Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [321]
The Potsdam Declaration, signed by the American, British and—in absentia—Chinese leaders, was issued on the evening of 26 July:
Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay.
• There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest…
• Until such a new order is established…points in Japanese territory shall be occupied.
• Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as determined.
• The Japanese military forces, after being completely disarmed, shall be permitted to return to their homes with the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives.
• We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals…Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established.
• Japan shall be permitted to retain such industries as will sustain her economy…
• The occupying forces of the Allies shall be withdrawn from Japan as soon as these objectives have been accomplished and there has been established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people a peacefully inclined and responsible government.
• We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces…The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.
The Potsdam Declaration was not dispatched to the Japanese government as a diplomatic communication, but merely broadcast to the world through the media. The Soviets were stunned to find themselves excluded from the signatories, and indeed shown a copy only after the declaration’s release. They had come to the conference with their own draft, demanding Japan’s unconditional surrender, but using the words “The United States, China, Great Britain and the Soviet Union consider it their duty to take joint, decisive measures immediately to bring the war to an end.” This was never presented or discussed.
The Americans were within their rights to confine endorsement of the ultimatum to co-belligerents against Japan, and thus exclude the neutral Soviets. But Stalin could thereafter be in no doubt of America’s determination to address Japan in its own way, with minimal reference to Moscow. For once, the Russian leader might have been excused paranoia, in fearing that the U.S. hoped to renege on Yalta, and deny him his promised Asian prizes. From Potsdam he had already telephoned Moscow to demand a ten-day acceleration of the Red Army’s timetable for invading Manchuria. He lambasted Beria, his spymaster, for ignorance of the successful American bomb test, which he readily inferred from Truman’s hints.
On 29 July at Potsdam, Molotov asked that the U.S. should make a formal request for the Soviet Union to enter the Far Eastern war. The Americans refused. Truman later claimed that he did not want to give the Russians scope to claim that their intervention decided the outcome of the conflict. Byrnes, in his memoirs, was much more frank. He asserted that, given recent Soviet behaviour and violations of the Yalta Agreement in Europe, he did not want the Soviets in the Asian war, and believed that the atomic bomb would compel Tokyo’s surrender without them. Truman responded to Molotov’s request with a personal letter to Stalin on 31 July, suggesting that the four Allies’ 1943 Moscow Declaration fully justified the Soviet Union in joining the war without any further preliminaries. Such a view scarcely suggested much regard for diplomatic niceties, but