Even as the formal days of atonement in the Jewish and Christian calendar weaken, lose some of their traditional power, and attract fewer of the young to their rites, the age-old human impulse to critical self-scrutiny, with resulting acts of contrition to amend for past sins, takes on a new and secularized form. The date is August 6. Its icon is a mushroom cloud. The sin to be expiated is America’s. And the event is Hiroshima.

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I

The casual observer can witness year by year the transformation of history into myth. With the predictability of a religious sacrament, the familiar images are pulled from the film vaults and presented to the public for viewing yet again—a sort of passion play for our time, with a cast of thousands and gorier than any Spanish depiction of the Cross.

This year, to break the growing pall of anonymity, newsmagazines commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb by detailing the minute-by-minute agonies of specific individuals at Hiroshima in 1945, those who perished, and those who painfully survived. Television showed American children taken to the exhibits at Hiroshima, choking and weeping with remorse and shame, for belonging to the nation that committed this crime. Evidently, while we would not think it proper to impose on the youth of Japan pangs of guilt for a war launched by their forebears in 1941, advanced opinion now seems ready to impose on the youth of the U.S. a more searing guilt for the way in which our country ended it.

The four hours consecrated to Hiroshima by PBS television on the evening of the fortieth anniversary this year encapsulated the now-standard view. A black social scientist from Harvard assured us that the dropping of the bomb was motivated by “racism.” None of the five other guests saw fit to challenge this interpretation. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., the celebrated novelist, calmly declared that Hiroshima was an act of “genocide,” and that by dropping the bomb the United States “went into the Auschwitz business.” Only one of the six guests (William Manchester, the lone historian) saw reason to object to this. The next three hours were given over to films, interspersed with commentary by an MIT scientist who had worked on the bomb and in remorse has since devoted his spare time to “peace” activities.

The first film, The Day After Trinity, gave a fair and even eloquent account of the decision to build the atomic bomb. But as it headed to the finish, and Japan instead of Germany loomed as the designated target, a distant crunch of ideological gears was felt, guilt began to flower, interviews concentrated almost exclusively on the scientists who later decided Hiroshima was a profoundly wrong decision, and the film concluded with an outright historical falsehood: that the United States did nothing to try to control the power of the atom it had unleashed. (Somehow, the Baruch and Lilienthal proposals for the international control of atomic energy and weapons—which Bertrand Russell considered so generous he thought America should present it to the Soviets not as a proposal but as an ultimatum—managed to slip the minds of the film’s producers.)

There followed an animated Japanese film which even more perfectly served the cause of “peace activists” determined to transform history into myth. The scene is Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Japanese people are seen going about their own business, children are at play, a trolley tinkles gaily down the street, a mother bares her breast tenderly to nurse her babe, and the only hint that a war might be going on is vaguely suggested by a man in uniform going to his lookout post to scan the skies. Then a silver plane appears. A smiling little boy points to it. Suddenly a flash, and hell on earth is loosed—peeling flesh, dead babies, blood-encased bodies, carbonized corpses in grotesque postures.

This was a fairy tale of malevolence as neat as any that could be conceived, and here we had in its purest form the contemporary myth of Hiroshima. People are pursuing their daily lives, and for no rhyme or reason are blasted out of existence by distant, cold, technologically diabolical Americans. Small wonder that Hiroshima, presented thus, impresses the young around the world as a monstrous crime for which Americans are commanded to feel an endless guilt.

That such feelings of guilt are the aim of Western commemorations of Hiroshima, certainly, is unmistakable to anyone who has attended them. Where once such ceremonies were limited to Quakers, today all manner of activist groups, political and religious, old leftists, young pacifists, environmentalists, mainline churches, Eastern cultists, the hopeful and the frightened, peppered with secular liberals long out of the habit of Yom Kippur or Lent, gather ecumenically to mark Hiroshima Day as a date worthy of our shame and obloquy. To ensure that those congregated express themselves beyond mere tears and symbolic grief they are invited henceforth to “work actively for peace” so as to expiate in a meaningful way their understandable feelings of anguish. Exactly what “working for peace” should consist of, the more subtle public speakers and pastors do not say. They teach by example, through their own support of “peace” groups, through the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter on nuclear war, through the nuclear-freeze campaign, and through acts of protest and even civil disobedience against defense spending, local military installations, and the Pentagon.

Increasingly they also teach, directly, through the schools. Now our children can be called on to stare at the icon of a mushroom cloud not just on August 6 but on any day of the year. Boards of education have been lobbied assiduously to approve the introduction of “peace education” into the school curriculum from kindergarten through grade 12, and small towns to big cities such as Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and the two largest—New York and Los Angeles County—have given their imprimatur to what have invariably turned out to be highly politicized programs of instruction drawn up either by nuclear-freeze groups or out-and-out pacifists.¹ The entire state of California is about to make such programs mandatory for the children of its 25 million people. (Oregon has already done so.) The powerful National Education Association has taken a leading role in this cause. Films, grisly photographs, and detailed descriptions of what the Hiroshima residents endured at American hands enjoy a premier place in the effort to trace on the minds of the young the stigmata of permanent remorse, disgust at the mad “build-up” by our country of weapons far worse than the Hiroshima bomb, and a metaphysical resolve to pursue nuclear disarmament at any cost.

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II

That there is something not quite right about all this, seemed as clear to some Americans this past August as was the equally apparent impropriety of protesting it. Who would deny the suffering of the victims of Hiroshima? The ill-articulated reactions of popular irritation, the grumblings from American veterans of the Pacific, the angry letters to the networks for their failure to stress why it was we dropped the bomb, expressed what “sophisticated” people may consider crude emotions. On closer scrutiny, however, these crude emotions may constitute not just signs of basic health but a more accurate understanding of the moral complexities of forty years ago. Since August 6 is not going to disappear from our calendar, and since the evolution of Hiroshima into myth has been accomplished by isolating and removing it from the context of the war in which it occurred, the proper response is patiently, deliberately, and repeatedly to recontextualize it.

To begin with, if we wish yearly to remember the personal sufferings of those who died in World War II, surely one may ask why we ignore the millions of victims of Japanese fascism—Koreans, Manchurians, Chinese, Indochinese, Burmese, Malays, and Filipinos? After all, those who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were made to do so for a reason—to end the war—whereas the millions of people killed and wounded by the Japanese suffered for no reason at all, were victims in the root sense of being truly innocent. Yet thanks to contemporary revisionism, the primary victims—the victims of Japanese aggression across the Pacific—have been forgotten, allowed to slip down some black hole of cultural memory, while the secondary victims—the Japanese themselves—have been raised to a privileged public altar. It is as if the war in Europe were to be commemorated by yearly attention to German civilians who died in the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, while the victims of Nazi aggression on the battlefield and in the death camps were to be consigned to oblivion.

When it comes to the decision taken by Truman and his advisers to drop the bomb, a similarly selective amnesia seems to operate, both with regard to the actual circumstances that existed at the time and with regard to other possible courses of action open to the U.S. Thus, many of those who denounce Truman for dropping the bomb cite an alternative option: the United States could have invited the Japanese to witness a demonstration of the new weapon on some empty atoll, and the spectacle would have sufficed to make them acknowledge defeat and accept surrender. It is a nice idea. Unfortunately, this scenario ignores two sets of facts. The first concerns the practicality of such a demonstration; the second concerns the philosophy of death and war that prevailed in Japan at the time and that dominated the thinking of the Japanese leadership until the very end.

It was Dr. Arthur Holly Compton, a scientist-adviser to the interim committee on the ultimate use of the new weapon, who explicitly proposed to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that the bomb first be shown the Japanese by way of demonstration. The committee then discussed the proposal. The objections were numerous.

First, if the test were done on neutral soil the Japanese might think it was a fake, accomplished with a massive amount of ordinary TNT.

Second, if it were to be dropped on an isolated spot in Japan, the need to notify the Japanese as to time and place would allow them to shoot down the plane carrying the bomb.

Third, the actual bomb devices were new and scarcely tested. Any number of things could malfunction. What would be the psychological effect on Japanese leaders of a flub?

Fourth, only two bombs were available at the time, and every day the war continued meant death for thousands.

Fifth, the very idea of demonstrating the bomb ran counter to its purpose—to shock the Japanese out of their faith that dying in war was a noble and heroic enterprise.

Nothing is more natural for a democracy at war than for its leader—elected by the people and answerable to them—to attempt to ensure that victory is attained with the minimum loss of soldiers’ lives. For an industrial democracy, firepower is the means to that end. The almost extravagant use of material firepower in order to save young men’s lives has been called, rightly, “the American way of war.” Using the atom bomb against Japan was simply the ultimate step in an approach to war that marked the Pacific conflict from the moment Douglas MacArthur took command.

The Japanese view was close to the reverse of the American. Death in war was not to be avoided, but to be sought. The Shinto cult of radical self-sacrifice taught that suicide was glorious while surrender was unthinkable disgrace. So numerous were the suicide volunteers who spontaneously arose in the ranks of the Japanese armed forces that they were organized separately for routine training in the technique of air or naval kamikaze, the way other soldiers were taught to operate a radio or drive a jeep. One-man suicide submarines were specially designed and manufactured for the purpose, and human torpedoes or kaiten followed, employed by the hundreds against Allied shipping.

But it was in the air that the kamikaze ethos proved most effective; at Okinawa alone the Special Attack Corps sent as many as 1,500 volunteers against American ships. In addition to the spiritual satisfactions of a glorious suicide, the Japanese considered this an effective means of countering the American advantage in materiel. A lone suicidal airman could sink a whole destroyer. The motto of the Special Attack Corps was, “one plane, one ship.”

The peculiar disgrace that the Japanese attached to surrender was one of the causes of the despicable treatment American POW’s suffered at the hands of the Japanese—far worse than their treatment by the Nazis. The reason lay in the very fact of surrender. For the Japanese this made the American POW’s the equivalent of “sub-humans,” and in consequence there was no compunction about using them for experimental purposes, either to inject them with diseases or to observe the effects on them of weapons and exposure. All this was quite apart from the ordinary cruelty in warfare for which the Japanese made themselves notorious in all the nations of the Orient they conquered.

Japanese revulsion at the idea of surrender was seen throughout the war. The number of prisoners yielded was minimal. When U.S. troops succeeded in taking Okinawa not only did Japanese uniformed men commit suicide in droves to avoid the degradation of being captured, but thousands of ordinary Japanese civilians did so as well. Mothers with their babies in their arms leaped off cliffs to their death; student nurses, gathered in small groups, blew themselves up with a single hand grenade.

As American forces advanced closer to the Japanese mainland, this ferocity and refusal to surrender, clearly witnessed at Iwo Jima, did not diminish but increased. The Japanese military leaders used it to argue—quite logically—that a battle on the soil of Japan would result in a toll of American dead in numbers not yet seen and would certainly produce the most sensational and bloody climax to the Pacific war.

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The American plan of invasion (until news of the successful Trinity test reached Truman at Potsdam) was to land three-quarters of a million U.S. troops on Kyushu on November 1. (This would be the initial landing, already four times the troop level at Normandy.) The Japanese for their part had prepared KETSUGO or Operation Decision: 2,350,000 soldiers would crush the Americans as they landed on the beaches. They would be backed by four million army and navy civilian employees, a special garrison of a quarter-million, and a mammoth civil militia of 28 million men and women armed with everything from feudal muskets to bamboo spears.

The leadership repeatedly made clear its intention to fight to the last man, woman, child. As late as June, following the devastating incendiary bombing of Tokyo, the entire Cabinet issued this statement: “With a faith born of eternal loyalty as our inspiration, we shall—thanks to the advantages of our terrain and the unity of our nation—prosecute the war to the bitter end in order to uphold our national essence, protect the imperial land, and achieve our goals of conquest.” Prime Minister Suzuki spelled it out more colloquially at a press conference: “If our hundred million people fight with the resolve to sacrifice their lives, I believe it is not at all impossible to attain the great goal of preserving the essence of Japan.”

The slaughter that would have followed an American land invasion of Japan would have been unimaginable on both sides. Estimates of a half-million U.S. soldiers and one million Japanese killed are not high but low. Any American President deciding to undertake such a bloody exchange of lives while refusing to use the atom bomb once the option presented itself would almost certainly have been impeached by the American people and condemned at the bar of history.

If anything, Truman and his aides exaggerated the shock effect that atomic blasts would have on the Japanese leadership. Even after both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese Cabinet was deadlocked and could not agree on the Allied terms of surrender. General Umezu expressed his confidence that future atomic attacks could be stemmed by anti-aircraft measures, while on land “we will be able to destroy the major part of an invading force.” The War Minister, General Anami, told the Cabinet: “That we will inflict severe losses on the enemy when he invades Japan is certain, and it is not impossible to reverse the situation and pull victory out of defeat.” When several civilian ministers timidly ventured that the people were tired and that food shortages threatened, the War Minister snapped: “Everyone understands all that, but we must fight to the end no matter how great the odds against us!” He concluded with finality, “Our men will simply refuse to lay down their arms. They know they are forbidden to surrender. There is really no alternative for us but to continue the war.”

Despite two atomic bombs, then, the Cabinet could not accept the idea of conceding defeat. As John Toland reveals in his fascinating and monumental The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, the surrender of Japan was finally the result of a bold initiative by Prince Kido. As Privy Seal, Kido was in a position to sound out the Emperor, who was constitutionally forbidden from initiating policy; Kido found he favored surrender. Prime Minister Suzuki now also inclined to surrender, so Kido proposed the unprecedented move of having Suzuki ask the Emperor—at an imperial conference with the full Cabinet present—what his opinion was. The Emperor would delicately indicate his preference, and the military would be confronted with a fait accompli, for how could they defy the Emperor’s will?

Yet even though the imperial conference went just as Prince Kido planned, that too was not the end of it. Once out of the Emperor’s presence, various military leaders began having second thoughts. Not just one but several plots were hatched for a palace coup to seize power, isolate the Emperor, and pursue the war. Admiral Onishi, the organizer of the kamikaze corps, said to conspirators of the Hatanaka group: “We must throw ourselves headlong into the plan and make it come true. If we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives in a ‘special attack’ effort, victory will be ours!” General Anami was disposed to sacrifice still more lives while holding out the hope of less tangible results: “Even if we fail in the attempt, 100 million people are ready to die for honor, glorifying the deeds of the Japanese race in recorded history!”

To succeed in averting the surrender of Japan it was essential that the conspirators seize the recording the Emperor had made calling on his people to envisage “enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.” The insurgents narrowly failed in the attempt. Their leaders then duly and by various means committed hara-kiri.

As Japanese who were adults at the time later testified, the greatest shock of those days was not the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was hearing for the first time in their lives the voice of the Emperor, speaking the unspeakable, and instructing them to surrender. They could hardly believe it.

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III

These facts, readily available to anyone interested, explode the claim that the Japanese were ready to surrender prior to the dropping of the atom bombs, and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki amounted to gratuitous acts of barbarism. Almost as foolish is the claim that the Soviet entry into the Pacific war was enough to make the Japanese surrender. The Germans, after all, had maintained two war fronts without seeing in this circumstance a reason to surrender, and only seven weeks before Hiroshima, Prime Minister Suzuki—a “moderate”—confessed himself astonished that the Germans had not fought to the last man.

It required, finally, the combination of all three events—Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the August 9 declaration of war on Japan by the Soviets—to convince even the civilian leadership of the need for surrender. It then required the stratagem of Prince Kido to outfox the military leaders, a stratagem which in turn had to survive their attempts at a palace coup. The claim that the bomb was not a necessary element in this chain of events simply cannot withstand an examination of the historical record.

Neither can the outrageous and impertinent charge that the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima out of “racism.” Proving this would require, first of all, showing that the bomb was not needed for reasons of war, and that the Japanese leadership was previously disposed to surrender—claims plainly contrary to fact. But even if the bomb had not been needed to compel surrender, end the war promptly, and thus save Japanese as well as American lives, the “racism” thesis would founder on the fact that the bomb had been developed in the first place with Nazi Germany—a white European nation—in mind. Nor had this supposed racial advantage preserved the Germans from Allied bombings quite as deadly as what befell Hiroshima, as those who survived Dresden and Hamburg can testify. Likewise impaled on these same humble points of fact is Gar Alperovitz’s thesis, advanced in Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, that Truman used the atom bomb simply to intimidate the Soviets, the Japanese being, so to speak, gratuitous victims of American cold-war malevolence (even before any conventionally accepted date for when the cold war actually began).

The real meaning of Hiroshima is that war is an extremely nasty business, and that we must do everything consonant with our freedom and our honor to assure that such terrible events do not recur. Modern warfare is particularly trying on the conscience of decent people because the tension between the need to save one’s own men and the requirement indiscriminately to kill the enemy’s rises with each “improvement” in the destructive capacity of the weapons, thereby narrowing the scope of moral choice into a series of increasingly grim alternatives. The decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima was just such a choice. It was almost certainly the correct choice. But that does not make it any more pleasant in retrospect to contemplate. The evil, if evil there was, lay not in the dropping of the bomb but in the circumstances, i.e., the war itself, that compelled Truman and his advisers to make the choice they did.

Intelligent thinkers, were such unexpectedly to arise in the television business, would begin to grasp that the evil of World War II is not to be found by flying a crew to Hiroshima to record interviews, but by inquiring a little more studiously into the causes of that war. Those causes in the first instance lay in the mad and aggressive myths of superiority on which the German and Japanese people were too long fed, but also in their perception of the Western democracies as decadent, hedonistic, and timorous societies that would be reluctant to fight.

Western pacifists of the 1930’s were significantly responsible for creating and abetting the latter impression. Oblivious of history’s lessons, and armed now with a powerful myth of guilt and shame, their descendants are spreading the selfsame notions today. The consequences then were death, suffering, and destruction on a hitherto unimaginable scale. If old follies are embraced anew, what will be the consequences tomorrow?

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¹ For a detailed study of these programs, see Educating for Disaster, by Thomas B. Smith (Mark Books, 1985, Evanston, IL 60204). See also “Terrorizing Children,” by Joseph Adelson and Chester E. Finn, Jr., COMMENTARY, April 1985.