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Was the atomic bomb necessary to end war with Japan?
00:36:57
Eighty years on from the end of the Second World War, Richard Overy questions the logic and legacy of the US's aerial assault on Japan that culminated in the use of atomic bombs in August 1945
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- [00:02]
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- [01:05]
Eleanor Evans
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. The decision by the United States to drop atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains one of the most controversial moments in modern history. In this episode we hear from the historian Professor Richard Overy, whose new book Reign of Ruin considers the role of Oppenheimer's bombs and the firebombing that paved their way in forcing the Second World War to an end. Speaking to Ellen Evans, Richard traces the varied factors that complicate the argument that the atomic bomb was a war ending weapon from American misreadings of Japan's willingness to surrender to the scientists eagerness to test out their creation.
- [02:00]
Richard Overy
Richard, your new book rethinks how we should regard this later stage of the war and what the role of the bombs meant in ending the conflict. I wanted to start with a little bit of context from you, please, in what listeners need to understand about the US Plans to bombing Japan. What historical elements do we need to appreciate that paved the road for the atomic bombs being dropped in August?
- [02:25]
Advertiser
Well, the Americans had thought for a long time about the possibility of war with Japan and what they would do and how they would solve the geographical problem because Japan's difficult to get to. And they had planned really from the 1920s that if it ever happened that they would force their way across the Pacific using the US Navy and when they got to islands near enough, they would then bomb Japan and in that way might be able to avoid an invasion altogether. Now, I think most people don't know that this is something that the American military had already Been considering long before the outbreak of war in Pearl Harbor. But after Pearl harbor and once the United States found itself at war with Japan, basically that strategy was the one they pursued. They fought the Japanese across the islands of the central Pacific in a series of bloody engagements until they got to the islands near enough to the Japanese home islands to be able to bomb effectively. And that's exactly what they did. They finally arrived in the Mariana Islands, a thousand miles from Japan. They developed an aircraft, the first aircraft with very, very long range so it could reach Japanese cities. And they were ready to pursue the strategy they thought about for a long time.
- [03:43]
Richard Overy
And take us a little bit closer into this strategy, if you will, please. What sort of campaigns are they looking at, launching in these stages of capability in being able to reach Japan?
- [03:53]
Advertiser
It was to decide what you ought to bomb and how you ought to bomb it. We need to remember that in the European theater, the American Air Force had concentrated on bombing precise targets by day. That was difficult to do until they produced a long range fighter which could protect the bombers. And that was really their strategy to find targets in Germany that were economically and militarily vital and to destroy those. Most people assumed that when the United States Air Force began bombing Japanese cities that they would do more or less the same. And indeed, that was the initial strategy to try to see whether you could destroy what was left of a Japanese war economy from the air through precise daylight raiding. And it was only when that proved impossible that they shifted to what we now know, the firebombing of Japanese cities.
- [04:50]
Richard Overy
Something that struck me in your book is that when the US was preparing for their firebombing campaign of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, they planned out Japanese houses in America, which to me suggested obviously there is that civilian element. They were looking at how fire would spread across civilian houses and weren't just looking at military targets, however much this might have been sort of assuaged by military language. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that.
- [05:21]
Advertiser
I mean, it's very striking that in both Britain and the United States they had areas where they made model German houses, model Japanese houses, residential houses, and tried to find out the best way to destroy them by fire. The Americans were more successful on the whole than the British in those experiments, but they carried on through 1943, 44, so that you know already by the time the firebombing started, they had a pretty clear view that Japanese housing was extremely vulnerable, but burned very easily as it did. And yes, of course, you're thinking of civilians. You're not thinking about industry or factories or marshaling yards or whatever. You're thinking about civilians. And I think what that raises is an important point about the radicalization of strategy. As the war goes on, as total war becomes more bitter, even the democracies are willing to embrace strategies which they would otherwise have rejected before the war.
- [06:19]
Richard Overy
Started and find new ways to justify them. Yeah, this is something that is very much overshadowed by the August atomic bombs, but as you outline in your book, really no less devastating. Before we go into the devastation that rained down, could you introduce us to General Curtis LeMay and his part in targeting this approach?
- [06:43]
Advertiser
One of the problems that American Air Force Chief of Staff Henry Arnold had was to try and choose a commander who would understand the difficulties of bombing Japan and be able to find a strategy that would work. Now, the man he chose was General Curtis LeMay, who'd had a very distinguished career as a bomber commander in Europe, had been sent to China to try to bomb Japan from Chinese bases with very little success, very hard to reach. And finally, in January 1945, Arnold, frustrated with what had so far been achieved, thought that lemay was the man he needed. Ruthless enough, organized enough, to be able to make some kind of impact on Japan. And that's what LeMay did. Iron Ice, he's called by his pilots a tough guy who wanted no messing about. If he couldn't bomb the Japanese from a high level in precise raids, he decided that the best thing to do would be to bomb them from low level with incendiary raids and see what that would achieve.
- [07:53]
Richard Overy
Well, can you take us closer into what it does achieve for the American forces, then? What is the impact for Japan of these raids?
- [08:02]
Advertiser
Well, once the incendiary raids have begun, they were very successful. The mayor was very pleased. The American Air Force commanders were very pleased. At last, the Air Force seemed to be doing something which they hadn't for years in the Pacific campaign. It all meant the Navy and the Army. Now, at last, the Air Force was doing something. And the impact was pretty horrendous. Within five months, the American Air Force had destroyed 60% of Japan's urban area. It's quite a heavily urbanized state, so if you think about it, destroying 60% of the urban area is a pretty extraordinary. And in the course of doing that, they killed a quarter of a million Japanese, overwhelming majority. Women, children, old people. And the impact on Japanese society was profound. 10 million people left the cities and fled to the countryside, making it very difficult to feed them. It was very difficult to, you know, Sustain the transport system, difficult to sustain war production. So, you know, long before we get to the atomic bombs, we've got a bombing strategy which is ruthless. It kills civilians in very large numbers without really much moral concern, and it begins to have a severe social impact on the Japanese.
- [09:19]
Richard Overy
Yes, the pictures that you paint in your book of this firebombing are stark brutal. You know, women burned with babies on their backs and people running across bridges that are too hot to hold. And it's really stark. You mentioned there's not much moral compunction to avoid this from us higher ups. Are there any voices against at this point?
- [09:42]
Advertiser
Well, actually, not many at all. I mean, you might expect there would be. And it's very interesting that when LeMay briefed his officers on the day before the bombing of Tokyo, and the bombing of Tokyo was the most murderous of all, the raids killed 84,000 people. He briefed them, and one of the officers said, well, hang on, isn't this just what we've been criticizing the British for doing? Now we're going to do it ourselves. And the mayor said, well, he said it's impossible to avoid killing civilians in war. Has to be done. And so there was some sense that the Americans had not been doing this in Europe, but now they were perfectly content to do it in Japan, and they carried on. And in the end, there was no real voice against the firebombing of Japanese cities. After the war, all the attention was on the atomic bombs. And so even the American public had little sense, really, of quite how deadly and extensive the conventional bombing campaign was.
- [10:39]
Richard Overy
Yes, we're getting a sense here of this path being paved for that ultimate moral decision in August. But if I can just ask, on the point you made about Britain, obviously having bombed Germany in, you know, a brutal fashion in Dresden, for example, and America's bombing of Japan, is it fair to say there's an extra racialized element here that many US Higher ups were able to sort of disassociate in that way?
- [11:04]
Advertiser
Well, I think there is. Of course, it's not formally part of a directive. Nobody talks about race in quite that way. But there's no doubt that American commanders and a great many American soldiers and airmen in the field felt strongly about the Japanese. They thought they were barbarous. They thought they were less than human. They had all kinds of epithets they used to describe the Japanese, which they never did with the Germans, even though they were horrified by the concentration camps and the things that were found at the end of the war and so on. For the Japanese, there was definitely a kind of racial hierarchy, you know, that somehow or other Japanese were not like the Germans. So you could do to the Japanese things you couldn't do in Europe. One of the interesting things about that, I think, is that when it came to dropping the atomic bomb, there's a great deal of discussion still about whether they would have dropped an atomic bomb on Germany. Great deal of doubt about that, I think. But they, you know, in the end, had no hesitation about dropping an atomic bomb on Japanese. It did treat the two peoples differently.
- [12:01]
Richard Overy
So we're getting a sense then of the broader picture. We hope the listeners will understand in this big anniversary year of the bombings. A perspective you bring in in your book that's perhaps less looked at is the British involvement in all of this. What were Churchill and co. How much were they involved at this stage? How much do they know about the bombing? How much did they want to be involved?
- [12:22]
Advertiser
Well, the British wanted to be involved once they defeated Germany. That was their priority above all, and actually relaxed the means, economic or military, really, to do a great deal before that. The Americans were skeptical. They thought that, you know, that the British had pretty much worn themselves out in the war in the Mediterranean and Europe, and there wasn't much that they were going to be able to contribute. The British contribution was much more important in the development, well, two things, actually. First of all, in the development of the theory of incendiary bombing, where there was a great deal of discussion between the two sides, the British made all kinds of recommendations. They studied the issue of how to burn a city down. And that knowledge was shared very much with the United States side. So that when LeMay began his incendiary bombing, there was already a good deal of discussion and a good deal of knowledge in America based on what the incendiary bombing in Europe had achieved. That's one thing. The second is that British scientists. In the end, after Churchill pressured Roosevelt, British scientists were allowed to go to Los Alamos and help with the engineering of the atomic bombs. It's almost always overlooked in histories of the first atomic weapons, but the British scientists played very important part there, too, and were very enthusiastic about producing a bomb, engineering a bomb. So at least these two respects, I think we need to see that Britain also has a role to play in what, in the end, of course, is not a particularly edifying strategy.
- [13:54]
Richard Overy
Right. Well, your book brings in this British perspective in this reign of ruin. And we can turn to another perspective that you examined, the Japanese perspective. So let's remind ourselves at this Stage, Japan has sustained incredibly heavy and brutal aerial bombardment from Curtis LeMay and his forces. Meanwhile, the atomic bomb is being developed by a team at Los Alamos. What is Japan's morale like at this stage? What are its leaders, leadership, thinking about their position in the war?
- [14:22]
Advertiser
Well, I think the morale of ordinary Japanese is pretty low. I mean, they're getting hungrier and hungrier. They're working very long hours. Children and old people are being made to go off and work in factories in poor conditions and so on. They've been heavily bombed. Millions of them have moved to the countryside, where the peasantry on the whole is quite hostile to having all these townspeople crowding into their villages. So it would be wrong entirely to say that morale was favorable. There was an effort in the propaganda to persuade the Japanese public that actually the defeats were victories, really. And the kind of double speak used by the Japanese media and propaganda agencies during the period is quite remarkable. But most Japanese, of course, must have known perfectly well that they were on a back foot. Among the leadership, military and civilian, was a divided response, as everybody knew, and as the Americans suspected. Of course, the military hardliners wanted to fight to the end. They wanted a kamikaze finale to the Japanese nation. They would go down fighting for every foot of the homeland. But that was a relatively small fraction of the leadership, I think, by. Well, even by the spring, by the time of the bombing started, but certainly in the summer, most of the elite and quite a few of the leading military commanders knew the war was lost, knew that Japan and its population were going to go on suffering more and more extensively, and they wanted to terminate the war. They called it terminate the war because they didn't have really a word surrender. They never had to do it, and they didn't much like the idea because it was entirely contrary to Japanese ethos. But they were determined to find a way to terminate the war, the emperor, too. And that happens really a couple of months or perhaps three months before the dropping of the atomic bombs. The problem is that the Japanese political system and structure was very complex and difficult to navigate, difficult for somebody simply to come along, the Emperor, to come along and say, I want to stop the war. He couldn't do that. It wasn't supposed to do that. The cabinet had to reach unanimity. And across the summer there's this argument between the military hardliners, the kamikaze people, and the rest who really did want to find a way to end the war, even on Allied terms. As long as somehow or other, Javan could be Preserved, not destroyed. And this tension between these different groups went on. The Americans didn't know much about this, but it went on across the summer till it was finally resolved in August. Hey, everybody, it's Nicole Byer here with some hot takes from Wayfair. A cozy corduroy sectional from Wayfair. Um, yeah, that's a hot take. Go on and add it to your cart and take it. A pink glam nightstand from Wayfair. Scalding hot take. Take it before I do. A mid century modern cabinet from Wayfair that doubles as a wine bar. Do I have to say it? It's a hot take. Get it@wayfair.com and enjoy that free shipping too. Wayfair.
- [17:29]
Richard Overy
Every style, every home. And what, in your view, did the American generals fail to understand about this sort of belief at the heart of Japanese politics and Japanese culture that meant that surrender was, you know, a much harder thing to achieve?
- [17:44]
Advertiser
Well, some people knew about it and they tried to advise the military and political leadership, but they had very little impact. The basis of the American view was the stubborn resistance of the Japanese garrisons in the Pacific and the south and Southeast Asia, where they just wouldn't surrender. The soldiers died in huge numbers. Extraordinary disproportion between the number of dead Japanese and a number of dead Americans. And so for the American leadership, it seemed clear that that would happen on Japan as well. When they invaded Japan, they'd find exactly the same kind of fanatical resistance, unwillingness to surrender. And they assumed that if they could find a way of getting round that invasion, conventional bombing to start with, that was the idea, then perhaps the atomic bombs, then that would save a very large number of American and indeed Japanese lives. But the American view generally was that the Japanese were not really susceptible to the idea of surrender, and therefore you would have to find some other solution.
- [18:47]
Richard Overy
What does this mean, then, for the moral argument around dropping the atomic bombs that meant they might equal this surrender on the part of the Japanese?
- [18:58]
Advertiser
Well, I mean, the moral argument was the argument used by Truman and others that you had to save American lives. That was LeMay's argument, too. And if dropping the atomic bombs would force the Japanese to surrender, well, then that was whatever the cost and whatever the moral issues involved, it would save American lives and shorten the war. And that was the other priority. By then, the American and British governments wanted to end the war as soon as possible. They thought it'd be difficult to make their societies go on fighting into 1946, even 1947. They predicted and so, you know, if you could find a shortcut, then that would be morally defensible in the end, as we know, the shortcut they chose was the atomic bomb.
- [19:43]
Richard Overy
Is it fair to say that as well as shortening the war, this being a key aim of this bomb, for many of the scientists and the managers and the administrators involved in that, it was also having a weapon that was able to be used during wartime. That was a key motive as well.
- [20:00]
Advertiser
Yes, no, it was. And I think it's something that is often overlooked by historians of the bombing. It's, you know, it's evident over and over again. During the course of 1944 and 45, the group of scientists who were engineering the bomb, not the ones who were developing other aspects of a nuclear program, but the ones who were engineering the bomb were determined to get it finished in time, before the end of the war, before no Japan has surrendered as well. And they were determined to use it because they were curious, having produced it, curious about what a bomb would do for them. There was a good deal of scientific kudos attached to this. The idea that they were the first people to produce an atomic bomb and to see an atomic bomb work, I think it blinded them, in a sense, to the sheer horror of an atomic bomb and what it actually does to the people you drop it on.
- [20:51]
Richard Overy
How much of that was in the discussions then that you examined in the lead up to its deployment? I mean, in terms of you mentioned strategic sites being aimed for, is that possible with an atomic bomb? What kind of choices were being weighed up with where these were going to be dropped?
- [21:09]
Advertiser
Well, I mean, during the course of the discussions from May 45onwards, they always emphasized that they had to find a military target in voted commerce. But a military target, it was true in Europe, too. A military target could be as big as a whole town. Of course, I mean, it was, you know, pretty specious. But a great effort was made to persuade Truman, for example, that they were only going to hit a military target. And various military aspects of the cities they were going to bomb were highlighted. There was a garrison here, there was a port there, so that somehow or other you could dress it up as a military industrial target and not as a city full of civilians and civilian workers. That played an important part in blunting any concern that people might have had about dropping an atomic bomb, just as it blunted any concern about firebombing cities. It was, you know, a very important perspective. And, you know, we see exactly the same thing in conflicts today. And people always think, oh, no, we only hit a military target when in fact you can see on screen that they've blown up a block of flats.
- [22:15]
Richard Overy
Yes, the sanitization of the military language used throughout seems very prevalent in terms of the way a lot of people were talking and justifying the deployment of this weapon. Can we move to early August 1945 itself when the bombs are dropped? I'm sure many listeners will be familiar with the devastation wrought. But just to really bring home what these bombs achieved or were responsible for, however way you look at it. Can you take us into that?
- [22:43]
Advertiser
Yes. There was a good deal of discussion at Los Alamos in Oppenheimer's complex where they were engineering the bombs, about what bombs would actually do. Some calculations suggested quite a low level of TNT equivalent. Others suggested 20,000 ton TNT equivalent. There was only one brief discussion about civilian casualties when Oppenheimer estimated that perhaps 20,000 people might be killed, which shows some recognition that you're going to kill a lot of civilians by using this. But there was curiosity from the scientists. You know, if a bomb actually worked, what actually would it do? And even the test in July, the Trinity test, which they tested the bomb to see what it would do, still didn't show them exactly what a bomb would do if you dropped it in the middle of a city. And when you drop it in the middle of a city, it causes an extraordinary moment of radiation, an extraordinary wave of noise, briefly a very, very powerful wind. And then as a result of the damage it's done, it creates a firestorm. That's what the atomic bomb did in both cases, more or less. Human beings right by the epicenter of the bombing are vaporized. They don't exist anymore. People a bit further away are so severely injured, they die, of course. And as you get a kilometer or a kilometer two kilometers away. The British and the Americans calculated all this after the war just so they could be sure what a bomb did. The level of injury changed. But for most people within the immediate area of the bombing, even if you were not killed, you died of radiation sickness a few days or weeks later.
- [24:26]
Richard Overy
These are clearly very devastating effects. But as you've alluded to earlier, very. The first deployment of this bomb did not immediately lead to this sort of notion of surrender in Japanese councils and leadership. You've already mentioned that the nature of surrender is a bit difficult within Japanese culture. But what sort of discussions were happening in the immediate aftermath of the first atomic bomb?
- [24:53]
Advertiser
Yes, I mean, most historians and a great many of the public assume that the bomb really was the thing that Made the difference. The Japanese were stubbornly digging their heels in. Suddenly here comes an A bomb and you know, they surrender a couple of days later. It's far too simple a narrative. A number of things have to be considered. The first is that the Japanese were trying to find a way to terminate the war anyway. Beforehand. They chosen the wrong way. They wanted to get the Soviet Union to intercede with Britain and America to reach some kind of settlement. And the Soviet Union, of course, was about to declare war on Japan. So of course did nothing. The second thing is that the conventional bombing and the naval blockade between them had created a growing social crisis. There was going to be serious food shortages, even starvation. By the autumn and winter, there was widespread unhappiness among the Japanese people, expressed in the only way they could graffiti rumors, et cetera, et cetera, and so deep concern that Japanese society might not survive the continuation of the war. But the most important thing I think that people have always overlooked is they didn't know what the bomb was. Although the Americans sent a leaf, you know, saying, we've just dropped an atomic bomb on you, a lot of the people involved thought it was propaganda that no power could possibly produce the bomb. They were slow in sending out a team to investigate it. And in fact, the leading nuclear scientists in Japan only arrived on August 9th. That same day, the Japanese leadership were already discussing how to end the war. And later that night they finally decided to accept the American ultimatum. So the atomic bomb had at most a very indirect effect on the final Japanese deliberations. Much more important, in my view, was the news on the evening of August 8th that the Russians were going to declare war on Japan. The following morning, the Red army burst into Manchuria like a knife through butter, went through a Japanese army. And for the Japanese leadership, suddenly they realized that, you know, it's a possibility actually that the Communists will get here first before the Americans. And they'd seen everything that happened in Eastern Europe and they were very worried about that prospect. There's no doubt that the hurried meetings on 9 August were not about the bomb, but they were about, we've got to reach some agreement now before the Russians get here and also before the conventional bombing destroys everything else in Japan. That was really the basis of that decision. Late at night on the 9th, early hours of the 10th, the emperor called them together and he did an unconstitutional thing. He announced a so called sacred decision in which he said, we have to terminate the war, we have to accept the ultimatum, and you've all got to agree with Me.
- [27:46]
Richard Overy
So this sacred decision comes. It leads to Japan's surrender. But there's plenty there within. Your answer to show that this formula of bombs equal surrender is just hugely complicated on the US side of things. What does it mean for the people who've been responsible for dropping this bomb? I wonder if you can give us some insight into the likes of LeMay or Truman. What kind of conversations are happening at highest levels to appraise the US's decision to do this?
- [28:15]
Advertiser
Well, this was a separate process, of course, from what was going on in Japan. I mean, LeMay didn't have any problems at all. I mean, he wrote later on in his memoirs, you know, to worry about the morality of what we were doing. Nuts, he wrote, Truman was. Truman suddenly, I think, reached a moment where he realized that all these people telling him it was a military target had not been telling him the truth. And on August 10, the same day that the Emperor accepted the ultimatum, he told his cabinet that they were not to drop another atomic bomb. He didn't want all those women and kids killed. He later on did begin to think about dropping another bomb because the Japanese were slow to respond to the, you know, effort to reword the ultimatum, and so on and so on. There was a good deal more argument until August 14, when it was unequivocally accepted. And Truman did think maybe we should drop a third bomb. But they didn't. But he did have second thoughts later on. He said, you know, it was quite justified what we did. You know, it saved American lives. There should be no moral argument about it. But at the time, he did worry about it. So did Oppenheimer, as probably everybody knows from looking at the film that after Hiroshima, he was like everybody else, delighted it worked. But by the time of Nagasaki, he was much more worried about what he'd unleashed. What it actually did mean, you know, when you faced it and you suddenly realized what you'd done. I think it was much more morally worrying than it had been at the beginning.
- [29:43]
Richard Overy
I mean, I'm sure our listeners can understand why, and we'll have many questions themselves. One thing we haven't yet explored is that the firebombing continued alongside the atomic bombs, which I think many people might be surprised by. These aren't two separate things, are they? And I think that's maybe just important to bring home here, as this is the culmination of a sustained campaign, isn't it? What can you tell us about that?
- [30:06]
Advertiser
Yes. No, no. I mean, I argue in the book that the American side, the Air Force saw the atomic bombing and the conventional bombing as part of the same process of destroying Japanese cities and trying to get them to surrender. And the firebombing did go on. In fact, some of the cities that were bombed after Hiroshima were destroyed more comprehensively. They were small C, destroyed more comprehensively than Hiroshima. And the bombing went on. The last bombing occurred after the Emperor had finally authorized the surrender to the Americans on August 14th. This was one of the things that he referred to again and again, and he referred to again after the war when he was discussing with his advisors and so on. The thing that really worried him was the damage done by the conventional bombing to all the small towns of Japan. To the Japanese people as a whole. Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just one part of that one thing. Actually, I could say we always talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but we overlook the fact that the Americans were planning to use a lot more atomic bombs. And I think that everybody has lost sight of that. They assume there were just two. But the plans from the spring of 1945 onwards was to wage nuclear war against Japan if Japan didn't surrender. And that meant not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it meant bombs on seven other cities. At least they thought it would need three bombs on Hiroshima to destroy it. In fact, it only needed one. And so as the bombs rolled off the production line in September, October, November, December, they had already developed a strategy for their use. In other words, waging not just the first atomic attacks, but a more sustained.
- [31:44]
Richard Overy
Nuclear war for the reign of ruin to continue. What a sobering possibility that is. So, remembering these events, then obviously there is so much more to be discovered in your book Reign of Ruin. But eight decades on from these bombings, how are they remembered in the US And Japan? How are these countries grappling with their various feelings about these events?
- [32:08]
Advertiser
Well, I talked about this in the final chapter in the book. It seemed to me important to see what happened afterwards. How did people treat the bombing? It's interesting that the conventional bombing and particularly the bombing of Tokyo, which, as I said, killed 83,000 people in one night, occasioned very little discussion in the United States, and actually not a lot of discussion in Japan. Discussion was suppressed by the American authorities for the first years after 1945, but they never really revived until much later in the 1970s and 80s in Japan. The atomic bomb, on the other hand, of course, was remembered. And in the United States, there remained a pretty solid majority in favor of their use, actually right way up to the 21st century. But a growing fraction of Americans, particularly young Americans, who could not see the point of their use and thought they were not necessary. So there's been a shift and a little bit in the way in which the United States thinks about it, but there's been no real question of remorse or indeed apology and so on for what was done. But in Japan, too, the problem really was to rebuild Japan, literally to rebuild it, of course, after 1945, to get the United States as an ally, because the Japanese were still pretty terrified of communism, which was all around North Korea, China, Soviet Union, and the security alliance with the United States, signed 1952, was a very important cornerstone for Japanese statutory and has remained so ever since. And so they didn't want to talk a lot about the bomb, they didn't want to blame the Americans, want to make a fuss about it, and so on. And it was actually only the people involved in the bombing, the people who'd been victimized by the bombing, who began to set up organizations in the 1950s to represent those who had been victimized and to mount a campaign of nuclear disarmament, which has again continued to the present day. So two rather different strands in both countries, really. In Japan, public remembrance has been much more subdued, or rather official remembrance have been much more subdued. But there is an important fraction of Japanese society which is strongly pacifist and strongly anti nuclear.
- [34:23]
Eleanor Evans
That was Richard Overy, professor of History at the University of Exeter, and he was speaking to Eleanor Evans. Richard's new book, Reign of Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, is out now.