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TRUMAN”S DECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB SOURCES
Source 1
“Bear in mind the fact that to be captured is a disgrace to the Army. Also your parents and family will never be
able to hold up their heads again. Always save the last bullet for yourself.”
Extract from the Japanese Army manual issued during the Second World War
Source 2
“The Japanese were so determined not to give in that they were literally prepared to commit suicide. Kamikaze
or suicide pilots would volunteer for missions in which they became ‘living bombs’. The pilot would take off in an
obsolete plane, packed with explosives, then fly directly at a U.S. warship. When the U.S. forces attacked
Okinawa, in June 1944, some 2000 kamikaze pilots died, sinking 30 U.S. warships.”
The Era of the Second World War by Nigel Kelly and Martyn Whittock (1993): 36.
Source 3
“In the many weeks in which the decision [to drop the bomb] evolved no less than six U.S. war leaders had
expressed reservations about use of the bomb: Admiral Leahy, Generals Arnold and Eisenhower, Rear Admiral
Strauss, Assistant Secretary of War McCloy and Under Secretary of the Navy Bard.”
No High Ground, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey (1961): 94.
Source 4
“Truman, Byrnes, and other leaders did not have to be reminded of the danger of the political backlash in
America if they did not use the bomb and invasions became necessary. Even if they had wished to avoid its useand they did not- the fear of later public outrage spurred by the weeping parents and loved ones of dead
American boys might well have forced American leaders to drop the A-bomb on Japan.”
“The Atomic Bombing Reconsidered,” by Barton J. Bernstein, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995: 149.
Source 5
“A brother of mine, flying P-38s in the South Pacific, had volunteered for an invasion of Japan. He said: ‘You
saved my life. We figured on at least a million casualties.’
Comment by a research scientist on the Manhattan Project.
Source 6
“We should have dropped the A-Bomb, yes. If we’d landed there with force we’d have killed off more people
than were killed by the bomb. All the prisoners of war would have been killed, of course.”
Comment by a former American prisoner-of-war.
TRUMAN”S DECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB SOURCES
Source 7
“It is my opinion that use of this barbarous weapon was of no material help in our war against Japan. The
Japanese were already defeated and were ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the
successful use of conventional bombing. The scientists and others wanted to make this test because of the vast
sums that had been spent on this project.”
Admiral D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, commenting in 1945.
Source 8
“All of us realized that the fighting would be fierce and the losses heavy…General Marshall told me that it might
cost half a million lives.”
The Memoirs of Harry S. Truman, by Harry S. Truman (1955): 417.
Source 9
“We thought we would be able to defeat the Americans on the first landing attack. But if the Americans launched
a second or third attack, first our food supply would run out, then our weapons. The Americans could have won
without using atomic bombs.”
Extract from an interview with the Secretary to the Japanese War Minister conducted in 1963.
Source 10
“The American aim was to avoid, if possible, the November 1 invasion, which would involve about 767,000
troops, at a possible cost of 31,000 casualties in the first 30 days and a total estimated American death toll of
about 25,000…In the spring and summer of 1945, no American leader believed- as some falsely later claimedthat they planned to use the A-bomb to save half a million Americans.”
“The Atomic Bombing Reconsidered,” by Barton J. Bernstein, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995: 149.
Source 11
“I expect the 100 million people in our glorious Empire to join themselves in a shield to protect the Emperor and
the Imperial land from the invader.”
Extract from a speech by Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki in 1945.
Source 12
“There was no weakening in the Japanese determination to fight. The total strength of the Japanese army was
about five million men. The Allies would be faced with the enormous task of destroying a force of 5 million men
and 5000 suicide aircraft, belonging to a race which would fight to the death.”
From an article written in 1947, by Henry Stimson, the American Secretary for War.
TRUMAN”S DECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB SOURCES
Source 13
Cartoon by Victor Weisz published in the British newspaper
Evening Standard August 15, 1960
Source 14
“…Another high policy advisor to President Truman expressed reservations on the issue of the bomb. Hap
Arnold, boss of the Army Air Force, had been to the Marianas, where LemMay convinced him the ‘we are driving
them back to the stone age’ with conventional bombing raids on Japan. Now Arnold had a talk with his deputy,
Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker. They believed the bombing of Japan, coupled with the blockade, had brought
the Empire to her knees. Japan was short of gas and oil, they agreed, most of her factories destroyed. Arnold
did not believe that an invasion would be necessary…Whether or not the atomic bomb should be dropped was
not for the Air Force to decide, but explosion of the bomb was not necessary to win the war.”
No High Ground, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey (1961): 85.
Source 15
“American intercepts of cables between Tokyo and the Japanese ambassador in Moscow confirmed the ‘real
evidence’ that the Emperor, the one person all agreed could end the war . . . wished to end the war . . . It is
impossible to determine whether President Truman saw every one of the intercepted cables. That he surely was
familiar with the contents of the most important ones cannot be doubted.”
Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, by Gar Alperovitz (1965): 177.
Source 16
Question: “Wasn’t there a particular effort to produce a bomb before the Potsdam Conference?
Answer: It was the intention of the President to say something about this to the Russians. The President said no
more than that we had a new weapon which we planned to use in Japan, and it was very powerful. We were
under incredible pressure to get it done before the Potsdam conference.”
Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Manhattan Project being questioned by at Senate hearing in 1954.
TRUMAN”S DECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB SOURCES
Source 17
“We were talking about the people who hadn’t hesitated at Pearl Harbor to make a sneak attack, destroying not
only ships but the lives of many American soldiers.”
From an interview in the 1960s with James Byrnes, US Secretary of State at the time of the bombing.
Source 18
“By early 1945, World War II – especially in the Pacific – had become virtually total war. The firebombing of
Dresden had helped set a precedent for the U.S. air force, supported by the American people, to intentionally kill
mass numbers of Japanese citizens . . . It may even have been easier to conduct this new warfare outside
Europe and against Japan because its people seemed like ‘yellow subhumans’ to many rank-and-file American
citizens and many of their leaders.”
“The Atomic Bombing Reconsidered,” by Barton J. Bernstein, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995: 141.
Source 19
“The bomb had been devised to be used, the project cost about $2 billion, and Truman and Brynes, the
President’s key political aide, had no desire to avoid its use.”
“The Atomic Bombing Reconsidered,” by Barton J. Bernstein, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995: 146.
Source 20
“[A] redefinition of morality was a product of World War II, which included such barbarities as Germany’s
systematic murder of six million Jews and Japan’s rape of Nanking . . . By 1945 there were few moral restraints
left in what had become virtually total war . . . . In that new moral climate, any nation that had the A-bomb
would probably have used it against enemy peoples. British leaders as well as Joseph Stalin endorsed the act.
Germany and Japan’s leaders surely would have used it against cities. America was not morally unique – just
technologically exceptional.”
“The Atomic Bombing Reconsidered,” by Barton J. Bernstein, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995: 151-152.
Source 21
“The decision to use the bomb against Japanese cities was based on certain assumptions that have been shown
since to be wrong. It was estimated that without such severe treatment, the Japanese would have continued to
fight for many months to come. It was also calculated that it would be necessary to invade the Japanese home
islands at the cost of a million American casualties. Naval officers questioned this view at the time, and late the
Strategic Bombing Survey came to the conclusion that both of these calculations were wrong and that the
Japanese would have surrendered in any case by early fall.”
Truman’s Crises: A Political Biography of Harry S. Truman by Harold F. Gosnell (1980): 255.
TRUMAN”S DECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB SOURCES
Source 22
“. . . If there was one subject on which Mr. Truman was not going to have any second thoughts, it was the
Bomb. If he’d said it once, he said it a hundred times, almost always in the same words. The Bomb had ended
the War. If we had to invade Japan, half a million soldiers on both sides would have been killed and a million
more ‘would have been maimed for life’”
Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman, by Merle Miller (1975): 244.
Source 23
“[On June 4, 1945] at the Metallurgical Lab in Chicago, seven atomic scientists met under the chairmanship of
[James O.] Franck in search of a method to prevent use of the bomb against Japan . . . Their report read in part:
‘We believe that . . . an early unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. If the United States
were to be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she
would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race for armaments, and
prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such
weapons. Much more favorable conditions could be created if nuclear bombs were first revealed
to the world by a demonstration in an appropriately selected uninhabited area.’”
No High Ground, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey (1961): 85.
Source 24
“General Marshall described the plan to invade the Japanese home island of Kyushu on November 1 with a total
force of 766,700 men. He predicted casualties would be relatively light . . . Admiral King said he thought U.S.
casualties would be somewhere between Luzon’s 31,000 and Okinawa’s 41,700.”
No High Ground, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey (1961): 85.
Source 25
“Of central importance, the group [Truman’s military and scientific advisers] stressed that the bomb should be
used as a terror weapon – to produce ‘the greatest psychological effect against Japan’ and to make the world,
and the USSR in particular, aware that America possessed this new power. The death and destruction would not
only intimidate the surviving Japanese into pushing for surrender, but as a bonus, now other nations, notably the
Soviet Union. In short, America could speed the ending of the war and by the same act help shape the postwar
world.”
“The Atomic Bombing Reconsidered,” by Barton J. Bernstein, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995: 142.
TRUMAN”S DECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB SOURCES
Source 26
“On July 12, 1945 . . . a poll was taken at Chicago Met Lab on how the bomb should be used. Dr. Farrington
Daniels, the new director of the laboratory, polled 150 scientists . . . Five methods of using the bomb were listed
on a type written sheet. Each man read the statements, then wrote the number most nearly corresponding to his
views on a slip of paper and dropped the paper in an envelope. The five methods read as follows:
1. Use them in the manner that is from the military point of view most effective in bringing about prompt
Japanese surrender at minimum human cost to our armed forces (23 votes).
2. Give a military demonstration in Japan to be followed by renewed opportunity for surrender before full
use of the weapon is employed (69 votes).
3. Give an experimental demonstration in this country, with representatives of Japan present; followed by a
new opportunity to surrender before full use of the weapon is employed (39 votes).
4. Withhold military use of the weapons, but make public experimental demonstration of their effectiveness
(16 votes).
5. Maintain as secret as possible all developments of new weapons and refrain from using them in war (3
votes).”
No High Ground, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey (1961): 85.
Source 27
“My own view is that presently available evidence shows that the atomic bomb was not needed to end the war or
to save lives - and that this was understood by American leaders at the time. General Eisenhower has recently
recalled that in mid-1945 he expresses a similar opinion to the Secretary of War: ‘I told him I was against it on
two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful
thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon . . .’”
Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, by Gar Alperovitz (1965): 14
Source 28
“We had contemplated the desperate resistance of the Japanese fighting to the death with Samurai devotion, not
only in pitched battles, but in every cave and dug-out. I had in my mind the spectacle of Okinawa island where
many thousands of Japanese, rather than surrender, had drawn up in line and destroyed themselves by handgrenades after their leaders had solemnly performed the rite of hari-kiri. To quell the Japanese resistance man
by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that
number of British – or more if we could get them there: for we resolved to share the agony. Now all this
nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision – far and bright indeed it seemed the end of the
whole war in one or two violent shocks.”
Winston Churchill in, Triumph and Tragedy: The Second World War. Volume VI, (1953): 639
TRUMAN”S DECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB SOURCES
Source 29
“[By late July 1945] there could be now no doubt that the Japanese government was seriously looking for a way
to end the war. But again, the president had little interest in attempting to investigate the possibilities the
Japanese approach offered…. Truman and
Byrnes fixed their attention on the much awaited battle test of the revolutionary new weapon. Hopefully it would
end the war before the [Russian] Red Army entered Manchuria. By its dramatic blast it would herald a new and
unprecedented advance in American power and its force would permit a new American initiative in European and
far Eastern diplomacy.”
Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, by Gar Alperovitz (1965): 185-187
Source 30
“At any rate, there was never a moment’s discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used or not. To
avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands
upon its tortured people by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few deliverance …Moreover,
we should not need the Russians … we had no need to ask favours of them.”
Winston Churchill in, Triumph and Tragedy: The Second World War. Volume VI, (1953): 639
Source 31
“Some 100,000 Allied prisoners of war (POWs) had an even greater stake in the bomb. Under orders from Tokyo,
the moment the invasion of Japan’s home islands began, the POWs were to be beheaded, stabbed, shot or
otherwise slaughtered en masse. At certain camps, prisoners had been kept busy in recent days digging their
own graves (50,000 POWs had died since 1942, many as a result of horrible abuses).”
US News and World Report, July 31, 1995: 51.
Source 32
“Once the reports were in confirming the success of the bomb test, Truman called together his military advisers on July 17. All
present were conversant with the mid-July status reports prepared by the intelligence branch of the War Department General
Staff. These reports estimated Japanese strength in the home islands at 2 million; a like number on the Asian mainland and
Formosa; with another 600 thousand scattered about in small groupings for a total of just under 5 million. The intelligence
reports, while taking cognizance of the Japanese mediation feelers to Russia, came to the curious conclusion that no
discernible, genuine weakening in Japanese determination to continue the war existed”
The Awesome Power: Harry S. Truman as Commander in Chief, by Richard F. Haynes (1973): 53.
TRUMAN”S DECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB SOURCES
Source 33
“In all, Japan maintained about 300 prisoner-of-war camps….In Makassar, where a number of survivors of the
Battle of Java Sea were imprisoned, the men were routinely beaten with iron pipes, as many as 200 blows per
beating, enough to reduce human flesh to pulp. On the deck of a ship bound for Shanghai, five American
prisoners from Wake Island were decapitated without any explanation whatever.”
The Rising Sun, by Arthur Zich (1977): 151
Source 34
“This was the new [the bomb’s successful testing gin New Mexico] Truman had been waiting for. The bomb
strengthened his position, for it meant that Soviet participation in the Far Eastern war was no loner essential as it
had been. At Potsdam, prior to receiving the test results, Truman purportedly remarked, with respect to the test
and negotiations with the Russians: ‘If it explodes as I think it will, I’ll certainly have a manner on those boys.”
The Awesome Power: Harry S. Truman as Commander in Chief, by Richard F. Haynes (1973): 51.
Source 35
“…the atomic bombs helped to bring home on a much larger scale to those Japanese leaders, who were already
seeing a means to end the war, how potentially catastrophic Japan’s situation was… the atomic bombs succeeded
in the American aim of shocking Japan into surrender…the events from 6 to 9 August 1945 helped to expedite the
Japanese decision making process, which was notoriously complicated and time consuming, and finally led to
Japan’s decision to terminate the war. Japanese leaders were not only awed by the American ability to produce
atomic bombs during the war, but were also taken by surprise when one was dropped on Hiroshima.”
From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1940-1954, edited by Saki
Dockerill, (1994): 208.
Source 36
“To me, it was a weapon of war, and artillery weapon. We faced half a million casualties trying to take Japan by
land. It was either that or the atom bomb, I didn’t hesitate a minute, and I never lost any sleep over it since.”
Comment by President Harry S. Truman.
Source 37
“In June 1945, Ralph Bard [Under Secretary of the Navy and a member of Truman’s interim committee
authorized to discuss the use of the atomic bomb] reversed his opinion with respect to bombing Japan without a
warning. In a memorandum on June 278 Bard said that Japan should be given a few days’ notice, ascribing his
changed views to consideration of America’s spirit of fair play and humanitarianism.”
The Awesome Power: Harry S. Truman as Commander in Chief, by Richard F. Haynes (1973): 50.
TRUMAN”S DECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB SOURCES
Source 38
“Colonel Ogata, then a military aide-de-camp to His Majesty, believed, when he heard the news of Hiroshima,
that ‘if Japan had possessed atomic weapons, she could have attacked the United States, which might have
changed the phase of the war in Japan’s favour.’ Seen in this light, lingering Japanese criticisms about the
American use of the atomic bomb (most of whose awful side effects were then unknown to the United States
leadership) are ill founded.”
From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 191-1945, ed. by Saki Dockerill, (1994): 209.
Source 39
“Truman and all his military and civil advisers were fully aware through intelligence reports that Japan was
actively seeking a negotiated end to the war some time prior to the decision to use the bomb. There was little
effort made…to follow up on the possibility of a political settlement. Obviously Truman did not energetically seek
non-military solutions; why he did not is the subject of continuing controversy diplomatic historians.”
The Awesome Power: Harry S. Truman as Commander in Chief, by Richard F. Haynes (1973): 58.