaut being steered towards Japan by Leslie Groves. After the war, Truman falsely claimed that he gave the order to attack Hiroshima at the beginning of August 1945, perhaps because he feared that it would seem shocking to posterity to acknowledge that there was no such moment of deliberate presidential judgement before Col. Paul Tibbets took off. Having acquiesced in the process months earlier, thereafter the president merely remained informed of progress, and did not halt the Enola Gay. Tolstoy argues—in the context of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia—that great events possess an impetus of their own, independent of the will of national leaders and commanders. Had he lived through 1945, he would have judged the countdown to the dropping of the bombs a vivid demonstration of his thesis.
The Japanese continued to delude themselves that they had time to talk, time to probe and haggle with each other and with the Allies. They believed that their ability to extract a huge blood price from their enemy before succumbing represented a formidable bargaining chip. Instead, of course, this helped to undo them. It seems irrelevant to debate the merits of rival guesstimates for Olympic’s U.S. casualties—63,000, 193,000, a million. What was not in doubt was that invading Japan would involve a large loss of American lives, which nobody wished to accept. Blockade and firebombing had already created conditions in which invasion would probably be unnecessary. New means now promised a summary termination of Japan’s defiance, and perhaps also pre-emption of the Soviet onslaught.
Why should the United States have endured prevarication from the sponsors of Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death march, or further duplicity and self-aggrandisement from the bloodstained Soviets? The public face of Japan remained implacable. Given the strains to which U.S.-Soviet relations were now subject, knowledge that the Japanese were seeking terms through Moscow rather than offering submission to Washington could only stimulate American impatience and cynicism. The dropping of the bombs did not represent, as Truman and others later claimed, a direct alternative to a costly U.S. invasion of Japan. The people disastrously influenced by the prospect of Olympic were not Americans, but the Japanese, whom it persuaded to continue the war. Much historic attention has focused upon whether the U.S. should have warned Tokyo