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Last update: 6 August 1997.
In my opinion Kent Curtis has erred seriously in his message, particularly in several statements in his penultimate paragraph. His error is in not heeding C. V. Wedgwood's crucial dictum that the historian should always remember that the historian knows one central important thing about any given event that no participant in the event knows. The historian knows how things turned out. Curtis states "If we explain Hiroshima or Nagasaki according to 1945 military strategy . . . and we stop at that, then we are in effect still fighting the war."
I would argue that if we do not "explain Hiroshima or Nagasaki according to 1945 military strategy"--I might add "/diplomatic" after military in deference to Alperowitz et al--then whatever we are doing it ain't history. That does not mean that we do not use insights gained since 1945 to criticize or praise the decision but the only way the decision can be understood is in 1945 terms. The decision must be examined where it exists and that is 1945 and no where else. We now know that there were elements in the Japanese government that were willing to consider peace prior to Hiroshima but we also know that they were not yet in control of the Japanese government. Might they have eventually taken over the government? That we will never know. Should we have prolonged the war to find out and thus lessen the loss of lives of our enemies and increase the loss of lives of our citizens? To ask the question that way is to answer it and yet that is what many revisionist historians ask.
The crucial decision, the inhumane decision was not the one to drop the A-bomb. The cruel decision was to indulge in the indiscriminate bombing of civilian centers in the first place. But the United States didn't make that decision. It was made for us by the Germans at Guernica, in the Netherlands, over England, and by the Japanese at Shanghai. The desire for revenge was not manufactured in Washington. It grew naturally out of the ruins of Pearl, out of the savagery of the Bataan Death March. It was incarnated out of Japanese plans, bombs, and bayonets. Sometimes in this imperfect world you do indeed reap the whirlwind.
To be sure I am old enough to remember WWII. My father, a professional soldier, fought in the Pacific and he did not have to participate in the invasion of the home islands. And yes that colors my thinking. Moreover I grew up in New Mexico which had the highest per capita ratio of Japanese POWs in the nation. I had friends whose relatives were on Bataan. Some came back, many didn't and those who did come back were neither improved nor ennobled by the process.
But I am also a professional historian who takes some pride in his fidelity to the principles of his craft and who tries to keep abreast in his reading and in his interpretations. I know now that the situation was neither as grim nor as black and white as it appeared in 1945. But the decision had to be made then not after Alperowitz or Bernstein or others had had time to study the relevant archival material.
Lord Acton, a pretty fair country historian, once wrote to the effect that if a historian was going to set himself up as judge and jury over a figure in the past then common decency required that he try the figure by the laws of his subject's time not his. That is not a bad rule. It has the virtue of being both simple to understand and fair. The reading and thinking public understand it. So should we.
Gus Seligmann
Department of History
Univ. of North
Texas
gus@cas.unt.edu
Return to resources for BANG! and Nuclear Fictions.
Last update: 6 August 1997.