Was there a strategic alternative to the atomic bombing of 1945?

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 I'll be right back.

spk_0 I'll be to imagine what you were doing two weeks ago.

spk_0 Now I want to take you on a little bit of time travel and ask you to imagine

spk_0 that you are President Harry Truman sitting at your desk in the White House

spk_0 amidst the Second World War.

spk_0 Only two weeks ago did you get a letter from your Secretary of State for War, Henry Stinson,

spk_0 saying that a new, exciting, but devastating weapon system has been developed.

spk_0 Like nothing else that we've ever seen before, you as President are going to have to make the decision

spk_0 about whether or not you're going to use it.

spk_0 Now with a straw poll here, could you just raise your hand for a split seconds

spk_0 if you think as President you would have used the nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb.

spk_0 Quick shove hands.

spk_0 Okay, that's a small, I think we're probably looking at about 15-20%

spk_0 if that's of the audience here today.

spk_0 We'll do another vote at the end.

spk_0 I want to see whether or not your opinions have changed.

spk_0 Now we know that this was extraordinarily dangerous, devastating, and contaminating weapon.

spk_0 And the best approach that we have found in humanity to deal with this particular system

spk_0 is to prevent its use, to minimize the stockpiles, and to prevent proliferation of it.

spk_0 But why was it used in 1945 and was there on alternative?

spk_0 So it is, I'm using some of those YouTube bits of footage we just heard about.

spk_0 There were effectively four reasons why this weapon was used.

spk_0 To hasten the end of the war was the first reason given.

spk_0 This was obviously the most costly war in the whole of human history.

spk_0 Already, by the time you're making your decision at your desk,

spk_0 over 50 million people have been killed in this war.

spk_0 The second reason that was given was that the American public would not forgive leaders

spk_0 who they found out had possessed the means to save American lives

spk_0 but had refused to use this weapon system to do so.

spk_0 The third reason was that the Japanese government, the army, and the people clearly intended to fight to the death.

spk_0 That was the argument given, this image from the taking of Okinawa.

spk_0 And the fourth reason was to make a major war in the future unthinkable,

spk_0 ever again, to prevent future war of this scale, a point that J-roppett,

spk_0 Oppenheim himself, of course, reverting.

spk_0 Now there is a group that it has arrived, if you like, since 1945.

spk_0 The so-called revisionists' historians.

spk_0 And the revisionists aren't trying to argue that the reason why the bomb was used at all

spk_0 was to impress the Soviets with a share of power of the United States.

spk_0 They also argue in some other texts that somehow the Americans wanted to, or rather Truman,

spk_0 wanted to win the next election.

spk_0 Here was his opportunity to do so.

spk_0 And the third reason, advanced by the revisionists, was revenge for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

spk_0 Well, at many other historians, I've been through American National Archives,

spk_0 I've been through the correspondence of Truman and others,

spk_0 and I have found absolutely no evidence, no empirical evidence, to support the arguments put forward by the revisionists.

spk_0 They could not have foreseen the Cold War that was coming,

spk_0 and so this idea about impressing Soviet seems highly unlikely.

spk_0 In fact, it was the other way around. Truman wanted to share the idea of the technology of the bomb

spk_0 that was prevented from doing so by many of his colleagues.

spk_0 So what was the situation in early 1945?

spk_0 The United States and the Allies had endured surprise attacks in which thousands had been killed.

spk_0 China was the first to be subjected to Imperial Japanese surprise offences,

spk_0 and both in 1931 in Mukden, Incident, Manchuria was overrun, and then in 1937 the war was continued into China.

spk_0 Shanghai was bombarded as a city by the Imperial Japanese in 1940,

spk_0 and as we've mentioned already in 1941, Pearl Harbor, and all of Southeast Asia, including Singapore,

spk_0 came under this relentless Imperial Japanese offensive.

spk_0 For the Americans, this resulted in a temporary loss of control, of half of the Pacific Ocean,

spk_0 and Imperial military Japanese occupation, with all the brutalities that came with it,

spk_0 all the atrocities that came with it throughout Southeast Asia and into the Pacific region.

spk_0 Now America tried to regain control of the Pacific, and it had lost the Philippines in the early stages of the war.

spk_0 It was clearly going to be unable to take that back with the mega military resources it possessed in late 1941.

spk_0 Australia came under Japanese air attack.

spk_0 The British had lost Singapore in the most ignominious defeat in British military history,

spk_0 and the prisoners that were taken Australian, British, American, those of the Southeast Asian nations,

spk_0 the Dutch, and so on, were subjected to barbaric forms of abuse by their guards.

spk_0 There were big naval battles that many of you know that, heard of, the Battle of Midway, for example,

spk_0 the Battle of Coral Sea, the Battle of Latae Gulp, so those were the attempts by the Americans to try to regain control.

spk_0 But what they were all learning in this early stage of late 1941 into 1942 was the sheer importance of air power.

spk_0 It was vital to military success, and Americans began to a massive building program of aircraft carriers,

spk_0 and they needed desperately air basins.

spk_0 In order to bring the war back to Imperial Japan's heartland, you had to try and get close to that Japanese mainland.

spk_0 The tyranny of distance means, and the limited technology of aircraft means you've got to have air bases that are closer.

spk_0 But you can see circles in the middle of the map, top right, midway islands, which the Americans possessed.

spk_0 As they've lost control of most of the other islands you can see in that sort of black, dot dashed line,

spk_0 they've got to either get closer to the Japanese islands, against the Japanese navy so they can bombard them and destroy their industry,

spk_0 or they've got to make their way slowly up through those islands of Southeast Asia to try and get air bases as they go along,

spk_0 and so they can get close enough, and you would see the line just below the Okinawa, the sort of arc in red,

spk_0 and they've got to get that close to launch air attacks on a regular basis, so they've got the entirety of that part of the Pacific to get through.

spk_0 So the means then of that strategy were to build and operate more carriers and capture islands to build air bases.

spk_0 The ways were to bombard and interdict Japan's industrial base to prevent them being able to bring resources in and sustain their resistance,

spk_0 and the ends were to render Japanese resistance reduced and perhaps even cut off all together.

spk_0 What they're trying to do in some is to prevent Japan from waging war.

spk_0 But as I say, there is this tyranny of distance. There's also the strength of imperial Japanese to bear in mind here as you sit at your desk in the White House.

spk_0 So the Japanese advancements did not stop in December 1941. They once held all the way through, 1942 through 1943, and into the summer of 1944.

spk_0 They reached the border of India in 1944, in Imperial Japanese, despite desperate fighting at Infal and Kohema, British Indian, Burmese soldiers managed to just hang on to stop the Japanese invading the entirety of India.

spk_0 There were attempts to push the Japanese back in Burma, which failed initially, and attempt to raid behind enemy lines under an organization called the Chindits, named after a mythical beast of Burmese history.

spk_0 These unfortunately failed. These were pinpricks. There was an attempt by the Americans to launch an air raid from great distance called the Do Little Raid. That too achieved very little, it's merely symbolic.

spk_0 But what they were up against was an army that had been coached and taught not to surrender, to never give in.

spk_0 It was something called the San Junqin, which meant it was like a code of honor, an idea that the orders for the Emperor were divine, who awares men mortals to stand in the way of the divine.

spk_0 Failure in carrying out your orders in this divine mission, by the way the orders of the Emperor were known as the Tenorside, the Imperial Edith, the IJ of the Leadership Principle, if you like.

spk_0 If you failed and you were about to bring dishonor there from the divine mission, it was considered honorable and appropriate that you would kill yourself in Sepulchum in a kind of act of suicide.

spk_0 Failure was imminent, but there was still an opportunity to overcome failure, then the idea was that you would launch one final whirlwind charge against your enemy, almost emulating the kamikaze wind that saved Japan in medieval period, the so-called Banzai, the final charge, the final effort to overwhelm your enemy.

spk_0 The Japanese would say in the period duty is heavier than a mountain, but death is lighter than a feather.

spk_0 Now the strategic options then, let's get really serious about these strategic options, because Admiral Ernest King, a rather prickly American naval officer who ran the American Navy, said,

spk_0 Now what we're going to do is we are going to send the US Navy from Midway Island across to Foramosa, today known of course as Tai-1, and there we're going to build bases and we're going to launch our attacks as naval attacks on mainland Japan.

spk_0 General Douglas MacArthur, a much more affable American general, fond of smoking his pipe, who'd been kicked out of the Philippines but had vowed to return, managed to persuade the then president, Rizavolt, that a far more effective way was to build up towards the Pyro-Japan by an island hopping campaign all the way through to Okinawa, and along the way they would build air bases as they went.

spk_0 There was another officer who eventually took over, he was not originally the head of the US Army Air Force or USAAF, but he did take over later, General Curtis Lenei, and he argued that what they should do is build air bases in the territory that are allied China, and from there they should launch attacks on Japan.

spk_0 They did indeed do that for a while until the Japanese launched the Itchagore offensive in 1944 and removed the ability of the Americans to operate within range of the Pyro-Japan.

spk_0 General Douglas MacArthur's plan was the one that was adopted, so this island hopping campaign, and the argument was we can build up resources as we go.

spk_0 We're going to buy time to build more aircraft carriers. To give you an idea, the Kaiser Shipyard in California, at the very very end of the war, last day of the war, there were 50 aircraft carriers under construction.

spk_0 That's a scale of American industry writ large, but he was basically buying time. He said we can train our troops on the go, we can build our ships, build our carriers, build our submarines, and also by the way it builds time to deal with Germany first, as opposed to Dean Winnington, Japan.

spk_0 It's considered to be a far greater threat, from the reasons my colleague has just pointed out.

spk_0 So, off they went through the Solomons, the Marianas, fighting up to the Philippines, which took months and months to recapture to eventually the Golisphar as Eogema.

spk_0 The problem was the cashier-tons. Japanese troops were very well fortified, incredibly well trained, and absolutely determined.

spk_0 The fighting was desperate and intense, and Americans were suffering very heavy casualties indeed.

spk_0 The Japanese simply refused to surrender, and they made themselves into human minds. They carried out sniping attacks.

spk_0 Even when they were captured, they would attempt to rip off their bandages, in some cases, and try to sail the men who were trying to help them.

spk_0 Extraordinary level of determination. When they reached Okinawa, sorry, just go back one, sorry briefly.

spk_0 When they reached Okinawa, American losses in the capture of one island, American casualties were 49,151, of which 12,500 were killed in action.

spk_0 Remember, your American president sitting at your desk looking at those cashier figures coming in at this late stage of the war.

spk_0 What was really even more tragic was that Japanese civilians on Okinawa decided to commit mass suicide rather than surrender and be captured.

spk_0 The Americans were utterly appalled and astonished at the determination of the Japanese people to fight to the very end.

spk_0 So how do you end this war? This is a summary of the things that we've just been talking about.

spk_0 What sort of post-war world, post-war world? Do you wish to have?

spk_0 The intelligence estimates, first of all, in all this were that the Japanese merchant marine, all the shipping designed to supply Japan, was being cut off from the mainland.

spk_0 There were lots of shortages in Japan, but still the Japanese were not surrender.

spk_0 So option two is a massive air campaign led by General Curtis Lamey, the person I just talked about.

spk_0 There were bombings of factories and ports and their intelligence reports came back saying we're not actually hitting the targets very effectively.

spk_0 The Americans have been forced to fly at a very, very high altitude to try and protect the pilots.

spk_0 The problem was that all the air mass movements meant that all the conventional explosives were not falling where they should be.

spk_0 So Curtis Lamey changed tactics, so I'd fly a bit lower and drop in sensory bombs to burn out large sections of urban areas because the factories thereafter were all inside those urban areas.

spk_0 I'm not Germany, but they tend to be set off to one side. But still the Japanese were not surrender.

spk_0 Tokyo was reduced to ashes in large parts by this incendiary attack and still Japan would not surrender.

spk_0 What about maritime option? The American Navy tried to get close to the Japanese mainland, but as they did so, as you can see from this illustration, they came under attack for over 1,200 kamikaze attacks.

spk_0 This is a suicide air attack by Japanese young men who've been morally pressured in many cases to fulfill tenor side, the great imperial edict, and to sacrifice themselves in this final last ditch form of attack.

spk_0 If you think about it this way, only one pilot, if it hits the target, it can take down entire ship which may have up to 1,200 people on board.

spk_0 20% of those attacks got through. You can do the maths.

spk_0 Large numbers of American marine and naval personnel were dying, ships going to the bottom of the ocean, so they needed a new approach.

spk_0 The amphibious assaults, as I say, are clearly inexperienced with indicating that the Japanese were not going to give up, that if they landed on the mainland with amphibious forces like Eogema and like Okanawa, the Americans in terms of Marines and Army,

spk_0 a forecast to lose 900,000 casualties, 900,000 families, husbands, wives, friends are going to suffer those kind of losses.

spk_0 On your desk is that plan as you sit there and contemplate whether or not you're going to use atomic weapons.

spk_0 The Japanese, by the way, if the islands are invaded, they're going to lose 10 million, largely civilian people killed and wounded.

spk_0 So he asked more information, Truman, as you would think. If I extended this out a bit longer, perhaps we can just bring Japan to its knees by attrition over time.

spk_0 Intelligence, as soon as it came back, yes, you can do that, Mr. President, and the war will end in July of 1947.

spk_0 Two more years of this much killing is going to go on.

spk_0 The war, of course, had been initiated by Japanese military-strip regime. It was not going to negotiate. That was the other insight he's got.

spk_0 And what Truman really wants is a world without major war. He's already got into the idea of a united nations organization where everyone can talk together to prevent wars happening all this scale ever again.

spk_0 He's got an idea for a World Bank, an international monetary fund. But we've got to get through this war first, is what he has to say.

spk_0 So Henry Stinson comes to him, as old Joe Roberts, so I come back to him in a moment, and he's the suspect's good individual, top of the screen, talking to Harry Truman.

spk_0 This is the initial letter, a copy of the initial letter that he obviously gave him back in April, but no detail. It wasn't really until June, July that Truman had any sort of sense about what this atomic weapon was going to do.

spk_0 Do you use the new weapon to end the war now, or not use it, take the losses over the next two years? That is the decision that you face as President.

spk_0 Now, what you're going to do is do what I would do, go and consult the scientists. Let's go ask them about this weapon and see what they say. The scientists are divided. Stinson found them, they couldn't agree.

spk_0 You can energy clearly very valuable, as we've heard, but a massive weapon, and the fear of its misuse is driving a lot of the concerns by the scientists.

spk_0 Truman goes back and has another thing. Should I share this with my allies? Should I internationalize this weapon system? Should I make sure that it's civilianized only for the use in energy production?

spk_0 Should I make sure that only civilians have control over it? That one he definitely decided on. Don't give it to the military to control. It must be controlled by civilians. It's too important to be left to the generals.

spk_0 The pressures on, every day that you delay in your decision, American personnel are dying under kamikaze attacks, and pilots being shot down out of the skies by Japanese, or many Japanese air defense systems.

spk_0 The bombing is not producing the surrender. Chinese military officers are calculating that if we can inflict massive losses on the Americans, then the Americans will give up, and our regime will survive.

spk_0 We can regenerate force and have another go in ten years to it.

spk_0 The United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps are ordered by Truman to prepare for amphibious conventional landings in Japan.

spk_0 Just a match, you've been through Okinawa, you've been practicing your eogema, you're a young man in your 20s, and you're told that you're going to be mimicking an armed landing at the teeth of Japanese imperial forces on the mainland of Japan itself.

spk_0 Imagine how you feel, your chances of survival are minimal.

spk_0 And Truman knows that.

spk_0 The Japanese authorities, even since late July 1945, are preparing the Japanese people for one final, last sacrificial stand.

spk_0 We are all going to die. School children are equipped with bamboo states with blades on the end, and they hope they'll get close to American personnel and stab them from behind.

spk_0 A last-ditch battle indeed, and so therefore, in July, the decision is made, Truman decides he's going to use this bomb.

spk_0 On 6 August 1945, Hiroshima is reduced to what you can see on the screen in front of you, but Japan does not surrender.

spk_0 As the intense debate inside the Japanese military state headquarters, alongside the political leaders, Akinian is desperately divided, and the Japanese come down in the end, on deciding to continue resistance.

spk_0 Maybe the Americans have only got one of these devices, and that's the end of it.

spk_0 So three days later, on the 9 August 1945, Naka Succane is destroyed in the second bomb.

spk_0 Then, finally, it dorms on the Japanese authorities, finally, that the systematic destruction of Japan is the only logical deduction they can reach from this weapon system.

spk_0 The unconditional surrender therefore comes just a little later on the 2 September 1945.

spk_0 So, Legend, let me ask you again, under the circumstances that you heard, if you were Harry Truman in July of 1945, can I just show you how many of you would have used the nuclear option?

spk_0 The numbers are slightly greater, okay.

spk_0 It is just fundamentally because I know that we're not going to have a bit of a break, and I think it's just worth mentioning that in a finale.

spk_0 This is the most serious thing I have to deal with in my academic career.

spk_0 And I want to comment at the UK government. I speak in my own behalf, I don't speak in my own behalf, but I have to try and rectify and justify my own mind why, as a University of Oxford academic, I'm working with the government, and why I have to deal with this question of the nuclear deterrence.

spk_0 So, I'm looking forward to our discussion later as I look forward to have that conversation about why does the UK possess such a devastating weapon system?

spk_0 Just to sort of put up there that we need to minimize these weapons, whilst at the same time what United Kingdom wants to remain a credible actor, whether it's.

spk_0 We need to be accountable, and to communicate with consistency why we have this system.

spk_0 We need to make sure it's very, very firmly controlled. We need to have this sense of overmatching military power to demonstrate to anyone who wishes to do us and our friends harm.

spk_0 The cost would outweigh the benefit to any aggressor to use such a system against us.

spk_0 But above all, to prevent and to deny harms of major wars such as the scale of the Second World War, in which we think over 50, potentially 60 million people died in that conflict.

spk_0 There's a gentleman, thank you very much, your patience.

Was there a strategic alternative to the atomic bombing of 1945?

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