Authors: Ira Katznelson
142
Of the city’s 90,000 buildings, 62,000 simply disappeared, and 6,000 others were damaged beyond repair. See Edward Teller (with Allen Brown),
The Legacy of Hiroshima
(New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 4.
143
Cited in Bird and Sherwin,
American Prometheus,
p. 316. Three days later, just before the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, President Truman stated, “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nonetheless true.” See Paul Boyer, “‘Some Sort of Peace’: President Truman, the American People, and the Atomic Bomb,” in
The Truman Presidency,
ed. Michael J. Lacey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 176, 177. From the moment that President Roosevelt met with Secretary of War Henry Stimson and other members of a “top policy group” on October 9, 1941, to launch a process to develop an atomic bomb, the weapon was conceived as a legitimate tool that, if developed in time, would be used. Only for reasons of timing—the bomb was not ready—was it not used against Germany, the target against which it was primarily directed. See Martin J. Sherwin, “The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War: U.S. Atomic Energy Policy and Diplomacy, 1941–1945,”
American Historical Review
78 (1973): 946; Barton J. Bernstein, “Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb, 1941–1945: A Reinterpretation,”
Political Science Quarterly
90 (1975): 32. Bernstein cites some evidence that FDR, at least for a time in 1944, considered not dropping the bomb on Japan but using it only as a threat (pp. 32–33).
144
So he recalled a decade later. See Harry S. Truman, “Greatest Thing in History,’”
Life,
October 24, 1955, p. 103. He was on the
Augusta,
sailing back from the Potsdam Conference.
145
Charles R. Reyher,
Memoirs of a B-29 Pilot
(Bennington, VT: Merriam Press, 2008), p. 153. Operating from Guam, Reyher flew thirteen missions against Japan between June and September of 1945. He believed the war could have been won without using atomic weapons and without an invasion of mainland Japan. Before Hiroshima, two key members of the Scientific Advisory Panel, Arthur Compton, the chair of the University of Chicago Physics Department, who directed the Manhattan Project’s Chicago laboratory, and Ernest Lawrence, the head of the California Radiation (Rad) Lab in Berkeley, proposed that the bomb be first used in a noncombat demonstration. Compton argued that the bomb’s use in Japan constituted “more serious implications than the introduction of poison gas,” and that at issue was “more a political than . . . military question” because the bomb “introduces the question of mass slaughter, really for the first time in history.” Oppenheimer disagreed, arguing that “no demonstration . . . would be sufficiently spectacular to convince the Japs that further resistance was useless,” Lawrence recalled. That view carried the day. See Barton J. Bernstein, “Four Physicists and the Bomb: The Early Years, 1945–1950,”
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences
18, no. 2 (1988): 2365–36.
146
Father Tadashi Hasegawa, cited in James Carroll,
House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 77.
147
Hastings,
Retribution,
p. 455; Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard, eds.,
Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), p. 211. Szilard had been among the first to recommend to President Roosevelt that he initiate an atomic bomb program, but by 1945 he was trying to persuade FDR, then Truman, not to use the weapon. See Bird and Sherwin,
American Prometheus,
p. 291.
148
Rossiter,
Constitutional Dictatorship,
p. 314. “The second World War,” he wrote, “was not to be the last” of the “great national crises. The possibility of an atomic war only establishes emergency government a little more prominently in the array of this nation’s problems. Not that martial law is going to save us from an atomic attack; still, it may be the only glue available when it comes time to pick up the pieces” (p. 307).
149
Table Ed223–227, “U.S. Strategic Nuclear Weapons, 1945–1996,” United States Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); available at https://hsus.cambridge.org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/HSUSWeb/search/searchessavpdf.do?id=Ed223-227.
150
John W. Dower,
Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9–11, Iraq
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 161; Henry DeWolf Smyth,
A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945). In August 1943, Britain and the United States signed an agreement at a summit in Quebec that promised nuclear cooperation and banned giving atomic information to the Soviet Union. See Hershberg,
James B. Conant,
pp. 172–93; Zachary,
Endless Frontier,
p. 212; Andrew Roberts
, Masters and Commanders: The Military Geniuses Who Led the West to Victory in World War II
(London: Penguin, 2009), p. 189. The secret was not kept because scientific communities, diplomatic agencies, and military organizations in the United States and Great Britain were penetrated by Soviet agents. See Bird and Sherwin,
American Prometheus,
pp. 285–86; Max Hastings,
Winston’s War: Churchill
,
1940–
1945 (New York: Vintage, 2011), p. 259; Hershberg,
James B. Conant,
pp. 158–59. The key figures who provided the USSR with reports from Los Alamos included Theodore Hall, a talented nineteen-year-old from Harvard who arrived in January 1944, and Klaus Fuchs, German by birth, who was part of the British team that came seven months later, in August.
151
H. H. Goldsmith, “The Literature of Atomic Energy of the Past Decade,”
Scientific Monthly
68 (1949): 295.
152
Cited in Bernstein, “Four Physicists and the Bomb,” p. 241.
153
Cited in Martin Gilbert,
The Second World War
(London: Stoddart, 1989), p. 440.
154
Overy,
Why the Allies Won,
p. 128.
155
Edmund Russell,
War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to
Silent Spring
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 131.
156
General H. H. Arnold, “Air Force in the Atomic Age,” in
One World or None
, ed. Dexter Masters and Katharine Way (New York: McGraw Hill, 1946), p. 27.
157
Overy,
Why the Allies Won,
p. 126; Ian Buruma, “The Cruelest War,”
New York Review of Books,
May 1, 2008, p. 24.
158
Time,
March 19, 1945, p. 32.
159
These campaigns were popular with the American and the British publics, serving as boosters of morale. See George E. Hopkins, “Bombing and the American Conscience during World War II,”
Historian
28 (1966): 451–73. For overviews, see Randall Hansen,
Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942–1945
(New York: New American Library, 2009); Roberts,
Storm of War,
pp. 429–60.
160
“Japan’s military economy was devoured in flames; her population desperately longed for escape from bombing. German forces lost half of the weapons needed at the front, millions of workers absented themselves from work, and the economy gradually creaked almost to a halt. . . . For all the arguments over the morality or operational effectiveness of the bombing campaigns, the air offensive was one of the decisive elements of Allied victory.” See Overy,
Why the Allies Won,
p. 133.
161
See http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/fr32/speeches/su43fdr.htm.
162
New York Times,
March 18, 1944;
The Nation,
March 18, 1944, p. 323.
163
Hastings,
Retribution,
p. 473.
164
“Barcelona Horrors,”
Time,
March 28, 1938, p. 16.
165
Dower,
Cultures of War,
p. 160.
166
Time,
October 29, 1945, p. 30.
167
D. W. Brogan,
The American Character
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944), pp. 163–64; Brian Waddell, “The Dimensions of the Military Ascendancy during U.S. Industrial Mobilization for World War II,”
Journal of Military and Political Sociology
23 (S 1995): 81–98. For an account of the problems faced by such a mobilization, see E. J. B. Foxcroft, “Planning and Executing Resources Allocation—A Phase of War Administration,”
Public Policy
4 (1955): 158–81.
168
Janeway,
The Struggle for Survival,
p. 361. Janeway, who was close to a range of important war administrators, including James Forrestal, Ferdinand Eberstadt, and Abe Fortas, stressed how FDR’s patterns of mobilization were meant to lean on and advance “the unorganized momentum of American democracy” (p. 361).
169
Weigley,
History of the United States Army,
p. 475. The U.S. Navy, though, was the largest in the world; larger than all the other navies combined. See John Lukacs,
The Legacy of the Second World War
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 48. For an overview of governmental planning and centralization during World War II, compared with that during World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, showing the extraordinary scale and growth in government spending and capacity between 1941 and 1945, see Arthur A. Stein,
The Nation at War
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 54–71.
170
Government as a unified technical enterprise led by specialists in violence, distinguished from politicians who were specialists in bargaining, were key themes in Lasswell’s landmark essay, “The Garrison State,” pp. 464, 455.
171
Congressional Record,
78th Cong., 2d sess., February 24, 1942, pp. 1570–71.
172
Rossiter,
Constitutional Dictatorship,
p. 276.
173
Mark Tushnet, “Civil Liberties after 1937—The Justices and the Theories” (unpublished manuscript, 2011), pp. 51–52.
174
See the “Defending Civil Liberties” chapter in the memoir by former attorney general Francis Biddle,
In Brief Authority
(New York: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 152–60.
175
For an official statement of “the position of the Communist International on the basic issues of our time,” see Georgi Dimitroff,
The United Front against Fascism
(New York: International Publishers, 1938).
176
John France,
Perilous Glory: The Rise of Western Military Power
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 329.
177
Richard Overy,
Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941–1945
(New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 223.
178
In April 1942, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov was assured on a visit to the White House that a second front would be opened in France later that year in an effort to pull forty German divisions away from the USSR. See Roberts,
Masters and Commanders,
p. 175.
179
Table Ed1–5, “Military Personnel and Casualties, by War and Branch of Service: 1775–1991,” United States Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States
; available at https://hsus.cambridge.org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/HSUSWeb/toc/showTablePdf.do?id=Ed1–5.
180
See the discussion in “Prisoners of the Reich,” in Max Hastings,
Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–1945
(New York: Vintage, 2005), especially pp. 393–396. Hastings observes how, “by 1945, the custody, exploitation, and murder of prisoners had become the largest activities in Germany beyond the military struggle” (p. 381).
181
B. V. Sokolov, “The Cost of War: Human Losses of the USSR and Germany, 1938–1945,”
Journal of Slavic Military Studies
9 (1996): 156–71; V. E. Korol, “The Price of Victory: Myths and Realities,”
Journal of Slavic Military Studies
9 (1996): 417–24. Estimates have varied widely, with some as high as 47 million, but such losses seem exaggerated.
182
Compared with Soviet, Japanese, and German military forces, relatively small numbers of American and British soldiers served on the front lines. Their support troops, backing up mechanized units, were far greater in number than the soldiers most at risk to suffer casualties. Soviet units, by contrast, “lacked mechanization, and relied on horse-drawn transport, as did something like 75 per cent of the German divisions.” See France,
Perilous Glory,
pp. 346, 348. During the war, the Soviet Union was devastated. It lost 32,000 factories, 40,000 miles of railway track, 1,700 towns, and 70,000 villages. See Catherine Merridale,
Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), pp. 147, 190; Timothy Snyder,
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin
(New York: Basic Books, 2010), pp. 171–75; Roberts,
Storm of War,
pp. 172, 345, 565; I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot, eds.,
The Oxford Companion to World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 823–25. This summary of Russian costs also relies on the comprehensive overview in Overy,
Russia’s War
.
183
Merridale,
Ivan’s War,
pp. 188–91.
184
George Sanford,
Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice, and Memory
(New York: Routledge, 2005). The tribunal heard conflicting testimony, and reached no conclusion about culpability at Katyn.