Back in August 1945, the majority of Americans believed that dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had forced Japan to surrender, thus shortening the war, removing the necessity of an American invasion of Japan, saving hundreds of thousands of American lives, and guaranteeing the security of the United States for the foreseeable future. Most Americans today probably still believe all but the last.
Few historians would accept any of these propositions without considerable qualification. The gulf between public belief and the prodigious research and analysis by historians remains wide. This probably explains why Paul Ham’s Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath is finally getting published in America, three years after its publication in Australia and two years after its British publication.
If this is “revisionism,” then many of the nation’s leading military authorities during and immediately after World War II were also revisionists. Asked in 1945 for his opinion on dropping the atomic bomb, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower replied:
“I was against it on two counts. First the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”Fleet Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff to both Roosevelt and Truman, flatly declared that:
“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.”Even the official US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded unequivocally that:
“Japan would have surrendered if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
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