Ham challenges role of atomic bomb in WWII

Transcript

ALI MOORE, PRESENTER: Now to our interview tonight.

It's widely believed that the bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the key events which ended the war in the Pacific in 1945.

Well, Australian writer and historian Paul Ham has spent the past few years poring over official documents, the minutes of high level meetings, and personal diaries to build an account of these events that challenges the traditional view.

Paul Ham's book, Hiroshima Nagasaki, was officially launched tonight.

Paul Ham joined me in our Sydney studio earlier.

Paul Ham welcome to Lateline.

PAUL HAM, WRITER AND HISTORIAN: Thank you very much.

ALI MOORE: There's no shortage of historical accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why write another? What wasn't there that we needed to know.

PAUL HAM: Well I think a very close reading, as I've done, of the core documents, the minutes, for example, of meetings in Tokyo leading up to the end of the war which I had translated; also the minutes of the Target Committee, which decided where and when to drop the bombs.

All the primary documents, a lot of them haven't been read as closely as I think they should have been. And certainly the Ultra transcripts, these are the American intelligence system which decoded Japanese cables, particularly between Japan and Moscow, which is a critical a thing in understanding the bomb.

You have to understand Japan's fear of Moscow and how that played out in the last stages of the war.

So I felt as I was doing my preliminary research that this story hadn't been told in the way that it should have been. I feel that in many ways, certainly the military case for the bomb has been misrepresented quite substantially. And this, this conviction, I got this conviction as I progressed through the documents and found that was left out.

ALI MOORE: But I guess it wasn't just that was it? I mean standard knowledge or standing thinking is that it was the bombs that brought on the surrender of Japan; you would argue differently?

PAUL HAM: Certainly. I would dismiss that. I would say the bombs were a contributing factor but I wouldn't say they were the decisive factor.

Now the idea in the American narrative is that the bombs led to the prompt and unconditional surrender of Japan. Well firstly they didn't surrender unconditionally. Their sole condition was the retention of the emperor, which America accepted.

ALI MOORE: And in the end saw the light of accepting because he was vital to getting a surrender.

PAUL HAM: Yes they needed him to force the Japanese army to lay down their arms. And they saw that.

Also the idea that the bomb was a sort of, had forced them, had forced them into submission, had shocked them into submission, which was the expression they used in Washington. Well it didn't shock them. The warlords in Tokyo were prepared to go on fighting against a nuclear-armed America. They actually sent out propaganda to their people saying “we will defend this country to the last man and woman.” They were going to commit national seppuku, national suicide.

In fact, the day of the dropping of the bomb in Nagasaki, there was a top meeting in Tokyo of the six warlords who ran the country then. And they were discussing, not atomic bombs but the Russian invasion of Japanese occupied territory the day before, and a runner comes in and says “Sir, we've lost Nagasaki, it's been destroyed by a new ‘special’ bomb.” They didn't know it was atomic at that stage. And the sort of six Samurai sort of said, “thank you, and run along with, that's interesting ...”

ALI MOORE: And off he went.

PAUL HAM: And off he went. We've got more important things to deal with, which is the Russian invasion of our territory. And this was an extraordinary dismissal of the loss of another city.

But the background of course is that at that point Japan had already lost 66, 67 cities to conventional bombardment, to the incendiary campaign, which was a deliberate attack on Japanese civilians. And this had been going on for six months.

So two more cities had been destroyed by a "special" bomb. Remember they hadn't seen photographs of it at this stage, they hadn't seen the mushroom cloud which so horrifies us today. They were just sitting there hearing that there's been this strange bomb and the city's devastated.

Well, they were talking in a bunker under Tokyo, which was absolutely devastated.

ALI MOORE: But what they were aware of was that Russia had invaded Manchuria. Now Russia, they'd been trying for long time to get Russia to play peacemaker, and they had had a peace agreement with the Russians until Stalin declared war himself?

PAUL HAM: Yes, they had a neutrality pact with Russia, between Russia and Japan. And this was supposed to last until April 1946. Stalin completely ignored it and in the last stage of the war he was very keen to get "in at the kill", as he put it, to grab some of the spoils of the Pacific war. He wanted a communist foothold in Asia.

Now this terrified the Japanese, because not only ...

ALI MOORE: But why did that terrify the Japanese, "a suffocating fear" as you put it, more than the Americans?

PAUL HAM: Well it's firstly, this is deep history now, because we had the vendetta for the Russian loss of the 1904-05 Russia-Japanese war. A most extraordinary humiliation to the Russians, especially the kind of vendetta mindset of the leaders of that country, and they never forgave Japan for that.

And this was, this was the invoice now. They sent 1.5 million Red Army troops across the Manchurian border into Japanese-occupied territory, that was on August the 8th. The bomb, perversely, brought forward the Russian invasion by a week. Because they wanted, they could see that if America had the bomb then maybe Japan would surrender, so we want to be in there as quickly as possible.

Japan was terrified, because here was a war they understood, it was a clash of blood and iron. It was a battle the Samurai mind could respect, if not win.

They regarded the incendiary bombardment of their country by Americans has cowardly attacks on civilians. Which of course, it was certainly an attack on civilians, there was no pretence that this was, that Curtis LeMay, who was commanding the air war, was attacking military targets. It was a deliberate policy to exterminate Japanese civilians. And this went on for six months.

And, you know, most, many observers of the time, it's not me saying this, but many generals at the time, certainly Eisenhower and MacArthur, thought that this was barbaric. They regarded the incendiary attacks on civilians as not really a meaningful influence on the war effort because it was destroying non-combatants. And they would say “if you're going to win a war, you attack combatants, you attack military targets.” And certainly the Russians were going to do that.

ALI MOORE: One of the extraordinary things, and you touched on it, was the fact that the Japanese themselves didn't seem to care for their population and indeed the propaganda was very much “there will be a victory.” Even when there was no food, there was little medical supplies, there was nothing to build new weapons. And nor did civilians seem to come into the equation when it was a question of where these bombs would be dropped?

PAUL HAM: They weren't even consulted. They were totally neglected by their country, by their leaders, they were simply cannon fodder for the act of ritual, national suicide. Every man, woman and child were going to die. And this was the intent of the government that everyone should fight. Every non-combatant should carry a bamboo spear or a, you know, a spade and stand up to the American onslaught, which they expected to arrive. They expected an invasion of Kyoto. And in fact the Samurai warlords in Tokyo wanted it, they looked forward to it.

So another thing that I think was running through Truman's mind was that “why should we send our men into this conflagration in Japan? Why should we deliver the Samurai what they want, which is national martyrdom and the collapse of the country through this sort of colossal sort of Armageddon?” And it was, from Truman's point of view, a land invasion of Japan as the months rolled by was not going to go ahead. In fact ...

ALI MOORE: Well he'd seen Okinawa.

PAUL HAM: He'd seen Okinawa. And one of his advisors said “we don't want a score of bloody Okinawas.” And the invasion plan was effectively shelved in early July.

So it wasn't a case of either the bomb or the invasion. They weren't going to go ahead with the invasion regardless of whether the bomb worked for the simple reason that they weren't going to tolerate the sorts of casualties that might be inflicted upon them. And they knew that country, the country was defeated.

I mean well, you spoke to Eisenhower or MacArthur or Halsey or all the admirals, they knew this country was totally defeated. It couldn't raise an offensive army, its kamikazes were reduce to about 4,000 and every time they took off from an airfield they were pretty much shot down. And as I say the aircraft in late July were actually targeting all the kamikaze airfields. And ...

ALI MOORE: So why do you believe they went ahead? Because once they built them there was never any question that they wouldn't drop them?

PAUL HAM: Well once you strip away the military case for the bomb, which this book certainly does. And I emphasise that this is through a very close and detailed reading of the events with an open mind, with a non-partisan view. But when you read it through, you reach this conclusion of what is the military case? And there doesn't seem to be one.

So what is the point of the bomb? Well you are reduced to believing or not believing what they said at the Interim Committee and the Target Committee, which is “we want to shock them into submission by, with a huge show of our power.” And Hiroshima and Nagasaki and two other cities were preserved precisely for that reason, as pristine targets. There were very few other cities still standing, they were the only two targets left. And if you read the book you'll realise just how chilling this process is of preserving these cities for the bomb so that we could show off, so that we could show off the power of the weapon to the world.

ALI MOORE: But also incredibly unscientific, I mean Kyoto was spared simply because one senior member of the US government had been there and liked it.

PAUL HAM: It was for aesthetic reasons. He liked the shrines and the temples and he wanted it spared. And it was a big fight, because they all wanted to destroy Kyoto, certainly General Groves, it was top of his list of targets.

ALI MOORE: You spoke to many survivors, what did the Japanese make of the story you were telling?

PAUL HAM: Well ...

ALI MOORE: Challenging, accepted with ...

PAUL HAM: To this day many of them were shocked to hear it. The extent to which their own government were complicit and neglectful of their country. The stories they told me were their own personal experience of memories of the great flash of light and the sort of fireball and the terrifying experiences.

One thing that did sort of come through from the survivors is they want to be treated as casualties of war, this was a weapon of war and ...

ALI MOORE: Because this is the extraordinary thing isn't it, the Japanese actually didn't treat them as victims or survivors. They treated them as affected by the bomb, they were basically outcasts ...

PAUL HAM: (nods) Bomb-affected people.

ALI MOORE: Bomb-affected people and they became the untouchables.

PAUL HAM: The untouchables. On trains to work there'd be a little space around them, no-one would go near them because they had such horrific injuries, not all of them, but terrible scarred faces. Girls would go to school and be, you know, mocked. Many of them were driven to suicide.

The story of the Hibakusha, the bomb-affected people after the war is absolutely disturbingly extreme what happened to them. They were, only last year did they win a case for compensation many of them.

ALI MOORE: But I guess, if they, if the survivors were surprised to know the extent to which they had been deserted by their own government, if you like, how did Japanese accounts of 1945 play it? How did they read, the official Japanese ...?

PAUL HAM: The official Japanese history books tend to, you know, they've changed a great deal over the last 60 years or so, but at the time they peddled the official line which was, you know, that we fought on and we were going to fight on until ...

ALI MOORE: But now? Do they recognise the influence of Russia in the decision-making ....

PAUL HAM: Oh yes ....

ALI MOORE: ... process?

PAUL HAM: Oh yes. They certainly recognise that and they recognise also the power of the American blockade. They recognise that they had no, that they were completely defeated. Of course this was recognised at the time as well. I mean the old men in Tokyo knew they were defeated. Anyone who had half a brain in Japan at the time and were in positions of power knew they were defeated. What they were pushing for was a negotiated settlement.

Of course they're not going to get that. They were the aggressors, they had inflicted appalling atrocities against Asian people and prisoners of war. And they were not going to get a negotiated settlement of peace. They hoped for one, but they were not going to get it.

But that doesn't ... the next question is does that, therefore justify the extermination of 100,000 people in an atomic holocaust or not? That's the question we've got to ask ourselves. I mean at what point is this bomb justified?

And I find that the equation in many people's minds between disgust at the Japanese military treatment of Chinese, Asian countries and our prisoners of war, that that should be, that if you accept that, and we all do, we have this revulsion towards that, that somehow we can't really sympathise with the Japanese victims of war, that they're somehow mutually exclusive.

But, you know, I think we're, that it's beholden on us to have a more, rather more profound understanding of these events and perhaps a more transcendent sense of compassion.

ALI MOORE: You say that the bombs, and you've outlined this, that they had no military purpose; but I wonder, how different would the nuclear arms race have been if we hadn't had Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I mean how much different is the threat of mutually assured destruction when you've seen the power, when you've seen the reality?

PAUL HAM: It's a very difficult question to answer because it's a hypothetical. But certainly one could, I suppose, argue, and it has been argued in several histories, that this was a great deterrent to a future nuclear war. We've seen what happened to the people of these two cities and we can never do it again.

Now I dispute that because we got very close to nuclear war on several occasions. The Cuban Missile Crisis was just the closest example. But during the Vietnam war there was pressure to use the bombs. Particularly the French was hoping the Americans would come in with nuclear bombs when their garrison was being destroyed. ...

ALI MOORE: Even the Korean War.

PAUL HAM: In the Korean War there was huge pressure on Truman to use atomic bombs.

ALI MOORE: But they didn't.

PAUL HAM: Truman didn't. Truman, and I think that in many ways he was a great president. I mean he restrained, he showed great restraint during the Korean War. And in spite of what he says in while, I do believe he came to regret the bombs. I mean he couldn't say that, but you read closely between the lines and you can see that there was concern about all that.

ALI MOORE: So you don't agree with the argument, that the fact that they were used made people that much more careful, more cautious?

PAUL HAM: I think it made people more careful. Again, I come back to the question, does that justify their use in the way that they were used? That's another question. And when I say there was no real military, that they didn't have a strategic military basis to their use, I'm using the language really here of Eisenhower and to a certain extent the other admirals, particularly Admiral Halsey who dismissed them as strategically unnecessary.

But they did have a perverse military affect in so far as they gave Japan, they gave the Japanese leaders a face-saving expedient to surrender to the “least bad enemy”, being America.

The Samurai mind, one has to try and enquire into this thinking of the Samurai mind, and that is that this gave them an out. It gave them an exit strategy. They could say that we never lost the war on our homeland, on the battlefield that mattered, which was their homeland. “The Americans used this most cruel weapon against us” as Hirohito said in his surrender speech.

ALI MOORE: A bizarre military purpose.

PAUL HAM: Absolutely, bizarre. And unintended from America's view of course, that's not what they meant. And it led to, of course, the first kindling of the idea that Japan, of Japan's martyrdom.

So again a perverse consequence of the bomb was that Japan could use it to martyr themselves. A country that least deserved to be martyred, the country that inflicted this abomination on the Pacific, whose armed forces had subjected so many innocent people to such horrific experiences. And here they are being martyred by the weapon the weapon that we used, and presumed to have used to end the war. It's extraordinary.

ALI MOORE: It is. It is indeed an extraordinary story and one that you tell very, very well.

Paul Ham, many thanks for joining us tonight.

PAUL HAM: Thank you very much.

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