After the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki On Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, there then ensued a U.S. propaganda campaign to claim the slaughter of more than 200,000 people saved lives, writes John LaForge.
President Harry Truman in 1948. (National Archives, Public Domain)
Originally published by Consortium News on Aug. 6, 2014.
By John LaForge
The U.S. atomic destruction of 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki was never “necessary” because Japan was already smashed, no land invasion was needed and Japan was suing for peace. The official myth that “the bombs saved lives” by hurrying Japan’s surrender can no longer be believed except by those who love to be fooled.
The long-standing fiction has been destroyed by the historical record kept in U.S., Soviet, Japanese and British archives — now mostly declassified — and detailed by Ward Wilson in his book Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
Greg Mitchell’s Atomic Cover-Up (Sinclair Books, 2011) also helps explain the durability of the “saved lives” ruse. Wartime and occupation censors seized all films and still photos of the two atomic cities, and the U.S. government kept them hidden for decades.
Even in 1968, newsreel footage from Hiroshima held in the National Archives was stamped, “SECRET, Not To Be Released Without the Approval of the DOD.” Photos of the atomized cities that did reach the public merely showed burned buildings or mushroom clouds — rarely human victims.
MacArthur’s Censorship
In Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial, (Grosset/Putnam, 1995) Robert Lifton and Mitchell note that Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, “left nothing to chance.” Even before Hiroshima, he prohibited U.S. commanders from commenting on the atomic attacks without clearance from the War Department.
“We didn’t want MacArthur and others saying the war could have been won without the bomb,” Groves said.
Leslie Groves, Manhattan Project director, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, with a map of Japan, undated. (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
In fact, MacArthur did not believe the bomb was needed to end the war, but he too established a censorship program as commander of the U.S. occupation of Japan. He banned reporters from visiting Hiroshima or Nagasaki, expelled reporters who defied the ban and later said that those who complained that censorship existed in Japan were engaged in “a maliciously false propaganda campaign.”
That most people in the United States still believe the “saved lives” rationale to be true is because of decades of this censorship and myth-making, begun by President Harry Truman, who said Aug. 6, 1945, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”
In fact, the city of 350,000 had practically no military value at all and the target was the city, not the base three kilometers away.
Taking President Truman at his word, the 140,000 civilians killed at Hiroshima are the minimum to be expected when exploding a small nuclear weapon on a “military base.” Today’s “small” Cruise missile warheads, which are 12 times the power of Truman’s A-bomb could kill 1.68 million each.
Official censorship of what the two bombs did to people and the reasons for it has been so successful, that 25 years of debunking hasn’t managed to generally topple the official narrative.
A Created Myth
The firestorm-cloud that engulfed Hiroshima, Japan, some three hours after the bombing. (U.S. military/Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
In 1989, historian Gar Alperovitz reported, “American leaders knew well in advance that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not required to bring about Japan’s surrender;” and later, in his 847-page The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Random House, 1995), “I think it can be proven that the bomb was not only unnecessary but known in advance not to be necessary.” The popular myth “didn’t just happen,” Alperovitz says, “it was created.”
Kept hidden for decades was the 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey’s conclusion that Japan almost certainly would have surrendered in 1945 without the atomic bombs, without a Soviet invasion and without a U.S. invasion.
Not long after V-J Day in 1945, Brig. Gen. Bonnie Feller wrote, “Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either of these events took place.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general and the supreme allied commander in Europe, said in his memoirs he believed “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”
Adm. William Leahy, the wartime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in 1950,
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material success in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
Feller’s, Ike’s and Leahy’s opinions were conspicuously left out of or censored by the Smithsonian Institution’s 1995 display of the atomic B-29 bomber “Enola Gay.”
Admiral Leahy’s 1950 myth-busting and censor-busting about the Bomb could be an epitaph for the nuclear age: “I was not taught to make war in that fashion,” he said of Hiroshima’s incineration, “and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
John LaForge writes for PeaceVoice, is co-director of Nukewatch,a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group,and lives at the Plowshares Land Trust out of Luck, Wisconsin.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The reason the USA felt it had to use the A-bombs was because they had to be dropped before the Soviet Union entered the war. They managed to do so a few days before then. And when the Soviets entered the war they knew the war was over.
The reason for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan is far from being the only piece of deception here:
Joseph Rotblat later recalled a conversation that he had in 1944 with General Groves in which Groves stated that the real purpose of the atomic bomb would be for use against Russia and not Germany.
General Groves confirmed this in 1954:
“I think it is also important to state — I think it is well known — that there was never from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this (Manhattan) project any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy and that the project was conducted on that basis.” (Testimony “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board, Washington, DC, April 12, 1954 to May 6, 1954, p.173 [p.183 in pdf]
Groves took charge of the Manhattan Project in September 1942. His is a truly startling revelation even if we allow for some leeway in his memory. It is also worth pointing out that the Manhattan Project was huge, employing at least 100,000, and that a German counterpart would have been of similar size. It could hardly have gone undetected for long.
Only the elimination of nuclear weapons can prevent their use. And so I urge everyone to get involved in that crucial fight for survival.
Thanks for the informative discussion of Truman’s decision to drop the bomb. He’d been ignorant of the bomb’s existence until he succeeded FDR a few months earlier, and he was led by advisors, notably War Secretary Henry Stimson, in his decision. Stimson saw it as a quick and easy way to end the war with a minimum of further American casualties. Japanese were enemies and their deaths were not his concern. In later years he saw the existence of atomic weapons as an effective inhibitor of future aggression, since the results of an atomic war would be so terrible. This view is supported by the ensuing “Pax Atomica,” which kept the Cold War “cold,” though it hasn’t prevented costly wars like Vietnam and the current Ukraine conflict. The idea that the atomic bomb would NEVER be used is utopian, and a demonstration of the horrors of even the relatively small A-Bombs dropped on Japan is a potent reminder of why this weapon must never be used again. Of course, such was not the motivation of Truman, Stimson, et. al., who were simply trying to end the war – and also send a warning to the Soviets of American military power in their foreseen future rivalry with us. War criminals? Perhaps, but remember the bomb was built in the expectation that Hitler would develop it and use it.
As a UK resident at school in the later half of the 20th Century, we were told the book version of these nuclear attacks and then taught that it was a war crime the US had committed. Thankfully, back in the day it was very easy for the teachers that wanted to, to get away with teaching the kids such common truths about things and they were always openly criticising government in class. Then again, I may have just been incredibly lucky in the schools I went to.
Later in life I came to believe from all I’ve read about it, that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were done to test the new atomic bomb on live targets and they did so purely because they could get away with doing it easily, thanks to their already very effective and well-honed propaganda machine along with the knowledge that it sadly only takes a few generations before atrocities committed by individuals posing as a country can become dulled by time and deception until those responsible evade all ramifications.
It’s these two specific historical war crimes that come to my mind everytime a US official sat atop their high horse blathers on about how so-and-so country aren’t allowed nuclear power because they could use it aggressively.
The gall of them..! The ONLY country to have ever deliberately used the technology to obliterate thousands of civilians not just once but twice, when there had never existed a need to, to then believe they have any right whatsoever to dictate nuclear policy to anyone else on the planet.
There are no words to adequately describe such monsters as we are seeing today.
Hey, I can’t remember…
What do they call it when someone kills civilians in order to achieve a political goal?
I want to curse God but can’t type it .
It seems easy to do but I freeze .
Just typing this says I already have .
Gaza , Madellin Albright , Bushwhacko , Chain-knee –The whole GD works .
F you & F me
There I took a deep breath .
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I have letters from WWII sent to my — inviting / seeking participation in the Madhatter project .
I hope you do not forewarn unnecessarily , yet timely .
I am not a bible thumper — Ezekiel 3:18
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I wish I could write and read and “right” all day today and yesterday .