He used the Potsdam Declaration of July to remind the Japanese that only more devastation awaited if they held out. Gallicchio, the author of several books of military history, sorts out these players - and many others - with great clarity, noting that Truman played coyly with both sides as the war shifted decisively in the Allies’ favor.Ĭonvinced that the Japanese would not surrender short of a final, decisive battle - or (once the A-bomb was available) a final incendiary event - Truman was unwilling to suggest American resolve was weakening. He railed against “reactionaries” who he said were determined to stir a red scare to roll back reform in America, purge progressive officials and deliver a conditional unconditional surrender to their friends in Tokyo. The left-wing journalist IF Stone joined the fray. And prefiguring neoconservatives of a later era, they insisted that only the deposition of the emperor - as part of a full transformation of the country’s political culture - would usher Japan into a peaceful postwar community of nations. But New Deal Democrats believed these experts did not know what they did not know about Japan. Gallicchio characterizes conciliatory State Department “Japan hands” as dupes of cosmopolitan Japanese who persuaded them that Japan’s emperor was actually a progressive who would help America build a stable, anti-Communist East Asia. Conservatives believed the left in the United States was more determined to use unconditional surrender to destroy Japanese feudalism than to confront Soviet ambitions - future manna from heaven for postwar redbaiters like Senator Joseph McCarthy. Republicans fought Truman on two fronts: First, they sought to undo New Deal social and economic reforms second, they argued that giving Japan a respectable way out of the conflict would save lives and, at the same time, block Soviet ambitions in Asia. Only by refusing to deal with dictators could Germany and Japan be redesigned root to branch.īut Truman faced powerful opposition from the Republican establishment, including the former president Herbert Hoover and Henry Luce, whose Time/Life media empire presaged Fox News today. Disarming enemy militaries was the start consolidating democracy abroad was the goal. President Harry Truman believed unconditional surrender would keep the Soviet Union involved while reassuring American voters and soldiers that their sacrifices in a total war would be compensated by total victory. It also traces ideological battle lines that remained visible well into the atomic age as the enemy shifted from Tokyo to Moscow. “Unconditional” offers a fresh perspective on how the decision to insist on “unconditional surrender” was not simply a choice between pressing the Japanese into submission or negotiating an end to the conflict. What is left to learn 75 years (and with so much spilled ink) later? For Mark Gallicchio, the answer is in the domestic politics of the United States and Japan, which drive a narrative that unwinds less like a debate than a geopolitical thriller. Every August, newspapers are dotted with stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, accompanied by a well-picked-over - but never resolved - debate over whether atomic bombs were needed to end the Asia-Pacific war on American terms.
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