Unconditional

Surrender,

Demobilization,

and the Atomic Bomb

__________________

by

Michael D. Pearlman

FOREWORD

The calculations for bringing large-scale hostilities to an end and for 

establishing a favorable environment in which postcombat operations, including 

the occupation of the enemy's homeland, can take place involve high-level 

military officers in the analysis of a wide range of considerations, many of which 

fall well beyond what would be traditionally recognized as strictly military in 

nature.
In Unconditional Surrender, Demobilization, and the Atomic Bomb, Dr. Michael 

Pearlman brings home this point through his shrewd assessment of the 

complex issues confronting U.S. officers as they debated the best course of 

action to follow in ending the war against Japan. Aside from the list of traditional 

concerns, such as the human cost of mounting an invasion of Japan, these 

officers had also to consider such intangibles as continued support for the war 

effort on the American home front. Thanks to Pearlman's research, the reader 

comes away with a deeper understanding of why these officers made the 

recommendations they did to the president and why the president decided to 

drop the atomic bomb to end World War II.

1996 JERRY V. MORELOCK

Colonel, Field Artillery

Director, Combat Studies Insulate

CSl publications cover a variety of military history topics. The views expressed herein are those of the 

author and not necessarily those of the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense.
Unconditional

Surrender,

Demobilization,

and the Atomic Bomb

__________________

by

Michael D. Pearlman

U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-1352

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pearlman, Michael, 1944-

Unconditional surrender, demobilization and the atomic bomb / by Michael D. Pearlman.

p. cm.

includes bibliographical references (p.). 

1, World War, 1939-1945---Diplomatic history. 2, Military

planning---United States----History----20th century. 3, Atomic bomb--
Japan. 4. United States--Foreign relations--1933-1945. I. Title.

D753.P43 1996

940.53'2----dc2096-32695

CIP

God bless democracy! I approve of it highly but suffer from it extremely. This incidentally 

is not for quotation.1

--George Catlett Marshall

__________________________________________

CONTENTS

Text

Notes

MAPS

1. Provisional Order of Battle for Invasion, of Japan

25 (August 1945)

__________________________________________
Contents

In one way or another, George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army's Chief of Staff, had long 

been expecting a sharp reduction in military morale. He had witnessed, as aide-decamp to General John J. Pershing, America's mood after World War I. Once Germany 

asked for an armistice (and before it signed a surrender), Congress and the public had 

demanded a swift demobilization. This indelible memory of November 1918 shaped 

Marshall's resolve to minimize military responsibilities after the Nazi capitulation. In 

Europe, this meant an end to operations in the eastern Mediterranean, where internal 

political conflicts and instabilities might require a large and long-term occupation by an 

army about to be drastically reduced in size. In the Pacific, the Japanese would have to 

be beaten into a position where their surrender would occur shortly after V-E Day. 

Otherwise, there might not be a capitulation at all, something Marshall predicted in 

1943: "the collapse of Germany would impose partial demobilization and a growing 

impatience ... throughout the United States." This mood could lead to a compromise 

settlement along the lines the Japanese Army was hoping to obtain: that is, the 

retention of the core empire it still occupied (Formosa, Manchuria, and Korea) and no 

change in the political institutions of Japan.2

America's military timing was exceptionally good, considering the enormous 

perplexities of the war. When Germany surrendered in May, the United States 

had already made what Marshall called the "preparation for the final kill." Its 

armed forces surrounded the home islands of Japan from the south and the east. 

It had also obtained from Russia a pledge to attack the Japanese Imperial Army 

in Manchuria, thereby completing the ironclad blockade that the U.S. Navy once 

planned to execute alone. However, the denial of imports of strategic items, from 

oil to coal and protein, did not mean that a mere mop-up operation was in the 

works, Most of the U.S. military, especially the Army, conducted planning on the 

premise "that defeat of the enemy's armed forces in the Japanese homeland is a 

prerequisite to unconditional surrender." Even before Japan strongly reinforced 

Kyushu, the first home island the United States would invade, the American 

military calculated that America would still have to conduct the toughest landings 

and follow-up battles seen in World War II --- actions that would likely result in 

some 200,000 casualties and 50,000 fatalities.3 Admiral William D. Leahy, 

chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an advocate of the blockade strategy, would 

later complain that "the Army did not appear to be able to understand that the 

Navy, with some Army air assistance, already had defeated Japan." The flaw in 

Leahy's argument was that the Japanese Imperial Army refused to accept the 

fact that it had lost the war, at least by the standard of unconditional surrender. 

That demand was completely unacceptable to an institution that ordered 

wounded soldiers to commit suicide rather than become prisoners of war.4
Leahy admitted 

however, that there was 

"little prospect of 

obtaining unconditional 

surrender" in 1945, 

Admiral Ernest J. King, 

Chief of Naval 

Operations, would write 

that the Navy "in the 

course of time would 

have starved the 

Japanese into 

submission" (Italics 

mine). Time, however, 

was a waning asset, 

especially to Marshall, 

who would later say that 

American "political and 

economic institutions 

melted out from under 

us [the U.S. military]". 

The Office of War 

Mobilization and 

Reconversion told the 

JCS what magazines 

and newspapers had 

been printing since late 

1944: there was 

overwhelming public pressure to increase production of consumer goods. I am 

"afraid of unrest in the country," said Director Fred Vinson. I have never seen 

"the people in their present frame of mind." Aside from reports about the "national 

end-of-the-war psychology among [the] citizens" of the United States, the JCS 

heard from its own military intelligence community. Their best estimate was that 

total victory through encirclement, blockade, and bombardment might well take "a 

great many years."5

Reasonably sane people like to avoid amphibious invasions against fortified 

beaches. Before they were attempted, Marshall would spend days in a cold 

sweat because of "the awfulness of the consequences that could occur should 

one of these go wrong." (A failed river crossing constituted a "reverse"; a failed 

landing meant -disaster.") Nonetheless, the different briefings Marshall received 

solidified his conviction that no "temporizing measure" could loosen the firm 

control of the militarists in Japan. Hence, he insisted on the need for an invasion, 

despite "the last ditch tactics of the suicidal Japanese."6
Ironically, the Japanese armed forces- and Emperor Hirohito -- would welcome 

Marshall's conclusion as an opportunity to "smash the inordinate ambitions of the 

enemy nation." Although the Japanese home army (if not their civilians) was still 

a long way from starvation, the Japanese had lost the air and naval capacity to 

fight off a blockade. However, they had soldiers dug deeply into a well-protected 

and interconnected "mass of eaves" on terrain the U.S. Army deemed "[un]suited 

for large scale mobile warfare." Consequently, Japan felt able to inflict heavy 

casualties in "a decisive battle at the landing point" of an amphibious assault, 

"We would have succeeded in driving you off the beaches," said one Japanese 

general With this scenario quite plausible, the U.S. government should have 

modified the common meaning of "unconditional surrender" or substantially 

strengthened its military means to fight. The government did neither, aside from 

working on a secret bomb, yet to be tested in New Mexico.7

Unconditional surrender was primarily a battle cry meant "to concentrate the 

attention of public opinion upon the winning of the war." As a coherent statement 

of political objectives, it had two competing definitions, when it had any clear 

meaning at all.8 Definition number one, used in State Department memoranda 

and within the Army's general staff, did "not mean absence of terms, but [that] 

whatever terms are imposed do not result from a bargain or a barter with the 

enemy." The victor laid down all conditions. For the vanquished, those conditions 

were unconditional.9 In definition number two, Japanese surrender was "not 

subject to conditions or limitations." In this case, the victor had absolute freedom 

over the vanquished because, as generals and diplomats put it, the enemy "is 

actually signing a 'blank check'"; there are "no contractual elements whatever."10

Contents
The armed forces and 

career diplomats 

preferred definition 

number one, as did 

Republican politicians 

(former President 

Herbert Hoover and 

senators from the 

Midwest and Northeast 

states) and certain elite 

publications, such as the 

Christian Century.

11

Other publications (from 

the Christian Science 

Monitor to mass 

circulation magazines) 

favored definition 

number two, as did 

political appointees in 

the State Department 

and Southern Democrats (identified below). As for President Franklin D. 

Roosevelt, he appears to have done what he typically did whenever forced to 

choose one thing or the other. He chose both, then discarded the option least 

suited to the specific problem at hand. For Germany, he preferred no 

specifications; for Japan, no negotiations. Since this differentiation was hardly 

popular least of all, treating Japan more leniently -- Roosevelt was opaque, as 

demonstrated by his reference to Grant's conversation with Lee at the end of the 

Civil War: "Take the animals home and do the spring plowing.... That is what we 

mean by unconditional surrender."12

So-called clarifications, like this vague and pointless historical anecdote, must 

have mystified the Japanese as badly as it did most Americans. The Japanese, 

consequently, thought U.S. policy towards Germany foretold the position towards 

them (both policies were called "Unconditional surrender"). Actually, U.S. policy 

did not clearly move in that direction until FDR died in April 1945.13

According to Leahy's notes at the Washington Conference (May 1943), "the 

grand strategy of the war remained fixed on achieving unconditional surrender of 

the Axis powers in Europe while [only?] maintaining pressure on Japan to secure 

positions from which her ultimate surrender could be forced." At the Cairo 

Conference (November 1943), the communiqué drafted by Harry Hopkins, at 

Roosevelt's instruction, made the obligatory demand for unconditional surrender. 

Then, it set specific stipulations, consistent with a series of position papers. 

drafted by State Department professionals and Asia specialists. None of the 

points were draconian, at least compared to those imposed on Germany. Japan 

was to be "stripped of all" its overseas conquests, presumably to quarantine a 

Map 1. Provision Order of Battle for Invasion of Japan (August 1945)
nation that Roosevelt believed was genetically disposed towards acts of lawless 

violence. The president's policy of isolating Japan from the rest of Asia may have 

smacked of political eugenics, but nothing was said about occupation, 

demilitarization, war trials, or the emperor of Japan. Nor was there any hint of the 

worst fear of one JCS intelligence officer: a bloody invasion of the home island 

that would destroy the imperial Japanese government before it could negotiate a 

peace.14

The Cairo communiqué was certainly not good news in Tokyo. Prime Minister 

Hideki Tojo said it meant Japan was to be reduced to a third-rate state. But he 

said nothing about what other Japanese would dread: that unconditional 

surrender meant the destruction of the nation and the ruin of the Japanese race. 

These Japanese officials made a mistake in assuming that the communiqué was 

just American propaganda, not a serious statement of terms.15

Specific conditions that the Cairo communiqué mentioned and omitted were not 

inadvertent. That November (1943), Roosevelt had asked China to conduct the 

postwar occupation of Japan. Its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, wanted an Allied 

pledge to punish the Japanese as war criminals, yet be dodged responsibility for 

occupation duty, deferring it back to the United States. He and Roosevelt then 

agreed "that as soon as Japan's military power has been broken, the Japanese 

in Japan proper would be permitted to work out their own destiny without outside 

direction." In short, there would be no occupation, let alone transformation of a 

society, such as Roosevelt planned for Germany. There, a generation was to be 

fed from U.S. Army trucks so that they would learn how badly they had been 

beaten -- far cry from the plan for the Far East that Roosevelt and Stalin made at 

Teheran. The Allies would only control "islands in the vicinity of Japan," hoping 

this would suffice to deter and prevent a renewed "course of aggression."16

Wise or foolish, that geographical objective was perfectly consistent with the U.S. 

military means available and emphasized in late 1943. Over objections from 

Admiral King and General Marshall, who still hoped for a major base in 

continental Asia, Roosevelt abandoned new operations in the China-Burma-India 

(CBI) theater lest they divert soldiers and landing craft from the invasion of 

Europe in 1944. ("He was Commander-in-Chief," wrote Leahy, "and that ended 

the argument.") CBI, thereafter, became a backwater campaign, like the D-Day 

operation had relegated the Italian campaign in the European theater. With most 

ground forces now unequivocally committed to France, a reasonable military 

strategy was to win the war with Japan from the Pacific Ocean with sea and air 

power. This could force an "ultimate surrender" -- provided terms were not too 

harsh. However, air and sea power were hardly sufficient for what Allied planners 

later called the "absolute military control of Japan" itself. It was no accident that 

the top brass of the Navy--Admirals Leahy, King, and Chester W. Nimitz--all 

spoke against unconditional surrender. That implied a protracted occupation that 

only the Army could provide.17
After Franklin Roosevelt died on 12 April, the new president, Harry S. Truman, 

told his military advisers about his hopes "of preventing an Okinawa from one 

end of Japan to the other." He probably overstated the danger, fearing the 

invasion could kill 500,000 Americans, "the flower of our young manhood," This 

is not surprising when one remembers the last time the new commander in chief, 

a former Army captain, commanded anyone in battle. In the fall of 1918, the 

Germans, outnumbered but dug in, were supposedly tottering on the brink of 

defeat. Nonetheless, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, they killed or 

Wounded almost half the soldiers in Truman's 35th Infantry Division. Twenty 

years later, he vividly recalled a "pile of [dead] American soldiers in all sorts of 

ghastly positions and an old hard boiled sergeant" who yelled at Truman's

battery: "Now you sons of bitches, you'll believe you're in a war."18

To mitigate American casualties in Japan, the civilian leaders of the War 

Department recommended removing demands for unconditional surrender. The 

United States could accomplish "everything we want to accomplish in regard to 

Japan without the use of the term," which would only inflict a humiliating "stigma" 

and "loss of face" on Japan's ruling bodies. They advised Truman to settle for 

"the equivalent of unconditional surrender," by which America could still fulfill its 

"vital war objective of preventing Japan front again becoming a menace to world 

peace." This was reminiscent of Roosevelt in 1943. lt also meant the 

transformation and retention of the emperor as "a constitutional monarch," in the 

words of Henry Stimson, "a kindly minded Christian gentleman" who was the 

secretary of war. Like most other people in the government who did not want a 

fight to the finish, Stimson believed that Emperor Hirohito was a silent partner 

and a passive witness in a political system "under the complete dominance of the 

Japanese Army," which allegedly ruled in the name of the "Emperor-God."19

Despite well-intentioned attempts to whitewash Hirohito, the emperor was an 

active participant in Japan's military-political complex. Stimson and company, not 

knowing much about his complicity, petitioned Truman not to attempt governing 

the island "in any such matter as we are committed in Germany." The War 

Department's wish to govern Japan through the Japanese government now 

apparently got a renewed lease on life. When Truman made his first public 

demands on the enemy, he asked for "unconditional surrender" solely from the 

military, As for the American military, it already felt itself too involved in European 

government, reform, and relief; the United States did not appear to have the 

endurance to take on more political missions. Indeed, the War Department 

wondered if it had the perseverance to carry on the war. Since December 1944, 

Stimson bewailed "the curious characteristic of our noble people," who are 

already failing quotas for scrap paper and victory gardens. "They have no more 

notion that they are in a war [where] sacrifices are needed--just so many 

children," he told George Marshall. However, what Stimson sensed in the civilian 

population was nothing compared to what he observed in army units redeploying 

from Europe to the Pacific: "These men were weary in a way that no one merely 

reading reports could readily understand."20
Marshall's own recommendation about unconditional surrender was a bit more 

subtle than that of Stimson, his civilian boss. The general advised Stimson and 

the president to change its "precise terminology" into "something which might be 

psychologically more conducive to the earliest defeat of Japan." Nonetheless, he 

wanted to retain "the phraseology," implicit recognition that the slogan was 

primarily a war cry, not a policy. New words would send the wrong signals to 

America, the Soviet Union, and the enemy. U.S. soldiers and the public might 

abandon "the firm determination" to fight; the Russians might withhold military 

"cooperation against Japan"; and the enemy might get the "impression that we 

are growing soft." This last point, in particular, had to be avoided because it was 

absolutely true!21

Marshall, the Army's civilian officials, and its general staff all wanted "a precise 

definition" of unconditional surrender, "Which we all agree is difficult to define." It 

was hoped that a clarification of Allied intentions would encourage the enemy "to 

accept a rationalized version" of war termination before the end of 1945, 

something that the head of strategy and policy at the Department of the Army 

called a "form of negotiated unconditional surrender." This phrase might seem 

patently illogical; the policy, however, made sense, at least for the U.S. Army. It 

wanted to retain the emperor to case the burdens it would have to assume in his 

absence.22 If Japan were not invaded and its home forces not completely 

destroyed, any occupation would have to depend on indigenous authority and 

"the good faith of the Japanese." An assault invasion, on the other hand, would 

destroy the central Japanese government and "normal administrative controls." 

Then, nothing would exist to "exercise firm authority over [still] undefeated 

military forces" and "lessen resistance by those Japanese who would accept 

Imperial commands," One military officer asked the joint war plans committee, 

"could we handle a situation in which the Japs have several million [men] under 

arms?"23

Aside from occupation duty, Army officers had immediate concerns on their mind. 

As military men, they judiciously planned for the worst. Privy to intercepts from 

the enemy army, as well as propaganda in Japanese newspapers, they heard 

their opponent planning to bloody the "evil and ugly [American] plutocracy" so 

badly that it would not "continue an unprofitable war" and would accept the 

Japanese empire, at least in northeast Asia. Consequently, the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff (JCS) leaned towards the distinct possibility that "increasing and cumulative 

devastation to be wrought by prospective military operations may engender a 

more desperate and bitter resistance" within Japan. According to Marshall: "We 

bad to assume that a force of 2.5 million Japanese would fight to the death as 

they did on all those islands we [already] attacked. . . . We felt this despite what 

[Army Air Force] generals with cigars in their mouths [an obvious reference to 

Curtis LeMay] had to say about bombing the Japanese into submission. We 

killed 100,000 Japanese in one raid in one night, but it didn't mean a thing insofar 

as actually beating the Japanese."24
Japan's Supreme War Council, like the U.S. Army, "did not believe that Japan 

could be defeated by air attack alone." The U.S. Navy counted 5,000 kamikazes 

(the enemy actually had 12,725), who were expected to destroy 30 to 40 percent 

of the initial Allied assaulting force when it invaded the Japanese homeland, 

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army prepared to attack thousands of eaves manned by 

"determined and fanatical [soldiers] whom we would have to exterminate, almost 

man by man." To reduce casualties, Marshall was then in the process of arming 

his infantry with a host of old and new weapons-body armor, a "super 

flamethrower," and poison gas, But, according to one Army study, it "was the 

single weapon [the atomic bomb] hitherto unused which assuredly can decrease 

the cost in American lives and should materially shorten the war."25

Before infantry could use any of these instruments on "those last pockets of 

resistance which had to be wiped out," they would have to get safely ashore. To 

accomplish this, Marshall planned to use nuclear bombs (of "cosmic 

significance") in a tactical role. They would be "a wonderful weapon [to] protect 

and prepare for landings" by hitting enemy communications and divisions in 

reserve. "Straight military objectives," for atomic weapons, were morally 

preferable to other targets, such as cities, which had "primordial considerations." 

The thought of bombing cities was so distressing to Marshall that he momentarily 

lost his legendary self-control. He went into the office of the assistant secretary of 

war rubbing his hands in nervous agitation and saying, "please don't let them ask 

me whether or not we should drop the atomic bomb on Japan. That's just not a 

military question."26

Along with assorted weapons, from new bombs to body armor, Marshall had one 

last military suggestion to avoid a "fight to the death." American forces would 

bypass strong points on the southern archipelago and attack less well-defended 

positions on the Tokyo plain. Thoroughly familiar with America's tendency to 

avoid long-distance operations, the imperial army was "absolutely sure" the 

United States would make a shorter hop. Hence, Japan stripped Honshu of 

assets to build up Kyushu, where. 900,000 soldiers (ten times as many as fought 

on Okinawa) were ready to "inflict severe losses on the enemy when he invades 

Japan." Unlike the Germans in Northwest Europe, who were deceived about 

Normandy in June 1944, the Japanese correctly predicted the exact landing 

locations and the approximate date of the attack shortly before the United States 

decided what to do itself.27

The big by-pass operation Marshall suggested (with a ninety-six-page plan on 9 

August) was less risky than his similar suggestion in mid-1944 to by-pass the 

Philippines and head straight towards Japan. In mid-1945, the Japanese Navy 

and Air Force were largely destroyed except for small suicide boats and planes 

manned by inexperienced crews. Thus, American bombers out of Okinawa could 

crater many of Japan's fifty-five airfields on Kyushu, thereby degrading the 

kamikaze force by some 25 percent. Next, the U.S. Navy could fake an invasion 

there, which would have hired the enemy to respond simply because they 
believed an invasion was apparently occurring. When kamikazes took off on oneway sorties to ram troop transports, there would be nothing on the ocean but 

cruisers packed stem to stem with antiaircraft guns, After this "turkey shoot" of 

inexperienced flyers diving on the first target they ever saw, amphibious forces,

supported by carriers and battleships, could land on any number of suitable 

beaches in Honshu. By then, there would not be much resistance from landbased enemy aircraft---or anything else in the face of the U.S. Pacific fleet, 

Nimitz, heretofore cautious about such undertakings, soon claimed he had 

gained "complete impunity [to] pound Japan at point-blank range."28

Marshall's concern to by-pass Kyushu was triggered by figures of a massive 

Japanese build-up collected by Pacific Army intelligence, which predicted that "a 

very strong and ferocious defense will be interposed at the beaches." However, 

Douglas MacArthur rejected Marshall's suggestion, probably for two reasons, 

First, MacArthur was stuck on methods that he said "have proved so successful 

in Pacific campaigns." Heretofore, he had leaped no farther than U.S. Army Air 

Force range to support landings and follow-on attacks. "There should not be the 

slightest thought," he told Marshall, "of changing the Olympic [Kyushu] operation.

Its fundamental purpose is to obtain air bases under cover of which we can 

deploy your forces to the northward into the industrial heart of Japan!"29

MacArthur's second reason for rejecting Marshall's suggestion (a reason less 

susceptible to substantiation) is consistent with MacArthur's behavior throughout 

his military career. The Inchon operation in Korea (September 1950) attests to 

his willingness to run risks far greater than the long leap to Honshu-provided the 

military objective furthered his political or personal agenda. In World War II, 

MacArthur's objective was the assumption of supreme command of all U.S. 

military forces in the entire Pacific theater, The Navy had not and never would 

consent to that appointment. But at least, as far as Kyushu was concerned, the 

JCS had given MacArthur an important concession consistent with his overall 

objective. For other invasions in the Central Pacific, the senior Army officer had 

assumed direction only when troops finally hit the ground, For Kyushu, 

MacArthur was given "primary responsibility for the conduct of [the] operation 

including control, in case of exigencies, of the actual amphibious assault through 

the appropriate naval commander." Granted it was not the supreme command of 

all forces that Eisenhower had had for Normandy. Nonetheless, it was still a leg 

up on Nimitz and the Navy and gave MacArthur ultimate authority of 1,300 ships 

(transports and cargo and landing craft). If the invasion of Kyushu were scrubbed 

in favor of Honshu, the issue of authority would be reopened, this time in an area 

of operations beyond the range of MacArthur's land-based air force -- 2,800 

planes. Then, aircraft carriers (launching some 1,800 planes) would have to 

provide virtually all close air support and interdiction over the beaches. This 

would give the Navy a new chance to gain control of the amphibious assault-the 

single most important (and dramatic) event in the military campaign for Japan.30
Whatever MacArthur's reasons for insisting on the Kyushu operation, he certainly 

had not mystified the Japanese; they had already zeroed in on the right beaches. 

Certainly he was far more sanguine than his own G2 (intelligence). Major 

General Charles Willoughby had observed the enemy build-up on Kyushu (which 

the Army Air Force and the Navy had said they would interdict) and told the G3 

(operations): "We are [now] in a race against time." At the highest levels of the 

Army, Stimson already foresaw a "score of bloody Iwo Jimas and Okinawas" and 

"a suicidal last ditch defense" unless America abandoned its demand for 

unconditional surrender.31

Leahy would later claim that the effort to state terms that could nullify the need 

for the invasion was consistent with Roosevelt's political objectives. Most career 

diplomats and East Asia experts would probably agree. Led by Under Secretary 

of State Joseph C. Grew, a former ambassador to Japan, they opposed what 

they called "a strict" or "rigid interpretation" of unconditional surrender and bad 

"no idea of interfering with the form of the government of Japan." They wanted to 

state specific demands and retain the emperor as the "de jure sovereign." Then, 

the Japanese people and office holders could be "induced to cooperate" with 

those specifications and obey the emperor's directive to disarm. For cover from 

media charges of appeasement and pandering to the dynasty, Grew was already 

hiding behind the Navy's high command, associating his policy with that of Nimitz 

and King. Meanwhile, the Truman White House and the State Department's 

political appointees had sought different cover of their own. They were more 

attuned to the rhetorical forms that embellished Roosevelt's war aims, partly (but 

not entirely) because they were "fully aware of [what] would be politically 

acceptable to the American people."32

In July, Archibald MacLeish and Dean Acheson, the assistant secretaries of state 

for public affairs and Congressional relations, respectively, led the effort to create 

"a surrender policy for Japan consistent with [the] surrender policy for Germany." 

The Pulitzer Prize winning poet and the prominent Washington lawyer both had 

joined the State Department in senior positions at Roosevelt's personal initiative. 

It was ironic, but not unusual, that FDR's political appointees would undermine 

his grand strategy. Kept largely in the dark by a president who ran strategy from 

the White House, neither man had a good idea what was on Roosevelt's mind, If 

they had known, they still might not have cared. They exhibited, according to one 

career diplomat, "a violent reaction" to the idea of retaining the institution of the 

emperor, which MacLeish called "the basis for much of the beastly behavior of 

the Japanese."33

MacLeish, far more than the pragmatic president of the United States, was a 

zealous New Dealer and Wilsonian liberal in domestic and foreign policy. He had 

hoped to make World War II a crusade for various reforms, from public health 

delivery systems to world disarmament. Sorely disappointed, he bitterly 

complained (in 1944) about "the tragic outlook of all liberal proposals, the 

collapse of all liberal leadership, and the inevitable defeat of all liberal aims," 
Conservative Republicans wanted to give Japan specific terms for surrender only 

slightly worse than the Cairo decree because they rejected the very idea of 

"teaching [the Japanese] a different form of Government." For MacLeish, the 

opportunity to create a new type of Japanese government was a last chance to 

get the type of peace "which alone will justify this war."34

Acheson, although MacLeish's oldest and closest personal friend, was not a 

fervent New Dealer and devotee of Woodrow Wilson. Nor was be the fervent 

opponent of the Soviet Union that he would become as secretary of state during 

the Cold War. In 1945, Acheson was a darling of liberal and left-wing 

publications, largely for fighting inside the State Department against a "soft" 

peace for Japan, "a totalitarian state." He might have shared their hopes of

reforming Japan's political institution--but one thing is clear, he had never made 

policy distinctions between the Axis powers, Japan and Germany, In mid-1941, 

Roosevelt, the State Department (especially Joe Grew), the Army, and the Navy 

had hoped to "reach a modus vivendi with Japan" in order to conduct a oneocean, one-continent war against the primary threat, Nazi Germany. Acheson, 

then assistant secretary of state for economic affairs, disagreed and pushed the 

rest of the administration towards freezing all trade with all Axis nations. The oil 

embargo he initiated in August 1941 "caused the Japs to decide to go to war," as 

he said in 1950. In mid-1945, arguing with Grew, the so-called '"Prince of 

Appeasers," Acheson said that if the emperor were not important to the 

militarists, why should "the military element in Japan be so insistent on retaining 

the Emperor."35

Approaching the same problem from slightly different angles, Acheson and 

MacLeish arrived at the same policy towards Japan. They were not content----as 

was Roosevelt and now Leahy and Grew--to maintain "unrestricted strategic 

control of the Japanese mandated islands" and "a string of additional bases 

across the Pacific." Grew maintained that military defeat had already discredited 

the militarists. Now he merely wanted to allow the rest of Japan "to determine for 

themselves the nature of their future political structure." Acheson and MacLeish, 

on the other hand, had faith in nothing short of long-term occupation "measures 

applied within Japan." If the enemy's domestic institutions were rehabilitated and 

democratized, MacLeish reasoned that America would not need forward military 

bases. The world could then move towards what he called "a people's peace," 

not a new balance of power. Acheson, while closer to Clausewitz than Woodrow 

Wilson, agreed with MacLeish on one major issue: the job of the armed forces 

was simply to fight for whatever policy the State Department gave it.36

This lack of consensus within the American government led to no modification or 

redefinition in the concept of unconditional surrender that could have helped 

substantially the peace faction in the enemy's diplomatic corps. Stimson told 

Truman that the later represented "a large: submerged class in Japan who did 

not favor the present war"; after all, it "is not a nation composed wholly of mad 

fanatics," The peace faction was actually a small body of very wealthy men who 
lived in fear of destruction by American weapons, revolution by indigenous 

Communists, and assassination by the Japanese Imperial Army. Other US. 

officials, especially Acheson and MacLeish, believed that the peace faction was 

weak, isolated, and beleaguered in the face of their military masters. One 

message American intelligence intercepted showed they were "not clear [even] 

about the views of the Government of the Military with regard to the termination 

of the war."37

At a minimum, the peace faction would need to be able to convince the Japanese 

Army that they could avoid national humiliation by negotiating what the Army 

called "peace with honor." This phrase, later used by America in the Vietnam, 

War, was defined by Japan as "the protection of the fundamental character of our 

government." At most, unnamed parties hinted through Sweden (indirect contacts 

that could be denied) that although discussions about "the Japanese constitution 

must be, considered as excluded ... the Imperial power could be somewhat 

democratized" (Italics mine), Unfortunately, the constitution and the character of 

that government was highly disposed to, when not controlled by, the imperial 

army. Even Joe Grew, "hoodwinked" by Hirohito according to widely read 

newspapermen, took a firm public stance that unconditional surrender meant 

"termination of the influence of the military leaders" (which he communicated in 

words written for him by MacLeish). Under these general circumstances, 

according to Japanese officers and diplomats, "it was taboo for us to speak about 

the problem of peace," let alone compose serious terms "in any concrete form." 38

Unconditional surrender, as an ill-defined slogan, did not foreclose any 

possibility, no matter how horrendous. A quick glance at American speeches, 

opinion polls, and movies would not reassure Japan. Thirteen percent of the 

respondents wanted to "kill all Japanese"; another 33 percent wanted to destroy 

the Japanese state. Life magazine showed photos of American war trophies sent 

home to loved ones in the form of hollowed out Japanese skulls. "This," 

responded Japan's most popular newspapers and writers, "is American Savagery 

Unveiled." "Barbarism is a conspicuous characteristic of their history," If Japan 

capitulates, they said, America will "inflict a general massacre and defile the 

purity of our blood." "All our men would be made into slaves and all our women 

would be prostitutes," ("It was a great relief," recalled one former teenager, "when 

the Americans came and no such things happened.") Less hyperbolic, the 

minister of foreign affairs wrote a subordinate in 1945: "The difficult point is the 

attitude of the enemy, who continues to insist on the formality of unconditional 

surrender.... Then our country and His Majesty would unanimously resolve to 

fight a war of resistance to the bitter end."39

The U.S. armed forces overheard all these diplomatic conversations, having 

broken the enemy's codes. Internal Japanese memos stated that "the Japanese 

believe that unconditional surrender would be the equivalent of national 

extinction." But U.S. military thought about modifying the slogan, the public had a 

strong opinion of its own. From late February through June, polls that went 
directly to the White House, when not printed on the front page of the 

Washington Post, repeatedly stated that only 10 to 18 percent of Americans 

approved "working out peace terms" with Japan. The idea of governing through 

the present dynasty had support from only 3 percent of the public. Another 33 

percent wanted to execute Hirohito, 11 percent wanted imprisonment, 9 percent 

wanted him banished, and 17 percent wanted him tried. Appropriate punishment, 

presumably, would be determined by the court.40

Public opinion could be confusing. As George Marshall wrote Dwight 

Eisenhower, "making war in a democracy is not a bed of roses." On the one 

hand, the nation forbade negotiations and wanted to dispose of Hirohito, with or 

without the rule of law. On the other hand, it gave so many signs of war 

weariness that the JCS wondered how to "forestall a Japanese offer of 

conditional surrender that may be politically and psychologically difficult to 

refuse." If that happened, America would stop short of the essential objective to 

"destroy Japanese capacity to start a new war."41

This complex political mosaic might have sent a strong warning to Franklin 

Roosevelt, who had modified his policy towards Germany in response to public 

and Congressional opinion about the Morgenthau Plan. One can imagine how 

public opinion struck Harry Truman, who took office at a most inauspicious time, 

Editorials in the Post were about the only thing in Washington that publicly 

challenged unconditional surrender. At the same time, these editorials attacked 

the Cairo communiqué for just paring down the Japanese empire "to its volcanic 

core" without "clearly recognizing the necessity of stamping out militarism in 

Japan." The Post agreed with the War Department's objectives (not the State 

Department's slogan). Could Truman's first major act as president, thanks to a 

cerebral hemorrhage, be the repudiation of the war cry of his predecessor who 

had been elected four times? Unlike the Post, the former vice president could 

hardly say: "What we are suggesting, to be sure, is conditional surrender. What 

of it?"42

Truman hung Roosevelt's picture on his White House office wall, like Roosevelt 

had hung one of Woodrow Wilson. he told one confidant, "I haven't been elected 

president.. . . I'm going to try to follow Roosevelt's policy as much as possible." 

Truman should have said that he would follow Roosevelt's policies as he best 

understood them because he privately admitted he never had a confidential 

conversation with the president "about the war, or about foreign affairs, or that 

[Roosevelt] had in mind for peace after the war." When Truman entered the 

White House, a heated confrontation was in the making with Russia about the 

implementation of the negotiations concerning Eastern Europe, especially 

Poland. Truman spent days laboriously going over the complete record of the 

Yalta Conference, since every time he read the ambiguous accords he "found 

new meanings in them." One doubts Truman ever read the Cairo communiqué.43
No one is more devoted to a dead president's slogans than his former 

understudy, When Truman met the JCS and the service secretaries in June 

1945, he said that "he did not feel that be could take any action at this time to 

change public opinion" about unconditional surrender. He had already addressed 

a joint session of Congress three days after he took office, saying that "the vision 

of our departed Commander in Chief ... must and will remain unchanged and 

unhampered!" ("Unconditional surrender" was the main applause line in the 

speech.) He had also been advised by his own and Roosevelt's secretary of 

state, both of whom he thought were very close to FDR, that anything other than 

unconditional surrender would seem "too much like appeasement of Japan." That 

would produce "terrible political repercussions in the United States" and lead to 

the "crucifixion of the President."44

Up until the Potsdam Conference between Truman, Winston Churchill, and 

Joseph Stalin, the administration was still not committed "to any particular 

definition of unconditional surrender," according to a civilian in the War 

Department that drafted the Potsdam Proclamation of 26 July 1945. In this 

document, Truman rejected the position of MacLeish and Senate Majority Leader 

Alben W. Barkley (Democrat, Kentucky), who said that the enemy's propaganda 

ministry would use surrender terms to "stiffen the resistance of the Japanese 

people" by claiming that "war-weary" America was about "to call off the Japanese 

war." The official government statement demanded unconditional surrender 

solely from "the Japanese armed forces," as had Harry Truman (unofficially) 

since 8 May, The State Department, which lost the intraagency tug of war on this 

particular issue, would have included "the emperor, the government, and the 

people."45

The Potsdam Proclamation retained substantial ambiguity, to the consternation

of the State Department, which warned that vague terms, under international law, 

are "interpreted favorably to the state which accepts them." All in all, the 

Proclamation represented a compromise position--too strong for America's 

professional soldiers and career diplomats but too weak for the political 

appointees who controlled State Department policy. lt was also too harsh for the 

peace faction inside the Japanese government, which was too weak to do more 

"than explain our intention in an indirect way," As for stipulations concerning the 

postwar occupation, they went beyond what the Pentagon supported but fell 

short of the State Department's objectives: only "points in Japanese territory" (not 

the entire nation) were to be occupied. "The terms of the Cairo Declaration," 

which limited "Japanese sovereignty" to its home islands, was officially 

superseded. Potsdam demanded "a new [political] order" ensured by a "stern 

justice [for] all war criminals." However, those "war criminals" could simply be 

military men who broke "the laws of war" in the field of operations. If the enemy 

surrendered on these terms, the Allied occupation was to be withdrawn as soon 

as its objectives were obtained. If it did not and "there are no alternatives" to the 

"objectives we are setting forth" - Japan would be "destroyed as a nation."46
Japanese officials immediately recognized that Potsdam was far more lenient 

than generally expected and softer than the terms imposed on Germany -- which 

was never offered any terms at all. The Japanese peace faction tried to persuade 

the emperor that, ipso facto, the document meant the abandonment of 

unconditional surrender. The military faction considered the document proof that 

America's will to fight had eroded and demanded its unequivocal rejection to 

solidify morale inside Japanese Army ranks. ("For the enemy [the Allies] to say 

something like that means circumstances have arisen that force them also to end 

the war.") Whatever way it was interpreted, the proclamation failed its function 

according to the JCS--that is, "to induce Japan's surrender and thus avoid the 

heavy casualties implied in a fight to the finish." Admittedly, the document said 

nothing about "the basic point on which acceptance of surrender terms will hinge, 

the disposition of the Emperor and his dynasty." Paragraph 7 insisted that "the 

authority and influence of those who have misted the people of Japan , . . must 

be eliminated for all time." Whom they were was not specified: you might read 

the emperor in or out. The U.S. government was vague for a good reason; it had 

not made up its own mind. The State Department wanted to put Hirohito under 

"protective custody" and "take over the government of Japan." The War 

Department merely wanted to influence "the political action of the enemy 

government," which had to be retained to enable a small occupation army to 

manage the country after the war.47

Although far tougher than Roosevelt bad been, the Potsdam Proclamation was 

too soft for some powerful members of the Senate, especially Richard Russell, its 

strongest proponent of equivalent treatment for both Axis powers, no matter what 

policy the U.S. Army wanted. In 1864, Yankee military units had destroyed the 

Russell family's textile factory when tramping through the South. Historical 

memory convinced the junior senator from Georgia that national security relied 

on the use of overwhelming force. He once told a Republican: "You'd be more 

military minded too if Sherman had crossed [through] North Dakota."

Sherman's march affected Russell in at least two ways. First, like many other 

Southerners, he carried a grudge against the Army but loved the Navy and 

Marines, whom he loyally supported on the Naval Affairs Committee. In 1945, 

when Russell noted that the War Department "has never taken [the] Pacific very 

seriously," he was not impressed by what was called a "high military authority" 

who petitioned Harry Truman to retain the emperor of Japan and forgo 

occupation of the island. Second, Russell wished to emulate Sherman's strategy 

and policy, making war unmitigated hell so that the vanquished would never 

challenge the victor again. Specifically, he opposed any terms "unless every 

Japanese is as firmly convinced as are the people of Germany that they have 

really lost this war completely." He told his fellow senators--and telegraphed 

Truman at Potsdam -- that leniency would only repeat the mistake made in World 

War I, when "weak and half-hearted methods" cost America a "golden age of 

permanent peace." The country should now "carry the war to [Japan] until they 
beg us to accept their unconditional surrender." In short, they should be "brought 

groveling to their knees."48

The American public backed Russell's hard-line policy with its words, but not 

With its blood. On the one hand, it gave every indication that it insisted on 

fighting until it had "completely beaten [the enemy] on the Japanese homeland" 

(84 percent approval noted in a poll). On the other hand, it demanded release 

from economic rationing, as well as at least partial demobilization, beginning 

virtually the day Germany surrendered (72 percent approval); the rest wanted 

something greater than "partial" demobilization. Truman, who was worried about 

"adverse [military] morale," would later recall that "Congress and Mamma and 

Papa put such pressure on us that the discharges were much faster than they 

should have been." The War Department was forced to release 450,000 soldiers 

from ground combat units at a time when the Army was replacing the Navy as 

the primary instrument of military power in the Pacific theater. Experienced and 

decorated infantrymen, whom George Marshall called "the first team," were the 

first to be discharged; all Medal of Honor winners were released upon request. 

Next came the men who "make a unit dependable in battle" -- the seasoned 

sergeants and the corporals who "make the wheels go."49

The War Department, fearful for "future legislative needs" and a public backlash 

against the Army, devised this system for demobilization with maximum input 

from those to be demobilized. Marshall told legislators that thirty statisticians had 

been sampling opinion since 1943, The general staff told Congress that our "plan 

is based on the opinion of the soldiers themselves." Meanwhile, Congress, 

saying that its "mail on the subject was growing daily, "demanded that the Army 

"reduce its size immediately by 1 million men."50

The actual system for demobilization was appropriate and proper in the light of 

common American values. Individuals "who have earned the right to leave [the 

Army] through long and dangerous service overseas" would have the "first 

chance at a civilian job," no small reward considering the fear that peace would 

reintroduce the Great Depression only ended by mass expenditures for World 

War II. However, the 75 percent approval of this plan by the rank and file took 

place at the expense of military capability. The Army had begun to treat GIs as a 

constituency, not as a military means wherein their lives, let alone their 

convenience, were "nothing more than tools to be used in the accomplishment of 

the mission." Demobilization occurred, as JCS planners feared it would, 

"regardless of the effect on the prosecution of the Japanese war."51

At best, as Marshall later put it, "demobilization could only be done with 

reasonable justice on the basis of the individual, and not on that of the units." 

Whole divisions were consequently gutted and "made almost unfit for combat." 

For example, the 45th Infantry Division, scheduled to invade the main island of 

Japan in 1946, lost its entire staff of artillery officers, save the artillery 

commander himself Eisenhower, observing situations such as this, said it would 
take at least six more months of training for most European theater divisions 

designated for the Pacific to be ready to fight Japan.52

Training was the least of the Army's problems. Morale, an essential ingredient, 

was virtually spent in ETO divisions, including the elite airborne. General Maxwell 

Taylor tried "to stir up enthusiasm for new worlds to conquer" in the 101st, one of 

only two Army divisions to have won a Presidential Unit Citation. "We've licked 

the best that Hitler had in France and Holland and Germany. Now where do we 

want to go?" The heroes of Bastogne and Normandy all screamed: "Home."53

Truman, who gave these and other men thirty-day furloughs in America "to have 

the best time [they] know how," wrote Marshall that there "is cause for 

disciplinary action" for protests over redeployment. Commanders in the United 

States spoke of "a very disturbing situation approaching open sedition" in their 

infantry divisions. Meanwhile, the War Department released 30,000 soldiers from 

the Pacific theater in June. It feared a major morale problem if veterans of 

Europe received preferential treatment vis-a-vis those who had fought longer in 

the Pacific, "while feeling that they were still being considered a relatively 

unimportant part of the world war."54

As for replacing savvy but tired veterans with the eager young men who make 

great marines, Congress proscribed assigning any eighteen-year olds to army 

combat units until they received six more months of training. This edict virtually 

stopped new infantry from reconstituting old divisions. Douglas MacArthur 

emphatically protested the shortage in replacements to the Army chief of staff 

and said that if more combat veterans were released, he would have to delay the 

invasion of Kyushu (scheduled for 1 November) until the spring of 1946. 

Politically, this seemed a nightmare scenario for George Marshall, who feared 

military policy would become a partisan issue in an off-year election, thus 

repudiating the president and creating a divided government during a war, 

However, instead of fighting the flow of events, Marshall admitted be was 

desperately trying to keep "one step ahead of public opinion," Congress, and the 

press. He did not have many options, In the American governmental system, a 

desperate appeal to preserve combat capability could not be kept confidential. lt 

thereby would confirm the Japanese Army's contention that it could still "stave off 

defeat" because of "war weariness in the United States."55

America's goal had been "the early unconditional surrender of Japan" and a "rigid 

interpretation" of the declaration. Its methods ironically included demobilization of 

those combat soldiers competent to conduct intricate assaults against fortified 

positions. On more open terrain, inexperienced and mediocre infantry could call 

in artillery and close air support to clear away obstacles in its path. Now, more 

difficult and demanding methods would be required. Ground reconnaissance 

would precede suppressive fire from naval guns to light mortars, all working to 

get tanks and flamethrowers in position to shoot down the mouth and close up a 

cave. Each situation would be different, depending on everything from the 
enemy's position on slopes to the precise gradients of hills. It hardly seemed the 

time or 

place for 

on-thejob 

military 

training.56

America, 

like a 

Greek 

melodra

ma, 

needed a 

deus ex 

machina

to solve 

its 

insoluble 

dilemma 

on open 

display before the Japanese. Enemy intelligence stated that partial 

demobilization and industrial reconversion already aroused U.S. optimism "for an 

early termination of the war." On the other hand, a protracting list of casualties 

would contribute "to decreased fighting morale among the [American] people and 

the military." With U.S. resolve so brittle, the Japanese Army reasoned that a 

climactic battle on the beaches would force America to make a compromise 

peace. That was the strategic setting on 6 August, when one specially modified 

B-29 took off from the Marianas to test the JCS assumption that, individuals 

notwithstanding, Japan "as a whole is not pre-disposed toward national suicide." 

The plane dropped a weapon on Hiroshima that, according to Japanese 

newspapers, "ignored basic human principles."57

On 10 August, after America dropped the only other atomic bomb in its arsenalbut warned of "a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen 

on this earth" - the emperor overruled the Imperial Japanese Army. The 

Japanese Army still had 2.35 million men under arms inside Japan, not having 

suffered the massive devastation that had been inflicted on the Japanese Air 

Force and Navy. In fact, the Japanese sneered at their erstwhile Axis ally for 

surrendering when only some 2.5 million Russians had fought their way through 

Berlin. The Germans lacked the "Bushido" tradition, commented the Japanese 

press. Now, the imperial armed forces pleaded for the chance to "find life in 

death ... .. If we are prepared to sacrifice 20,000,000 Japanese lives in a special 

attack [kamikaze] effort, victory shall be ours!"58

Ground zero at Hiroshima.
Ironically, Hiroshima turned out to be the military's face-saving device, one more 

powerful than an American abrogation of unconditional surrender. The emperor 

could now annul the unwritten constitution and capitulate without challenging the 

valor of the Japanese Army. One member of the peace faction would 

confidentially tell an American interrogator that the atomic bomb "was a good 

excuse" for surrender. More typical citizens would still tell American reporters that 

the United States "would [never] have dared attempt a seaborne invasion." On 

15 August, Hirohito made his first and last radio broadcast to his nation: ''The war 

situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage. [Military defeat, 

per se, was never mentioned.] Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new 

and most cruel bomb taking the toll of many innocent lives, Should we continue 

to fight, it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization."59

Lest the "whole nation be reduced to ashes" by the hundred atomic bombs 

America was thought to have, the imperial government accepted the Potsdam 

Declaration, "with the understanding that [it] does not comprise any demand 

which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler." Actually, 

the Allied terms only offered "sovereignty" for the Japanese nation, not the 

dynasty per se. The rulers of the island were insisting (as one Japanese diplomat 

confirmed) that there would be no change in the political institutions of imperial 

Japan, even if no Japanese empire was left standing to rule. These men were 

accepting, twenty months too late, the sole demand of the Cairo Conference for 

the liquidation of all overseas possessions. By now this was "conditional 

surrender," according to NBC radio news.60

In reply to Japan's offer, Truman issued a carefully drawn compromise position 

between the doves in the War Department, who thought "the Emperor was a 

minor matter," and the hawks at State, who wanted his head. He did not demand 

Hirohito's abdication nor expressly guarantee the existence of the throne. He did 

specify that "the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule 

that state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers who 

will take such steps as he deems proper" to fulfill the Potsdam Declaration. This 

was exactly what the War Department wanted -- the chance to rule Japan 

through the Japanese - because it knew it would never have enough manpower 

to rule Japan on its own. Truman's conditions were nonnegotiable, no matter how 

Hirohito saved face by proclaiming "the cessation of hostilities" (he never said 

"surrender") and claiming he had "been able to safeguard and maintain the 

structure of the Imperial State." Truman, for his part, could maintain that there "is 

no qualification" and that "the war lords of Japan and the Japanese armed forces 

have surrendered unconditionally." He probably crossed his fingers and hoped 

that the more hawkish elements in the government and the general public would 

agree. Up until the end, America had not yet decided exactly how to define 

unconditional surrender (whether, in the application of such a term, a verbal 

nicety such as "no contractual elements" was more important than one specifying 

"not subject to conditions" at all) and whether they should execute the emperor, 

even if he seemed willing to serve an occupation army.61
Whatever the rest of America felt, the president was happy to end the war on the 

basis of his verbal exchange with Japan. A proud former field artillery officer, 

Truman had no moral qualms about tactical nuclear weapons. They simply 

enhanced the combat power of his old military branch. "A half dozen batteries 

with atomic explosives can wipe out an entire front on the other side." But "I 

never had a happy feeling," he later confessed, "about killing non-combatants by 

dropping a bomb . . . That would have been murder.'' Consequently, Truman fed 

himself a fable that Hiroshima was selected for "proper military purposes" and 

that "soldiers and sailors are the target, not women and children." In fact, 

according to Stimson, the bomb was dropped to "administer a tremendous shock 

that would carry convincing proof of our power to destroy the Empire." (if it could 

horrify George Marshall, the seasoned soldier who employed it, it should impress 

Hirohito, the cardboard warrior on the receiving end.)62

According to the Potsdam Declaration, the destruction of Japan was not part of 

unconditional surrender. It certainly was implied in the atomic bomb that 

administered the shock Stimson stipulated -- and faster than almost anyone 

expected. John McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, would call it "a bolt out of 

heaven" and the greatest military surprise "since the Trojan horse." In 

Washington and the Philippines, American colonels and lieutenant generals 

admitted they were surprised; the government was stunned. Stimson was about 

to take a vacation when Japan surrendered. Truman had just requested 

formulation of a reconversion plan, due on his desk at the end of the month. 

Before he got it, he too was in a mild state of bomb shock. He complained of 

dreadful headaches as he mumbled that he desperately wanted to end the war: 

he could not 

stand wiping 

out more cities 

and killing "all 

those kids."63

Elements of 

the US, 

government 

still insisted on 

hard-core 

versions of 

unconditional 

surrender. The 

American 

Embassy in 

Tokyo 

forwarded 

Hirohito's 

name on a list 

of individuals 

Colonel Bernard Thielen, presenting President Truman with the Japanese 

surrender document (that Thielen brought from Japan). From left to right are 

Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Thielen, Secretary of War Henry 

Stimson, General George C. Marshall, Truman, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, 

Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson, General A. A. Vandegrift, USMC, 

Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, and Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker.
facing military trial--that is, before the War Department terminated the process 

and perhaps, the unnamed State Department official responsible for the action. 

Richard Russell, trying to take the issue out of the hands of the executive branch, 

introduced a bill that would force the government to try the emperor as a war 

criminal. Unopposed on the Senate floor, it died in committee, apparently from 

general neglect. Historians have pondered how quickly the public's hatred for 

Hirohito vanished after surrender. Most of the American people were simply too 

tired and too grateful for having avoided an invasion of Japan and the necessity 

for a hostile occupation to pay sustained attention to Hirohito's retention. The 

possibility that the United States might not have won the war exactly as the 

president said it had was no longer a vital issue. Truman must have been 

relieved, for he had risked his political career. The JCS were not surprised. They 

had spent the war worrying that the public will would exhaust itself short of 

achieving the unconditional surrender of Japan. Perhaps it had, although no one 

would admit.64

Contents

Notes

1.Marshall to Spencer L. Carter, 14 June 1948, Marshall Research Library, 

Lexington, VA.

2.Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall (New York: Viking Press, 1961-1987), 

1:191-97,204-10; Larry Bland, ed., George C. Marshall., Interviews and 

Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue (hereafter referred to as GCM: Interviews), 

13 February 1957 (Lexington, VA: Marshall Research Foundation, 1991), 397,

issue discussed; and Marshall (14 August 1943), quoted in Maurice Matloff, 

Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare (Washington, DC; Chief of Military 

History 1953-1959), 2:136, 185, 231, 514. Few the Japanese negotiating 

position, see Leon V. Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination 

at the United States and Japan, 1945 (Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press, 

1988), esp, 34-35,139,228. Marshall proved to be an excellent prophet. General 

John E. Hull, chief of operational plans in the Aremy general staff, would recall 

that the policy of bringing individuals home on the basis of time served abroad 

"really tore the heart out of the Army... Bad there been a serious threat, we'd 

have been in a very bad way because, the flow of replacements was never in any 

way large enough to fulfill the reduction don in the combat outfits overseas"; see 

Hull, Oral History (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Military History Institute, Army War 

College, 8 April 1974).
3.Marshall, in Frank Capra's movie for the Army, Two Down and One to Go

(1945); Combined Chiefs lots of Staff, "Report to President and Prime Minister," 

Memorandum by United States Chiefs of Staff, 29 Jane, Foreign Relations of the 

United States: Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, 1:911 (hereafter referred to 

as FRUS); for casualty estimates, we the various government documents printed 

in the annex of Martin J. Shemin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins 

of the Arm Race (New York: Knopf, 1975), esp. 342,346-47,357. In the recent 

public controversy around the Smithsonian exhibit on the atomic bomb (1995), 

some historians at press conferences and in political publications said that 

George Marshall estimated that it would cost America between 30,000 and 

60,000 casualties for the conquest of the home islands. In scholarly journals, at 

least one of these historians admits that this figure only applied to the first thirty 

days of ground operations necessary just to conquer southern Kyushu at a time 

when there were some 350,000 enemy defenders there. These initial estimates 

assumed "effective surprise as to the point of the loading," something America 

never really had. (As stated below, the Japanese anticipated the exact locations 

of the planned invasion) When America dropped the atomic bomb on 6 August, 

almost 900,000 Japanese defenders were in Kyushu; see Edward Drea, 

MacArthur's Ultra: Codebreaking and the War Against Japan, 1942-1945 

(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 202, 222 22. Compare Barton J. 

Bernstein, "The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered," Foreign Affairs 74 (JanuaryFebruary 1955): 149, with Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the 

Japanese Surrender. . . " Diplomatic History (Spring 1995): 232.

4.''Memorandum for President," 2 June 1945, in Stimson Diary, Yale University; 

William D. Leahy, I Was There (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 259; Robert J. C. 

Butow, Japan 's Decision to Surrender (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 

1954), 127, 161.

5.Leahy Diary, I January 1945, quoted in Pogue, Marshall, 3:603; Forest King 

and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King. A Naval Record (New York: 

Norton, 1992), 62 1; Marshall to Dean Rusk, ca. 1946, in Thomas J. 

Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy, and 

Johnson Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 127; for media 

statements and the quote from Vinson, 21, May 1945, see Jeremy A- Ball, 

"Strategic Limits of a Warring Democracy: American War-Weariness and the 

Decision to Invade Japan, 1944-1945," occasional paper (New York: Friends of 

West Point Library, 1995), 5; Malvina Lindsay, "War Weariness," Washington 

Post, 9 May 1945, 10; Joint Intelligence Staff, 141/3, "Defeat of Japan by 

Blockade and Bombardments," 14 April 1945, RG 165, Box 505, National 

Archives, Washington, DC.
6.Marshall, 1 January 1944 and 29 May 1945, quoted in Glen C. H. Perry, "Dear 

Bart": Washington's Views of World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 

1982), 235, and Pogue, Marshall, 4:17.

7.Signal, Fighting to a Finish, 38 - 40, 66-69; Hirohito, discussed and quoted (9 

June 1945) in Herbert P. Box, "Japan's Delayed Surrender," Diplomatic History

19 (Spring 1995); 202, 213; for Japanese food supplies, U.S. Army intelligence 

reports quoted, and Major General Taskashima Tatsuhiko quoted, in Robert P. 

Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (East Lansing: Michigan State 

University Press, 9155), 15, 24, 38, 50; Admiral Suzuki (1945), quoted in 

Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," 252.

8.The quote is, from a description of Franklin Roosevelt by Sumner Wells (his 

Personal friend, Groton School classmate and World War II undersecretary of 

state), as quoted in John L. Chase, "Unconditional Surrender Reconsidered," 

Political Science Quarterly 70 (June 1955);272-75. Although Americans have 

written numerous books that discussed "unconditional surrender,"the only 

discussion of its different definitions is in Makoto Iokibe, "American Policy 

towards Japan's 'Unconditional Surrender'" The Japanese Journal of American 

Studies 1 (1981):19-53. "Unconditional surrender," as a battle cry, was as 

meaningful a statement of war aims as "Remember the Maine" was in the 

Spanish-American War.

9.State Department Memorandum, n.d., RUS: Conference of Berlin (Potsdam)

1945,2:1285; JCS 1275/2, Colonel Marcus, "Conference-Surrender Terms for 

Japan," 14 March 1945, RG 165, Box 505, National Archives, Washington, DC. 

Before the war, David ("Mickey) Marcus, a West Point graduate, had been a 

prosecutor in the United States District Attorney's Office, New York.

10.Major General George Strong, in Minutes of Special Meeting, JCS Post-War 

Committee, 10 March 1945, RG 165, Box 505; "Comparison of the Proclamation 

of July 26, 1945 with the Policy of the Department of State," attached to Minutes, 

Secretary's Staff Committee (hereafter referred to as SSC), 25 July 1945, State 

Department Records, National Archives, Washington, DC.

11.Military officers, State Department officials, and Southern Democrats are 

discussed at length below; for examples of definition number one, by 

Republicans and publications, see Joan Huff Wilson, "Herbert Hoover's Plan for 

Ending The Second World War," International History Review 1 (January 

1979):99-101; for Senator Kenneth S. Wherry (Republican party whip, 

Nebraska), see New York Times, 24 July 1945, 5; for Senator Homer Capehart 
(Indiana), see ibid,, 13 July 1945, 3; Frank Laubach to Senator H. Alexander 

Smith (New Jersey), 4 June 1945, and Smith to Truman, 9 June, Official File, 

Box 662,Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO; Senator Wallace 

White (assistant minority, leader, Maine), Congressional Record, 2 July 

1945,79th Cong., 1st Sess., 7129; "After Okinawa, What?" The Christian 

Century, 9 May 1945, 575.

12. For examples of definition number two, see editorials in Christian Science 

Monitor, 16 August 1945; New York Times, 11 September 1945; and Atlanta 

Constitution, 11 August 1945; mass circulation magazines in John W. Dower, 

War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 

1986), 54, 56 passim; Roosevelt, Press Conference, 29 Judy 1944, in Samuel I. 

Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt

(hereafter referred to as FDR Papers) (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938-

1950), 13:210.

13. See Japanese diplomatic message traffic, in FRUS: Conference at Berlin 

(Potsdam) 1945,1:833, 2:1255-56,1294.

14. Leahy, I Was There, 160-61; Akria Iriye, Power and Culture: The JapaneseAmerican War, 1941-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 59-

60, 129, 154; Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged 

and the Peace, They Sought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 

1957),252-54; FRUS: Cairo and Teheran, 448; for FDR's ideas about isolating 

the Japanese "race" from the rest of Asia, see Christopher Thorne, Allies of a

Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 (New 

York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 8-9, 168-69; Captain George Kerr, 23 

November 1943, discussed in Iriye above, 166-67.

15. Iriye, Culture and Power, 163; Premier Suzuki, 9 June 1945, quoted in 

Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender, 69; interrogation of 700 Japanese officials 

summarized in United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Japan's Struggle to end 

the War, 1946, 5. 

16.FRUS: Cairo and Teheran, 323, 389, 532, 554, 864; John Patton Davies, Jr. 

(who attended the Cairo Conference as political adviser to the CBI theater 

commander), Dragon by the Tail: American, British, Japanese, and Russian 

Encounters with China and One Another (New York: Norton, 1972), 279-80; 

GCM Interviews, 326. One can only speculate whether Stalin was purposely 

trying to keep the United States out of Japan to ensure Soviet control of 

northeast Asia after World War II. Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to the 
USSR, thought "Stalin was afraid of Roosevelt. Whenever Roosevelt spoke, he 

sort of watched him with a certain awe"; see Harriman, quoted in Studs Terkel, 

"The Good War": An Oral History of World War II (New York: Ballantine, 1958), 

328.

17. For American military disputes and the quote from Leahy, see Charles F. 

Brower, "The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy: American Strategy and 

War with Japan," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1987, 194-97; 

Feis, Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin, 259; FRUS Cairo and Teheran, 765-67, 810; 

FRUS, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, 1300; for the opinion of the 

admirals on unconditional surrender, see Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries 

(New York: Viking Press, 1951), 69-70. At the Teheran Conference, which 

divided the Cairo Conference into sessions 1 and 2, Roosevelt left maps of the 

Pacific theater on his desk while he, Churchill, and Stalin discussed the war in 

Europe.

18.Truman quoted in Stimson Diary, 18 June 1945; for various Truman estimates 

of casualties, see John Ray Skates, The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the 

Bomb (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994),76-77; David 

McCullough. Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992),132, 439; Truman, 

"The Military Career of a Missourian," Senatorial Papers, 1937, 1939, Truman 

Presidential Library, Independence, MO.

19.Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy, to Secretary Stimson, 28 May 

1945, in Kai Bird, The Chairman, John J. McCloy,(New York: Simon & Schuster, 

1992), 243; and McCloy, "Memorandum for Chief of Staff, Subject: JCS 1340/l," 

20 May 1.945, RG 165, Box 504; Stimson, Memorandum for President, 2 July 

1945, Stimson Diary; Stimson's description of himself in 1947, quoted in Stimson 

to Frankfurter, 12 December 1946, Stimson Papers,; the final quote is from 

Joseph C, Grew (identified below). Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty 

Years, 1904-1945 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1952),2:1426; for positions of 

Truman, Leahy, Stimson, and Marshall, discussed in this and subsequent 

paragraphs below, see minutes of White House meeting, 18 June 1945, and 

other documents reprinted in Sherwin, World Destroyed, 337, 355, 357-58,361-

62.

20. Bix, "Japan's Delayed Surrender," 199-200, 210, 223; and Ed Drea, "Hirohito: 

Accomplice or Villain?" unpublished paper given at Annual Conference of Society 

for Military History, 1995; Stimson to Truman, 16 July 1945, FRUS: Conference 

of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, 1322; "News Conference" and "Announcement of 

German Surrender," both 8 May 1945, Public Papers of President Harry S. 

Truman (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961, 1966), 1:45, 49; for 
Stimson versus civil missions in Europe, see Wilson, "Hoover's Plan for Ending 

World War II" 97; Stimson to Marshall, 6 December 1944, in Brower, "JCS and 

National Policy: War with Japan," 208; Stimson quoted in Stimson and McGeorge 

Bundy, On Active. Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 

1948), 632.

21.Marshall, "Memorandum for Secretary of War," ca. 15 May 1945, RG 165, 

Box 504, and Marshall, Memo for Secretary of War, "Basic Objective in the 

Pacific War," 9 Jane 1945, Marshall Research Library. Lexington, VA. Marshall 

essentially agreed with Cordell Hull, secretary of state until 1945, who said that 

after FDR stated unconditional surrender "so emphatically at Casablanca," 

everyone had "to follow it at least in form," although it still "required explanation"; 

we The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 1571.

22. For Marshall, Stimson, Brigadier General George A- Lincoln (chief of strategy 

and policy at the War Plans Division), Major General Craig (acting assistant chief 

of staff), and the JCS staff, all on changing the formula for unconditional 

surrender, State-War-Navy meeting, 12 Jane 1945, in Forrestal Diaries, 68-69; 

Brower, "Sophisticated Strategist," 333- 36; Brian L. Villa, "The U.S. Army, 

Unconditional Surrender, and the Potsdam Proclamation,"Journal of American 

History 63 (June 1976):82-81. Several very intelligent people at the War and 

State Departments performed verbal gymnastics attempting to avoid the invasion 

of Japan. Aside from General Lincoln's proposal for two "negotiated 

unconditional surrenders," Dr Leo Pasvolsky, head of special projects at State, 

tried to make a distinction between the "treatment" and the "terms" of 

unconditional surrender. Japan ought not be granted special terms, but their 

treatment"would vary with the circumstances"; see Minutes, SSC Meeting, 19 

July 1945.

23.Joint Intelligence Staff, 141/3, 14 April 1945, RG 165, Box 505; JCS, 

Memorandum for Information No. 390, "Unconditional Surrender of Japan," 29 

April 1945, RG 165, Box 505; "Memorandum of Comments on Ending the 

Japanese War," n.d., RG 165, Box 166; and Craig to General Handy, 26 July 

1945, RG 165, Box 505; Joint Intelligence Committee, 128th Meeting, 20 April 

1945, RG 2 18, Box 63, Colonels Jacobs and Schmidt, general staff, Informal 

Comments on JCS 1275/3," 11 May 1945, RG 165, Box 260; JCS, Minutes of 

Joint Post-War Committee, 10 March 1945, RG 165, Box 505--all in the National 

Archives, Washington, DC; O.T. Pfeiffer, Comment on JWPC 263/2, 20 April 

1945, World War II Strategic Plans Division, Box 163, Naval Historical Center, 

Washington, DC.
24. Drea, MacArthur's Ultra, 209-11; Japanese newspapers and military officers 

quoted in Ben-Ami Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (Oxford: 

Clarendon Press, 198 1), 146-47; Sigal, Fighting to a Finish, 239; and Dower, 

War Without, Mercy, 36; JCS planning staff. "Draft Memorandum for the 

Secretaries of War and the Navy," n. d., RG 165, Box 504, National Archives, 

Washington, DC; Marshall quoted in John P. Sutherland, "The Story General 

Marshall Told Me," U.S. News and World Report 47 (2 November 1959):53-54.

25. For Admiral Kantaro (premier of Japan at the time of surrender), quoted on 

26 December 1945; for expectation of American losses, see Newman, Truman 

and Cult of Hiroshima, 49, 51; Marshall quoted on Japanese soldiers, in The 

Journals of David E. Lilienthal, 2: Atomic Energy Years (New York: Harper & 

Row, 1964), 198-200; for military innovations, the number of kamikazes, and 

other quotations from Marshall and from the Army study on poison gas, see 

Pogue, Marshall, 4: 17-18, 500, and Skates, Invasion of Japan, 88-96, 109- 10.

26. For Marshall see Journals of David Lilienthal, 2: 193 -200; Marc Gallicchio, 

"After Nagasaki: George Marshall's Plan for Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Japan,"

Prologue 23 (Winter 1991): 397, 400; Newman, Truman and Cult of Hiroshima, 

85; and Pogue, Marshall, 3: 358. Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy 

quoted in Dan Kurzman, Day of the Bomb: Countdown to Hiroshima (New York: 

McGraw-Hill, 1986), 309; and Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War, 119.

27.Marshall quoted in McCullough, Truman, 395; Japanese War Minister 

Korechika Anami, quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete 

History (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 716; for Marshall's suggestion and the 

Japanese plans, including the quote from chief Japanese Army planner, Major 

General Masakazu Amano, see Skates, Invasion of Japan, 118, 124-32, 140-43; 

and Thomas M. Huber, Pastel: Deception in the Invasion of Japan (Ft. 

Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1989), 35-40; 

for Japanese strength on Kyushu, also see Drea, MacArthur's Ultra, 222.

28.Newman, Truman and Hiroshima Cult, 20;Skates, Invasion of Japan, 191-

203; Nimitz (25 January 1946), quoted in Louis Morton, "Decision to Use Atomic 

Bomb," 517; for the effectiveness of an American invasion feint and the bombing 

of air bases on Kyushu, both during the invasion of Okinawa, see Roy E. 

Appleman, et al., Okinawa: The Last Battle(Washington, DC: Office of the Chief 

of Military History, U.S. Army, 1948), 49, 74. The Navy was already planning a 

less elaborate deception than the one this author outlines to get the kamikazes to 

attack a phantom invasion, of Kyushu two weeks before the real invasion was to 

take place in November 1945; see letter from Commander (Ret.) Lewis Walker, 

in Parameters 25 (Spring 1995):116-17.
29.Sixth Army Estimate of Enemy Situation, 6 August 1945, quoted in Newman, 

Truman and Hiroshima Cult, 20; Drea, MacArthur's Ultra, 222-23; MacArthur to 

Marshall, 9 August 1945, in Morton, "Decision to Use Atomic Bomb," 501; and 

Skates, Invasion of Japan, 143.

30.JCS to MacArthur and Nimitz, 25 May 1945, quoted in Grace Person Hayes, 

The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in World War II: The War Against Japan 

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1982), 706; Wayne A. Silkett, "Downfall: 

The Invasion That Never Was," Parameters 24 (Autumn 1994): 113-14. Compare 

MacArthur's response to the proposal to go directly to Honshu with his response 

to JCS critics who would my that Inchon was "the worst possible place ever 

selected for an amphibious landing." MacArthur told them "the very arguments 

you have made as to the impracticabilities will tend to ensure for me the element 

of surprise"; for quotations, see Omar Bradley and Clay Blair, A General's Life

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 544, 555; and D. Clayton James, The 

Years of MacArthur (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970-1985), 3:469. Surprise, so 

important at Inchon, would have been nonexistent at Kyushu.

31. Willoughby, 28 July 1945, quoted in Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima 

Cult, 56; Stimision, 10 August, quoted in Barton J. Bernstein, "The Perils and 

Politics of Surrender: Ending the War with Japan and Avoiding the Third Atomic 

Bomb,"Pacific Historical Review 46 (February 1977) :5; Stimson, Memorandum 

for President, 16 July 1945, FRUS: Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, 

2:1265, Mid-1945 was not the last time MacArthur dismissed the cautious of 

Major General Willoughby. In mid-November 1950, Willoughby counted over 

64,000 Communist Chinese soldiers in North Korea and growing daily. 

MacArthur thought them were 25,000 to 30,000 maximum. In two weeks, they 

would find out that there were over 300,000. Lieutenant General (Ret.) Philip B. 

Davidson worked for Willoughby in Korea as a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant 

colonel, briefed MacArthur directly, came to the conclusion that he (MacArthur) 

was his own J2, and was told by an officer who had briefed MacArthur in the 

Pacific that this was also true in World War II (Davidson interviewed by 

Pearlman, 23 August 1995).

32. Leahy, I Was There, 385; for quotations per different State Department 

positions, see Joseph Ballantine (director of Office of Far Eastern Affairs), 

"Treatment of Japan," SSC, I January 1945, and Ballantine to Grew, 6 August 

1945, FRUS: Japan, 6:587; for Grew's views on Japan, his concern with media 

attacks on appeasement, and the notion of using the Navy for public support, see 

SSC Meetings, 19 February, 8 March, and 28 May 1945,National Archives, 

Washington, DC. Leon Sigal's excellent book, Fighting to a Finish, postulates that 

political appointees-Archibald MacLeish, Dean Acheson, and Secretary of State 
James F. Byrnes (all discussed below)--simply mirrored public opinion. This was 

probably true of Byrnes, who sawTruman as a caretaker and himself as a future 

president, --provided be avoided some terrible political mistake that buried both 

of them. The hypothesis is far less true for MacLeish and Acheson, both of whom 

were looking forward to leaving the government at the time they argued 

vehemently against retaining the emperor.

33.Macleish to Secretary of State, 6 July, FRUS: Conference of Berlin (Potsdam)

1945, 1:895-97, 901; Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State 

Department (New York: New American Library, 1970), 42, 46, 13 1; for their 

debates with career diplomats, see Iriye, Power and Culture, 255-56; Acheson 

and MacLeish, described by Eugene Dooman, as quoted in David S. McLellan, 

Dean Acheson: The State Department Years (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1976), 52; 

MacLeish at SSC Meeting, 28 May 1945, National Archives, Washington, DC. 

When Averell Harriman, another Roosevelt appointee, was a special assistant to 

Roosevelt's special assistant, Harry Hopkins, he was in the proverbial loop. Once 

"demoted- to ambassador to the Soviet Union, he became what Hopkins called a 

"cookie-pushing pansie" in the State Department. Then Harriman would have to 

go to the Russian foreign office to find out what was happening in Washington; 

see Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: 

Harper & Brothers, 1948), 756, 777,

34.John Morton Blum, V Was For Victory: Politics and American Culture During 

World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1976), 23,26-30, 33-36 

,299-300; MacLeish quoted in "Defeatist Liberals," New Republic 110 (6 March 

1944):302; Senator Homer Capehart (Republican-Indiana), quoted in New York 

Times, 13 July 1945,3; also see the reference by senator Kenneth Wherry 

(Republican-Nebraska) to the Cairo Decree, ibid, 24 July 1945, 5; MacLeish to 

Adlai Stevenson, 16 January 1945, in R. H. Winnick, ed., Letters of Archibald 

Macleish: 1907-1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 326.

35.McLellan, Dean Acheson, 49-51, 63-68; for support of Acheson by left-wing 

publications that wanted to reform Japan (and try Hirohito as war criminal), see 

"Our Policy Toward Japan," I. F. Stone, "Shake-up in the State Department," and 

"The New Japanese Line," Nation 161 (14 July 1945):23 (25 August 1945):236, 

and (1 September 1945):195; "Grew and MacArthur"and"Japan's Strategy of 

Revival," New Republic 113 (27 August 1945):236, 242; Waldo Heinrichs, 

Threshold of War. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988),134,35, 161-63; Army War Plans 

Division (21 November 1941), quoted on 213; Jonathan G. Utley, "Upstairs, 

Downstairs at Foggy Bottom: Oil Experts and Japan, 1940-41," Prologue 8 

(Spring, 1976):20-24,26-28; Acheson, Memorandum for President, 15 December 

1950, President's Security Files, National Security, Council Meetings, Truman 
Presidential Library, Independence, MO; Acheson to daughter, 30 May 1945, in 

David S. McLellan and David C. Acheson, ed., Among Friends: Personal Letters 

of Dean Acheson (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980): 55; Acheson at State 

Department staff meeting, 7 July, FRUS: Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 

1945,1:901.

36.Leahy (24 April 1945) quoted and MacLeish and Grew discussed, in Michael 

Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: America's Plans for Post War Defense, 

1941-1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University press, 1977), 81, 86-87, 18 1; Grew 

(July 1944), quoted in Christopher Thorne, The Issues of War: States, Societies, 

and the Far Eastern Conflict of 1941-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 

1985),195-96; Minutes, SSC, 28 May 1945; and Grew, Turbulent Years, 2:1435; 

"Japan: United States Economic Policy," n.d., studying RG 59, Records of the 

Office of Assistant Secretary and Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Box 

11; MacLeish to Allen Grover, Letters of Macleish, 323; Villa, "Army, 

Unconditional Surrender, and Potsdam Proclamation," 77-80.

37.Stimson, 18 June, 1945, in Sherwin, World Destroyed, 360; Japanese army 

chief of staff to military attaché in Switzerland, 11 July 1945, and ambassador to 

Soviet Union to foreign minister, 16 July 1945: both quoted in Marc S. Gallicchio, 

The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and the Fall of the 

Japanese Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),6.

38.For the various fears of the peace faction, see Newman, Truman and 

Hiroshima Cult, 43, 56; Imperial Adviser Koichi Kido and foreign Minister 

Shigenori Togo, quoted in Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender, 114, 124; 

Minister of Sweden to Secretary of State, 6 April 1945, FRUS: Japan,

1945,6:477; Drew Pearson, nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, on Grew 

in Washington Post, 18 August 1945,20., Crew quoted in New York Times, 11

July 1945,2; Minutes, SSC Meeting, 10 July 194.5; how to respond to Pearson 

and similar attacks by Walter Winchell were subjects in State Department 

meetings, see SSC, 19 February and 10 July 1945; Japanese naval and foreign 

service, officers, quoted in Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," 239, 

242; and Bix, "Japan's Delayed Surrender," 224. Bernstein and Bix both believe, 

as does Butow, that Stimson strongly overstated The influence of the peace 

faction on Japanese policy.

39. For Public expression of American opinion, politicians, and media, see 

Dower, War Without Mercy, esp. 50-55; for Japanese response, se ibid., 223-25; 

Ben-Amil Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (Oxford: Clarendon 

Press, 9181), 146; James . Weingartner, "Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the 

mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941-1945," Pacific Historical Review 61 
(February 1992): 58-61, 63-64; propaganda remembered by Akira Muira, 

professor of Japanese literature, in Terkel, "Good War," 201; and quoted in 

Thorne, Issue of War, 134-35; Foreign Minister Togo, quoted in FRUS: Japan, 

1945, 6:1249, 1261.

40. Army General Staff memo, 30 June 1945, quoted in Rya Cline, Washington 

Command Post: the Operations Division (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of 

Military History, 1951), 347; Hadley Cantril, Public Opinion, 1935-1946

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 143; George H. Gallup, The 

Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), 

1:488-89; polls cited by Sigal, Fighting to a Finish,95, 247; for the poll on public 

preferences for the treatment of Hirohito printed on the front page of the 

Washington Post, 29 June 1945.

41. Marshall, 6 March 1945, in Pogue, Marshall, 3:552; JCS documents, 16 May 

and 9 June 1945, quoted in Ball, "Strategic Limits of Warning Democracy," 5-6.

42. When newspapers and Replublicans criticized the Morganthau Plan to 

dismantle German industry, FDR claimed that he had not endorsed the proposal 

and privately told Henry Stimson that "he had no idea how he could have initialed 

this." Stimson replied: "Mr President, I don't like you to dissemble with me," see 

Robert Dalleck, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 477; and Godfrey Hodgson, The 

Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950 (New York: Knopf, 

1990), 231; "Now Japan," Washington Post, 9 May 1945, 10; along with an angry 

letter to the editor, the paper reiterated its hard conditions for a conditional 

surrender, in "Editor's note," 13 May 1945, 4B; I have never seen the Post repeat 

an editorial in space devoted to criticism of its editorial positions. Nationally 

syndicated newspaper columnist, Barnet Nover, "Unconditional Surrender or 

What," in Washington Post, 12 july 1945, 12, Made another explicit attack on the 

Cairo Declaration. Nover was particularly close to Truman, receiving the first 

exclusive interview the new president gave to journalist-although it was not for 

the column on 12 July.

43. Truman quoted by Averell Harriman, "Mr. Truman's Way with Crises," in 

Francis H. Heller, ed., The Korean War: A 25-Year Perspective (Lawrence: 

Rgenets Press of Kansas, 1977), 230; Truman to daughter, 3 March 1948, 

quoted and issue discussed later in McCullough, Truman, 355, 375-76, 382; 

Truman (25 May 1945), quoted in Gallicchio, Cold War Begins in Asia, 13.
44. Truman, quoted at White House meeting reproduced in Sherwin, World 

Destroyed, 361; "Address to Congress," 16 April 1945, Truman Public Papers, 

1:3; and McCullough, Truman, 359; Truman's political advice came from Cordell 

Hull (secretary of state, 1933 to 1945); see Memoirs, 1954, and Secretary of 

State James F. Byrnes, as quoted in Bernstein, "perils and Politics of Surrender," 

4-5. Truman seems to have appointed Byrnes because of his so-called 

knowledge of Yalta and FDR's policies in general. In fact, Roosevelt kept both 

Byrnes and Hulll in the dark but hoped to use these former senators to win 

Congressional approval for his treaties; see Gallicchio, Cold War Begins in Asia, 

41.

45. Mark Howe, 28 June 1945, quoted in Newman, Truman and Hiroshima Cult, 

68; Cline, Washington Command Post, 345; Barkley, quoted in New York Times, 

13 July 1945, 3; MacLeish, in Minutes, SSC Meeting, 26 July 1945; "Comparison, 

of Proclamation of July 26, 1945 with Policy of State Department,"~ SSC, 25 July 

1945.

46. Ibid., (intelligence intercepted) cable from Japanese Ambassador to Soviet 

Union, 27 July 1945, in FRUS: Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, 2: 1291; 

Iriye, Power and Culture, 256, 260-65.

47. Japanese officials described and quoted, ibid., Bix, "Japan's Delayed 

Surrender," 208; Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender, 148; Newman, Truman 

and Hiroshima Cult, 70-72; Major General H. A. Craig, "Memorandum for 

General Handy, Subject: Status of Action on 'Military Aspects of Unconditional 

Formula for Japan,'" 13July 1945, RG 165, Box 505; "Comparison of 

Proclamation of July 26 1945 with Policy of State Department," 26 July 1945, 

SSC. Because the United States desperately needed the emperor as a 

figurehead if it were occupy japan with less than ninety divisions, Army 

prosecutors would later sanitize Hirohito's actual record of active participation in 

the war; see Bix (above), 201.

48. Gilbert C. Fite, Richard B. Russell, Jr.: Senator from Georgia (Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 2,132, 176; quote on 353; New York 

Times clipping, 25 July 1945; undated note by Russell, and Russell to John 

Outler, 14 August 1945; all in Russell Memorial Library, Hirohito File, University 

of Georgia; Russell in Congressional Record, 79th Cong; 1st Sesssion, 8671-72, 

8679.
49. For statements in movies and magazines similar to that of Russell, see 

Dower, War Without Mercy, 50, 56; public opinion polls, for 1 and 23 June 1945, 

in Sigal, Fighting to a Finish, 95, and Gallup, Gallup Poll, 1: 510-11; for Truman 

on morale, see Marshall, Memorandum for Secretary of War, 1 Augustt 1945, 

Marshall Research Library, Lexington, VA; Truman, discussion with Royse, 12 

March 1945 [1954], Post-Presidential Files, Box 9, Truman Library, 

lndependence, MO; War Department Demobilization Plan, n.d., attached to 

Acting Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson to Congresastrum George B. 

Schwabe, 20 July 1945, Officiall File, Box 674, Truman Presidential Library, 

Independence, MO; Marshall,"Remarks on Demobilization of the Army to 

Members of Congress, 20 Sept. 1945, "Papers of George C. Marshall: Selected 

World War II Correspondence,Reel 11 (microfilm series).

50. Chief of Army legislative and liaison division to Marshall, 29 April 1945, 

quoted in John C. Sparrow, History of Personnel Demobilization in the United 

States (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1952), 113; Marshall, 

"Remarks on Demobilization to Congress," 4-5; for subsequent quotes in this and 

the following paragraph, sec Undersecretary of War Robert P. Patterson, 

Memorandum for Deputy Chief of Staff, 24 July 1945; Brigadier General R. W. 

Berry to Congressman Carl T, Durham, 12 August 1941, and Major General Ray 

Porter. "Memorandum for Chief of Staff, 13 August 1945; all in RG 165 (GI 

personnel), Boxes 555 and 556, National Archives, Washington, DC; Senators 

Edwin Johnson (Democrat-Colorado) and Homer Capebart (Republican-Indiana), 

as quoted (and others) cited in New York Times, 23 July 1945, 11.

51.For the quote on military values, see General Omar N, Bradley, A Soldier's 

Story (New York: Henry Holt, 1951), 154; JCS planners (9 May 1945), quoted in 

Villa "Army, Unconditional Surrender, and Potsdam proclamation," 84; Richard H. 

Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy (Washington, 

DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1955-1967), 2:612,

52.Marshall, "Remarks on Demobilization to Congress," 4,7; Robert R. Palmer et 

al., TheProcurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops (Washington, DC: 

Office of the Chief ofMilitary History, 1948), 638-39.

53.Maxwell Taylor, Swords and Plowshares: A Memoir (New York: Norton, 

1972), 110.

54. "Special Message to Congress on Winning the War," 1 June 1945, Truman 

Public Papers, 2:93-94; Truman to Marshall, 18 August 1945, President's 

Secretary's File, Box 157, Truman Library, Independence, MO; Major General 
Harry Twaddel, commander, 95th Infantry Division, quoted in Skates, Invasion of 

Japan, 69; Marshall, "Remarks on Demobilization to Congress," 3,7; the final 

quote is from Marshall Interview, 23 Jane 1947, Robert Sherwood MSS, Harvard 

University, Cambridge, MA.

55. Marshall, "Remarks on Demobilization," 3; George C. Marshall, quoted in 

Sutherland, "Story Gen. Marshall Told Me," 56; U.S. Army intelligence report to 

Marshall, 13 July 1945, quoted in Robert James Maddox, Weapons for Victory: 

The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later (Columbia: University of Missouri 

Press, 1995), 84.

56. JCS (30 June 1944), quoted in Ray Cline, Washington Command Post,338; 

my istimate of what infantry battles would have ben like on the islands is based 

on the U.S. experience at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, as told in George Feifer, 

Tennozan : The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb (New York: Ticknor & 

Fields, 1992), passim, and in personal conversations with Colonel (Ret.) Leland 

Alexander, who got his battlefield commission at Iwo.

57. Imperial General Headquarters, Military Intelligence Section, "Estiamte of 

Situation for Spring of 1946," 1 July 1945, in Donald Detwiler and Charles 

Burdick, ed., War in Asia and the Pacific (New York: Garland, 1980),12:7-8; JCS, 

Memorandum for Information No, 390, "Unconditional Surrender of Japan," 29 

April 1945, RG 165, Box 505, National Archives, Washington, DC; Japanese 

newspapers quoted in Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan, 107.

58. American threat quoted and discussed in Morton, "Decision to Use Atomic 

Bomb," 515; Johanna Menzel Meskill, Hitler & Japan: The Hollow Alliance (New 

York: Atherton Press, 1966),183; War Minister Korcehika Anami and vice chief of 

the naval general staff, Onishi, quoted in Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender, 

183, 205.

59. Emperor Hirohito, in Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender, 224,248; (Foreign 

Minister) Shigenori Togo, The Cause of Japan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 

1956),318-22; United States Strategic, Bombing Survey, The Effects of Atomic 

Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 23; peace activists, 11 December 1945, 

quoted and cited in Newman, Truman and Hiroshima Cult, 33-49, 44, 484; 

unnamed citizen quoted in Richard Johnston, "Surveyy Shows Japs Unaware of 

Their Defeat," Washington Post, 4 September 1945.
60. Hirohito (August 14), and diplomatic message quoted in Butow, Japan's 

Decision to Surrender, 208,244; Lawrence Freedman and Saki Dockrill, 

"Hiroshima: A Strategy of Shock," in Dockrill, ed., From Pearl Harbor to 

Hiroshima: the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1941-45 (New York: 

St. Martin's Press, 1994), 207; comment by Japanese representative in Sweden, 

a nation Japan used to send messages to the United States, cited in Gallicchio, 

Cold War Begins in Asia, 160; national radio news commentary by Clifton Utley, 

11 August 1945; copy in Richard Russell Papers, Hirohito file, University of 

Georgia, Athens, GA.

61. Truman, 10 and 14 August, in Memoirs, 1:429,436. Although Hirohito would 

not say "Surrender' to the Diet, the Japanese prime minister did; see New York 

Times, 5 September1945,3; and Christian Science Monitor, 6 September 1945,1, 

6; Stimson quoted in Bernstein, "Perils and Politics of Surrender," 4; 

"Proclamation of Victory in the East," 16 August 1945, Truman Public Papers, 

1:223.

62. Truman, interviewed by Noyse, 22 January 1954, Post-Presidential Files, Box 

9, Truman Library, Independence, MO; Truman, Memoirs (Garden City, NY: 

Doubleday, 1955),1:420; and Truman Journal, 25 July 1945; Decision to Drop 

the Bomb File, Box 1, Truman Library, Independence, MO; Stimson and Bundy, 

On Active Service, 364, 369-70, 373.

63.McCloy (1965), quoted in Newman, Truman and Hiroshima Cult, 103; Colonel 

Robert Wood (Operational War Plans Division) and Lieutenant General Robert 

Eichelberger (commander, Eighth Army), quoted in Gallicchio, Cold War Begins 

in Asia, 59, 70; Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," 256 -57; Truman 

quoted in John Morton Blum, ed., The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. 

Wallace, 1942--1946 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 474.

64. The list of names of alleged war criminals to face international trial was sent 

from Tokyo to the secretary of state, with an information copy going to the War 

Department as a standard procedure. The chief of the Operational Plans Division 

was on duty, contacted the secretary of war, and stopped the procedure, see 

General John Hull, Oral History, April 1974.

Nobody spoke against the Russell bill, which (while harsh) was consistent with 

Senate Democratic party policy enunciated by Majority Leader Barkley, as 

mentioned above. Those speaking for the bill included Senators J. William 

Fulbright, who would later lead the Senate against the Vietnam War, and Glen 

Taylor, who would run for vice president against Truman on the Henry Wallace 

Progressive party ticket in the 1948 election. A search of the National Archives 
revealed nothing about the Russell bill (S.J. Res, 94) after it was sent to 

committee, see Congressional Record. 79th Cong., 1st Session, 8675-78, The 

contemporary American left seems to think that the hard-line stance against 

Japan was an excuse to use the atomic bomb to intimidate the Soviet Union. In 

point of fact, in 1945, many representatives of the American left--Taylor, 

MacLeish, Alger Hiss, the Lawyer's Guild, the American Veteran's Committee, 

The Nation, The New Republic magazines, and the American Communist Partyall opposed any so-called appeasement of Japan, wan" to try Hirohito as a war 

criminal, and, in several cases, expressly approved the use of the atomic bomb; 

see Irye, Power and Culture, 167; Bernstein, "Perils and Politics of Surrender," 6; 

Charles Bolte, 'The Last War Front," Nation 175 (25 August 1945)177; Bruce 

Bliven, "The Bomb and the Future," New Republic 113 (20 August l945):2l2; 

"Challenge to Humanity," and "War Not Yet Over,"Daily Worker, 8 August 1945,6 

and 9 August 1945, 5- For comments (and wonder) about the rapid dissipation of 

public hatred for Hirohito, see Sigal, Fighting to a Finish, chapter 6.

Dr. Michael D. Pearlman has worked at the Combined Arms Center, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas, since 1986 and has taught history for the Combat 

Studies Institute since 1989. He has a doctorate in history from the 

University of Illinois and a master's degree from the University of 

Chicago. Aside from CSI, he has taught at the Universities of Illinois, 

Wisconsin, and Nebraska. His first book, To Make Democracy Safe for 

America, was published in 1984. This present study on World War II is 

part of a manuscript on policy in American wars from the colonial period 

to Desert Storm that Pearlman has just completed.

COMBAT STUDIES INSTITUTE
The Combat Studies Institute was established on 18 June 1979 as an academic 

department within the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. CSI has the following mission:

• Prepare and present instruction in military history at USACGSC and assist other USACGSC departments 

in integrating military history into their instruction. 

• Publish works in a variety of formats for the Active Army and reserve Components on historical topics 

pertinent to the doctrinal concerns of the Army.