Truman’s impossible atomic calculus

Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War, James M. Scott, W.W. Norton & Company, £32

‘My God, what have we done?’ wrote Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the B-29 Superfortress, Enola Gay, after he had dropped Little Boy over Hiroshima’s clear blue sky on 6 August 1945. The immediate answer to that question was too horrendous to even contemplate, but in Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War, James M. Scott does not hold back as he provides the reader with a pure and compelling vision of hell.

The infamous mushroom cloud, synonymous with the worst excesses of 20th-century warfare, concealed temperatures of 7,200 degrees at ground level, meaning that rescuers trawling through the charred remains saw things that would haunt them for the rest of their lives, including a skull with the victim’s glasses melted inside the eye cavity. At a local hospital, where bloodthirsty flies feasted on open wounds and laid their eggs in the rotting flesh, a patient watched in horror as a corpse was removed from its maggot-infested bed. ‘The nurses brushed the maggots off’, he recalled, ‘clearing the space for the next patient.’ A survivor, meanwhile, his body on fire, remembered making a dash for the nearest body of water, only to find that it was choked with bodies. ‘I had to push them aside with my hands to find space enough to take water into my cupped hands.’

Although such graphic descriptions will strike some as gratuitous, they go to the very heart of the matter: Was the use of the atomic bomb by the Americans at Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified? Given the apocalyptic scenes and devastating loss of life, some will always find it impossible to defend US actions. Even that staunch soldier and patriot, President Eisenhower, said that he ‘disliked seeing the United States take the lead in introducing into war something as horrible and destructive as this new weapon’. By contrast, President Truman – who took the fateful decision after only a few months in office – remained convinced for the rest of his life that he had helped save thousands of American lives.

Having written extensively about the war in Asia, Scott is impressive in describing the impact the conflict had on the benighted Japanese people. When the Americans unleashed their urban firebombing raids, the Japanese had to endure unimaginable hardships. To survive, everything was rationed, families had to wait for hours to be fed and, as one kimono-maker recalled, ‘even a tiny mackerel had to be divided among ten families’. Moreover, the death and destruction wrought by these raids heralded the emergence of a new dystopian reality for humanity. A conventional bombing attack of Tokyo on 10 March had sent temperatures soaring, leaving one journalist to note how ‘some of the bodies, reduced to ashes, were simply scattering like sand’.

But the book offers more than a catalogue of bloodshed and destruction. The pen portraits are sharp and incisive. Emperor Hirohito was weak, easily swayed by men in uniform, and ‘better suited to a library than a battlefield’. Although Truman was derided as ‘the little man from Missouri’ by Ivy League snobs – one of whom remarked that Truman’s White House had the distinct ‘odour of 10 cents cigars’ – most ordinary Americans admired their president. ‘All he wants to do is serve his God and his people,’ said one Washington taxi driver. Compared to Roosevelt, his patrician predecessor, Truman suffered from imposter syndrome, though the self-doubt concealed a flash of steel. At Yalta, Truman was adamant that the Soviets should live up to their promises regarding Poland and he did not mince his words with the Soviet ambassador, who complained that nobody had ever talked to him like that before. ‘Carry out your agreements’, Truman snapped back, ‘and you won’t be talked to like that.’

Although Scott does an admirable job of carving out the different personalities, there is at times too much biographical detail on show. It takes four chapters for Roosevelt to die before he really gets into the meat of the story, and it is not clear whether we really need to know chapter and verse on Truman’s long and tortuous courtship of Bess Wallace in a book that is supposed to be about war in the Pacific.

That quibble aside, once he gets going, the author’s diligent research is matched only by the style and panache with which he tells the story. Among the wealth of government reports, diary entries and interviews, two points stand out above all others. First, the Americans’ committed and forensic approach to defending their national interest was nothing short of remarkable. The Manhattan Project cost more than $2 billion, with more than 600,000 people involved in developing the bomb. Deciding which Japanese cities to target was the result of long and painstaking research, with a variety of committees poring over the data before reporting their findings back to the president. Truman looked at all the options, including a full invasion, more fire-bombing, a blockade, and a combination of all three options. He refused to make a decision until he had ‘all the facts’ and, as the author’s almost hour-by-hour account demonstrates, this was not a decision he took lightly. Truman’s biggest concern was the human cost behind an invasion, and his main priority turned on saving American lives. As his countrymen knew only too well, the enemy’s kamikaze attacks could be deadly. ‘They would come in at you in such numbers and so low’, recalled one pilot, ‘that you could see the expressions on the faces of the pilots.’

Second, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Japan’s fatal mixture of arrogance and obduracy led to her own downfall. After the audacity of the attack on Pearl Harbor they assumed that democracy would hamper the US, as voters would not tolerate a long and costly war. Later, they had an overinflated faith in the power of their kamikaze attacks, believing that they would sink a quarter of US forces at sea, destroy another quarter on the beaches, while the rest would be annihilated in the subsequent land battle. Some, like Ambassador Joseph Grew, predicted how this would end:

‘The Japanese will not crack… even when the eventual defeat stares them in the face… they will pull in their belts another notch, reduce their rations from a bowl to a half bowl of rice, and fight to the bitter end.’ 

One such example was the war minister Korechika Anami, who ended up committing seppuku, which involved sitting on his knees, slicing open his abdomen with a dagger and then running the blade across his neck. But before meeting that grisly end, he did everything in his power to continue the war. After Hiroshima, the six-man war cabinet, which included Anami, discussed whether it would be possible to surrender but with certain conditions attached. Astonishingly, when news of Nagasaki reached them, the council remained evenly divided, and it took Hirohito’s unprecedented intervention to break the stalemate.

The question of whether American actions were justified will never be settled. In outlining the different perspectives, the author of this fine work rightly dismisses the idea that the Americans were merely trying to frighten the Soviets with their power; he emphasises the ruinous impact the bombs had on Japan and neighbouring countries across Asia, yet also highlights the aforementioned Japanese obduracy, even when faced with the prospect of total annihilation. To his credit, Scott does not come down conclusively on one side of the overall debate, but sets out the arguments lucidly and allows readers to make up their own minds. In the final analysis, when asked about her son’s actions, Truman’s 92-year-old mother told reporters: ‘I’m proud of Harry, everyone should be proud of Harry.’ Although not everyone will concur with that assessment, many right-minded people will reflect that, despite the unspeakable horrors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the alternative of a prolonged war costing even more lives would have been significantly worse.