The documents show that after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, word began trickling into Imperial headquarters in Tokyo that the city had been wiped out. The Japanese military didn't believe it: No fleet of bombers had appeared on their radar near Hiroshima.
The Americans had come, and gone, the night before. The city's infrastructure was built to handle the region's earthquakes, too. What was coming in via radio was impossible. So the army sent a staff officer in a plane to report.
He radioed back: Hiroshima had been devastated. By something.
A few hours later, the president of the United States read a statement, announcing to the world that his country had developed and used an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. And Harry S. Truman left no doubt that the Americans would finish what was started at Pearl Harbor:
"We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake: We shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.
"It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware . . . ."
If the Japanese Imperial Army would have surrendered that day, there would have been no need for Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Seventy-five years ago today.
George Will of The Washington Post said this past week, on the 75th anniversary of Japan's summer of ruin, that one of mankind's greatest achievements is that there has been no third such bomb dropped on an enemy. But there had to be a second. No matter what those who rewrite, or ignore, history say in 2020, there had to be a second A-bomb to end the war that month, without an invasion that year.
Every Aug. 6, it seems, the world argues about whether the atomic bomb should have been used against Japan. The argument simmers down to a slow boil by Aug. 9, when the news cycle gives us something else to argue about. But the books say upwards of 80,000 people died in the second blast. It's a horror that shouldn't be overlooked.
A horror, doubtless. More in doubt is whether the A-bomb should have been dropped at all. Or, after the first, if the one at Nagasaki was needed.
It was. Unfortunately, tragically, it was.
After the bombing of Hiroshima, Admiral Soemu Toyoda visited the city, then allowed that his country would have to endure the destruction but "the war would go on." The Japanese officially dismissed calls for unconditional surrender, even demanding that they should handle any trials for war crimes by Japanese soldiers. The U.S. secretary of war, Henry Stimson, continued to prepare for the invasion that he knew would cost millions of lives. NB: Most of those lives would have been Japanese.
In the hours after Hiroshima and President Truman's announcement, the Japanese showed no inclination toward giving up the fight. Not officially. Not through back channels. The Soviet declaration of war against Japan certainly rattled Toyko, but President Truman's autobiography says that only after Nagasaki did panic sweep through the Japanese government--and talks of surrender began streaming into Washington.
Truman's was an ugly and necessary decision. But it was an ugly and necessary war.
This past week, The Washington Post ran an opinion piece by an author who has written about Nagasaki and the bombing. She wondered in print: Was the bombing "right"? She accuses Americans of being "frozen in the debate" and says we have ignored or even denied the bomb's human impact. We don't know a person in this debate who has denied the human impact of the two bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But as far as being "right," the bombs were the right way to end the war. Otherwise, a lot more people would have died in massive fire bombings, artillery, and every other nightmare of total war.
There have also been calls this past week for the United States to apologize, officially, for dropping both bombs. This happens every summer, but this summer marks the 75th anniversary of the war's end, and those who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now elderly. The calls for an apology aren't getting stronger as much as more impatient.
A couple of years ago, as President Obama was preparing to visit Japan, The Los Angeles Times wrote a story asking: Does Japan even want an apology? The answer was no. For several reasons:
First, the paper reported, Japan didn't need more people "allergic" to nuclear power, a condition that's recently gotten worse after the Fukushima meltdown/earthquake/tsunami.
Second, an apology from the American president might re-ignite those demands for Japan to apologize for its part in World War II. Grant Newsham, a senior research fellow with Japan Forum for Strategic Studies, told The Los Angeles Times in 2016: "If Obama apologizes at Hiroshima, it draws attention to Japanese behavior elsewhere in Asia during the '30s and '40s. It might even be demanded that the Japanese government and emperor go to Singapore and apologize for slaughtering 25,000 Chinese there in 1942. Or to Australia to apologize for how they treated their POWs. Or to the Philippines for a few hundred thousand murders by the Imperial Japanese Army as well."
The demands for an apology for the decisions of 1945 are mostly coming from people in the West. Because at this point, we are safely removed from the threat of Japan's late and unlamented Imperial Army. We can afford to be sensitive now.
What we can't afford is to forget. Today's date is a horrible, ugly, and necessary anniversary, too. And although there are lots of disagreements about the use of the A-bombs 75 years ago, there is one thing on which most everybody seems to agree:
May there never be a third.