American textbooks perpetuate the big lie

This summer the world commemorated the 73d anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most Americans are still supportive of Truman’s decision despite overwhelming historical evidence the bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war.

Americans suffer from a misinformation campaign initially perpetrated by the Truman administration and carried on to this day by high school textbooks that continue to tell the story as if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were indispensable in ending the war and saving countless American lives. The historical record is clear, however. President Eisenhower said, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

There is no hint of controversy regarding the decision to drop the bomb in the majority of texts in use in American classrooms and many textbooks contain blatant historical inaccuracies, but the greatest purveyor of historical mistruth is the U.S. Army’s Leadership, Education and Training (LET 3) Custom Edition for Army JROTC. JROTC is the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. More than a half million American high school students are enrolled in JROTC classes nationwide.

JROTC students do more than march in uniform on the football field. They study government and they study a “history” of sorts. The JROTC treatment of Truman’s decision to drop the bomb is riddled with falsehoods and leaves students convinced that destroying those cities was the right thing to do.

Thanks to policymakers and military leaders of the era who have subsequently told their stories, we know today what transpired. We can also thank Professor Gar Alperovitz of the University of Maryland for an academic career dedicated to analyzing American policy in this regard. Quite simply, President Truman dropped those bombs on a defeated Japan to tell the Russians and the world to back off. In a typically cavalier fashion, Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., Commander, U.S. Third Fleet remarked, “It was a mistake to ever drop. They had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.”

Today everybody knows:

•Every top U.S. military leader of the era has since stated that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were militarily insignificant.

•The idea that dropping the bombs saved a million American lives is completely fabricated. The war against Japan could have been “won” without additional loss of life.

•The Japanese had been trying to surrender for months.

•The Japanese would have unconditionally given up without the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

•The bombing was not so much the last military chapter of the Second World War as it was the first Chapter of the Cold War.

The authors of the JROTC course book grapple with the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan within the context of an ethical case study where students discuss ethical choices and consequences inherent in a series of historical events. Rather than presenting an unbiased version of events, the discussion is tainted by a strong preference toward bombing Japan, complete with falsehoods and inexcusable omissions.

The JROTC text packages all the most prevalent misperceptions regarding Truman’s decision into one outrageous historical account. The U.S. Army is teaching high school students that using atomic weaponry was necessary to forestall a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland that would have cost a million American lives. The text leaves the impression that the Japanese military in mid-1945 was extraordinarily powerful and that the Japanese were fanatical in their resolve to resist. The text also perpetrates the falsehood that the top brass supported the bombing when in fact all of the top brass subsequently came out to object to its use. Finally, and perhaps most egregiously, the Army’s version of events distorts the complex geostrategic mix involving the Soviets.

The Army text leaves out Japanese attempts to surrender. The book makes no mention of the prior agreements to bring the Soviets into the war against Japan or the Soviet declaration of war on August 8th. The JROTC text fails to recognize that Japanese power quickly disintegrated during the first 6 months of 1945, especially after the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killing more than 300,000 people, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book doesn’t describe absolute American control of Japanese skies in the summer of 1945.

Consider the following selections from Leadership, Education and Training 3:

“The Soviet Union had not participated in the Pacific campaign, choosing to remain neutral with Japan while fighting for survival against Germany. Truman was in Potsdam meeting with Churchill when he learned of the atomic test at Trinity.”

At face value this is true, but this statement represents the totality of the Army’s discussion of the Soviet role. The JROTC text minimizes the importance of the Soviets while elevating the significance of the atomic bombings in bringing about Japan’s surrender.

During the Tehran Conference in 1943 Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan after Hitler was defeated. In 1945 at the Yalta Conference Stalin agreed to enter the War with Japan within three months of the end of the war in Europe. The Soviet invasion began on August 8, 1945, precisely three months after the German surrender on May 8th. The start of the invasion fell between the atomic bombings of Hiroshima, on August 6, and Nagasaki, on August 9. In the words of Air Force General Claire Chennault: “Russia’s entry into the Japanese war was the decisive factor in speeding its end and would have been so even if no atomic bombs had been dropped.” An examination of the Japanese historical record confirms this point. “Truman was troubled by the mounting casualties in the Pacific as Allied forces drew nearer the Japanese home islands. Driven by the Bushido warrior code, the Japanese were prepared to resist to the last, and more willing to die than surrender.”

Truman knew a week before Potsdam that Japan’s emperor had intervened to attempt to end the war and there were several attempts at peace before this. Japan was prepared to surrender, but Truman had two bombs and he was determined to use them to fire a kind of a shot across the bow to the Soviets as post-war Europe was taking shape. General Douglas MacArthur understood it this way. “The war might have ended weeks earlier.

Colonel Charles Bonesteel, Chief of the War Department Operations Division Policy, poignantly described the situation in the summer of 1945, “The poor damn Japanese were putting feelers out by the ton so to speak — through Russia.”

 “The Joint Chiefs told Truman to expect over 1,000,000 American casualties and even larger number of Japanese dead in the pending attack on the home islands.”

This is false. There’s no record of the Joint Chiefs of Staff formally studying the decision and they never made an official recommendation to the President, according to Alperovitz. Additionally, the Joint Chiefs never claimed to be involved. The claim of 1 million casualties as a result of an American invasion is a complete fabrication. It originated from a 1947 Harper’s article by Secretary of War Stimson. Stimson invented the number. It is not based on a shred of historical evidence.

For his part, President Truman randomly selected the number of American lives ostensibly saved as a result of dropping the bomb. He said it would “save thousands of American lives. It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are. I thought 200,000 of our young men would be saved by making that decision.”

The Japanese position was hopeless by the summer of 1945. They were trying to surrender because they were defeated. According to Brigadier Gen. Carter W. Clarke, “We brought them down to an abject surrender through the accelerated sinking of their merchant marine and hunger alone, and when we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.” Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Henry H. “Hap” Arnold looked at the situation from the air, “The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.”

“By August 1945, the United States had two nuclear bombs in its arsenal. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Over 140,000 Japanese were killed in the blast, and an uncounted number died from the lingering effects of radiation. On August 9, 1945, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The next day, August 10, 1945, Japan indicated its willingness to surrender.”

Japan had been indicating its “willingness to surrender” for some time before the bombs were dropped.

Every top American military leader was revolted by Truman’s decision to drop the bomb. They couldn’t see its military necessity. It is incomprehensible that today’s Army feels compelled to contradict its greatest leaders who understood the role of the military in relation to its political superiors. Commander of the U.S. Army Strategic Air Force, General Carl Spaatz understood the separation. He said,” The dropping of the atomic bomb was done by a military man under military orders. We’re supposed to carry out orders and not question them." No, that was purely a political decision. It wasn’t a military decision.

Top Naval officers joined in the chorus. Admiral William D. Leahy, the President’s Chief of Staff said, “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet echoed the sentiments of his colleagues, “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan. Truman appointed a committee to evaluate using the atomic bomb. The committee examined many options, including a demonstration in Tokyo Bay, but Los Alamos was uncertain the device would detonate. Rather than lose a valuable war asset, and to emphasize its destructive power, the committee recommended dropping the atomic bomb on a city.”

Secretary of State James Byrnes, Truman’s personal representative on the Interim Committee, was the most influential member of the committee and steered policy in the direction of using the new weapon without warning on a Japanese city. It was Byrnes who saw the bomb as a promising way to keep the Soviets in line in the post-war era.

Impressionable high school juniors are on the receiving end of this despicable propaganda. It is astonishing how easily the Army’s authors dismiss a quarter-million lives. The discussion of the decision to drop the bomb in the JROTC text ends with the following:

“When thinking of ethical decisions that affected U.S. and world history, try to imagine how history would have been changed if the Atomic bomb had not been dropped on Japan during World War II. Would the war have continued much longer? Would the U.S. have been attacked again by the Japanese, as they had been at Pearl Harbor the year before? Because the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan on August 8th, do you think that thousands of Soviet and U.S. soldiers would have lost their lives?”

Based on the information contained in the JROTC text, it is “clear” to American high school students that the war would have dragged on indefinitely if Americans hadn’t dropped the bomb. They had to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki to keep the Japanese from attacking America as they did in 1944, and had to do this to save American and Soviet lives!

JROTC lessons are developed and taught by Senior Army Instructors and Assistant Instructors. Although they have college degrees, they are typically not state-certified teachers. They must be retired from the Army and may be hired with a high school diploma provided they earn an associate’s degree within five years. They are the only unsupervised non-professionals allowed to instruct students in classrooms in most states across the country.

That was a feature titled, "Hiroshima and Nagasaki: American High School Textbooks Perpetuate the Big Lie" authored by Pat Elder. It was first published in 2013.

Truman, a-bombs, and killing of innocents

Some 73 years ago a president of the United States dropped an atomic bomb on
Nagasaki, a city full of innocent Japanese.

It was the second time in three days that Harry Truman had done such a thing: He had bombed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The fatalities in the two cities totaled 150,000–246,000. The victims – mostly children, women, and old men – suffered horrible deaths in the blasts and firestorms. Only shadows remained of those who were vaporized. Many more were injured; others later died from radiation sickness.

However, no condemnation could be harsh enough, for if Truman wasn’t a mass murderer, no one was. Truman said no to a bombing demonstration on an uninhabited island. He was a liar too. In announcing the first bombing, he called Hiroshima an “Army base.” But author Greg Mitchell writes, “Hiroshima did contain an important military base, used as a staging area for Southeast Asia, where perhaps 25,000 troops might be quartered. But the bomb had been aimed not at the ‘Army base’ but at the very center of a city of 350,000, with the vast majority women and children and elderly males.”

Nevertheless, in his Aug. 9 radio address to the American people, Truman said, “We wished in the first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.”

And Nagasaki? Author Greg Mitchell writes, “it had become a Mitsubishi company town, turning out ships and armaments for Japan’s increasingly desperate war effort. Few Japanese soldiers were stationed here, and only about 250 of them would perish in the atomic bombing. It was still the Christian center in the country, with more than 10,000 Catholics among its 250,000 residents. Some 35,000 perished instantly, with another 50,000 or more fated to die afterwards. The plutonium bomb hit with the force of 22 kilotons, almost double the uranium bomb’s blast in Hiroshima.”

Nothing can justify what Truman did – neither revenge for the Japanese attack on the US naval fleet at Pearl Harbor nor avoidance of a US invasion of Japan. Truman first justified the bombings in terms of vengeance. Top American military leaders – Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Leahy among others – opposed the bombings. The estimate of American casualties in an invasion have been grossly exaggerated, even invented out of whole cloth. While guesses ranging from half a million to millions are bandied about, Truman’s Secretary of State James Byrnes said the death rate would be in the thousands. But even if we accept the high guesses, why was the slaughter of Japanese noncombatants preferable to the deaths of military personnel, even if many on both sides were conscripts?

Why do people today assume an invasion would have been necessary without the bombings? American military leaders did not believe it. Japan had already been defeated; its leaders were suing for peace, though they resisted Truman’s unreasonable demand for unconditional surrender, which appeared to require removal of the emperor. In the end, the emperor remained.

In fact, America could have – and should have – simply gone home, neither bombing nor invading. Moving back a step, we should also reject the article of faith that the attack on Pearl Harbor justified the American war against Japan. Even had the attack not been deliberately provoked or in some manner foreseen by the Roosevelt administration, it could not have justified the American state’s taxation, conscription, suppression of dissent, and the foreseeable mass killing of noncombatants. All wars are double wars: States wage war against the populations they rule as well as against the foreign populations of the opposing countries. The war against Japan was not inevitable — even after Pearl Harbor which was a military base. It was a choice. What should the United States have done? Sue for peace.

As Bryan Caplan writes in his pragmatic case for pacifism,

In the modern world, there are no wars of “self-defense.” War today inevitably means deliberately or at least recklessly killing many innocent civilians. This creates a strong moral presumption against war. 

To overcome this presumption, you’d have to show that long-run benefits of a war are so wonderful than they clearly overshadow its grisly short-run costs. And you’d have to show that there isn’t any cheaper, more humane way to obtain these benefits. 

In practice, predicting the consequences of war is extremely difficult. Expert predictions are barely better than chance. “It’s complicated” is not a good enough reason to deliberately or recklessly kill many innocent people.

The moral distinction between killing noncombatants deliberately and killing them in “collateral damage” is overstated. As Caplan says, “But we greatly exaggerate the moral difference when foreigners are the ones who suffer the ‘unavoidable side effects.’ If the police firebombed a domestic apartment complex to pursue the legitimate goal of killing Charles Manson, few people would consider the doctrine of Double Effect a defense! Would you?”

People with a connection to the bombings knew they were war crimes. According to Robert McNamara, a World War II strategic bombing analyst who would later engineer the war in Vietnam, Major General Curtis LeMay acknowledged that if America had lost the war, he and his colleagues would have been “prosecuted as war criminals.”

Leo Szilard, one of the physicists who prompted the Manhattan Project, wrote in 1960: “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”

The Truman administration revealed that it knew the atomic bombing was immoral by attempting to keep the full truth from the American people. For more information in this regard you could refer to Greg Mitchell’s “White House Cover-Up: When Truman Censored the First Hollywood Movie on the Atomic Bomb” and “Atomic Film Coverup – Key Footage from Hiroshima Buried for Decades.” Truman decided not to drop a third bomb, saying, “The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible … all those kids.”
Wanton disregard for noncombatants continued in Korea, Vietnam, and beyond to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and more. Today, America, under Trump, inflicts sanctions on the Iranian people through the terrorism of economic sanctions, allegedly aimed at stopping Iran’s nonexistent nuclear-weapons program. Anthony Gregory writes that: The US has committed mass terrorism since 1945, although not on quite the scale as in past generations. Back in the day the US would drop tons of explosives, knowing that thousands would die in an instant. In today’s wars, it drops explosives and then pretends it didn’t mean to kill the many civilians who predictably die in such acts of violence. Only fifteen hundred bombs were used to attack Baghdad in March 2003. That’s what passes as progress. The naked murderousness of US foreign policy, however, is still apparent. The bombings of water treatment facilities and sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s deliberately targeted the vulnerable Iraqi people. Once the type of atrocities the US committed in World War II have been accepted as at the worst debatable tactics in diplomacy, anything goes.

The bombings – and other atrocities committed by the US government during World War II, including the “conventional” firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 noncombatants; the destruction of Dresden, a German city of no strategic value; and the continued bombing of Tokyo after the A-bombings and an agreement to surrender – should have been enough to destroy forever any perception of moral authority in the US government – particularly on the subjects like terrorism. But, oddly, things have not worked out that way.

America proclaims itself the “indispensable nation.” The rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to American “leaders.” Because of alleged “American exceptionalism,” presidents of the United States get to write their own rules, even redefining torture if they wish. If much of the rest of the world objects, it’s too bad; no one is in a position to do anything about it. This immunity from common rules of decency extends as well to America’s “closest ally,” the usurper regime of Israel.
Until Americans come to see the mass murder in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the war crimes they are, it’s hard to be optimistic that they will ever see US imperial foreign policy for the aggression it is.

Hiroshima Marks 73rd Anniversary of US Atomic Bombing

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Hiroshima marked the 73rd anniversary of the US atomic bombing on Monday, with its mayor making a fresh call for a world without nuclear weapons through dialogue.

Despite some expectations of progress toward nuclear disarmament in recent years, Mayor Kazumi Matsui warned of the re-emergence of tensions over nuclear weapons seen during the Cold War and sought rational actions by global leaders.

"If the human family forgets history or stops confronting it, we could again commit a terrible error," Matsui said at a memorial ceremony to remember the atomic bombing, Kyodo news reported on Monday.

Japan needs to lead the international community toward "dialogue and cooperation for a world without nuclear weapons," the mayor added.

At the Peace Memorial Park, a moment of silence was observed at 8:15 a.m., when the "Little Boy" uranium-core atomic bomb dropped by a US bomber exploded above Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. It killed an estimated 140,000 people by the end of that year.

Matsui expressed hope that the easing of tensions on the Korean Peninsula will continue through dialogue and called on global leaders to make an international treaty comprehensively prohibiting nuclear weapons a "milestone" toward the goal of ridding the world of nuclear arsenals.

The mayor made the Peace Declaration before representatives from 85 countries and the European Union. The United States sent its ambassador to Japan to the annual ceremony for the first time in three years.

"Certain countries are blatantly proclaiming self-centered nationalism and modernizing their nuclear arsenals, rekindling tensions that had eased with the end of the Cold War," Matsui said.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, attending the memorial ceremony, pledged that Japan will try to bridge nuclear powers and non-nuclear states and lead international efforts.

"Maintaining its three non-nuclear principles, our country is determined to make strenuous efforts to serve as a bridge between both parties," Abe said.

As of March, the number of hibakusha stood at 154,859. Their average age is now just over 82.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in his message the legacy of Hiroshima is one of "resilience" and sought continued moral support from hibakusha survivors.