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By Root 1384 0

had defined the moral argument from the very beginning, and as word reached the Western newspapers of what was happening in China, what had been done to prisoners of war at Bataan, or the civilians in every place the Japanese had conquered, the fury of the American people had grown substantially. The military had their own fury, of course, and yet throughout the war, the Americans had played as close to the rules as anyone could expect. But the kamikaze attacks against American sailors had seemed to be the final straw, confirmation that the enemy in the Pacific was nothing like the Germans. Not even the spreading news of the Holocaust had seemed to affect the American troops with the kind of visceral disgust for what the Japanese had done. Germany’s sins could be placed too easily at the feet of Hitler and a few of his henchmen, but the astounding viciousness of the Japanese seemed to pervade their entire military culture, a culture that Truman knew was nothing the Americans had ever faced before. He had been astounded to hear a broadcast, forwarded to him from the monitoring stations that recorded Japanese radio. The speech had come from Japan’s Prime Minister Suzuki.

Should my services be rewarded by death, I expect the hundred million people of this glorious empire to swell forward over my prostrate body and form themselves into a shield to protect the emperor and this imperial land from the invader.

With such resolve being fed to the Japanese people, who would no doubt respond as their emperor hoped, the decision to use this extraordinary weapon caused Truman no heartburn at all. Quite the opposite. Without such a decisive piece of weaponry, the American invasion of Japan was the only viable strategy that remained. If the speculation about the power of the atomic bomb was accurate, Truman believed along with his generals that this one weapon could prevent the potential loss of an enormous number of American troops. But Suzuki’s speech had offered up another reason for the Americans to avoid an invasion, something that many of the military advisors had given little attention. If the Japanese defended their homeland with the same ferocity they had inflicted on other lands, Truman had to believe that the loyalty of the Japanese people to their emperor might result in a fight that would cause the slaughter of millions of Japanese civilians, a moral nightmare for the United States, and especially for the young American soldiers who would stand at the point of the spear. To the commanders who had seen the barbarity of the Japanese up close, the morality of that was no issue at all. Increasingly there was a mood among the troops that Japan needed to be punished, all of Japan. It was an argument Truman could not dismiss. Throughout Asia, the people who had suffered such extreme depravity at the hands of the Japanese troops and their leaders had to receive at least some compensation, even if the best that could be accomplished was a weapon that some might see as overkill, an act of vengeance.

Though the military chiefs were mostly unequivocal in their support for the Manhattan Project, as June rolled into July, Truman felt that something had changed among the physicists, a slight whiff of what Truman felt was hesitation, or even pacifism. Truman suspected that the shift in mood was the result of the victory at Okinawa, the sense that the Japanese were beaten already, that this new weapon might be unnecessary. But the military chiefs had blasted that opinion to pieces, few believing that Okinawa would change anything in Tokyo.

A serious argument had been made for exploding a bomb off the Japanese coast, with no surprises, everyone notified well in advance, the whole world allowed to watch. If the Japanese High Command had any doubts about American superiority in arms, some said that this would clinch it, would inspire even the most fanatical Japanese generals to call it quits. But many of the military people thought that idea a waste of time, and there were two very good reasons why. Since 1942, Japan’s newly acquired