The Legend of Hiroshima

WHILE EVERYONE KNOWS THAT TWO ATOMIC BOMBS WERE DROPPED on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nearly wiping out the civilian populations of both cities, many people do not know the story behind the decisions to drop those bombs. Stop an American on the street and ask her/him whether there was any controversy over the atomic bombing of Japan at the end of World War II and he or she will probably say no, the decision was unavoidable -- had the bombs not been dropped, the war would have ground on with vast numbers of American and Japanese dead, etc. The bombings, most Americans would say, were a done deal, both necessary, and, before they occurred at least, stirring little or no controversy among the government officials and scientists making the decision.

To this day, few Americans are aware that these twin beliefs in the military necessity of the bomb, and the lack of controversy surrounding the decision to drop two of them on Japan, were generated in the weeks and months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Truman Administration, which put a strong and deliberate spin on the story. Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy, revisits the decision to drop the bombs and explodes the popular mythology. This enormous, and aesthetically handsome work, brings together nearly 50 essays written between 1945 and 1997 by scholars, military, political and religious leaders, independent intellectuals, and survivors of the atomic bombings, as well as rare post-attack photos of Nagasaki, and a section containing primary historical documents, some published here for the first time. Edited by Kai Bird, contributing editor for The Nation, and Lawrence Lifschultz, who has been a South Asia correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Hiroshima's Shadow combines intellectual history and activism, and is unusual in that, though it has a strong editorial point of view, the editors unflinchingly present voices from all sides of the argument.

In their lengthy introduction, Bird and Lifschultz raise the question of the bombs' effect on American thought and politics: "How do we know, or come to know, what we know? Essentially, this question of epistemology pertains not only to one's self but also to the societies we inhabit. From the earliest days of human consciousness, mythical accounts of the past have guided entire peoples and nations. Myth and fact have frequently been united into narratives that ultimately become integral parts of the history of a person or a country... the legends and stories of our (American) past have at moments... blinded us to ourselves and have on more than one occasion become accessories to acts of willful and powerful destruction." (xxxi) The atomic bombs dropped on Japan destroyed nearly every man, woman and child in two cities. In America, life went on, but the damage to free inquiry, and to the right to question officially sanctioned views of the past, has been deep and long-lasting.

As partial evidence, the editors point to what they call "one of the great intellectual scandals of American history," the 1995 cancellation of a Smithsonian Institution exhibit that would have dared to raise questions about whether the attacks should have occurred. The curators of America's principal national museum planned an exhibit to commemorate the 50-year anniversary by displaying the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the plane which dropped the first atomic bomb, and an accompanying script. It was originally planned that the script would include brief references to the views of General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy which appeared in memoirs both men published after the war. Prior to August, 1945, Eisenhower and Leahy expressed what Eisenhower described as "...grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives." (xxxiii)

Two private organizations, the Air Force Association, a lobby for the military aerospace industry, and the American Legion voiced such heated objections to the inclusion of the Eisenhower/Leahy views and other brief references critical of the use of the atomic bombs, that the Secretary of the Smithsonian, I. Michael Heyman decided to cancel the original exhibit. Heyman's decision is excoriated by the editors of Hiroshima's Shadow who weave a section on the Smithsonian's exercise in censorship and mythology propagation into the book. "Throughout the Cold War," declare Lifschultz and Bird, "Americans routinely mocked the crude Stalinist revisions of history in which images of Trotsky or Bukharin, among others, could be removed from museums, books, and even photos where they had stood beside Lenin. Once done, a little historical cleansing could be followed by 'new originals' from which the offending figures had been made to disappear. The censorship at the Smithsonian entered boldly and without shame into this ignominious intellectual terrain." (xxxiv)

THE FIRST SECTION OF Hiroshima's Shadow examines the motives of those determined to use the bomb, and looks at the opposition to its use expressed before the atomic attacks by Eisenhower and Leahy, and in the months and years following by Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Thomas, and many others. Independent writers and intellectuals, long ignored on the question of the atom bomb, can be read in these pages: Albert Camus, Dwight Macdonald, Lewis Mumford, Norman Cousins, Mary McCarthy, A. J. Muste, among others. Indeed, one of the most appealing aspects of this book is the way in which the editors have compiled writings by those who went on record in the immediate aftermath of August 1945 in courageous opposition to the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan. Some of them even gleaned the operation of the propaganda machine which created the "common wisdom" of the bombs' military necessity still believed by many people today. In a perspicacious article for the September 1945 issue of politics, a mere month following the bombings, Dwight Macdonald wrote, "... the Bomb produced two widespread and, from the standpoint of the Authorities, undesirable emotional reactions in this country: a feeling of guilt at 'our' having done this to 'them' and anxiety lest some future 'they' do this to 'us'... The Authorities have therefore made valiant attempts to reduce the thing to a human context, where such concepts as Justice, Reason, Progress could be employed. Such moral defenses are offered as: the war was shortened and many lives, Japanese as well as American, saved, etc.... The flimsiness of these justifications is apparent: any atrocious action, absolutely any one, could be excused on such grounds." (p. 264-5)

Another voice heard from is Mary McCarthy's. In a withering critique of John Hersey's famous 1946 New Yorker piece on the atom bomb, McCarthy declared, "...what it (the Hersey piece) did was to minimize the atom bomb by treating it as though it belonged to the familiar order of catastrophes -- fires, flood, earthquakes -- which we have always had with us... The interview with the survivors, is the classic technique for reporting such events -- it serves well enough to give some sense, slightly absurd but nonetheless correct, of the continuity of life. But with Hiroshima, where the continuity of life was, for the first time, put into question, and by man, the existence of any survivors is an irrelevancy; and the interview with the survivors is an insipid falsification of the truth of atomic warfare. To have done the atom bomb justice, Mr. Hersey would have had to interview the dead." (p. 303)

In the book's preface, Nobel Peace Prize-winning physicist Joseph Rotblat describes arriving at the decision to leave the Manhattan Project after learning that Germany could not possibly develop an atom bomb before the end of the war. He also describes a meeting with Manhattan Project director General Leslie Groves, who startled Rotblat when he asserted that the actual purpose for building the bomb was not to have a stick with which to threaten Germany, but rather to subdue the Soviets. This assertion later led Rotblat and many others to wonder whether the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not only the final act of World War II, but the opening act of the Cold War as well.

THE EDITORS PROVIDE SPACE NOT ONLY FOR THE CRITICS OF THE BOMB but also its defenders. These include sledgehammer pundits such as Charles Krauthammer, who, in writing of the Enola Gay episode, says that we should "let the Japanese commemorate the catastrophe they brought on themselves." (387) Washington Post commentator Jonathan Yardley warns against the Smithsonian Institute's "moral smugness" and vaguely intones "you can assemble all the facts on earth, but you can't make people interpret them for what they are." (397) Paul Fussel, a gifted English professor and ex-front-line combatant, endorses the slogan "thank god for the atomic bomb" while noting that Truman was "as close to a genuine egalitarian as anyone we've seen in high office for a long time. He's the only President in my lifetime who ever had experience in a small unit of ground troops whose mission it was to kill people." (221) The pro-bomb camp, it turns out, contains a variety of voices; Fussel's nostalgia for a different brand of Democratic Party elite is different from Krauthammer's reflexive war-drumming. An even wider range of ideological positions is represented on the side of the critics: Lifschultz and Bird have recovered an anti-bomb editorial from the paleo-right-wing Human Events and placed it alongside the observations of Mahatma Gandhi and Norman Thomas. As the editors put it, "the usual distinctions of left and right on economic and social issues were not reliable guides which could accurately predict what people thought about Hiroshima."

Other contributors to the volume include Gar Alperovitz, Barton Bernstein, Wilfred Burchett, John Dower, Albert Einstein, William Lanouette, Kenzaburo Oe, John Rawls, Bertrand Russell, Murray Sayle, Martin Sherwin, and Henry Stimson. A substantial section of the book contains memoirs of a few survivors. These memoirs underscore the enduring reality that it was civilians, not military objectives, who were then, and remain, the prime target of nuclear weapons. Hiroshima's Shadow concludes with a comprehensive set of key historical documents, including a July 17 Petition of 155 Manhattan Project scientists who appealed to Truman not to use an atomic weapon against Japan. It is published here for the first time, with the names of all signatories.

Hiroshima's Shadow is all too topical in 1998, at a time of threatened biological warfare, continued nuclear build-up and proliferation, and, as the Smithsonian debacle shows, the ongoing need to protect the democratic right of free inquiry. In its challenge of official orthodoxy, this is a seminal work.

Contents of No. 25