A staple of Hiroshima Revisionism has been the contention that the government of Japan was prepared to surrender during the summer of 1945, with the sole proviso that its sacred emperor be retained. President Harry S. Truman and those around him knew this through intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, the story goes, but refused to extend such an assurance because they wanted the war to continue until atomic bombs became available. The real purpose of using the bombs was not to defeat an already-defeated Japan, but to give the United States a club to use against the Soviet Union. Thus Truman purposely slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese, not to mention untold thousands of other Asians and Allied servicemen who would perish as the war needlessly ground on, primarily to gain diplomatic advantage.
One might think that compelling substantiation would be necessary to support such a monstrous charge, but the revisionists have been unable to provide a single example from Japanese sources. What they have done instead amounts to a variation on the old shell game. They state in their own prose that the Japanese were trying to surrender without citing any evidence and, to show that Truman was aware of their efforts, cite his diary entry of July 18 referring to a telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace. There it is! The smoking gun! But it is nothing of the sort. The message Truman cited did not refer to anything even remotely resembling surrender. It referred instead to the Japanese foreign offices attempt (under the suspicious eyes of the military) to persuade the Soviet Union to broker a negotiated peace that would have permitted the Japanese to retain their prewar empire and their imperial system (not just the emperor) intact. No American president could have accepted such a settlement, as it would have meant abandoning the United States most basic war aims.
An exchange I had with two revisionists, Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, is revealing. In the December 2007 issue of Passport (newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations), I published a short critique of their Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Among other things, I accused them of resorting to semantic jugglery in falsely equating Trumans diary reference to peace with surrender, and pointed out that they had failed to provide even a wisp of evidence that Japan was trying to surrender. In their response, Sherwin and Bird in turn accused me of dismissing a huge body of distinguished scholarship, but again failed to include a single example of such evidence.
In particular, Sherwin and Bird berated me for failing to refer to Tsuyoshi Hasegawas Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Hasegawas research into Soviet and Japanese archives, they wrote, is replete with massive new and important wisps of evidence about the causes of Japans surrender. It seems telling to us that his work is ignored. What Sherwin and Bird apparently did not know, or hoped their readers did not know, was that although Hasegawa agreed with revisionists on a number of issues he explicitly rejected the early surrender thesis. Indeed, Hasegawa in no uncertain terms wrote that Without the twin shocks of the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese never would have surrendered in August. So much for the massive new and important wisps of evidence.
