False equivalence enabling apologetics for treason

As a southerner I disdain the southern tendency toward entitlement, victimhood, and pettiness, and it’s ever been thus. Look at the war monuments thing during the shutdown – reject all attempts to avoid a big fight, but complain bitterly about the negative and very foreseeable consequences that they bring on themselves and could end at any second.

I agree with SamChevre. How can those of us who don’t accept the evil of the Taliban or Saddam Hussain as a justification for war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq be complacent with the idea that the evil of slavery justified Sherman’s march?

What’s gross about Benton’s remark is that he makes the moral equivalence while putting his complaints about Sherman’s march in purely monetary terms.

Were Sherman’s tactics worse than those of other generals in the Civil War?

After all, Lee sold US soldiers and Northern civilians into slavery.

Agree with Herschel. Sherman (and other Union generals in e.g. the Shenandoah Valley) seized food, destroyed infrastructure, and burned supplies that they felt would go to the Confederate Army, but to my knowledge there was no killing of civilians whatsoever by Union armies, including by Sherman.

On the other hand, local populations lynched slaves who fled plantations to join or follow the Union Army. Seriously, this is offensive false equivalence. While the humanitarian argument for Sherman’s campaign (and the war in general) “sound” like bullshit rationalizations for misguided aggressive wars as we’ve heard in Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s one key empirical difference. The Civil War **actually was** fought and won to secure humanitarian aims.

Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel by C. Vann Woodward (1938, reissued 1973) is one hell of a good book.

Were Sherman’s tactics worse than those of other generals in the Civil War?

Probably (so far as I know only he and Sheridan attached civilians), but his real reputation as a war criminal comes from his later command of the Army against the Indians.

Local populations lynched hundreds of white Union supporters in Texas (800, as I recall).

You won’t find a more devoted anti-confederate than me, but even I couldn’t condone praise for Sherman – he was an inhuman monster, and his name should down beside those like Hitler and Pol Pot. Not just for his war crimes in the Civil War, but for what he did to thousands of Native American children. He was an embarrassment to his country, and not worthy of the colors he fought under.

Watson did oppose U.S. entry into WWI. On race he was a nasty piece of goods.

Since no one seems to want to talk about Tom Watson, and instead everyone prefers to recycle nonsense about Sherman, permit me:

Sherman did not attack civilians. He attacked civilian property. He destroyed the civilian infrastructure that supported the Southern military machine. And he did it, as best he could, without putting his own men’s lives in danger – that is, he saved the lives of Northern soldiers and Southern soldiers both. He really did believe that war is all hell, and he tried to do as little fighting as possible, so as to kill as few soldiers as he could.

Before Sherman, Union generals thought that the way to conquer the Confederacy was to seize and hold territory. That meant fighting along long and vulnerable supply lines, linking up armies along fronts, consolidating and pacifying the territory behind the lines. It was slow and static. It allowed the Confederate armies to stay out of reach of the Union fronts and to move around at will. It meant that the Confederate generals could choose when and where to fight. It was a recipe for interminable warfare, and interminable warfare meant that the South would win. Why? Because the South, being partially occupied, could not quit – it had to fight until it was beaten. But the North could give up at any time – and that was what the South was counting on. The South could never defeat the North militarily but if it did not give up, then Northerners would get tired of the war and the South would win. Or so it thought.

Sherman changed all that. He understood that holding territory was not necessary. Supply lines weren’t necessary. Pacifying the countryside wasn’t necessary. All you had to do was move through the South destroying the infrastructure that supported the war: railroads, farms, warehouses, docks, factories, and most important – slave labor. Once the slaves were freed they would never return and southern fields could not be harvested.

This is not to denigrate Grant’s importance. But Grant was a butcher. He put his armies up against the Confederates and lost 5,000 men, and then he did it again the next day, and the next. Before Grant, if you fought one day a month you were doing your job. Grant fought every day he could, and because the Union had more men and more materiel he could fight day after day until the Confederates were bled white. In the Wilderness Campaign of May-June 1864, Grant lost 55,000 of 120,000 men. The Confederates lost 33,000 of 65,000 – and it was a Union victory.

Sherman’s tactics were merciful – his soldiers pillaged and rampaged, and they lived. Grant’s fought and died.

And why the last Confederate general who faced him served as one of his pallbearers.

Ending slavery was nevertheless worthwhile.

“he re-invigorated the tactics of total war and committed massive war crimes”

A bit of detail would be nice. Burning supplies intended for the front isn’t a war crime. Neither is destroying infrastructure, even if it has a dual use. If I blow up a bridge to stop enemy tanks from crossing it, it’s legal, even if the bridge was also used by civilians.

Now, enslaving enemy POWs? That’s a war crime.

In fact, Lee was a worse “butcher” of his own troops

Good point, and I’d add “especially since he did so pointlessly” – he kept fighting long after it was (or should have been) obvious that the South couldn’t win.

as long we’re complaining about Civil War calumnies…
Time to mention “Beast” Butler, whose terrible, unforgivable, atrocious crime was (while military governor of New Orleans) to threaten to put civilians in jail overnight if they shouted abuse at Union soldiers.

” he kept fighting long after it was (or should have been) obvious that the South couldn’t win. “

Which just makes him all the more romantic…

By “Grant was a butcher” I meant that Grant consciously fought a war of attrition whose goal was to kill as many Confederate soldiers as he could, even if that meant losing as many or more of his own men to do it.

“Beast” Butler, whose terrible, unforgivable, atrocious crime was (while military governor of New Orleans) to threaten to put civilians in jail overnight if they shouted abuse at Union soldiers.

Well, that wasn’t quite it–there was a sexual element:

“As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.”

Not that he was wrong

Grant consciously fought a war of attrition whose goal was to kill as many Confederate soldiers as he could, even if that meant losing as many or more of his own men to do it

No, that was never Grant’s plan. He repeatedly tried to beat Lee by manouver–he wasn’t trying for a win by attrition–it’s just that he was willing to accept a win by attrition if all else failed.

it doesn’t follow that leftists have to defend the record of General Sherman? Unless, of course, it’s worth defending

Let’s say I know nothing about General Sherman. Who, on this thread, is misleading me?

efending the principle that the destruction of property intended, at least in part, to support the enemy military

The “at least in part” is doing an awful lot of work. (I think what Sherman did was in the same class as the WWII bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, and I think those were war crimes; the military goals were trivial relative to the damage to purely civilian concerns.)

(Can I just note how amusing it is to compare this discussion to discussions of Israeli destruction of houses and property of those who actively attack them?)

I think what Sherman did was in the same class as the WWII bombings of Tokyo and Dresden

Jesus fucking christ. Sherman burned tens of thousands of people to death? What the fuck are you talking about?

The March to the Sea was devastating to Georgia and the Confederacy. Sherman himself estimated that the campaign had inflicted $100 million (about $1.4 billion in 2010 dollars)[17] in destruction, about one fifth of which “inured to our advantage” while the “remainder is simple waste and destruction.”[16] The Army wrecked 300 miles (480 km) of railroad and numerous bridges and miles of telegraph lines. It seized 5,000 horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle. It confiscated 9.5 million pounds of corn and 10.5 million pounds of fodder, and destroyed uncounted cotton gins and mills.[18] Military historians Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones cited the significant damage wrought to railroads and Southern logistics in the campaign and stated that “Sherman’s raid succeeded in ‘knocking the Confederate war effort to pieces’.”

Not even in the same fucking ballpark, as Jules Winnfield would put it. Compare it to what Louis XIV did to the Palatinate or Marlborough to Bavaria.

Andersonville didn’t have a lot to do with freeing slaves. Not that Sherman was running it. But Union jingoism’s pretty facile, considering. And Sherman’s record with the indigenous does undercut his liberator of the oppressed pr.

Andersonville didn’t have a lot to do with freeing slaves. Not that Sherman was running it. But Union jingoism’s pretty facile, considering.

Um…you do realize that Andersonville was a prison run by the Confederates, right?

I don’t think cheerleading any war, even the ones you do support (currently or historically) is proper, and I admit that it may be a touch childish of me, but

But Union jingoism’s pretty facile, considering.

jingoism is my response when I run into someone making mealy mouthed excuses for those noble sons of the south fighting for the right to own people. I seem to be some sort of unreconstructed abolitionist Yankee, and of my many failings that’s not one I’m remotely embarrassed about. There’s a slice of the American citizenry that can’t reconcile themselves with the idea that their possibly hypothetical great-great- or great-great-great grandfathers fought a bloody war for a worthless cause, and one of the results is a lot of milquetoast “on the one hand on the other hand” nonsense (in public discourse and in our schools) and the celebration of brave generals who decided to fight against the nation that gave them their commission. Some of my great-great-great-grandparents were bad people, in my estimation, and just as it wouldn’t be proper to attack me for their sins it wouldn’t be proper for me to defend them against a fair accounting, either.

But that doesn’t mean that one also has to defend Bomber Harris.

All right, since you won’t answer the other question, who in the thread has Sherman right?

With regards to my previous comment, this article would provide one of the many reasons. (Note both Sherman and Sheridan in the story? There’s a reason they are still hated.)

I live in Annapolis, MD, where a Beaux-Artish statue of Justice Taney sits, overlooking the lovely State House grounds. Once in a while someone suggests removing it. On the other side of the State House is an ugly statue of a truly great man, Thurgood Marshall. But I don’t like the idea of pretending, not only that we were never ruled by racist villains, but that we never celebrated the racist villains. That is, I like being reminded, as I look down at the Annapolis Harbor, that the charming city was a major slave-trading port, and that this state produced Taney as well as Marshall. The odious monuments of past eras can be valuable Denkmaeler for the present.

the attacks on places like Dresden and Hamburg, or Tokyo, Hiroshima and Naasaki, were in retaliation for the attacks on Coventry and Rotterdam and Nanking

That the commission of some war crimes was in retaliation for others obviously doesn’t excuse them or decriminalize them. But beyond that, the equivalence you suggest here is hogwash. The German bombing of Coventry and of Rotterdam did not have as their principal objective to kill large numbers of non-combatants. (Obviously Germany did a lot of killing of non-combatants in other areas.) The Rotterdam bombing was in support of the German army’s attempt to capture the strategically important industrial port city of Rotterdam, not to kill all the people in Rotterdam. The death count on the ground was measured in hundreds, not tens of thousands. Coventry was an important industrial center of war production, and again, the death count was in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands. The “rape of Nanking” was certainly a huge crime against the people there, but I have to wonder about a retaliation that came a full eight years after the fact. None of this is to excuse or condone the actual crimes committed by the Axis powers, but in the matter of bombing civilian populations, the Allied air-raids were disproportionately horrifying, and were among the greatest crimes in history.

I have yet to see anyone in this thread name a specific war crime committed by General Sherman in the Georgia campaign.

As Sherman, who thought about this stuff quite a bit remarked, war is itself a crime. And in the case of both the Southerners and Native Americans of the Plains he considered that he was reacting to criminals who were making war on the United States. Being a descendant of an ancestor who had his father and mother and most of his siblings massacred in north Texas in 1866 by the Commanche (a story that makes the movie “the Searchers” particularly troubling for me), I perhaps understand Sherman’s logical, if cruel solution to the problem of a white migration into the Native American territories and Native resistance to that migration. The Commanche tried their best to defend their territories with their own Shermanesque terror tactics and strategy, but in end their were to just many white fools and guns, and not enough buffalo.

As for the South, I must admit I am fond of the sentiments in “Marching through Georgia’s” closing verses:

“Sherman’s dashing Yankee boys will never reach the coast!”
So the saucy rebels said and ’twas a handsome boast
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the Host
While we were marching through Georgia.

Verse 5
So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train,
Sixty miles in latitude, three hundred to the main;
Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain
While we were marching through Georgia.”

And speaking of Native Americans, most of Georgia was stolen from the Cherokee and Creek 40 years before. Frankly, W. T. Sherman looks like a saint next to Andy Jackson.

49- My only excuse is writing in a moving truck’s passenger seat on someone else’s i5. I wasn’t myself. Of course I wasn’t.
51-Having completely disqualified myself from the discussion(see above) I just don’t know what to tell you. There’s nobility all over the place, sometimes. Both sides of awful contests. Something beyond nobility too. If I thought the Civil War was fought about slavery primarily and specifically and entirely, I’d agree with something like your attitude, but I don’t think it was. But then for a few minutes today, don’t ask me why, I sincerely thought Andersonville was a Union prison.

sorry for screwing up the formatting

59: There’s something particularly special about reading an attempt to minimise and excuse mass killings of civilians by the Nazis that’s written by someone called Herschel.

Even destroying civilian private property and causing civilian suffering thereby isn’t necessarily a war crime.

Correct; however, destroying civilian private property with the intent to cause civilian suffering and no military objective beyond that is generally considered a war crime.

And even by “destroying civilian property if the civilians have military relatives is OK” standards, the treatment of the Roswell Women was fairly problematic.

“The rhetoric around Sherman as history’s greatest monster implies that Confederate property was more important than African American lives and freedom.”

Yeah, this pretty much nailed it.

however, destroying civilian private property with the intent to cause civilian suffering and no military objective beyond that is generally considered a war crime.

Sherman’s Field Order 120 has quite a lot in it aimed at preventing unnecessary hardship to the civilian population. Things like “In all foraging, of whatever kind, the parties engaged will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and may, where the officer in command thinks proper, give written certificates of the facts, but no receipts, and they will endeavor to leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance” don’t imply that the intention was to cause suffering to the civilian population simply for the sake of it.

It did, however, also allow army commanders to destroy things like cotton mills in areas where they had met resistance. This sort of retaliation against the civilian population would (probably) qualify as a war crime. (“Probably” because it’s supposed to be an antiguerrilla measure and I’m not sure if burning the house of a known guerrilla is OK or not. He is, after all, a combatant.)

70: “You’re a badly-dressed, incompetent idiot. But that’s not meant to insult you” is still insulting. Making excuses for the killing of civilians is still making excuses for the killing of civilians, even if you then say that isn’t what you’re trying to do.

“You’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company”

the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were different
– ‘exceptional’, you might say.

scare the hell out of the Japanese government and – perhaps especially – the Soviets

73: 70: “You’re a badly-dressed, incompetent idiot. But that’s not meant to insult you” is still insulting. Making excuses for the killing of civilians is still making excuses for the killing of civilians, even if you then say that isn’t what you’re trying to do.

If I had been making excuses for the killing of civilians, perhaps your comments would be apt. I was taking exception to an argument that the Allied bombing campaigns targeting large population centers were appropriate retaliations for the German bombing of Coventry and Rotterdam. War is hell, and people get killed in them, but not all bombing of cities is the same kind of hell. Much as the Nazis killed a whole lot of people just because they wanted them dead, the civilians killed in the bombing of Rotterdam and Coventry were not the point of the operations, unlike the Allied bombing of cities in Germany and Japan, the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible. Let the Nazis and their enablers stand convicted of the monstrous crimes they committed. But letting the Allies off the hook for their own monstrous crimes because of Rotterdam and Coventry is not acceptable.

There. Get it?

#81 – the purpose was not to “kill as many civilians as possible.” The purpose was to end the war as quickly as possible with as few Allied losses as possible. Get it?

Oh, and are you offended by my use of “get it,” which implies that you’re a fool or a knave or both? You are, aren’t you? So don’t say it to us. We’re not fools and knaves and we don’t need to be schooled by you.

Something worth reading on Allied bombing in WWII is this, which I recommend to you and everyone else who may still be here:

http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/sites/core/files/pages/Paul%20Fussel-Thank%20God%20for%20the%20Atom%20Bomb-August%201981.pdf

Unfortunately I’ve forgotten how to search (via google or some other engine) for one’s past comments on CT (I believe Substance McGravitas once mentioned how to do that), but in a thread of quite some ago I had occasion to quote Richard Evans to the effect that there is at least a solid (if not completely knock-down) argument to be made that the Allied bombings of German cities continued well after any justification of military necessity could have been convincing.

As for the fire-bombing of Japanese cities, Robert McNamara basically said in the movie ‘The Fog of War’ (and others have mentioned this here before) that those bombings were war crimes, and that those involved in ordering them could have been put on trial had the U.S. lost.

Re the link at 83: Paul Fussell was a WW2 infantryman, wounded in the war, so he’s going to have a particular view of the atomic bomb decision. I would no more take Fussell as the final word on this whole subject than I would take the completely opposite view of Nicholson Baker (in ‘Human Smoke’).

LFC, I don’t have an Evans quote at hand, but you are correct. Max Hastings in Bomber Command, 336:

Harris “continued remorselessly with his personal programme for the leveling of Germany’s cities until the very end. In the first four months of 1945, 181,000 tons of bombs were delivered to Germany, a fifth of the tonnage dropped throughout the entire war.”

This while disregarding his orders and frustrating the “Oil Plan” aimed at German industrial targets … because, see, Harris had a list of German cities, and it was important to cross them all off.

A minor obsession of mine, LFC. Like German war guilt!

83: #81 – the purpose was not to “kill as many civilians as possible.” The purpose was to end the war as quickly as possible with as few Allied losses as possible. Get it?

The goal may have been to end the war quickly with few Allied losses, but the immediate object of the raids was to kill as many civilians as possible, supposedly in pursuit of that goal. I seem to recall some saying involving “ends” and “means” and “justify”. Perhaps you have your own version.

Oh, and are you offended by my use of “get it,” which implies that you’re a fool or a knave or both? You are, aren’t you? So don’t say it to us. We’re not fools and knaves and we don’t need to be schooled by you.

No, I’m not offended by your use of “get it”, as you are free to say whatever you like and I’m not a delicate flower. I also didn’t say it to you, so I don’t understand where your “us” comes from. My use of “get it?” arose from frustration at what seems to me to be obdurate point avoidance, and the ridiculous (and, indeed, offensive) suggestion that I (someone named Herschel!) was making excuses for the Nazis. I’d say that “get it?” is pretty mild stuff compared to that. I had no idea it would wound anyone’s tender feelings. If I have inadvertently given offense to anyone, please accept my apology.

That General Sherman may have been at least somewhat racist, in a period when a large proportion of the world’s academics were racist? Perish the thought!

Also, the justification presented for the fire-bombing of Japanese cities was that some factories had dispersed their machinery and operations to their employee’s homes. I happen to think that the cities were fire-bombed because they took fire easily and burned well, but that isn’t what a lawyer for the Allied defense would bring up in the fantasy war-crimes trials that are being imagined here. (For no good reason I’ve always found it especially disturbing that meticulous replicas of German and Japanese homes were built on a military reservation in the American Southwest, on which the effects of various varieties of incendiaries were tested.)

And the atomic bomb justification always presented, at the time and now, is that they were dropped in the effort to avoid an invasion of the Japanese home islands, which would have resulted in an enormous loss of Allied life, at least.

Long ago I read the memoirs of a Japanese diplomat (sorry, can’t remember the author’s name, but in the film of the USS Missouri’s surrender ceremony, he is the young man who leans forward to blot the signature of Foreign Minister Shigemitsu). His belief was that the atomic bomb left the military establishment relatively unfazed; it was so obviously new that the Allies couldn’t have many of them, and when the second bomb was dropped, why that meant a third such strike was even less likely.

What did get the generals’ attention was the entry of the Soviet Union into the war — the possibility that it might had apparently been giving them nightmares ever since Zhukov’s victory at Khalkhin Gol. The third factor that tipped the balance toward surrnder, in the estimation of the diplomat, was the emperor’s consent.

johne@93
What did get the generals’ attention was the entry of the Soviet Union into the war

On that, see these posts and the comment threads:

http://howlatpluto.blogspot.com/2013/06/what-caused-japan-to-surrender-in-1945.html

http://ipeatunc.blogspot.com/2013/06/atomic-bombs-and-audiences.html

“Just saw that follow up on your linked post, LFC. Your commenter finds “A good bit of evidence the first bomb was dropped to signal to the Soviets””

This run down of the lit disagrees with that claim now as well

http://www.theamericanpresident.us/images/truman_bomb.pdf

Just re-checked and yes, it is on page 12 of the pdf.

LFC, agree entirely re: Kort. For the sheer investment, redirecting some 88s from the Eastern Front is a ridiculously small payoff (particularly if we don’t ask the Red Army how they felt about it).

The “oil campaign” was a good idea, but as noted upthread, Harris & others were more devoted to burning down cities, for various reasons, not all of them entirely psychopathic.

Ronan – that run-down reads like a polemic rather than a judicious literature survey.

Anderson – I’m sure you’re right that the US were keen to use their new toy on some real human bodies, but the precept ‘ignore sunk costs’ is not exactly controversial, and one of the reasons for wanting to drop the bomb, an the second bomb, was pretty obviously to demonstrate their fearsome power, for all the usual standing reasons (scaring opponents into compliance, forcing them to expend resources on counteracting the threat, etc. And at this point, with Cold Warrior Truman at the helm and the distant WW2 clearly all over bar the shouting, the relevant opponent was obviously the USSR.

Skimming the doc reminded me that what I find most irritating about historians is their obsession with and exaggerated respect for the content of official documents. Obviously being able to rely on those would be very convenient, and going through musty old boxes in a cellar no doubt inclines one to expect hidden treasure, but that don’t make it so.

It’s hard to imagine a point at which one is going to be more guarded than when composing such documents – the idea that hypocrisy and the hiding of agendas don’t apply to official records and communications borders on the absurd. (And yes, obviously some are better than others in this regard, and my description is slightly caricatured for effect – but Chris Auld aside, I think most people can still get my point.)

I recall going on about some of the ways this kind of thing works in relation to the US diplomatic cables leak.

The attacks on Sherman are part of the rewriting of history that Confederate sympathizers gave us in the late 19th century. Someone needs to mount a defense of this hero. With Sherman in charge, it is doubtful the Southern aristocracy would have be reinstalled and Jim Crow would never have come to be.

And all this tsk-tsking from a country that obliterated Fallujah in the last 10 years.

“We did it to kill LOTS of people and scare the hell out of the Japanese government.”

Hmm. I was told at school that the main reason for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to demonstrate the cool new weapon to the Soviets. And this explanation still makes a lot of sense.

And come on , it’s not *that polemical*
Phrases like ‘the debate is over’ or ‘the revisionist argument lies in tattters’ might be a bit much, but Kort deals extensively with the literature, and unless he’s willing to put his reputation at risk by completly misrepresenting it, I think he clearly has an argument worth dealing with without dismissing it because of ‘tone’ or irritation with historians

Mao: the defects of your schooling are a separate topic.

Back to the Allied air campaigns for a moment: more supportive of Kort’s view that the air war was v. important is Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, who argues it caused Hitler to divert resources from the ground war, esp on the Eastern front (and which Mearsheimer squabbles with in an endnote: Tragedy, p.439, n.47). I think some aspects of the air campaigns prob helped make the war shorter than it otherwise would have been, but that doesn’t justify the area bombing of cities, esp toward the end.

No, it’s not irrelevant, because, like I said in 112 it demonstrates that at least in some places the “revisionist” view has been, in fact, the only view from the beginning. Lends it some credence, y’know.

And I don’t think the work of historians (in the sense of who said what, or wrote in a cable) counts all that much in this case. People don’t need to declare their intentions, or even have clear intentions; events like this have their own logic. It’s just common sense, Occam’s razor.

The tone wouldn’t matter, but when there’s manifest bias, and one is supposed to rely on this author (who he?) for the accuracy of his reports and assessment of others’ claims of yet others’ errors, with no detail provided, that’s when I think you might want to think again about treating this as if it were a handy God’s-eye view summary of the current state of human knowledge, let alone the old actualité. I’d add that right at eth beginning there seems some confusion abot which propositions are under discussion and what their import is.

The main target is an Alperovitz – Kort goes on about his book having too many endnotes – swarming like flies to be swatted away – which provide a ‘veneer’ of scholarship. The main critic is a Maddox, and it’s impossible to assess the reported criticisms without taking the author’s word for it.

Given the obvious bias – even hostility – he manifests, I won’t do so. I did think it just about worth looking one step further down the chain of sources, but couldn’t find Maddox’s criticism (it’s on JSTOR,to which I’ve just discovered I’m entitled to free lifetime access but until the Oxford Alumni Office manages to flail itself into some semblance of activity- if it ever does – it costs $19). I did find another Alperovitz critic who sides with Maddox – http://www.mmisi.org/ir/23_02/shapiro.pdf – and he has a handful of criticisms (presumably his best shots) of which while some appear subtantiated, at least one was utterly without merit (re: the 2nd block quote on p32 as numbered).

And none of this really gets us very far, because obviously the topic is not Alperovitz but (I suppose) Truman. Shapiro even states (p31, 3rd full para) that he – and he thinks ‘perhaps’ Maddox – wasn’t trying to refute A., only discredit him. That comment was in relation to the outrageous suggestion that the orthodox position which sought to overturn the initial ‘revisionist’ one (see Kort; NB too that by now ‘revisionism’ as a label has a nasty taint to it in pop discourse) was heavily influenced by patriotism under Cold War conditions. (BTW I haven’t quoted Shapiro as it’s an image and OCRing or copying is too much effort for negligible benefit.)

So anyway, a couple of things I notice about this debate in general – one is that too often (i.e. more than never), objective fact is brought to bear on assessing the subjectve state of mind of Truman et al.; e.g. what hs been discovered about Japanese intentions well after the evets in question. The other is that little emphasis seems to be placed on the sheer enormity of the decision to use this new holocaust machine; that is something that can’t have been overlooked by Truman, and means that mere number crunching about expected casualty figures is not the whole story by a long chalk.

Three things – because that reminds me, and this goes back to bias embedded in official records – either S or K say that that revs’ hypothesis must be that after the fact, Truman fiddled the figures for projected (US) casualties in case of an invasion of Japan. Thus S/K claims that documents suggesting higher figures before the fact (because of ULTRA intercepts showing troop build up at the planned invasion site) show that Truman didn’t exaggerate them. But as we know from later examples of facts being fixed around policy, it’s entirely plausible that assessments were ramped up in anticipation and thus fiddled figures written into the official record. I have no idea how plausible this is, but these commens aren’t going to ettle the substative issue anyway so I put the point forward primarily as an illustration of the kind of thing I was referring to earlier.

actually, don’t NB too that by now ‘revisionism’ as a label has a nasty taint to it in pop discourse since the epithet was in use in this context well before it gained its pop connotation. But the fact that the ‘revisionist’ view among historians predates the orthodox one (accordig to K) is, pace Mao’s remarks, not entirely uninteresting.

Also, while I obviously think Mao has a point about the detail obscuring the big picture and the obvious logic of the situation, I wouldn’t bring Occam’s razor into it.

One more thing – K calls the revisionist account ‘frankly conspiratorial’ or rather K ‘frankly’ calls it ‘conspiratorial’. Which is a tinfoil coronation if ever I saw one – as if the hypothesised motives or machinations are any more ‘conspiratorial’ than geopolitical strategies in general.

One more thing – K calls the revisionist account ‘frankly conspiratorial’ or rather K ‘frankly’ calls it ‘conspiratorial’.

No. He says it about Alperovitz:

“While even many revisionist historians shied away from Alperovitz’s essentially conspiratorial thesis about he bombing of Japan, they borrowed some of his ideas to construct their own critiques of American policy during World War II and the early postwar period.”

jeff @ 105 –

indeed. and the conversational drift in this thread – from the question of Sherman’s activities during the Civil War, to the point that under Sherman’s command terrible crimes were later perpetrated against the Indians, to the comparison between Sherman and the bombardments of German and Japanese cities, and finally into an interesting and lengthy discussion of military crimes against civilians in WWII – is … interesting.

The thread drift is natural, and it’s understandable that many would be more interested in the turn it took, and there are too many folks on Crooked Timber from places other than the US (and I’m not enough of a regular reader to remember who’s are who) for me to just map my US-centric cultural observations onto the more diverse community here, but I’ve seen and participated in conversations like this among educated liberal Americans, who are sort of embarrassed by Sherman’s march through Georgia as the ne plus ultra of their general awkwardness around the topic of the Civil War. Too many people are unwilling to oppose the kind of Confederacy-ennobling that cloaks itself in the protection of starting every paragraph with “Of course slavery was terrible, but …” Mr. Benton up top doesn’t dislike Sherman because he was responsible for massacring Indians, ferchrissakes, he dislikes him because he burned his way through Georgia and helped ruin the South’s capacity to continue waging war.

Incidentally I just learned that while progressing from Atlanta to Savannah Sherman’s personal escort was the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment, a unit made up entirely of white Southerners who stayed loyal to the United States.

last bit is edit-dross, not an unfinished remark.

The long bit you quoted begins:

“The claim that after the war Truman and some of his advisors exaggerated casualty
projections of an invasion and final defeat of Japan––specifically that those projections reached 500,000 or more––for decades was one of the main pillars of the revisionist case. That pillar collapsed with the first thorough examination of the issue, “Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasions of Japan, 1945-1946: Planning and Policy Implications” by military historian D. M. Giangreco. Writing in The Journal of Military History, Giangreco explained that in military ..”

the paragraph you quoted then continues to show that those projections did reach 500,000, so Im not sure what you’re disputing here?

To the reply you made to Anderson’s ‘they had the bomb so had to use it’. It can be about more than one thing.
It can be *in part* about the Soviets,( but we have to define what that ‘about’ is), and it can be in part due to the bombs existence pressuring the Truman Admin to use it, but then it can also be *primarily* for the stated reason – to end the war

Anyway Ill leave it there for a bit

TW:
I tend to agree with Mao that (given that the war was clearly all over bar the shouting, as I said) even US casualties weren’t necessarily as much of an issue as one might fondly imagine. I mean it’s not as if there was going to be a big outcry about the US casualties that could have been prevented had Japan been nuked.

The war with Japan was NOT “all over bar the shouting”. In the ‘island-hopping’ campaign in the Pacific, Japanese soldiers fought v. fiercely and, very very often, to the death rather than surrender. U.S. casualties in such battles as Okinawa and Pelelieu (sp? sorry) were v. substantial; these were extremely bloody engagements. The whole Pacific war was conducted w an unparalleled ferocity on both sides: see the title alone of Dower’s prize-winning War without Mercy. Or just read Jones’ The Thin Red Line.

The Japanese defense of the home islands was going to be, if possible, even more to-the-last-man than that of the other islands. (That’s why Paul Fussell btw, linked by Bloix way upthread, said later “thank God for the a-bomb.” He thought it saved his life and those of his fellow soldiers. Again, this is separate from the question of moral justification: the a-bombings can’t be *justified* by ref to these considerations, but they might well be *explained* by them.) If an invasion of the home islands had ensued and resulted in high casualties, and IF it had come out that there were alternatives that might have averted that, it wd have caused an outcry. Anderson’s imaginary 1946 headline (see above @126) is to the point.

Without taking sides on all the intricacies here, I wd register strong disagreement w Mao’s statement that no one cared about soldiers’ lives. There was obvs more public tolerance for casualties in WW2 than the attitudes that came later, but to say casualties were of no importance in the calculations b/c no one cared about them is, I think, wrong.

If the Manhattan Project cost $2B in 1945$, that may equate to $25B in 2013.

I find it intriguing, the idea that the bombs were dropped to help Mr. Truman win the election. Never occurred to me, frankly. It still seems highly unlikely, but now I’m saddened by the realization that I’m obviously not anywhere near cynical enough.

In comparison to the bombing of the rest of Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not notable as moral exceptions. At that point we were getting pretty good at starting firestorms. (I’ll repeat an earlier borrowed contention that Hamburg and Dresden were accidents, in the sense that a firestorm was a always a desired result, but not one that could be reliably achieved. I’ll also stipulate that bombing of cities is a war crime: YNATKC: You’re Not Allowed To Kill Civilians.)

Japan was pretty badly beaten at that point. As it happens, we unleashed a deus ex machina, a technological WHAT THE FUCK, and it did the job pretty quickly. Perhaps it provided a necessary excuse. Or whatever. It’s difficult to generalize from individual events.

Some recent reporting from Hiroshima suggests that the death toll radiation was less than anticipated; as usual, nearly all the damage was done by the blast. The consensus on dirty bombs seems to be that adding radioactivity would be a waste of effort, though I still think it might be a lot of fun to fly a cropduster over a congested Los Angeles interchange, spraying the commuters with concentrated oscillococcinum.

This might be interesting re WW2:

http://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/irrc_859_maier.pdf

Hector St Clare:
I don’t particularly give two ****s how many American soldiers lives were saved by the atomic bombs. they were soldiers, in war soldiers die. cry me a river. none of that was worth violating the moral law by willfully killing civilians.

Virtually no one here, afaics, is disputing this. Anderson has said this repeatedly and again @138. And I said above @129:
this is separate from the question of moral justification: the a-bombings can’t be *justified* by ref to these considerations, but they might well be *explained* by them.

I know you’re a botanist or a biologist or some kind of scientist, but I assume you’re familiar w the distinction between MORAL and EXPLANATORY statements. If you’re not, you’ve got a problem.

On what the Potsdam Declaration said re Japan’s surrender:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#The_Potsdam_Declaration

Nb, among other things, that there was no mention in the declaration of the future position of the emperor. The US and UK had different views on it, so the declaration said nothing about it. (Or so a glance at the Wiki article indicates.)

“I certainy agree that It can be about more than one thing. Many – most – such decisions are. There were no doubt elements of vengeance, not ‘wasting’ sunk costs, expecting to secure unconditional surrender quickly and without US casualties, testing the thing on human bodies, pre-empting Soviet incursions into the region, and demonstrating complete and ruthless military dominance over the entire globe. ”

Well I think we probably agree more than disagree, and it’s just a matter of emphasis. Just to add though, when talking about ‘atomic diplomacy’ we need to aknowledge that dropping the bomb wouldnt only have *one*, easily predictable outcome on US/Soviet relations (and US global power). Namely that it would reinforce it, and cower the Soviets

Realistially it could have had any number of consequences, including encouraging the Soviets to develop a bomb themselves or undermining other wartime alliances. It also rests on the assumption that the Truman admin had a coherent, explicit policy towards the Soviets *at that time*, and that policy was going to be a purposely hostile stance. Afaik that wasnt neccessarily the case

So out of the three main areas (1) stopping the war with the least US casualities (2) scaring the Soviets (3) reinforcing US global power, it seems that number (1) still makes the most sense (and appears to be supported by most evidence) as the reasoning behind dropping the bomb.

There also needs to be an explanation behind 2 and 3, *how* did they want to influence the Soviets, *how* did they see this as reinforing US power. If 2 is specifically ‘preventing Soviet incurcions in the region’ then that certainly seems logical, but also appears (as a political aspiration) less important than ending the war early

Ronan, one of your reasons (1) is not like the others, and 2 and 3 are exactly the same thing. Nuclear strike is a geopolitical act, and minimizing the causalities is a different category. You could as well argue that they did it to save on fuel for the aircraft carriers.

Superpowers pursue their ambitions, they try to achieve their objectives, and within that frame they may care more, or care less, or not care at all about minimizing the casualties. But minimizing the casualties is not, by itself, a project; definitely not a project to be solved by a nuclear strike.

They could, for example avoid a whole bunch of US casualties by letting the Soviets finish up the Nazis – at the price of the Soviets owning Germany, France, Italy, etc. But that’s just not a serious imperial thinking, obviously.

“Superpowers pursue their ambitions, they try to achieve their objectives, and within that frame they may care more, or care less, or not care at all about minimizing the casualties. But minimizing the casualties is not, by itself, a project; definitely not a project to be solved by a nuclear strike.”

There were demobilization riots in Europe by this time, IIRC. Your blithe dismissal of US domestic political considerations really shows that you aren’t questioning the rosy picture that US students are spoon fed in school.

Mao, 1 is also like 2 and 3, ending the war quickly with the least damage to your ability to project power is also a ‘geopolitical act’. Saving your military from an extended war is certainly a ‘geopolitical act’, if we’re running with these terms

Mao @145
They could, for example avoid a whole bunch of US casualties by letting the Soviets finish up the Nazis – at the price of the Soviets owning Germany, France, Italy, etc. But that’s just not serious imperial thinking, obviously.

“Imperial” and “geopolitical” are not synonyms, or at least should not be used as such in this context.

Of the US, USSR, and Britain, Britain was the only one w a formal empire. And there were plenty of diplomatic tensions during the war stemming from Churchill’s commitment to holding onto the empire vs Roosevelt’s commitment (in principle, if not always practice) to decolonization. The main reason the tensions weren’t worse is that the main priority for both was winning the war and the differences tended to be subordinated to that goal.

The chess player, in attacking the opponent’s queen, doesn’t have in mind the checkmate position that will occur 10 moves later. What do you do to enemies? Attack, harry, frustrate, threaten, etc. You don’t need a fully worked out plan. As anti-conspiratorialists are always pointing out, adopting grandiose, Byzantine strategies too firmly, too far in advance is unlikely to work. Of course the anti-CTists seemingly don’t recognise is that professional Machiavellians with $billion budgets know this better than they, and always keep options open, adapt to events, have resources in reserve, make feints, cut losses, persevere, repurpose, use well-tried heuristics, etc etc.

Incidentally, I remember reading some book about the Caribbean crisis, and it gave me the impression that the president doesn’t really get to decide much. President is the public face, but the important decisions are taken by the apparatus, professionals. And these professionals, especially in the military, are not even a part of the normal political theater. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do operate in geopolitical terms.

“I don’t think it’s controversial that Truman was a pretty hard-line Cold Warrior”

Once again, reading the future back into July 1945. There was no Cold War in July 1945. There were definitely anti-Soviet people in the gov’t, but the possibilities were still open. What are you reading about the Cold War, Tim?

(IMHO Stalin was going to force a cold war no matter what, but the unfortunate prominence of Byrnes on top of Truman’s existing suspicion of the Commies did not help. But there was no Cold War in 1945. The Long Telegram, the Fulton MO speech, both in 1946, and some would date the inception even later.)

Now, Groves for one was already talking about the Bomb as a tool vs. the Soviets before Hiroshima. But then, he was the guy whose career most depended on using the Bomb, which was originally meant for Germany. He had a huge vested interest in seeing his baby used somehow or other. And the dropping of the Bomb was a civilian decision, not a military one.

… It’s a difficult factor to weigh, but the sudden Japanese surrender, forestalling Soviet invasion, may’ve prevented a partition of Japan such as Germany experienced. We are well beyond the point where Soviet hegemony can be represented as a good, or even neutral, thing. How does that weigh vs. the massacre of over 100,000 civilians, many in a horrible fashion previously unknown in the long annals of human suffering? I have no idea, personally.

“It was a total war with primarily conscripted armies on both sides, so you can’t draw a clear moral line between citizens who have been drafted, citizens who are working directly in support of the war effort in civilian jobs, and citizens whose contribution is more indirect.”

But that’s the standard argument for terrorism. On one level (nation vs nation) it makes sense. But on another level, since these people, including the conscripts, do not control their leaders who are responsible for the hostilities, it seems a bit unfair to massacre them wholesale, as if they were some objects, property of the enemy nation. In any case, this is a rationalization for almost any terrorist act: they have it coming, they deserve it, because they are citizens (productive assets) of country X, and the government of country X has been doing very bad things to country (or group) Y.

“r u seriously arguing that the power structure of the US, UK, France, from 1917 onward, didn’t view communism as worse then pedophilic coprophagy ?”

What does France have to do with anything here? The Conservatives who preferred Nazism to Communism were shunted aside in May 1940. FDR restored diplomatic relations with the USSR in the 1930s. And rather conspicuously, the USSR joined the Allies in June 1941. There were plenty of high-ranking Americans who thought the Soviets, understood and handled properly, could continue to be partners with the US. You should read a book sometime.

Rawls wrote a piece for Dissent in ’95 on the atomic bombings. A quick search indicates that this may well be the only ungated version available (might have to zoom in):
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pkt/1999m06-a/msg00004.html

I read it when it came out but don’t remember it v. well.
(Cd be read as a counterpoint, I suppose, to the Fussell piece mentioned earlier. Completely different style, though.)

I’m aware of one piece written before the atomic bombings: John Ford, S.J., “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing,” Theological Studies (1944), portions reprinted in R. Wasserstrom, ed., War and Morality (1970).

The atom bombs reduced the number of Japanese casualties, as well as American.

The two bombs killed between 150,000 and 25,000 people. An invasion of Japan would have killed many times that number. Over 110,000 Japanese soldiers died in the battle for Okinawa, an island of less than 1,000 square miles. In order to conquer the home islands, the US would have had to kill millions of Japanese soldiers and civilian militia members – virtually all conscripts, and many of them women and children.

In addition, an invasion would have destroyed what was left of Japan’s economic base and caused destitution and famine for years.

A US State Department study after the war estimated that an invasion would have killed or wounded between five and ten million Japanese – perhaps a tenth of the population.

I read the Rawls piece linked in #163, and his premise is that the war was “effectively over” by the time the bombs were dropped. I don’t know what he means by this. Does he mean that Japan was about to allow itself to be occupied without resistance? Or does he mean that the war could have been ended promptly by negotiation, without an occupation?

Either way, I think he is fantasizing. I don’t believe that an end to the war was possible without a surrender and an occupation, and I don’t believe that either would have been possible without another year of horrific fighting that would have killed more Japanese and wrecked far more of the country than the bombs did.

Sherman’s campaigns and the use of atomic weapons had this much in common: both were aimed in large part at destroying an enemy’s will to fight, with the means being a demonstration of their helplessness before attacking forces; both involved the infliction of deliberate hardship, and in the case of atomic weapons, mass casualties, upon civilians; and both were likely the ethically correct course of action (with exceptions in Sherman’s case for certain events).

Regarding the analysis that ultimately led Truman to go forward with the bombings, imho the best understanding is this:

Japan continued to maintain an army in the millions, even if its naval and air forces were in ruins. As preparation for an invasion of Japanese held territories, intense air and naval bombardment would have to continue, which would be followed by the invasion of ground forces. While this process would result in many times the number of casualties projected from the use of atomic weapons, the progressive nature of the process could only serve to harden Japanese resistance. Even if it did not, the progressive nature would permit the more hawkish faction of the Japanese government to continue in power for a substantial period of time.

By contrast, the use of atomic weapons would be devastatingly surprising and fast. The US would demonstrate the ability not only to annihilate their means of resistance, but to do so with terrifying rapidity and with little loss of American lives. All hope of anything other than survival being completely extinguished, power within the Japanese government would shift towards those who favored surrender.

Given the available alternatives, the use of atomic weapons held the best hope of ending the war with the fewest loss of lives and the least amount of destruction. The means were certainly horrific, but no less so than the alternatives.

Walzer in Just & Unjust Wars (quote below is from the 1st, 1977 ed.) argues, as did T. Wilkinson above and geo (by implication), that the unconditional surrender demand was the problem:

The military estimate of casualties [of an invasion of the home islands] was based not only on the belief that the Japanese would fight almost to the last man, but also on the assumption that the Americans would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender. The war aims of the American government required either an invasion of the main islands, with enormous losses of American and Japanese soldiers and of Japanese civilians trapped in the war zones, or the use of the atomic bomb [perhaps he shd have mentioned blockade as another poss.]. Given that choice, one might well reconsider those aims. Even if we assume that unconditional surrender was morally desirable because of the character of Japanese militarism, it might still be morally undesirable because of the human costs it entailed. But I would suggest a stronger argument than this. The Japanese case is sufficiently different from the German so that unconditional surrender should never have been asked. (p.267)

the argument continues on p.268 (for those w the book to hand)

djr @156
It was a total war with primarily conscripted armies on both sides, so you can’t draw a clear moral line between citizens who have been drafted, citizens who are working directly in support of the war effort in civilian jobs, and citizens whose contribution is more indirect.

I would be inclined to maintain, if at all possible, the civilian-combatant distinction, which is basic to the law of armed conflict, rather than say the distinction ceases to have import in “a total war with primarily conscripted armies on both sides.” It’s a difficult question, and I recognize that it’s difficult to weigh conscripts’ lives vs civilians. Nonetheless, I do think the civilian-combatant distinction is worth trying to keep. (There was a thread here a while back about the Vietnam war and I don’t recall many people suggesting in that context that killing Vietnamese civilians was acceptable if it meant saving a lot of American draftees’ lives. Yes, very different wars and contexts, to be sure, but draftees and volunteers are both combatants and I’m not sure the status of conscript shd drastically change the legal/ethical analysis.)

” Over 110,000 Japanese soldiers died in the battle for Okinawa, an island of less than 1,000 square miles.”

But that is not exactly the same. A person fighting a battle has the option to surrender, while a person killed by a bomb in a city does not. Again, it depends on your framework. In the end, it seem quite possible that a scenario with more casualties will appear to the average person less egregious than a scenario with more casualties.

geo @ 168:

Would the US ever have used the bomb in Central Europe, on Caucasians?

Since that was basically the point of the whole Manhattan Project, and the preliminary British research which preceded it (no one was worried about Japan developing a bomb, though there was in fact Japanese research in that direction), that seems a rather odd question.

(The British and Americans were certainly willing to try mass firebombing of German cities, even when, as in the case of Dresden, the alleged military purpose had become increasingly flimsy.)

Also: what was the point of all those nuclear weapons built by the US (and also by the UK) during the Cold War, if not to be used, first and foremost, on Caucasians in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union?

Kort. No good at remembering names

Tim: Gaddis is a hack, certainly, but historians in general are useful, at least for those who like and respect facts.

If you’re interested, as you seem to be, I suggest a look at Downfall, which is well researched and thorough. I will check later what he says about the Soviets.

The fact that Americans didn’t want to be Communist doesn’t mean they wanted to oppose the USSR postwar. Perhaps only a Stalin could have dragged the GOP out of its isolationism. But your bit about “projection” suggests you think Stalin not so bad?

I think Stalin not so expansionist

Well, he already sat on an empire ranging from Siberia to East Germany and Tajikistan to Latvia.

181: exactly, and while the US gave Stalin the benefit of the doubt, as it became clear that the occupied states weren’t going to enjoy any sort of independence (something Churchill had either known or guessed beforehand – hard to give Churchill much credit for thinking the worst of the Reds, tho often he thought correctly), the US began to find more plausible that the USSR *had* created an empire, and that its boundaries were not necessarily done growing. So for ex Acheson’s initial willingness to work with the Soviets soured with experience, and he started to find Kennan’s explanations of the longue duree of Russian policy more believable.

Given Soviet fear of the US, masked with belligerent talk, and the intrinsic opacity of the Stalin regime, it wasn’t absurd for the US to fear Soviet expansion. The whole thing could and should have been handled better – I am not a Truman fan – but unless Stalin had fallen out a window in 1945-46, it all seems pretty inevitable, and maybe even that wouldn’t have helped.

@roy belmont 172
So how do you propose these issues be discussed? or shd they simply not be discussed? btw I think you used to make fairly conservative (as in pro-mil force, pro-Repub etc) comments here? If I’m remembering correctly, what’s w your recent change in tone?

I don’t know about the historians’ consensus, but I have found this thoroughly sourced timeline of the decision/railroading process, which does a much better job than I of compiling the relevant info – I wish I’d found it earlier.

http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/timeline/timeline_page.php?year=1945

I’ve noted before that the decision (for it was one, however abridged the deliberations may have been) was no doubt down not ony to Truman’s predilections but also to the influence of those around him, who were all gung ho for action, seemingly regardless of whether it was really necessary to force Japanese surrender. The compilers did not concern themselves with the motivation for this unseemly enthusiasm, though.

BTW that site also has the full quote of Eisenhower’s remarks – he is very modest about his opinions, to the point I think of misusing the word ‘refute’ – but he does report he kind of angry dismissal of dissent that we in this marginally more transparent age are already familiar with in the case of the similarly steamrollerish decision to invade Iraq in 2003:

“In 1945 … , Secretary of War Stimson visited my headquarters in Germany, [and] informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act…. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and second 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. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’ The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude, almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusions.”

Actually, that timeline is so useful that I’ll post the relevant section. Obviously things it doesn’t report could alter our view of those it does, but it seems to address Anderson’s claim about the lack of any deliberation at all, and some of the entries do seem to come as close as anything ever does to speaking for themselves.

May 12
William Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Services, reports to President Truman that Japan’s minister to Switzerland, Shunichi Kase, wished “to help arrange for a cessation of hostilities.”

May 25
Leo Szilard visits the White House with a letter of introduction from Albert Einstein to warn President Truman of the dangers that atomic weapons pose for the post-War world and to urge him not to authorize use of atomic weapons against Japan. Szilard is referred by Matthew J. Connelly, Truman’s appointments secretary, to James Byrnes in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

May 28
Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy argues to Secretary of War Stimson that the term “unconditional surrender” should be dropped, arguing that “unconditional surrender is a phrase which means loss of face, and I wonder whether we cannot accomplish everything we want to accomplish in regard to Japan without the use of that term.”

Leo Szilard, along with Walter Bartky, and Harold Urey, meet with Jimmy Byrnes at his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Szilard attempts to persuade Byrnes to demonstrate the bomb’s power, rather than using it on Japan. Byrnes asks Szilard, “How would you get Congress to appropriate money for atomic energy research if you do not show results for the money which has been spent already?” Reflecting on this meeting later, Szilard writes, “I thought to myself how much better off the world might be had I been born in America and become influential in American politics, and had Byrnes been born in Hungary and studied physics. In all probability there would then have been no atomic bomb and no danger of an arms race between America and Russia.”In a State Department Memorandum of Conversation, Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew describes a meeting with President Truman that day. Grew writes, “The greatest obstacle to unconditional surrender by the Japanese is their belief that this would entail the destruction or permanent removal of the Emperor and the institution of the Throne. If some indication can now be given the Japanese that they themselves, when once thoroughly defeated and rendered impotent to wage war in the future will be permitted to determine their own future political structure, they will be afforded a method of saving face without which surrender will be highly unlikely.”

May 30
Wanting to influence the Interim Committee, Szilard arranges a meeting with Oppenheimer in Groves’ office. Oppenheimer tells Szilard, “this is a weapon with no military significance. It will make a big bang–a very big bang–but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.”

May 31
The Interim Committee agrees that “the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Among those agreeing is James Conant, the president of Harvard University. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) reports on receiving a Japanese peace feeler through a Japanese diplomat stationed in Portugal. The Japanese diplomat says that the actual terms are unimportant so long as the term “unconditional surrender” is not used.

June 1
Interim Committee makes a formal decision not to warn the civilian populations of the targeted cities. The minutes for the Interim Committee meeting state: “Mr. Byrnes recommended and the Committee agreed, that the Secretary of War should be advised that, while recognizing that the final selection of the target was essentially a military decision, the present view of the Committee was that the bomb be used against Japan as soon as possible; that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes; and that it be used without prior warning.”

June 9
Chief of Staff General George Marshall, in a memo to Secretary of War Stimson, writes, “We should cease talking about unconditional surrender of Japan and begin to define our true objective in terms of defeat and disarmament.”

June 11
The Franck Committee, headed by Nobel Laureate James Franck, issues a report advising against a surprise atomic bombing of Japan. The report states, “If we consider international agreement on total prevention of nuclear warfare as the paramount objective, this kind of introduction of atomic weapons to the world may easily destroy all our chances of success.” The report correctly predicts that dropping an atomic bomb “will mean a flying start toward an unlimited armaments race.”

June 14
The Franck Committee Report–with its recommendation that the bomb be demonstrated to Japan before being used on civilians–is taken by Compton to Los Alamos and copies were given to Fermi, Lawrence, and Oppenheimer.

June 15
Joint War Plans Committee (JWPC), an advisory committee to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concludes that about 40,000 Americans would die in the planned two stage assault on Japan.

June 16
Compton, Fermi, Lawrence, and Oppenheimer conclude, “We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”

June 17
Assistant Secretary of War McCloy tells Secretary of War Stimson that “there were no more cities to bomb, no more carriers to sink or battleships to shell; we had difficulty finding targets.”

June 18
President Truman convenes a meeting of his chief advisers to discuss the military’s contingency plans for the invasion of Japan. The invasion was to begin no earlier than November 1, 1945 and according to Admiral William Leahy, “The invasion itself was never authorized.” McCloy is asked to prepare language for what is to become Article 12 of the drafted Potsdam Declaration. It specifies that the post-war Japanese government “may include a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty.” Admiral Leahy makes a diary entry noting, “It is my opinion at the present time that a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provision for America’s defense against future trans-Pacific aggression.” He also notes that General Marshall believes that an invasion of Kyushu, the southern-most Japanese island, “will not cost us in casualties more than 63,000 of the 190,000 combatant troops estimated as necessary for the operation.” This may be compared to later estimates, after the atomic bombings, of 500,000 to 1,000,000 American lives saved.

June 19
James Forrestal’s diary describes a top-secret “State-War-Navy Meeting” in which surrender terms are discussed. He writes, “Grew’s proposal, in which Stimson most vigorously agrees that something be done in the very near future to indicate to the Japanese what kind of surrender terms would be imposed upon them and particularly to indicate to them that they would be allowed to retain their own form of government and religious institutions, while at the same time making it clear that we propose to eradicate completely all traces of Japanese militarism.”

June 20
A meeting of the Supreme War Direction Council before Emperor Hirohito is held on the subject of ending the war. According to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, “the Emperor, supported by the premier foreign minister and Navy minister, declared for peace; the army minister and the two chiefs of staff did not concur.”

June 26
TheUnited Nations Charter is signed by delegates from fifty nations in San Francisco. Stimson, Forrestal, and Grew agree that a clarification of surrender terms should be issued well before an invasion and with “ample time to permit a national reaction to set in.” The three agreed that “Japan is susceptible to reason.”

June 27
Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph Bard sends a memo to Secretary of War Stimson recommending that “fair play” demanded that the U.S. give the Japanese prior warning of an atomic attack. He recommends that the U.S. give the Japanese “information regarding the proposed use of atomic power.”

July 1
Leo Szilard begins circulating a petition to President Truman, expressing opposition on moral grounds to using the atomic bomb against Japan.

July 2
Secretary of War Henry Stimson advises Truman to offer a definition of “unconditional surrender,” and Stimson states, “I think the Japanese nation has the mental intelligence and versatile capacity in such a crisis to recognize the folly of a fight to the finish and to accept the proffer of what will amount to an unconditional surrender.”

July 3
James Byrnes becomes U.S. Secretary of State.

New York Times reports, “Senator [William] White of Maine, the minority [Republican] leader, declared that the Pacific war might end quickly if President Truman would state, specifically, in the upper chamber just what unconditional surrender means for the Japanese.”

July 4
Leo Szilard writes to a colleague regarding the petition to the President: “I personally feel it would be a matter of importance if a large number of scientists who have worked in this field went clearly and unmistakably on record as to their opposition on moral grounds to the use of these bombs in the present phase of the war.”

July 7
Truman leaves for Potsdam on the Augusta, accompanied by Secretary of State Byrnes. They are at sea one day when Byrnes receives a telegram from Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew describing a peace overture from the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm. The attaché offered a negotiated settlement of the war if the U.S. would guarantee the reign of the Emperor.

July 10
At a meeting of the Supreme War Direction Council, Emperor Hirohito urges haste in moves to mediate the peace throughout Russia.

July 13
Washington intercepts and decodes a cable from Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo to his Ambassador in Moscow that states, “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace..” Secretary of Navy Forrestal writes in his diary: “The first real evidence of a Japanese desire to get out of the war came today through intercepted messages from Togo, Foreign Minister, to Sato, Jap Ambassador in Moscow, instructing the latter to see Molotov if possible before his departure for the Big Three meeting and if not then immediately afterward to lay before him the Emperor’s strong desire to secure a a termination of the war.”Farrington Daniels, Director of the Met Lab at the University of Chicago, reported to James Compton that 72 percent of the scientists favored a military demonstration of the bomb in Japan or in the U.S., with Japanese representatives present, before using the weapon on civilians.

July 15
President Truman lands at Antwerp on his way to the Potsdam meeting. Byrnes has convinced him to drop Article 12 of the Potsdam Declaration, which had provided assurance that the Emperor would be allowed to retain his throne as a constitutional monarch.

July 16
The Trinity test, a plutonium implosion device, takes place at 5:29:45 a.m. mountain war time at Alamogordo, New Mexico. It is the world’s first atomic detonation. The device has a yield of 19 kilotons, which is equivalent to 19,000 tons of TNT. J. Robert Oppenheimer recalls a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu text, which states, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Brigadier General T.F. Farrell, General Groves ’ deputy commander, describes the explosion in this way: “The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined…”

July 17
President Truman at Potsdam writes in his diary, “Just spend [sic] a couple of hours with Stalin .. He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about.” Secretary of War Stimson records in his diary, “Byrnes was opposed to a prompt and early warning to Japan which I first suggested. He outlined a timetable on the subject [of] warning which apparently had been agreed to by the president, so I pressed it no further.” Leo Szilard, unaware of the Trinity test, prepares final draft of Petition to the President of the United States, calling on the President to “exercise your power as Commander-in-Chief to rule that the United States shall not resort to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender; second, that in such an event the question whether or not to use atomic bombs be decided by you in the light of the considerations presented in this petition as well as all other moral responsibilities which are involved.” The petition was signed by 155 Manhattan Project scientists.

July 18
President Truman writes in his diary, “P.M. [Churchill] & I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe the Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [reference to Manhattan Project] appears over their homeland. I shall inform about it at an opportune time.”

July 21
President Truman approves order for atomic bombs to be used.

July 23 – 24
Assistant Secretary of War McCloy writes in diary, in Potsdam, “Throughout it all the ’big bomb’ is playing its part–it has stiffened both the Prime Minister and the President. After getting Groves’ report they went to the next meeting like little boys with a big red apple secreted on their persons.”

July 23
UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill remarks, “[I]t is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan.”

July 24
Walter Brown, special assistant to Secretary of State Byrnes, writes in his journal that Byrnes was now “hoping for time, believing after atomic bomb Japan will surrender and Russia will not get in so much on the kill, thereby being in a position to press claims against China.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson passes on orders for atomic attack.

July 25
President Truman writes in his diary: “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley era, after Noah and his fabulous ark. Anyway we think we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexican desert was startling – to put it mildly…” “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10. I have told the secretary of war, Mr. Stimson , to use it so that military objectives and soldiers are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.” General Carl Spatz, commander of the United States Army Strategic Air Forces, receives the only written order on the use of atomic weapons from acting Chief of Staff General Thomas Handy.

July 26
Secretary of Defense Forrestal’s secret diary states: “In the past days Sato in Moscow has been sending the strongest language to the Foreign Office at Tokyo his urgent advice for Japan to surrender unconditionally. Each time the Foreign Minister, Togo, responds by saying that they want Sato to arrange for the Russians to receive Prince Konoye as a special representative of the Emperor to Moscow. Sato’s persistent reply to these messages was that this is a futile hope, that there is no possibility of splitting the concert of action now existing between Great Britain, the United States and Russia.”

July 26
The Potsdam Declaration calls upon the Japanese government “to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces.” The alternative, the Declaration states, is “prompt and utter destruction.”

July 28
U.S. Senate approves the U.N. Charter by a vote of 98 to 2. Japan rejects Potsdam Declaration.

August 3
President Truman, while aboard Augusta, receives a new report that Japan is seeking peace. Walter Brown, special assistant to Secretary of State Byrnes, writes in his diary, “Aboard Augusta – President, Leahy, JFB agreed Japs looking for peace. (Leahy had another report from Pacific.) President afraid they will sue for peace through Russia instead of some country like Sweden.”

LFC-
It’s a little specious to turn the responsibility for the discussion’s posture and tone over to a critic of same. But, okay.
Triage of emotion, confrontation with horror leading to dry tactical assessments and analyses, sure, but the need for that mammalian center, where the horror does its ghastly work, to remain active, conscious…
Otherwise it gets insectile, alien. That shift can be necessary, but it can also elide the immediate, local, human part, so we get hive-mind formulae and critique.
Pawns and drones and units of tactical force. Children moving toys around the battlefield/carpet.
Far as my presence here before just recently – after a digital hiatus of a few years – I was, amusingly, frustratingly, the “parrot guy” for awhile, but not even remotely anything like your recollection of pro-etc.

Peter @175: You may well be right. But the project was launched because the US plausibly feared Germany would develop and use it first. The Germans didn’t, however. Perhaps I should have phrased the question: would the US have used nuclear weapons on non-Communist Caucasians who did not have the bomb and were clearly already defeated militarily, who had a large hyphenated-American community, and who had many pre-war business ties with American policymakers? (Dulles, for example, handled a great deal of German business while at Sullivan & Cromwell.)

Anderson: I’m sure you’re right that bureaucratic inertia played a part in the use of the bomb. But this doesn’t preclude the additional motives of wanting to intimidate Stalin and fearing public reaction to not using it if the fighting had continued, with accompanying American casualties. Also, when you say “the fact that Americans didn’t want to be Communist doesn’t mean they wanted to oppose the USSR postwar,” are you sure you’re not slipping into the fatal misidentification of “Americans” with “American policymakers”? What Americans care about matters little to p0licymakers, except in terms of legitimacy costs, ie, the difficulties of controlling a disenchanted or unruly populace. Policymakers were not “naïve”; they were very clear that they wanted to roll back — not merely contain — Communism. So they went ahead and “scared hell out of the American people” — who, as you say, were not particularly keen on confrontation with the USSR — regardless of what they themselves may have thought about Soviet intentions. As for the latter, I’m not sure whether the opening of the Soviet archives has shed any new light, but the fact that the Soviet Union had been invaded across the flatlands of Eastern Europe three times in a century and a half — the last time almost enslaved and annihilated, with a complacent, even jubilant, West looking on — seems prima facie a pretty plausible explanation (not, of course, justification) for the Soviet conquest of the region.

would the US have used nuclear weapons on non-Communist Caucasians who did not have the bomb and were clearly already defeated militarily, who had a large hyphenated-American community, and who had many pre-war business ties with American policymakers?

Congratulations. You have just proved that the US did not assist in burning down Dresden in March 1945.

Although the one on the left side of the map was clearly more powerful, and thus, naturally, more aggressive and expansionist.

Clearly and naturally!

Sorry, “motives” should be “moves.”

Geo, I think I will take, say, Tony Judt over Chomsky, any day of the week.

As for the Soviets’ motives, they weren’t always assessed as coolly as Kennan did, but there was plenty of paranoia on the Russians’ side as well. The Soviets’ own habit of saying one thing and doing another did not reassure; exactly how much more of Europe were they going to need to feel secure? Austria? Greece? Italy?

atomic weapons were thought at the time to be an order of magnitude more horrible than incendiary bombs

At what time? Before Hiroshima? I don’t “know that perfectly well,” because it’s false. Even Oppenheimer’s account to the politicians of what to expect was incomplete. The non-scientists certainly were vague about what to expect. I think Stimson may’ve been the only one to “get” that. Most seem to’ve thought of it as an entire air raid squeezed into a single bomb. Radiation sickness, particularly of the type and scale unleashed by fission bombs, was poorly understood.

Nor am I sure that you are taking into account the extreme horrors of the firestorms at Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. Frank begins his book Downfall with a horrifying account of the March 1945 Tokyo firebombing, which was hell on earth.

either through negotiation as a non-belligerent, or after forcing one by declaring war and opening hostilities.

actually, that bit is garbled, not worth correcting, please ignore

@198
Yeah, the atomic bomb was seen as worse (or better) than other forms of bombing. But from what I recall from “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” there was a lot of concern that the Germans would get it and use it on us, and the plan was pretty much to use it as soon as it was ready. So I see no reason to believe that moral concerns would have prevented its use in Europe.

Now the atomic bomb was more useful against Japan – the 1500 mile overwater flight from Tinian to Tokyo puts a huge premium on destruction per pound of weapon compared to the 600 mile flight from London to Berlin. Or more to the point the 700 mile drive from Le Harve to Berlin.

Re: the expected effect of the bomb, I find this over at Duck of Minerva:

Michael Gordin’s Five Days in August challenges the central premise of this story: that the atomic bomb was perceived as a weapon qualitatively different from what we now call conventional weaponry. Instead, he argues, many (though not all) of the scientists and political and military decision makers understood the new nuclear weapons as simply a more powerful and efficient method of delivering destruction than conventional weaponry, and that this viewpoint was dominant. Although the atomic bomb was part of a larger plan to “shock and awe” the Japanese into surrender, it was only one component of that plan, along with the conventional firebombing of Japanese cities and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in the Pacific. Most people involved expected the war to continue for some time longer–at the very least, into September, and they expected that they would need to continue to deliver additional atomic weapons throughout this period. The true impact of the atomic bomb, particularly its radiological effects, was unknown, even to the Manhattan Project scientists, who initially discounted reports of radiation sickness in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as Japanese propaganda. The US was surprised not only by the effects of the atomic bombs, but also by the speed of the Japanese surrender.

I’m not sure I *entirely* buy that – Marshall, for instance, expected the Japanese to fold quickly after Hiroshima – but I think that overall impression is probably correct. And perhaps the book, which I’ve not read, includes Marshall in that “though not all.”

http://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2013/the-image-before-the-weapon-a-critical-history-of-the-distinction-between-combatant-and-civilian-by-helen-kinsella/

FWIW I do not think that this potential justified the massacre of civilians (including infants and the disabled) by preemptively destroying a city from which such a militia might have been recruited. (Not what LFC or Bloix meant of course, just thought it needed pointing out.)

Yes. My position, in case it wasn’t already clear, is that the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombings can’t be justified especially since the top U.S. decisionmakers did not, apparently, actively explore whether a negotiated surrender could have been worked out.

By contrast, Bloix’s position @165 is:

I don’t believe that an end to the war was possible without a surrender and an occupation, and I don’t believe that either would have been possible without another year of horrific fighting that would have killed more Japanese and wrecked far more of the country than the [atomic] bombs did.

So Bloix’s position is that of the choices realistically available, the bomb was the least bad. That is also Andrew F’s view @167:

Given the available alternatives, the use of atomic weapons held the best hope of ending the war with the fewest loss of lives and the least amount of destruction. The means were certainly horrific, but no less so than the alternatives.

My view, on the other hand, is that other choices were available, such as exploring a negotiated surrender. Even if, in the end, it proved impossible to agree on terms, it should at least have been tried. Only if it had been tried and failed would one even reach the bombs v. invasion v. blockade choice. And at that point I would give, or try to give, more weight to the civilian-combatant (or noncombatant-combatant) distinction than either Bloix or Andrew F. apparently would.

Of course, these things are easier to debate in hindsight, and if I had gone through Fussell’s experiences I might well have come out where he did. (I don’t know for certain because I didn’t go through those experiences.)

p.s.
I think Andrew F. meant to write: “The means were certainly horrific, but the alternatives were no less so.” This is a case in which changing the word order changes the meaning.

I think you would find about half of Frank’s book very interesting

yes, I’m going to look at it