After 1945, the horrors of the Holocaust discredited racist attitudes in the West. But right up to Japan’s surrender, American animus toward the Japanese was significantly more ferocious than what passes for racism in the US today. Why? Because of Pearl Harbor. Because of Japan’s treatment of American prisoners of war in general and the notorious, 65-mile ‘death march’ it held in Bataan, the Philippines, in 1942 – a forced trek to internment camps, during which hundreds of Americans died of exhaustion, overcrowding, brutality, starvation and disease.
To have these humiliations visited upon Americans instilled the spirit of revenge. While US generals and admirals might have objected to the use of the Bomb on military grounds, Truman, the politician, saw it as an essential lesson to friend and foe alike. World domination, and a world in which the Japanese could never again figure as impudent usurpers, was his aim. To that end, atomic weapons were for him a right and proper means to make these two points.
But America’s victory proved transient. By 1949, Uncle Sam had lost its monopoly of atomic weapons to Moscow, and had lost China to Mao. In retrospect, Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave American imperialism a breathing space – one that it still enjoys today. But they didn’t provide it with the supremacy it wanted.
The Allies attempted to present mass annihilation as an essential, even life-saving act. Eighty years on, it’s an account that no longer endures.
James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. He tweets at @jameswoudhuysen
(1) Quoted in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P Bix, Harper Perennial edition, 2016, p502
(2) The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb and the Fateful Decision to Use It, by Iain MacGregor, Constable, 2025, p58
(3) The Hiroshima Men, pp59, 61-63
(4) Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, by Richard Overy, Allen Lane, 2025, ppX, XI
(5) The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb and the Fateful Decision to Use It, by Iain MacGregor, Constable, 2025, p28
(6) Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, by Richard Overy, Allen Lane, 2025
(7) Richard Overy notes that the figure of one million killed and injured ‘was suggested by former president Herbert Hoover and became a widely employed statistic to show how high the cost of [US] invasion would be’. See Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, Allen Lane, 2025, p74
(8) Quoted in ‘Hiroshima: a strategy of shock’, by Lawrence Freedman and Saki Dockrill, in From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1941-45, Saki Dockrill (ed), Palgrave Macmillan, 1993, pp197, 199
(9) As Truman put it in a radio broadcast on 9 August, with typical American pragmatism, ‘Having found the bomb we have used it’. Quoted in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P Bix (2000), Harper Perennial edition, 2016, p502, 596
(10) See War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, John Dower, Pantheon Books, 1986
(11) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II, John Dower, Penguin Books, 2000, p284
(12) Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, by Richard Overy, Allen Lane, pp74-75
