DID AMERICA HAVE TO DROP THE BOMB?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300037-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 37
• Publication Date: August 4, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300037-1
ARTICLE
ON PAGE
WASHINGTON POST
4 August 1985
Did America Have to Drop the Bomb?
0
By Chalmers M. Roberts
FOR 40 YEARS MANY Americans, and
foreigners too, have been contending
that the United States never should
have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, that
Japan was so battered and beaten it was on
the point of surrender. They reject the
counter-argument that only use of that
dreadful weapon forced the surrender and
thus avoided the heavy loss of life inevitable
if the planned invasion of Japan had taken
place.
Because 'l played a small role in this mat-
ter and because, by sheer coincidence, I was
flying over the initial invasion beach in Japan
on Nov. 1, 1945,,the day it was to begin, I.
want to cite the record as I've been able to
accumulate- it, including some from recent
digging into the National Archives.
That record, to me, is overwhelming that
Harry S Truman, president only four months
when he made the decision, chose to drop
the bomb essentially to end the war in a
hurry and save American lives. In his 1955
memoirs, Truman wrote: "In all, it had been
estimated that it would require until the late
fall of 1946 to bring Japan to her knees.
And: "Gen. Marshall told me that it might
cost half a million American lives to force
the enemy's 'surrender on his home
grounds."
On July 18, 1945, when he' was at the
Potsdam Conference with Stalin and Church-
ill and just after he heard that the Alamagor-
do, N.M., test was a success and after Stalin
had promised to join the war on Aug. 15,
Truman wrote to his wife in a letter not dis-
closed until 1983: "I'll say that we'll end the
war a year sooner now, and think of the kids
who won't be killed! That is the important
thing."
On June 15, 1945, Gen. George C. Mar-
shall; Army chief of staff, sent a message, re-
cently declassified, to Gen. Douglas MacAr-
thur, then planning to lead the invasion:
"The president is very much concerned as
to the number of casualties we will receive
in the Olympic operation [code name for the
first phase of the invasion].... This will be
discussed with the president.. . ."
At' a meeting that took place on June 18
Marshall inquired about a MacArthur staff
report that "for planning purposes" had esti-
mated- "battle casualties" for the first 90
days at 105,050 plus non-battle casualties of
12,600. MacArthur's response was to brush
this aside as an "academic and routine" esti-
mate, adding: "I do not anticipate such a
high rate of loss." He went on to argue that
the invasion's "decisive effect will eventually
save lives by eliminating wasteful operations
of non-decisive character," doubtless mean-
ing those of his Navy rival, Adm. Chester W.
Nimitz.
The general, who later would contend that
by 1945 he had felt Russian intervention
"had become superfluous," added that "the
hazard and loss will be greatly lessened if an
attack is launched from Siberia sufficiently
ahead of our target date to commit the
enemy to major combat."
A t the June 18 meeting Marshall put
the casualty estimate for the first 30
days at 31,000. MacArthur's staff
estimate for the same initial phase had been
50,800.
Some revisionist historians have con-
tended that Truman's bomb decision had an
anti-Soviet cast, that it was designed to use
the American monopoloy for atomic black-
mail. The evidence to support such a view is
certainly thin and scanty, although Truman
was shortly to become a cold warrior.
Others contend that the million casualties
estimate was ridiculous, at best simply a
typical Pentagon worst-case figure.
In a recent case stud X, for example, Rog er
Hilsman. a World War 11 militarv intelligence
officer and later the State Department's in-
telligence chief, put it this way: "Although
no one knows where he got his figures,
Stimson also told Truman that an invasion
would cost a million American casual-
ties, not to mention Japanese casualties."
Hilsman contended that Marshall's estimate
of the invasion cost was not 1 million but
only 40,000. For this Hilsman relied on a
1968 book by Nuel Pharr Davis in which
Davis, without giving any source, flatly
stated that "Marshall estimated the cost at
40,000." I think this figure is in error.
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote
in his 1947 memoirs, done in collaboration
with McGeorge Bundy, that the invasion
plans would involve military and naval forces
"of the order of 5 million men" or more and
that "we estimated that if we should be
forced to carry this plan to its conclusion,
the major fighting would not end until the
latter part of 1946, at the earliest. I was in-
formed that such operations might be ex-
pected to cost over a million casualties to
American forces alone. . . .
Stimson called use of the bomb "our least
abhorrent choice" for ending the American
fire raids, lifting the blockade and avoiding
the "the ghastly specter of a clash of great
land armies.. ." In his public report at
war's end, Marshall wrote .that "defending
the homeland the enemy had an army of 2
.
million, a remaining air strength of 8,00
planes of all types, training and combat."
After leaving the presidency, Truman in a
television interview said "it was estimated"
that the initial invasion of the southernmost
island of Kyushu, Operation Olympic, "would
cost 700,000 men - 250,000 of our young-
sters to be killed and 500,000 of them to be
maimed for life." Those figures doubtless
stretch any 1945 estimate. But Truman that
day also referred to another key factor in his
decision: the murderous Okinawa campaign
that had lasted from April 1 to June 21 and
had cost 48,000 American casualties.
The key import of Okinawa in affecting
the Truman decision was the mass employ-
ment of so-called suicide aircraft, known in
Japanese as kamikaze. The toll on American
ships by these one-way pilots had been the
greatest in the Navy's history: 30 vessels
sunk and 368 ships damaged including 10
battleships and 13 aircraft carriers. At the
June 18 White House meeting Truman had
commented that he hoped to avoid "an
Okinawa from one end of Japan to the
other." And on the TV program he recalled
that bloody Okinawa "gave us some idea of
what we had to do in order to defeat the
Japanese... .
A U.S. Fleet Headquarters estimate as of
Aug. 9, the day the second bomb was
dropped on Nagasaki, totaled the Japanese
army and navy aircraft still available in the
home islands as 3,669 and of these 1,115
were in western Japan,, the Kyushu area.
During the Okinawa assault by kamikazes
the Navy had begun to include in its estimate
of enemy aircraft both training and combat
units because trainers were being used in
battle. However, the Navy said, "not in-
cluded in this estimate is a substantial num-
ber of training types which may be used for
suicide attacks, especially at night."
By that time I was a military intelli-
gence o icer in the Pentagon- in
char a of tracking the kamikaze units
in the r Amy Air Force on the basis of inter-
cepted Japanese military messages. And the
reason I was flying, with three other officers,
over that initial invasion beach, at iyaza
on Kyushu, was that at war's end I had gone
to Japan where I headed an eight-man team
checking u on our i-Tr
Il gore estimates,
party the U.. trate c Bomb urve .
The Miyazaki beach, barely 30 es long,
looked like an ideal landing spot, long and
gently sloping to the sea, the biggest beach
on the island. But it was terribly shallow and
behind it rose a range from which murderous
fire on the beaches would have been possible.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300037-1
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300037-1
My notes show that at Oita, in northern
,Kyushu, we found Japanese biplane trainers
with bomb racks loaded for kamikaze pilots,
that at Karasehara further south the now
meek Japanese officers furnished order-of-
battle documents to show that at war's end
they had 56,000 troops dug in with another
70,000 in reserve and that there were many
planes, 850 regular planes plus 790 suicide
planes, a total of 1,640 tucked into the air-
craft at air strips or hillsides.
A general told me "we were figuring on
1,000 planes, special attack kamikaze type"
for defense against allied landings on Kyu-
shu. There was a gasoline shortage but some
ingenious substitutes already had been used.
The Japanese told us they figured. we would
land on Miyazaki beach - where else, they
asked?
One Japanese general, once an assistant
military attache in Washington, broke down
and cried as he told us how he had planned
to go out with his men on a large scale sui-
cide mission on Aug. 16. A few others actu-
ally did so after the surrender. A lieutenant
colonel objected to the American use of the
word "suicide," calling it a "misnomer."
"The pilot," he told me, "did not start out
on his mission with the intention of commit-
ting suicide. He looked upon himself as a
human bomb which would destroy a certain
part of the enemy fleet for his country. They
considered it a glorious thing, while a suicide
may not be so glorious."
I have no doubt that my Pentagon shop's
estimates of kamikaze strength were fed
into the weekly order-of-battle tables that
worked their way up the chain of command
to become a fragment of what was put be-
fore Marshall, Stimson and Truman. In 1948
Stimson obviously depended on such figures
in writing that "the air force had been re-
duced mainly to reliance upon kamikaze, or
suicide, attacks. These latter, however, had
already inflicted serious damage on our sea-
going going forces, and their possible effectiveness
in a last ditch fight was a matter of real con-
cern to our naval leaders."
Stimson summarized: "As we understood
it in July, there was a very strong possibility
that the Japanese government might deter-
mine upon resistance to the end, in all the
areas of the Far East under its control. In
such an event the Allies would be faced with
the enormous task of destroying an armed
force of 5 million men and 5,000 suicide air=
craft, belonging to a race which had already
amply demonstrated its ability to fight lit-
erally to the death."
The last word should come from Marshall
on whom the responsibility must ultimately
rest for the estimates, however good or bad
the intelligence work on which he had to de-
pend. On June 11, 1947, not long after Stim-
son's initial account had appeared in Harp-
er's magazine, the general, now secretary of
state, ruminated with David Lilienthal, head
of the Atomic Energy Commission, who re-
counted Marshal's comments in his diary:
"There has been a good deal of discussion
about whether we were justified in using the
atomic bomb. . . . One of the things that
appalled me was the cost, in casualties, of an
invasion. . . . Even an ill-equipped force
can cost terrible losses to a landing party.
To get to the plains [of eastern Japan] would
have been a very costly operation, in lives.
We knew the Japanese were determined and
fanatical . . . and we would have to extermi-
nate them, almost man by man. So we
thought the bomb would be a wonderful
weapon as a protection and preparation for
landings. But we didn't realize its value to
give the Japanese such a shock that that they
could surrender without complete loss of
face. . . . What he [Stimson] said as to the
considerations that were weighed is entirely
true. But we missed one of the most impor-
tant consequences."
It is easy now, 40 years later, to for et
the passions, bitterness, hatred, t e faulty
intelligence, misjudgments and sheer stupidi-
ties of the war. Using the bomb, especially
against non-whites, certainly has hurt the
United States in the eyes of many world-
wide. But even at such a cost and even at
this remove, to one who had some small role
in it all, it seems 'to. have been the right
choice.
Chalmers Roberts is former chief diplomatic
correspondent of The Washington Post.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300037-1