Dan Snow's History Hit - The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

Episode Date: August 7, 2022

On August 6 and 9, 1945, US B-29 bombers, dropped their nuclear bombs on the two cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands and consigning millions to disease and genetic defects. The accepted wisdom in the U.S. since has been that dropping the bombs on these Japanese cities was the only way to end World War II without an invasion of Japan that would have cost hundreds of thousands of American and perhaps millions of Japanese lives.Gar Alperovitz is a historian, political economist, activist and writer. A critic of the bombings, Gar joins Dan on the podcast to discuss how the decision to use the atomic bomb was wrapped up in atomic diplomacy: that the U.S. used nuclear weapons to intimidate the Soviet Union in the early stages of the Cold War. To mark the anniversary, we also dug back into the archives to bring you the human story at the heart of the tragedy - Hirata San, a survivor of the Hiroshima attacks, shares his experiences of the bombing.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On August 6th, 1945, the first of two nuclear weapons was dropped on Japan. These remain, thankfully, the only time that nuclear munitions have ever been used on the battlefield. Two weeks before, on the 26th of July 1945, the Allies had called for the unconditional surrender of the Imperial Japanese armed forces in Potsdam, in defeated and occupied Germany, at the end of the war in Europe. They promised that the alternative to surrender was prompt and utter destruction. Arguments have raged ever since as to exactly whether the Japanese did completely choose to ignore that ultimatum. We'll be hearing more about that in this podcast. Whilst that demand was being

issued, the United States Army Air Forces were training and equipping a special group of Boeing B-29 Superfortresses to bomb the home islands, the Japanese homeland, with atomic weapons if required. Originally, the most suitable aircraft to deliver the atomic bomb was actually the British Lancaster bomber, but the Americans obviously wanted to use one of their own aircraft, and so they produced a specialised version of the Boeing B-29 superfortress. These were deployed to Tinian in the Mariana Islands. Many Japanese cities had been incinerated in the firebombing campaigns of the previous year, but a handful of cities had been spared and they were now seen as the ideal testbed to show

the potency of this new weapon, to force the Japanese to surrender, but arguably just as importantly, to show the rest of the world, namely the Soviet Union, this devastating new weapon the Americans could now deploy. Kyoto was suitable, but removed from the list because the US Secretary of State for War, Stimson, had spent his honeymoon there and thought it was a rather wonderful place. The final shortlist was Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagata, and Nagasaki. They were large urban areas, they held significant military facilities. In the end, Hiroshima was designated the target. A report at the time said it was the right size, so a large part of the city could be extensively destroyed with just one bomb, and the adjacent hills were likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage. The bomb, destined for Hiroshima but

without its uranium core, left California on the 16th of July aboard the cruiser USS Indianapolis. It arrived at Tinian on the 26th of July. The fissile core was then flown out to Tinian, and together they were loaded aboard the Enola Gay, a B-29, named after the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr. He named the plane after his mum because she believed in him. When he'd left a medical career to go and join the armed forces, his dad thought he was crazy, but his mum, who he described as a courageous, red-haired woman,

had been a source of enormous strength to him. Enola Gay took off very early in the morning of the 6th of August. She was accompanied by two other B-29s. In front of them was a spotter plane. At 7am it had flown over the city of Hiroshima. It reported, cloud cover, less than three-tenths at all altitudes. Advice, cloud cover less than three-tenths at all altitudes. Advice, bomb primary. The fate of Hiroshima and of tens of thousands of its inhabitants was sealed with that message. At 0815 Japanese time, Enola Gay released her bomb, nicknamed Little Boy. It contained 64 kilograms of uranium. It took around 45 seconds to fall from the aircraft, which was flying at 31,000 feet. It detonated at 580 meters, that's around 2,000 feet,

above the city. In the time it had taken between release and the bomb detonating, Oleg A had traveled about 12 miles, and yet the crew felt the shockwave as if some anti-aircraft fire detonated right next to the fuselage. The detonation of Little Boy released as much explosive energy as all of the weapons used hitherto in the Second World War put together. Only 2% of its nuclear material went through the process of fission. And yet, the radius of destruction was about a mile. Nearly everything within a mile was destroyed. There were fires across the rest of the city. We think around 70,000 to 80,000 people were killed at this point of detonation or in the hours that followed it as a result of the blast itself or the fires that swept through the city,

another 70,000 people were injured. Japanese officials later determined that about 70% of Hiroshima's buildings were completely destroyed. I remember as a child going to the Imperial War Museum in London, and it's one of my earliest memories, it was quite traumatic in fact,

they had on display in the museum a corpse, a woman who was burned to death in that explosion. I always remember making out the recognisable features on the body, the rest of it was so distorted and blackened. It was the terrible start of a new era of warfare. The prospect now loomed of superpowers, hurling nuclear weapons of mind-boggling destructive capability in wars that could threaten the continued existence of human life on planet Earth. That was the Cold War era in which I grew up, and tragically, it's an era that we have not left behind following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. It's a shadow that still looms over us all today. As you'll hear in this podcast when I talk to a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing,

the death and injury caused in that moment of detonation was really only the beginning of decades of torment for people that were lucky enough to survive. Many died slow, lingering deaths from the effects of radiation, and others faced a stigma from their fellow Japanese as having been exposed to nuclear bombs. There were widespread stories in Japan about birth defects among survivors of the blast, so young women found it very difficult to marry, and all of them, to a certain extent, were stigmatised. The events of August 1945 cast such a long shadow for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

for the people of Japan, and for all of us all over the world. Tibbets aboard the Enola Gay returned safely to its base on Tinian to great fanfare. They touched down after a 12-hour mission. Hundreds of people gathered and cheered their landing. Tibbets was immediately presented with the distinguished service cross as he stepped onto the runway. On the 9th of August, a second nuclear strike took place. It would have been brought forward two days from the 11th to allow for a bad weather

forecast. This time, a bomb codenamed Fat Man was dropped on its secondary target, Nagasaki. It had been designated for Kokura, but the city was obscured by smoke from the fires of a neighbouring city that had been struck by conventional forces the day before. In this podcast, you're going to hear from two guests. One is a historian, an economist, activist, writer. He's a former fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He's called Gar Alperovitz. He served both as a legislative director in the House of Representatives and the Senate and as a special assistant at the US Department of State. He is a great critic of the bombings. In 1965, he popularized

the idea of something called atomic diplomacy, in which the weapons were primarily deployed to intimidate the Soviet Union in the early stages of the Cold War. We discussed his ideas, his theories, and what evidence he has for it in this podcast. But I've also dug back into the archive because I think it's important to hear from someone who was actually there at Hiroshima and who remembers the blast. Hirata-san is a survivor of the Hiroshima attack. He's one of the few survivors now alive from that terrible bombing. I'm very grateful for him for conducting this interview in English. I'll never forget our meeting in the Japanese embassy in London. I'm very grateful for him for sharing his memories of such a traumatic event. But let's start off with Gar Albovitz.

Enjoy. Gar, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Yes, glad to be here with you. Tell me, what was the situation in the summer of 1945? Germany was defeated, Japan was undefeated. Where was the fighting and how intense was it? Well, Japan, essentially, they'd lost their fleet. They'd been bombed city after city after city by conventional weapons.

And they were desperately trying to keep the Russians out of the war. The Russians were wedgled by U.S. determination to enter the war three months after the end of the war in Europe, which was May 8th, which made it August 8th. And all of our intelligence suggested that in this desperate situation, that Japan was certain to surrender as soon as the Russians came in. They couldn't face the Russians and the Americans at that time. They were very desperate. But the fighting in places like Okinawa was raging. Although it was hopeless, the Japanese defenders fought tenaciously through this summer. That's true, but all of the intelligence was clear because we'd broken the codes and we knew that the internal

decision-making at the emperor's level was desperately trying to go. And we knew when the Russians came in, the war would end. Why have we been told now, years later, that the decision to drop the atomic bomb was one of necessity and the only other option would have been a terrible invasion that would have made D-Day look like a cakewalk? It would have involved the loss potentially of a million Allied service personnel. Well, the why is one has to speculate a little bit, but it's quite clear that we knew that they understood the war was likely to end. They had three months to test when the Russians came in. We were begging the Russians to come in before the bomb was a reality. The intelligence said, because we'd broken the codes, We were following the Japanese codes back and forth to Russia

When the Russians came in, they had nothing left to stand with They were scheduled for August 8th Three months to the day after Germany surrendered That was the promise That was our understanding And the intelligence and the president was advised that that was the situation And there were another three months to test whether the intelligence was correct. But instead of that, on August 6th, we bombed Hiroshima and then August 9th, Nagasaki. What were the debates going on within the

American high command? Who was keen to drop the bomb and who wasn't in that summer of 45? It all gets involved with a very different question having nothing whatsoever to do with the Japanese war. It has to do with the Russian question, because what was developing from the Yalta time in this February of 1945 and building up to July, which is when the bomb was tested, and building up to November when the invasion could take place three months later, we were reading the Japanese codes, and they were desperately trying to find a way out. And U.S. intelligence advised that if we told them they would keep their emperor in a figurehead role, which as you know, they still have an emperor in a figurehead role, that was the only

real condition necessary for surrender. They were prepared to do that. That was not a very demanding question. And the president was prepared to do that. So, as far as we can tell from all of the available information, they understood full well that there was high likelihood that there would be no invasion of Japan, no great loss of American lives. There couldn't be an invasion for three months. And in any case, you could test it. If it didn't work, you could find out that soon, and you could use the bombs first before an invasion. Instead, they chose to use the bombs on August 6th and August 9th rather than the November invasion couldn't take place for three months. Who was the strongest advocate of using the bomb on the other side?

So far as we can tell, most of the decision making, we pretty much know what the attitudes were, but most of the decision-making was between the president, who, as people forget, Truman came into office suddenly with the death of President Roosevelt. He was well over his head. He knew nothing about foreign policy. His chief advisor was a man named Burns, James F. Burns, who had been the man who took him as a senator. They were both senators at one point and took him under his arm and taught him how to be a United States senator. Truman made him Secretary of State. Burns was basically in charge of most of these recommendations and decisions in the first three, four months of the Truman presidency, the time when the decision was made. Later on, Truman fired him about a year and

a half later. But at that time, it's James F. Burns. And he was a believer in dropping the bomb. For what reason? He convinced Truman, and the best language that you find is Truman's language in his diary, before the bomb was tested, which was on July 16th. He said, if it works, as I think it will, I'll certainly have a hammer on those boys meaning the russians not the japanese that it would certainly end the war in japan because all the intelligence said it would end the war the war would end without an invasion once you told them they could keep their emperor but what he was really thinking about at this point so far as we can tell from the documents we have and the diary entries we have, the thought was now focused on the Russians in Eastern Europe and in Manchuria.

That's the hidden story of Hiroshima having virtually nothing to do with Japan by this time. Japan was desperately trying to get out of the war. This is the part of the story that most people don't understand. This was just after the Potsdam meeting with Stalin to settle Europe, not Asia, but primarily Europe, Eastern Europe, particularly, and Germany. So there's a lot of Soviet diplomacy involved in what's really going on in the White House at this time. And that's what we've learned from the diaries ever since. So Truman has met with Stalin at Potsdam in Germany, now defeated and occupied Germany. And it's clear that there's a confrontation now looming between the former allies that

helped overwhelm Nazi Germany, the USA and its allies of Britain and France, and the Soviet Union. Yes, that's right. Note the dates. The Potsdam meeting began on July 16th, 1945. Can you talk me through the bombing itself of Hiroshima? Well, the bombing itself, remember the Japanese air defense system was virtually destroyed, almost clear skies. It was a single bomber and a follow-on plane and a weather plane.

They flew over, came over the target, and it was a very clear, and from their point of view, from the point of view of the bombardier buyers, it was a very simple decision, routine almost. They dropped the bomb. They had to do a kind of maneuver that took them away as fast as they could on the left turn and up into the sky to get away from the blast, but it was a conventional routine mission. And tell me what happened when Little Boy detonated at 8.15 that morning. Well, if you were in the airplanes while you saw the famous mushroom cloud roiling up above, when it detonated, the area was simply flattened and destroyed. Amazing destruction throughout the area of this blast, aimed at the bridges over the river. That was the targeted area, and they hit their target.

It was an extraordinary explosion that no one had ever experienced, except the test out in El Mercado before that time. What was the Japanese response? They rushed into the decision-making rooms with the emperor and came to the emperor's war team. They very quickly decided that there was no choice, that they had to surrender. And very quickly they did, with the sole condition that the emperor be kept in some titular head with no power.

And the negotiations proceeded from then. We went forward with Nagasaki, which was totally unnecessary at that point, but they wanted to make sure, as We went forward with Nagasaki, which was totally unnecessary at that point, but they wanted to make sure, as I said. Why Nagasaki? So far as we can tell, and most of this was not recorded in official documents, we get diary entries, because the real discussions about this at this point in time were between the president and the secretary of state. And what they were thinking about was, one, Eastern Europe, negotiations of Germany and Potsdam with Stalin in July of 1945

over the fate of Germany, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, what became Yugoslavia later. All of that was in discussion at Potsdam and had been discussed a few months earlier at Yalta. And Truman saw the bomb, and Burns particularly saw the bomb, as a leverage in diplomacy. And hopefully they could get the bomb into Japan before the Russians actually reached Japan itself. And it's worth thinking about that. August 8th, three months after the German surrender, was the deadline for the Russian entry into the war. We had asked them

to come in before the bomb was tested. We dropped the bomb on August 6th, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, August 9th, by way of preventing them from getting into Japan and also, I think, showing the power for the European negotiation. Gar, thank you very much indeed. Tell us how people can find out more. There's a book I've written. It's called The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, which goes over this entirely. It's available online. You can find it easily.

Go and check it out, everyone. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. You listen to Dan Snow's History, we're talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Coming up after these ads is Hirata-san.

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By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Dan Snow's History. You're now going to hear an interview I did several years ago with Hirata-san, a man now in his 80s who survived the atomic blast on Hiroshima as a child. Where were you in August 1945? In Hiroshima, two kilometers away from the epicenter. You're very young, so you away from the epicenter. You're very young, so you must have been a baby.

Nine years old. Do you remember Hiroshima before the strike? Tell me what the city was like. The city is, of course, this World War II, mainly concrete building is very scarce, very few. Right now, if you go to the Hiroshima city, it's remodeled, Mainly concrete building is very scarce, very few. Right now, if you go to the Hiroshima city, it's remodeled. But the house is, at that time, mainly wood or papers, so that it's very frameable. You were living with your mother, and was your father away at the war? Well, actually, at that time, the Japanese government, especially for the big city, enforced the young children or young family to evacuate from the city.

Because day by day, lots of fire attacks, fire bombs. And what do you remember about the day of the bomb being dropped? It's hard to say, but I was sent back to the evacuated place to the original house of Hiroshima. Three of us are sitting in the dining room on the breakfast. And after the breakfast, we are just chatting or visiting each other then all of a sudden white flash come from the ceiling so that my father spontaneously pushed me in the foxhole type shelter and Japanese

living room is next to its corridor. And there is no clear wall to the yard. It's usually the moving slide, mainly made of wood. And it's open so that my father just pushed me in about five meters away of the living room into the shelter. And maybe light comes first. Two kilometers means about seven seconds was available to make an action so that it is easy for him to push in. But then finally, he tried to get in the shelter. The shockwave hits him,

and he was seriously injured by the debris of the glass. So that is the situation. So your father saved your life? That's right, yes. How long were you in the shelter, and what did you see when you came back up out of the shelter? I don't know how long we stayed in the shelter, but anyway, for some moment, the surrounding situation is very quiet.

All of us get out from the shelter, and we are all shocked that scenery has changed entirely. The house is probably totally broken, but the main pole of the house is still sitting, but the roof or even the wall roof was blown out. That's one thing.

When I get out, we get out from the shelter. And the other is probably 10 minutes or 20 minutes later, I get out from my house to see the road. The lines of the ghost, the burnt people just walking away from there. They are escaping from the center of Hiroshima to the safer suburbs. It's just like a ghost because they have a burn on the skin and seeking for water, water please, or ouch, ouch, kind of groaning. Did you have lots of friends and family that were killed and wounded?

Sure, sure, sure. About 140 people, 40,000 people in Hiroshima was killed according to the statistics of UN by the end of 1945. It's spontaneously killed or have a burn or after hex. And also there's lots of radiation diseases was brought by bombing. After the bomb, did you look around Hiroshima? Did you want to go in or it's too scary to go into the middle of the site?

On the evening, my father said that my mother and the sisters are worrying about us so that we thought that it is probably our house would not receive the extension of the fire. So we just tried to get out from the house to the evacuation spot. But at that time, we had to pass by the burnout area. And I'm sure in England too, 70 years ago, the electricity pole is made of wood.

And it started smoking or something, small fires. I have a memory watching the surface of the river from the river bridge, that a bunch of corpse of the dead seeking the water and getting in. The burned people require order, but if you give them order, probably the death period comes faster.

And the Japanese to heal the burnt heart skin, they are drowned. So they're full of the corpse on the surface. How has this affected your life and your mental health through the rest of your life? I personally do not have seriously damage by mental, but it was the later parts of the career of life start to talk about this kind of a story. Because I always, of course, pray regardless of the place on August 6th. But do not tell anything about to my even the friends or families, we know it, but the

friends or the colleagues, but probably with ages. It's my way of thinking, but probably that is true. Getting older, they started to speak out, at least for the next generation. I was surprised that so many people started to make a testimony, but probably most of people very busy to live on the daily life and do not want to talk about it. Do you hate the people who dropped the bomb? I'll make a pretty short answer to you. I'm not blaming or I'm not asking any apology from the U.S. people.

I had a chance to make the first A-bomb exhibit at UN, United Nations, New York. And these people are trying to speak for the next generation that they would not try to make another

survivors of the A-bombs or nuclear weapons. So that is probably the answer to you is, first, I thought it's a fool, the person of the bombing such inhumane. But at the same time, for the next generation, we have a very serious situation. We have to speak out for you. That's the reason. So there will be no more survivors? No more survivors. Yes, no more hibakushas. Thank you very much, Harata-san. Thank you for sharing your memories.

Thank you very much, Ratasan. Thank you for sharing your memories. Thank you. you