Truman and the Bomb. The Untold Story. By D M Giangreco. Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2023.
Reviewed by Tim Coyle
As ‘history wars’ go, President Truman’s decision to order the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs on the 6th and 9th of August 1945 respectively was a rich field of academic skirmishing, extending across two generations up to the present.
D M Giangeco is a military historian of note who has defended the ‘conventional’ – or ‘non-conspiracy’ – narrative of Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against ‘revisionist’ historians. Giangreco edited the US Army’s Command and Staff College Military Review for 20 years and was publications director for the Foreign Military Studies Office in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He has authored fourteen books on military and sociopolitical subjects. One of these: Hell to Pay; Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan 1945-1947, addressed the military planning for the invasion of Japan (reviewed in these columns in 2017).
Having swept the seas of the Imperial Japanese Navy and ‘island hopped’ across Japanese-occupied Pacific islands, the mighty US sea, land and air forces were poised to invade the Japanese Home Islands under Operation Downfall. This incorporated Operation Olympic, an initial assault on Kyushu in late 1945, to capture the southern third of the Home Island, and Operation Coronet to take the Kanto Plain around Tokyo.
In his earlier book, Hell to Pay, Giangreco examined the massive challenges facing the US command. Notwithstanding the superb quality and massive quantities of weapons and equipment, and the absorption of the hard lessons learnt over the previous three years in fighting the Japanese, US forces had suffered heavy losses culminating in Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Intelligence assessed Japanese military personnel strength at up to three million, augmented by irregular civilian combatants. The island campaigns had shown the Japanese would fight to the last man and there was no reason to doubt that invasion of sacred Nippon would be any different.
Contemporaneous to the Operation Downfall planning were two other major considerations: the imminent entry of the Soviet Union to the war and the potential for use of the atomic bombs developed under Project Manhattan.
Harry S Truman had assumed the presidency on the death of Franklin D Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. It is because of this late assumption of power and a presumed ignorance of Vice President Truman’s knowledge of highly classified information that revisionist historians propounded theories related to the end of the Pacific war and the atomic bomb development. In Truman and the Bomb, Giangreco demolishes these falsehoods.
The revisionist arguments were:
- Truman didn’t know about the atomic bomb before he became president.
- The huge casualty estimates cited by Truman and Secretary of War Stimson were a post-war creation devised to hide their guilt for killing thousands of defenceless civilians.
- Truman wanted to defeat Japan without any assistance from the Soviet Union and to freeze the USSR out of the post war settlements.
Giangreco refutes these claims by arguing that:
- Truman’s knowledge of the bomb is revealed in his own carefully worded letters to a Senate colleague and are specifically discussed in correspondence between the army officers assigned to his Senate investigating committee;
- The misrepresented ‘low’ numbers (cited by the revisionists) are based on narrow interpretations of highly qualified, and limited, US Army projections which were not part of the detailed planning for Operation Downfall;
- Both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman actively sought USSR involvement in the last stages of the war.
Giangreco adopts a slightly different approach in fielding his arguments by dividing the book into two parts: a narrative of six chapters followed by 16 extensive appendices containing contemporary correspondence, chronologies, tables, meeting minutes and related official documentation.
Chapter One discusses what Truman knew, as vice-president, of Project Manhattan. As a top secret project he was aware of a potential quantum addition to the US arsenal but not necessarily a ‘war winner’ given its experimental status. Appendices D, E and F support the argument that Truman knew of the atomic project as vice-president.
More conclusive were the agreements between the US, Britain and the USSR, culminating in the Potsdam conference (Roosevelt’s last) for the USSR to enter the war against Japan. So keen was the US for this outcome that Projects Milepost and Hula were commenced by which vast quantities of US weapons and equipment were to be shipped to the Soviet Union to equip the Red Army to invade Japan. The aim, of course, was to minimise American losses while aiding the Soviets to reconstitute territories lost to Japan as far back as the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-05. Chapter 2 details these Projects and the agreement which was concluded between the then Allies. Appendix G lists the US naval assets to be transferred to the Soviet navy (145 minor war vessels – patrol frigates, amphibious craft, minesweepers and submarine chasers). Vast numbers of tanks, trucks and associated equipment were shipped in US liberty ships reflagged with the Soviet ensign. The agreement included training for the Soviet naval personnel. Appendix H is the Agreement regarding the Entry of the Soviet Union into the War against Japan. This gave the lie to the revisionist claim the US wanted to shut the USSR out of Japan by stealing a march through the atomic bombs. The US, despite its overwhelming military might, desperately wanted Soviet augmentation for Operation Downfall.
Appendix C: The Historiography of Hiroshima; the Rise and Fall of Revisionism, by Michel Kort, powerfully complements Giangreco’s arguments.
The vexed question of US casualties occupied the revisionists for decades. This is a complex narrative, but basically Truman was advised that casualty estimates incurred in Operation Downfall could range from 500 000 upwards. Revisionists claim these figures were totally unrealistic, based on initial US Army estimates which were predicated on losses incurred in the Pacific Island operations. These numbers were drastically revised upwards when planning for Downfall reached critical mass. Appendix J: Proposal for Increasing the Scope of Casualty Studies emanating from the Office of the Secretary of War, and Appendix K: Discussion of American Casualties at President Truman’s Meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Service Secretaries, June 18, 1945, seal the argument that American casualties would be horrendous and unsustainable with domestic repercussions.
Other revisionist claims include that Japan was ready to surrender because of the US bombing of Tokyo, killing approximately 100 000 on 10 March 1945 and that there should have been a ‘demonstration’ of the power of the atomic bomb (an argument propounded by some Project Manhattan scientists).
In Truman and the Bomb, D M Giangreco has laid to rest the revisionist controversary of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The lay reader may question why, in the face of such overwhelming official evidence, there should have arisen this revisionist ‘industry’. According to Giangreco, much of this material stemmed from the Vietnam war agitation when anti-war activism predominated in US society. A more (personal) cynical observation might be that certain left-leaning (?) academics saw rich pickings in book sales, academic conventions and reputational enhancements by emotive arguments of inhuman actions and conspiratorial coverups.
Truman and the Bomb not only provides a masterful repudiation of a generational historical misinformation campaign, but it also serves as a case study for how sectional interests can distort facts for self-gain; in other words a ‘self-licking ice cream’.
I suggest there would be a tiny minority (if any) of the millions of US and Allied service personnel serving in August 1945 who were not blessedly relieved that this horrific weapon had been instrumental in ending the Pacific war.
In my review of D M Giangreco’s 2017 book Hell To Pay, I included a letter, quoted in full from the book, on the palpable relief of one service member. I repeat it here as it spoke for those service men and women and their families:
Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan 1945-47 | The Australian Naval Institute
The letter was written by the noted author James A. Michener, dated 20 October 1995, to a friend to be opened and read after his death (which occurred in 1997). Michener was a US Navy officer in the South Pacific. The letter is worth quoting in full as it summarises the feelings of millions of men and women from the wartime generation and answers the revisionist armchair academics and moralists decrying the terrible use of the atomic option:
Dear Martin
In the summer of 1945 I was stationed on Espiritu Santo close to a big Army field hospital (combining the 31st General Hospital and 23rd Evacuation Hospital) manned by a complete stateside hospital staff from Nebraska and Colorado. I had close relations with the doctors, so I was privy to their thinking about the forthcoming invasion of Japan. They had been alerted to prepare for moving on to the beaches of Kyushu when we invaded there and they were prepared to expect vast numbers of casualties when the Japanese home front defense forces started their suicide attacks.
More important, I was on my own very close to an Army division (the 27th Infantry Division) that was stationed temporarily in a swampy wooded section on our island. They were a disheartened unit for the Japanese had knocked them around a bit in the action on Saipan. Now they were informed unofficially that they would be among the first units to hit the beach in our invasion of Kyushu, and they were terrified. In long talks with me, they said they expected 70 or 80 percent casualties, and they could think of no way to avoid the impending disaster.
So it was with knowledge of what the doctors anticipated and what the Army men felt was inescapable that I approached the days of early August, and I, too, became a bit shaky because the rumor was that I might be attached to the Army unit because of my expertise in keeping airplanes properly fitted out and in the sky. Then came the astounding news that a bomb of a new type and been dropped on Hiroshima, a second one on Nagasaki and that the Japanese emperor himself had called upon his people to surrender peacefully and await the Allied peace-keeping forces to land and establish the changes required by the recent turn of events.
How did we react? With a gigantic sigh of relief, not exultation because of our victory but a deep gut-wrenching sigh of deliverance. We had stared into the mouth of Armageddon and suddenly the confrontation was no longer necessary. We had escaped those deadly beaches of Kyushu.
I cannot recall who was the most relieved, the doctors who could foresee the wounded and the dying, or the GI grunts who would have done the dying, or men like me who had sensed the great tragedy that loomed. All I know is that we said prayers of deliverance and kept our mouths shut when argument began as to whether the bombs needed to be dropped or not. And I have maintained that silence to this moment, when I wanted to have the reactions of the men understood who had figured to be on the first waves in.
Let’s put it simply. Never once in those first few days nor in the long reconsiderations later could I possibly have criticized Truman for having dropped the first bomb. True, I see now that the second bomb on Nagasaki might have been redundant and I would have been just as happy if it had not been dropped. And I can understand how some historians can argue that Japan might have surrendered without the Hiroshima bomb, but the evidence from many nations involved at that moment testify to the contrary. From my experience on Saipan and Okinawa, when I saw how violently the Japanese soldiers defended their caves to the death, I am satisfied that they would have done the same on Kyushu. Also, because I was in aviation and could study battle reports about the effectiveness of airplane bombing, especially with those super-deadly fire bombs that ate up the oxygen supply of a great city, I was well aware that the deaths from the fire-bombing of Tokyo in early 1945 far exceeded the deaths of Hiroshima.
So I have been able to take refuge in the terrible, time-tested truism that war is war, and if you are unlucky enough to become engaged in one, you better not lose it. The doctrine, cruel and thoughtless as it may sound, governs my thought, my evaluations and my behaviour. I could never publicly turn my back on that belief, so I have refused opportunities to testify against the United States in the Hiroshima matter. I know that if I went public with my views I would be condemned and ridiculed, but I stood there on the lip of the pulsating volcano, and I know that I was terrified at what might happen and damned relieved when the invasion became unnecessary. I accept the military estimates that at least 1 million lives were saved, and mine could have been one of them.
Sincerely,
James Michener
