Mythology II: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer.

The film Oppenheimer has made a lot of noise in the run-up to the anniversaries this month of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and not just from Christopher Nolan’s bombastic soundtrack. As happens every year, these anniversaries prompt debate over the the decision to use atomic weapons, and whether they were necessary to end the war with Imperial Japan.

The film itself seems timed to influence those debates. As Axios reported over the weekend, it has at least stirred controversy in Japan, although perhaps not exactly as its producers intended:

“Oppenheimer” has generated backlash in Japan, for what critics argue is its failure to fully grapple with the destructive reality of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its celebration of the “father of the atomic bomb.”

Why it matters: While the film does chronicle J. Robert Oppenheimer’s guilt over the deployment of the weapon he helped create, it doesn’t truly show “what happened under the mushroom cloud,” Keiko Tsuyama, a former staff writer for Kyoto News who covered the aftermath of the bombing in Nagasaki, tells Axios.

It has also been deeply uncomfortable for some Japanese people and Japanese Americans to see the development of weapons that killed upwards of 200,000 people in 1945 become part of a pop culture phenomenon.

Part of this aims at Warner’s efforts to promote the tongue-in-cheek “Barbenheimer” social-media memes, which the living survivors understandably find offensively trivializing. Some of this, however, comes from efforts in Japan and the US to strip the decision to use the bombs from the context of the war, especially in the way Imperial Japan itself conducted its genocidal campaigns and their refusal to deal with the consequences and realities of their own choices.

The film contributes to this revisionist impulse, either intentionally or accidentally. In a scene between J. Robert Oppenheimer and Harry Truman after the war, Oppenheimer laments that “I feel I have blood on my hands,” an anecdote taken directly from the biography American Prometheus on which the film is based. Truman calls Oppenheimer a “crybaby” behind his back after trying to ease his conscience by reminding Oppenheimer that the decision to use the bombs was Truman’s.

The film, clearly sympathetic to that perspective, fails to explain why Truman made that choice, other than as a decision based on choosing between dead Americans and dead Japanese. That in itself is enough of a legitimate wartime calculation, but the issue was far more complicated than that, and even more complicated than calculations about the cost of an invasion.

As this debate erupted on social media, Twitter follower Crosspatch recommended a book from 1999 that had the full and declassified scope of material from both Imperial Japan and the US about what exactly happened in 1945. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank deconstructed all of the revisionism, especially the fanciful notion that Japan had already decided to surrender before either of the bombs dropped, or even initially after both of them dropped. Frank demolished all of these arguments nearly a quarter-century ago from records of the imperial government, including that of their diplomatic correspondence.

The book is not easy to find; Amazon has a limited source of the paperback version, apparently, but with Prime deliveries nearly a month out. I found a copy on my vacation at a used-book store in St. Paul (salute to Midway Books!) and found it fascinating. The book is very detailed but still a compelling read and impossible to sum up in an article here. In fact, it’s so complicated that Frank ends up using the last two chapters, especially the last one, to deconstruct and rebut the revisionism that had gripped this question in the fifty-four years that passed between the war and the publication of his book.

Nevertheless, let’s roll through a few of the important points, while still recommending that readers should really find the book themselves for the underlying details.

• The question of civilian deaths — By this point of the war, American bombing doctrine had adopted city-destroying patterns of incendiary bombing, resulting in tens of thousands of casualties in each instance. Japan had adopted a somewhat decentralized war-industry model in which workers fabricated key components from their homes. The bomb damage assessment photos revealed these workshops early, and the need to aggressively end Japan’s war production resulted in the shift of tactics. BDAs eventually used estimates of the percentage of urban destruction as a performance metric, under General Curtis LeMay. The two atomic bombs achieved similar results with one drop rather than hundreds of sorties, and from high altitude with more safety to the pilots.
•  Willingness to surrender and the status of the Emperor — Many revisionists blame the US demand for unconditional surrender for the reluctance of Japan to end the war. Had we just let them know that we would allow the Emperor to remain in place, the argument goes, Japan would have surrendered before Hiroshima and certainly before Nagasaki. This is nonsense, which Frank shows in multiple ways. In the first place, the Potsdam Declaration strongly hinted that the Japanese people could choose to keep its emperor, but that wasn’t enough for Hirohito or his war cabinet. The imperial regime spent July and August trying to offer concessions to the Soviet Union to broker an end under the following conditions: no occupation of Japan, no war crimes tribunal by the allies, and the “independence” of all Japanese conquests that would force withdrawal by American forces in the region. The formulation that revisionists claim as a solution – surrender while leaving the emperor in place — was explicitly rejected several times in communications with their diplomat in Moscow. He repeatedly warned Tokyo that they had no clue about the realities of their situation, even after the the bombs had dropped.
• Imminent starvation — The Allies had cut off Japan’s supply lines by the summer of 1945. An invasion would not only produce massive casualties for both sides — Japan had a 1:1 ratio against the planned US invasion of Kyushu — but any prolonged conflict could produce millions of deaths in rapid order as food supplies ran out. Even with the surrender and occupation, the US only narrowly avoided a massive famine on an unimaginable scale, as Frank details. The only way that was avoided was by the unconditional surrender. (By the way, the only conventional alternative to invasion — a blockade-bombardment strategy that Nimitz was starting to favor — would likely have made a famine even worse.)
• These are just a few of the many arguments Frank puts forward in his book to answer revisionist theorizing about the non-atomic counterfactual. But to this, we must add the context of Japan’s conduct in the war, and their fanatical adherence to bushido code to justify it. No less than Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan was predicated on their belief in absolute racial/spiritual superiority. On that basis, their soldiers had brutalized China, Korea, the Philippines, Manchuria, and everywhere else they conquered. Their fanatical leadership believed in preordained ‘supremacist’ victory so thoroughly that they wanted to lure the US into an invasion of Kyushu, where they believed we would get so badly bloodied that we would thereafter leave them in place. That was the entire point of Ketsu-Go, their strategy for the invasion — to use Japanese civilians and nearly 600,000 soldiers in Japan as fodder for a battle that would have made Okinawa look like a day in the park and force the Americans to negotiate on Japan’s terms rather than ours.

The only way to break that spell was to demonstrate an ability to destroy Japan entirely without an invasion. And even with the atomic bombs, the imperial army nearly conducted a coup in order to keep fighting, which Hirohito only narrowly defeated with his radio address to the nation. It took nearly a week after Nagasaki for Japan to surrender for a reason, after all — and that surrender was necessary to ensure an end to fighting in other theaters, especially in China.

The use of atomic weapons was undoubtedly horrific. There will always be room for a debate over the moral and human issues involved in their use. But there is no doubt that the two bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 shortened the war by several months at least, and may have saved millions of Japanese as well as hundreds of thousands of Americans.