But President Truman’s bigotry toward Asians long antedated reports of Japanese savagery. As a young man courting his future wife, he wrote, “I think one man is as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So, do I. It is race prejudice I guess.” Truman regularly referred to Jews as kikes, to Mexicans as greasers, and to other groups with equally derogatory names. His biographer Merle Miller reported, “Privately Mr. Truman always said ‘nigger’; at least he always did when I talked to him.”
Truman’s racism notwithstanding, it is right to criticize Japan’s unconscionable behavior during the war. However, it is also worth noting that Americans often behaved wretchedly as well. U.S. Pacific war correspondent Edgar Jones detailed U.S. atrocities in a February 1946 article in The Atlantic Monthly: “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.
Although Harry Truman left office “with approval ratings so low that only George W. Bush has come close, he is now widely viewed as a nearly great president and routinely showered with praise by Republicans and Democrats alike. Former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whom George W. Bush credited with telling “me everything I know about the Soviet Union,” named Truman her man of the century to Time. Some historians have fallen into the same trap, none more than David McCullough, whose hagiographic biography of Truman won him a Pulitzer Prize.
The view from the ground was very different and far more harrowing— At the hypocenter, where temperatures reached 5,400° F, the fireball roasted people “to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away.” Tens of thousands were killed instantly. An estimated 140,00 were dead by the end of the year and 200,000 by 1950. The United States officially reported that only 3,243 Japanese troops were killed. Among, the casualties at Hiroshima were approximately a thousand American citizens, mostly second-generation Japanese Americans, and twenty-three U.S. prisoners of war, some of whom survived the blast only to be beaten to death by bomb survivors. Several U.S. prisoners of war were killed by the bomb.
Truman was dining on board -the USS Augusta on his way back from Potsdam when he learned of Hiroshima. He jumped up and exclaimed “This greatest thing in history.” He shortly thereafter said that announcing the news Hiroshima was the “happiest” announcement he had ever made.
Later that morning, before Japan had time to react to the Soviet invasion, the United States dropped an implosive plutonium bomb, nicknamed Fat Man, on the city of Nagasaki. Poor visibility over the primary target—Kokura-forced the pilot, Charles Sweeney, to switch to downtown Nagasaki. The bomb landed two miles off target in the Uramaki district, exploding over the largest Catholic cathedral in Asia with a force of 21 kilotons. Forty thousand people died immediately, including about 250 soldiers. Seventy thousand died by the end of 1945, perhaps 140,000 in five years. Spitzer said that he and other crew members of the Great Artiste, after watching Hiroshima disappear, could not believe that a second city had been wiped off the face of the earth: “There was no need for more missions, more bombs, more fear and more dying. Good God, any fool; could see that.” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, observed.
Six of the United States’ seven five-star officers who received their final star in World War II—Generals MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Arnold and Admirals Leahy, King, and Nimitz—rejected the idea that the atomic bombs were needed to end the war. Sadly though, there is little evidence that they pressed their case with Truman before the fact.
The Vatican quickly condemned the bombing. Catholic World described “bombs’ use as “atrocious and abominable. The most powerful blow delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law.”
Truman always claimed that he felt no remorse, even bragging that he “never lost any sleep over that decision.” When television interviewer Edward R, Murrow asked him, “Any regrets?” he responded, “Not the slightest—not the slightest in the world.” “When another interviewer asked if the decision had been morally difficult to make, he responded, “Hell no, I made it like that” snapping his fingers.
Writer and social critic Dwight Macdonald captured this dehumanization even before Hiroshima’s devastation. He traced the transformation from the “unbelieving horror and indignation” people felt when Franco’s planes killed hundreds of Spanish civilians in 1938 to the abject indifference —to hundreds of thousands of victims in Tokyo: “We have grown callous to massacre. King Mithridates is said to have immunized himself against poison by taking small doses which he increased slowly. So, the gradually increasing horrors of the last decade have made each of us to some extent a moral Mithridates, immunized against human sympathy.” ~ The Untold History of the United States
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