What follows are three relatively short extracts from Dr. Peter Kuznick’s article
“The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative,” published in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 3, 2007. Dr. Kuznick is a professor of history at American University.
Inflated Casualty Estimates for U.S. Invasion of Japan:
This victor’s narrative privileges possible American deaths over actual Japanese ones. As critics of the bombing have become more vocal in recent years, projected American casualty estimates have grown apace--from the War Department’s 1945 prediction of 46,000 dead to Truman’s 1955 insistence that General George Marshall feared losing a half million American lives to Stimson’s 1947 claim of over 1,000,000 casualties to George H.W. Bush’s 1991 defense of Truman’s “tough calculating decision, [which] spared millions of American lives,” to the 1995 estimate of a crew member on Bock’s Car, the plane that bombed Nagasaki, who asserted that the bombing saved six million lives--one million Americans and five million Japanese. (p. 2)
Innumerable scholars have debunked the “half a million” myth, and we know from internal War Department memos that senior military planners knew this estimate was baseless and implausible. But, as we can see, this hasn’t stopped the myth from not only being spread but from being padded. There were several reasonable versions of surrender terms that would have ended the war without an invasion, but Truman rejected every one of them, even after he learned, several weeks before Hiroshima, that the emperor wanted to end the war and that he hoped the Soviets would broker a peace deal.
The Nuking of Hiroshima Produced Limited Military Casualties Because the Bomb Was Aimed at the Civilian Part of the City:
American strategic planners targeted the civilian part of the city, maximizing the bomb’s destructive power and civilian deaths. It produced limited military casualties. Admiral William Leahy angrily told an interviewer in 1949 that although Truman told him they would “only … hit military objectives …. they went ahead and killed as many women and children as they could, which was just what they wanted all the time.” (p. 2)
Of course, when Truman announced the nuking of Hiroshima, he not only said that Hiroshima was “a military base” but that it had been chosen “because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” It is possible that Truman did not know this was an obscene lie; he may have been merely repeating what he had been told by his military advisers and/or by Byrnes. Over 100,000 civilians were killed at Hiroshima, most of them women and children.
The Air Force Association and the American Legion Demanded that All Photos of Hiroshima Victims Be Removed from the 1995
Enola Gay Exhibit:
The Smithsonian’s ill-fated 1995 Enola Gay exhibit was doomed when Air Force Association and American Legion critics demanded the elimination of photos of Japanese bombing victims, particularly women and children, and insisted on removal of the charred lunch box containing carbonized rice and peas that belonged to a seventh-grade schoolgirl who disappeared in the bombing. Resisting efforts to humanize or personalize the Japanese, they objected strenuously to inclusion of photos or artifacts that would place human faces on the bombs’ victims and recall their individual suffering. (p. 3)
