[Nic Name]

Pearl Harbor, Internment, and Hiroshima: Historical Lessons

In later years, Truman was fond of citing the "fact" that had the U.S. not dropped the atomic bomb, "half a million" American troops would have died in the planned land invasion of Japan. This was the purest fabrication. The truth is that the Joint War Plans Committee estimated on June l0, 1945, that 40,000 Americans would be killed in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, not "half a million." Moreover, by the end of June, American military planners had concluded that Japan had already lost the war: Its cities were devastated, its people were demoralized, and its soldiers no longer had the capacity or will to fight. Japan had even made indirect overtures to the U.S. to discuss the possibility of surrender-rebuffed by Truman, who demanded "unconditional surrender." A top-secret report prepared for the Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting at Potsdam argued:

We believe that a considerable portion of the Japanese population now consider absolute military defeat to be probable. The increasing effects of sea blockade and cumulative devastation wrought by strategic bombing, which has already rendered millions homeless and has destroyed from 25 percent to 50 percent of the built-up areas of Japan's most important cities, should make this realization increasingly general. An entry of the Soviet Union into the war would finally convince the Japanese for the inevitability of complete defeat.

The report suggested that the U.S. should offer Japan "a conditional surrender." Admiral William Leahy, who believed that an invasion of Japan was unnecessary, also advised Truman to accept a Japanese surrender that would allow them to retain the emperor. Many concur that Japan only needed the facesaving gesture of keeping the emperor in place to lay down its arms. By July, the emperor had already indicated that he was interested in suing for peace. "It is my opinion," wrote Leahy a few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender."' In the end, following Japan's surrender days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. did precisely what Leahy had earlier recommended-it allowed Japan to retain the emperor.