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20. So, Truman did what the righteous fury of four years of the bitterest war demanded, and made a lasting peace. You could say that of precious few of our wars since 1945, which suggests maybe Truman knew something we have forgotten about man and war. /end
Hi Dan, thanks for engaging. A few brief thoughts: 1. I agree 100% that "unconditional surrender" predated Truman. Didn't try to imply otherwise. But you seem to leave out that there were MANY folks (including Churchill!) who, by Potsdam, thought it was worth reconsidering.
In fact, pretty much everyone who weighed in on the issue at Potsdam, including military and State analysts, thought it was a loser of a strategy, because the MAGIC intercepts made it so clear that the Japanese were really "stuck" on one condition (the Emperor).
Truman and Byrnes thought otherwise. And hey — I am OK with people saying, "I think they were right." But you make it sound like it was an unassailable thing. In fact it was one of the major decisions Truman made, and should be recognized as such, rightly or wrongly.
And — just to make it clear — my "goal" here is to emphasize the decisions and the choices, the areas of contingency and individual agency. Both because many people mis-locate them (e.g., in the "decision to use the bomb," which didn't happen), and because
there are a lot of narratives that stress inevitability (which is a form of responsibility-dodging). Whether people think the choices were good or bad is a separate question from indicating what the choices were.
2. You're repeating the old "bombs versus invasion" line — and one of my points (and every scholar in the last 15-20 years?) is that this wasn't actually the choice as anyone saw it in 1945. That's an after-the-fact justification, one cooked up only after the bombs "worked."
This is an important thing to wrestle with, because OBVIOUSLY if the choice is "drop two atomic bombs OR suffer a terrible invasion that kills huge numbers of Americans and Japanese" the only appropriate response is the former.
But as many historians have documented, that WASN'T how any American policymakers saw it in July 1945. Their plan was bomb AND invade. Several top-level people (Groves made it very explicit) thought it would take upwards of EIGHT atomic bombs to end the war.
Obviously these folks couldn't predict the future. And if the bombs COULD end the war prior to an invasion — sure, that's a benefit. But if you buy into the "bomb or invade" framework, you're already prejudicing the results, and repeating a myth.
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