Hiroshima and the Historians

Pyle wrote this book with three objectives—to provide an “anatomy” of the long-standing debate among historians over the use of atomic bombs against Japan to end World War II; to use that debate as a case study to explain the “nature of the historian’s craft,” that is, the techniques that historians use to provide an accurate account of the past; and to affirm that what historians do is vital to a democratic society, whose citizens need a knowledge of the past to make informed choices about public policy. The book itself grew out of Pyle’s course on the Hiroshima decision at the University of Washington.Pyle calls historians “custodians of the public memory” (18). He acknowledges the difficulty of knowing history “as it actually was” given that historians inevitably select and then interpret facts according to biases, prejudices, and other influences (25). Nonetheless, he stresses, open debate between historians with different interpretations (their “clash of ideas”)—although unable to provide a “final verdict of history”—advances historical knowledge (15, 242).Pyle’s evaluation of how historians advance historical knowledge through discussion and debate is informative and convincing. He is less successful in his use of the Hiroshima debate to illustrate that process. At times he allows his personal perspective to skew his presentation of the differing viewpoints of the Hiroshima debate. That debate pits the “orthodox” viewpoint—that the atomic bombs were necessary to bring about Japan’s surrender—which explains why they were used, against the “revisionist” perspective, which maintains that Japan would have surrendered without the atomic bombings and that motives other than ending the war explain their use. Pyle himself seems to hold a moderate revisionist position—that the United States, although not guilty of ulterior motives, could have ended the war against Japan without using atomic bombs.Pyle’s problematic treatment of the Hiroshima debate begins in his introduction when he mentions its signature event, the controversy over the National Air and Space Museum’s (nasm) planned exhibition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. He acknowledges that the exhibition’s initial script had a “slant” and quotes its notorious opening statement that labeled the America’s war effort a “war of vengeance” against Japanese defending “their unique culture against Western imperialism” (11–12). But he then presents the subsequent controversy as between informed historians and “outraged” veterans groups uncompromisingly determined to protect their “Good War” memories (11–12). Pyle’s phrase “the public memory was wedded to ... a ‘good war,’” which he uses later to describe the opposition the exhibition’s curators encountered, echoes the self-serving language of some pro-exhibit historians that the exhibit was “caught between memory and history,” with the understanding that the former was the fallible “commemorative voice” and the latter the reliable “historical voice” (113).1But while preparing their initial draft, the nasm curators did not consult any experts who might have challenged that “historical voice” and its “war of vengeance” perspective.2 In fact, many of the nasm’s critics were historians. To his credit, Pyle reports that the historians that the nasm commissioned to review the exhibition’s initial draft found it biased and unacceptable. But what follows, from Pyle and several commentators that he quotes, sides with the nasm and disparages its critics. No nasm critics are quoted. As it turned out, shortly after the exhibition was cancelled, several publications by prominent historians appeared that supported the “memory” of the veterans, including works by Newman (a World War II veteran), Maddox, Giangreco, and Frank.3A lack of balance appears elsewhere in this book. When referring to two prominent historians, one a moderate revisionist and the other an orthodox scholar, Pyle writes that the former “puts it well,” “threads the needle carefully,” and has done “extensive research,” while the latter is the “harshest critic” of one revisionist and “excoriated” them in general (64, 153, 212, 112). He adds that when the first revisionists challenged orthodox scholars, their reaction was “often shrill and vindictive,” and that a later “neo-revisionist” encountered the “ire of anti-revisionists,” including one historian who became his “most bitter critic” (110–111). Hiroshima and the Historians contains no such language characterizing revisionist critiques of orthodox scholars.The chapter “Gauging Japanese Responsibility” for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a balanced and informative overview of the scholarship on Emperor Hirohito. But the chapter “A Wider Perspective” lacks that balance. Pyle maintains that the Allied unconditional surrender policy, though justified for Nazi Germany, should not have been applied against Japan—it allegedly stiffened Japanese resistance, lengthened the Pacific war, and contributed to its “Armageddon ending” (228). This argument has advocates but also formidable critics to whom Pyle gives little hearing, which should not happen in an “anatomy” of the Hiroshima decision. Indeed, uprooting Japan’s militaristic regime was a fundamental Allied war aim, and the postwar American occupation vital to doing that and turning Japan into a democratic nation was made possible by unconditional surrender.All this said, two concluding observations seem justified. First, any course on the Hiroshima decision should consider the context provided by Truman aide George Elsey when he recalled how determined Allied leaders justifiably were to end a war that already had caused their people so much grief: “It’s all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddam war was a horrible thing.”4 Second, the concerns of this book raise the matter of the precarious status of free speech at America’s leading universities. A recent poll found that in forty prominent history departments, liberals outnumber conservatives by a ratio of 33 to 1.5 That situation, especially given current hiring practices, hardly bodes well for the “clash of ideas” that Pyle correctly states is essential to the historian’s craft

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