Hiroshima and American Mythology

“Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance.”–Washington Post, August 6, 2015

On the 70th anniversary of the American atomic attack on Hiroshima, one of the most indelible aspects to commemorate may be the mythology that has survived despite three generations of historical scholarship. Today Richard Johnson and Bonnie Berkowitz repeat one of the most durable myths in their “illustrated history” feature for The Post.  As Gar Alperovitz recounted meticulously in his magnum opus The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Knopf, 1995), Harry Truman maintained for the rest of his life that a primary reason for approving the attack was that the bomb was dropped on an important military target. But the modern documentary record simply does not support either this characterization of Hiroshima or this supposed criterion as a crucial decision-making factor. Indeed, the reason Hiroshima still stood pristine in early August 1945, when other Japanese cities already lay in ruins from conventional bombing, was that it had been judged by American air corps planners to be of low priority.

Hiroshima canards are not hard to correct nowadays with an hour or so in a good university library. Johnson and Berkowitz can perhaps be forgiven for their newspaperly haste. But for a dose of the obscene depths to which mythology can still sink, students may wish to find Bret Stephens’s essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, to which I refrain from providing a link out of sheer dismay.

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Until the old comforting lies about August 6, 1945, are abandoned, Americans will not fully come to terms with what was wrought in their name on that day.

Hiroshima

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