AMH 2020 – American History II – Fall 2018 Second Analytical Paper Assignment For this assignment, you will write a paper critiquing and examining a secondary article of your choosing. This paper is due at 11:59 PM on Sunday, November 18. Your paper should be uploaded to Canvas. It will be checked for plagiarism using Turn-It-In. Prompt: For this assignment, you will critique a secondary article of your choosing. First, you will choose an article from the American Historical Review or Journal of American History (NO BOOK REVIEWS). This can be from any topic that you want, as long as it pertains to American history and falls into the timeframe of this class – 1865-2016. After reading the article, you answer the following question regarding your article. 1. Summarize the Article: What is the author discussing in this article? What is the argument/main point that the author is trying to make? 2. Evidence: What types of evidence does the author use? Is there any types of evidence that you could think of that would reinforce the author’s argument? 3. Analyze the article: After writing about the main point and the type of evidence, did the author use the evidence to convincingly to reinforce their main point? Why or Why not? 4. Further research: Do you agree or disagree with the conclusions of the article? If you were to research this topic more, what would be you next step to expand this research? DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS: Essays must conform to ALL conventions of formal writing. This means that your essays are expected to be doubled-spaced, grammatically correct, and refer back to the journal article you selected. Please submit your document as a Microsoft Word file – or a similar word processing file. DO NOT convert the file to a PDF. Format • • • • Please include a citation of your article at the top of your paper! I will show you how this is done in class. Each question above should be a new heading in the paper. I do not expect a flowing narrative with this paper. Instead, I want you to simple provide the answers to the questions above. Each question should be roughly 2 paragraph. You don’t need to refer to any of the class readings, nor should you consult Google or Wikipedia. I am only interested on your thoughts about the article you selected. AUSTRALIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH ASIA THE ATOM BOMBING OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI: WERE THEY WAR CRIMES? John Greenwell The allied bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the first atomic bombing in history. The decision to make the atomic bomb was originally taken in case Germany acquired one first. Two European physicists, Szilard and Teller, living in America, kept in touch with what was happening in Europe. In 1939 they became alarmed upon learning that Germany had suddenly banned the export of uranium ore from Czechoslovakia. The Belgian Congo was the only other country with the ore. They became extremely worried but were relatively unknown refugees. Szilard had the idea of getting ‘the old man’, Einstein, to write to President Roosevelt so they hunted Einstein down in an obscure cottage on Long Island. Hence, the famous Einstein letter of 2 August 1939 in which he wrote to Roosevelt that ‘recent work had made it possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power...would be generated by which, my dear Mr President, it might be possible to unleash an immense destructive force’. Thus followed the Manhattan project. Importantly for subsequent events, the Conference at Yalta in February 1945 decided the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan ninety days after the defeat of Germany. Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945. Truman, his Vice President, knew nothing of the bomb. The Americans landed on Okinawa in April-May 1945 and in the brutal ISAA REVIEW Volume 12 Number 2 2013 35 AUSTRALIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH ASIA battles to subdue the island suffered 50,000 casualties – 12,000 of them deaths. Okinawa was similar in terrain to the Japanese islands that held considerable scope to hold an invader at bay. On 25 April President Truman met with Secretary of War, Stimson, and General Groves who was in charge of the Manhattan project. He was then told about the bomb. This meeting established the Interim Committee, presided over by Stimson, charged with considering in detail the country’s future weapons policy. Attached to this committee was a Scientific Panel that included Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton. Groves explained to the President the state of preparations at the Manhattan Project. Germany surrendered unconditionally on 7 May 1945. On 31 May the Interim Committee recommended to the President that the bomb be used against Japan. At a meeting on 18 June Admiral Leahy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed out to President Truman that the United States had suffered 35% casualties on Okinawa. He added that a similar percentage could be expected on Kyushu, which had been selected for invasion. In that event, with 760,000 troops committed to the operation, the toll of dead and wounded would amount to 268,000. By the end of May 1945 the Joint Chiefs had worked out a plan for the invasion. This called for the invasion of Kyushu in the autumn of 1945 and an assault on the main island, Honshu, in March 1946. Truman commented that ‘he hoped there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to another’. A summit of the big three – Truman, Churchill and Stalin – was to take place in Potsdam on 17 July. The date had been deferred at Truman’s request. He wished it to be after the impending test of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. That test, the first dramatic display by mankind of nuclear power, took place on 16 July at 5.30 am. Its success was transmitted to Truman who was already in Potsdam. In his Second World War Churchill recounts what happened: On July 17 world-shaking news arrived. In the afternoon Stimson called at my abode and laid before me a sheet of paper on which was written, ‘babies 36 ISAA REVIEW Volume 12 Number 2 2013 AUSTRALIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH ASIA satisfactorily born’. By this manner I saw that something extraordinary had happened…It means the experiment in the Mexican desert has come off. The atomic bomb has become a reality. Next morning a plane arrived with a full description...The President invited me to confer with him...He had with him General Marshall and Admiral Leahy. Up to this moment...we’d contemplated the desperate resistance of the Japanese fighting to the death with Samurai devotion, not only in pitched battle, but also in every cave and dug-out. I had in my mind the spectacle of Okinawa island...To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and to conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number of British...Now all this nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision – fair and bright indeed it seemed – of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks...moreover, we would not need the Russians...I have no doubt these thoughts were in the mind of my American friends. At any rate, there never was a moment’s discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used or not. Truman now knew he would no longer need Russian help in the war on Japan and that the invasion by Russian forces as had been foreshadowed at Yalta was unnecessary. On 24 July he decided to tell Stalin of the bomb and the test at Los Alamos. Speaking to him casually after the Plenary, he told Stalin that ‘we had a weapon of unusual destructive force’ and was surprised at Stalin’s apparent lack of curiosity, not knowing, of course, that Klaus Fuchs had already divulged the secrets of the bomb to the Russians. On 26 July the order was given to deliver the bomb as soon as weather permitted after 3 August 1945. In his Memoirs, President Truman wrote: ‘The final decision about where and when to use the bomb was up to me. Let there be no doubt about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt it should be used.’ The first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. What then happened has been described as follows: For those who were there and who survived to recall the moment when man first turned on himself the elemental forces of his own universe, the first instant was pure light; blinding intense heat...if there was a sound no one heard it. The initial flash spawned a succession of calamities. First came the heat. It lasted only an instant but was so intense that it melted roof tiles, fused the quartz crystals in granite blocks...and incinerated humans so thoroughly that nothing remained except their shadows, burnt into asphalt pavements...bare skin was burned up to two and a half miles away. After the heat, came the blast, sweeping outward from ISAA REVIEW Volume 12 Number 2 2013 37 AUSTRALIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH ASIA the fireball with the force of a 500 miles per hour wind...A few minutes after the explosion, a strange rain began to fall. The raindrops were as big as marbles – and they were black…After the rain came a wind – a great ‘fire wind’ – which blew back in towards the centre of the catastrophe…The wind blew so hard that it uprooted huge trees in the park where survivors were collecting. Thousands of people were simply fleeing blindly...some of them seeing them thought at first they were Negroes so blackened were their skins. They could not explain what had burned them. ‘We saw the flash’ they said ‘and this is what happened’.1 The scenes of pain and horror were unending. There were people with their bowels and brains coming out... there was a woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of her mouth wandering about in the rain crying for help. One man stood holding his torn out eye in his hand.2 The immediate effect was that 60,000 were killed and almost 100,000 injured out of a population of 250,000 but the ongoing deaths from radiation continued for years. Physically, almost the entire city had been destroyed by the blast. President Truman delivered an ultimatum to Japan the next day demanding that it surrender unconditionally. On 9 August Soviet forces crossed into Manchuria. At 12 pm on 9 August a US B-29 Bomber dropped a plutonium bomb, ‘Fat Man’, upon Nagasaki. Some years later, the Mayor of Nagasaki described it: ‘more than 70,000 burnt and mangled victims lay dead or dying in the ruins...Within five years a further 70,000 had died from the effects of radiation’. On 15 August the Emperor announced Japan’s surrender. In his address to the Japanese people, the first by a Japanese sovereign, but which never once mentioned surrender, he did say that the enemy had begun ‘to employ a new and most cruel bomb’. That then is the description of the dropping of the bombs. I turn to deal with two issues of fact which immediately arise: The first, and to my mind the easiest, is whether the bombs precipitated the surrender. It would seem clear that they did and were indeed referred to by the Emperor in his ‘surrender’ address as ‘most cruel’. But there is a body of opinion, particularly among Japanese historians, that it was the Soviet invasion on 9 August, which preceded the Emperor’s 38 ISAA REVIEW Volume 12 Number 2 2013 AUSTRALIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH ASIA surrender address and which led to some immediate disorganisation of Japanese forces, that led to the surrender. In my view it is not unreasonable to assume that the Soviet invasion, which had been preceded the day before by Ambassador Sato in Moscow seeking to persuade Molotov to desist, did play a part – the final nail in the coffin, so to speak – but I cannot believe that that this and not the dropping of the bombs was the decisive factor in the Japanese surrender. A more difficult question is whether, had the bombs not been dropped, Japan would have surrendered before November 1945. You will recall that the invasion of Kyushu had been planned for then and for the main island of Honshu in March in 1946 – and Okinawa-like casualties were thought likely to follow such an invasion and it was that fear which was advanced as justifying the dropping of the atomic bombs. There were a number of general background factors suggesting that Japan might have surrendered in any event: the Soviet invasion, the devastated state of the country and the collapse of the Japanese economy making it difficult to sustain the army and the Japanese people. The food rations imposed in August 1945 were extreme – more so than those in Germany and barely sufficient for survival. Senior military figures in the United States did not support the bombing, or were equivocal. The most famous was General Eisenhower, as he then was. The Chief of the Staff, Admiral Leahy was bitterly opposed. ‘The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.’ One might say though that all this was a matter of judgement. Truman could not have been satisfied that the Japanese would surrender before the invasion and thereby avoid the great loss of life which he and Churchill no doubt genuinely feared. Yet this apparently reasonable view is greatly undermined by the failure to take any or any reasonable steps to warn the Japanese in advance of the consequences of the atomic bomb, the enormous difference between its effects and the bombing that they had experienced. ISAA REVIEW Volume 12 Number 2 2013 39 AUSTRALIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH ASIA THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE ATOMIC BOMB First, it may be observed that a Declaration was issued following the Potsdam Conference on 26 July 1945 warning Japan of the Forces ‘poised to strike the final blows upon Japan’ and giving it ‘an opportunity to end the war’, but no mention was made in that quite extensive Declaration of the atomic bombs. Thereafter leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities and once again the readers of those leaflets – it could be reasonably inferred – would have construed the reference to ‘destruction from the air’ without elaboration, as something similar to the massive bombing they had already endured and not to ‘a new and cruel bomb’ – to use the words of the Emperor. One might ask whether a warning disclosing the explosive potential of the atomic bomb as revealed at Los Alamos on 17 July could have been given. Or, more effectively, whether a demonstration of its potential could have been given. Some months before the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, General Marshall had proposed ‘that these weapons might be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that...we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which people would be warned to leave – telling the Japanese that we intended to destroy such centres’. That was another possibility. At the meeting of the Interim Committee and the Scientific Panel on 31 May, which has been previously mentioned, the possibility of a demonstration rather than direct use was discussed over lunch. Oppenheimer opposed the suggestion. He said the bomb might prove to be a dud; the Japanese might shoot down the delivery plane; the Japanese might bring American prisoners into the test area. I feel bound to say I do not myself find those views at all convincing and when they were conveyed to the scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, produced uproar. The scientists established their own committee – the Chicago committee under James Franck – to examine the question. It reported in a thoughtful 40 ISAA REVIEW Volume 12 Number 2 2013 AUSTRALIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH ASIA study on 11 June, clearly stating that an unannounced attack on Japan was inadvisable. They attempted to convey their views to Stimson, Secretary for War. In turn the Scientific Panel reconsidered the matter in the light of the Committee’s views but could ‘propose no technical demonstration likely to end the war’. Szilard whose initiative, you will recall, had led to the Manhattan project, continued to apply pressure and circulated a petition signed by sixty-seven scientists, dated 17 July. Groves carefully re-routed it so that it arrived in Washington after the President had left for Potsdam and Truman never saw it. We do not of course know what would have happened if a warning had been given and how the Japanese would have reacted but the important question is – why was it not attempted? One gathers the impression, not least from President Truman’s diaries, that dropping the bombs was not ‘a last resort’ in the President’s thinking. Against this, it is true that on 9 August, he said, ‘I realise the tragic significance of the atomic bomb...it is an awful responsibility...we thank God it came to us, instead of our enemies’. More specifically though, it would seem that both Truman and his Secretary of State, James Byrne, were greatly exercised by the superior claims Stalin would have had, should there be delay in bringing about a Japanese surrender. By the Potsdam Conference the Cold War had effectively begun. It was known then that Soviet forces were poised to invade Manchuria. An early surrender resulting from the bomb would have had the effect of forestalling those claims. MORAL AND INTERNATIONAL LEGAL IMPLICATIONS War is so inherently barbaric that short of conduct which in no way contributes to the participant’s victory it may be said there is no other controlling moral or legal criterion. A moment’s reflection however suggests this cannot be. It would justify the shooting of prisoners or their torture followed by the necessary publicity to induce terror in the enemy. It would of course involve refusing them hospital or nursing treatment. Civilisation ISAA REVIEW Volume 12 Number 2 2013 41 AUSTRALIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH ASIA must struggle against barbarism even in the midst of barbarism. One means of doing so is by law. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, and against the background of the cruelty of the crusaders in Constantinople and the three-day massacre of the inhabitants of Acre, a principle that came to be historically important was established and received the approval of the Church. War was not a relation between man and man but between state and state. It was wrong therefore to harm those who did not and could not engage in war. Generally, this confined permissible war to military forces. The factual basis of this distinction though substantially collapsed, especially in World War II when civilians participated in the war economy. To some extent, bombing designed to apply to this situation and confined to it, falls outside our inquiry. Thus, I mention the concerted attacks on the German ball-bearing industry at Schweinfurt and other places. But the principle specifically declared at the Hague Conference (1907) and universally accepted is that ‘the means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited’. Consider for a moment what this negative principle implies – that there are certain means conducive to victory or the avoidance of defeat, which must be foregone. Among these is the ‘intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking a direct part in hostilities’. I have taken these words from the Rome Statute for an International Criminal Court, Art 8(1) but those words are not materially different from those of the Hague Convention 1907. They embody twentieth-century international law. It means that such deliberate attacks against the civilian population would constitute a violation, even where the resulting terror might contribute to victory. CONCLUSION In my view it is not possible to justify the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the desired need to deprive Stalin of a Cold War advantage: even less so when their dropping was not preceded by the ‘example’ proposed by General Marshall, or warning of the explosive 42 ISAA REVIEW Volume 12 Number 2 2013 AUSTRALIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH ASIA potential of the bombs if Japan did not surrender. The thanks given by Truman to God on 9 August 1945 for preserving the United States from atomic bombing ‘by the enemy’ was specious. At that time there was not the least prospect of that. The atomic bombing of both cities was in my opinion a war crime. Eisenhower pithily summed it up when he said: ‘there was no need to hit them with that damn, awful, thing’. ROYAL AIR FORCE AREA BOMBING OF GERMAN CITIES I should perhaps make some brief observations on Royal Air-Force area bombing of German cities in 1940 and 1941 and its relationship to the views presented in this essay. I stress this period. England was alone. Europe had been conquered. The Soviet Union was in alliance with Hitler. The United States was not yet in the war. England was alone – but it was not just its existence that was in question, but the existence of anything that could be called civilisation. Churchill was literally right when he said ‘the long night of barbarism would descend’ in the event of defeat. We know that this was so beyond any conceivable doubt from the genocide we witnessed in 1945. I agree with the great German writer, Thomas Mann, when he said the bombing of the cities was dreadful but a Hitler victory and its consequences were unthinkable. We thus have the rare if not unique situation where it is not just the victory or defeat of England or any other country that is in issue. The terror bombing was a war crime but in this rare case civilisation may have been preserved by the breach of international law insofar as it halted a Hitler victory at that time. This distinction and the rationale advanced to justify the bombing of civilians to create terror at that period do not apply to the area bombing later in the War when, as in the case of the bombing of Dresden, it was clear the Allies had ‘won’. Dresden, Florence on the Elbe, was the capital of Saxony. Shortly after 10 pm on 13 February, an armada of 243 Lancaster bombers arrived over the city. In twenty-five minutes they unloaded 1,477 tons of explosives. Three hours later came another 529 Lancasters, this time with firebombs. ISAA REVIEW Volume 12 Number 2 2013 43 AUSTRALIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH ASIA The second raid caused a series of infernos – the fires suffocated thousands of victims. People were burnt to ashes in a moment even in cellars. In the four-hour onslaught an estimated 25,000 people died and approximately 350,000 made homeless.3 Dresden was overwhelmed and did not function until after the war. Churchill, who had previously supported the bombing, began to have reservations. Fletcher Knebel & Charles Bailey, No High Ground – the Secret History of the Atomic Bomb, Harper, New York, 1960. 2 Jonathan Glover, Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Pimlico, London, 2000, p.98. 1 3 Peter Rees, Lancaster Men: the Aussie Heroes of Bomber Command, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, Sydney, 2013, p.349. 44 ISAA REVIEW Volume 12 Number 2 2013 Copyright of ISAA Review: Journal of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia is the property of Independent Scholars Association of Australia Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
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