Total Victory and a Costly Peace:
GRAFF, HENRY F.
Total Victory and a Costly Peace Japan Subdued. By Herbert Feis. Princeton. 199 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of History, Columbia University It is part of the mystery and...
...All of this was not apparent at the time...
...In a number of respects, the present volume is his best: It has a single focus...
...In a memorable passage in his diary, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson described the effect that favorable news of progress on the atomic bomb had on President Truman at Potsdam: "When he got to the meeting after having read this report, he was a changed man...
...and the devastating effect it had on traditional international relations was felt immediately when the War was terminated...
...it deals with the fascinating problem of the relation between diplomacy and the technology of warfare...
...In 1945, Japan, our hated enemy, lay prostrate at our feet, and its supineness opened the way to Russian advances and conquests we could not prevent...
...One of the central questions is, of course, why the Soviet Union was encouraged to enter the conflict if the atomic bomb was so close to success...
...consequently, when he is critical of our leaders he is also understanding...
...The supreme irony of the end of the War in the Pacific was that the very magnitude of the American triumph raised the political cost beyond our wish or expectations...
...The atomic bomb made this kind of victory possible...
...it is drenched in the essence of poetic—if not moral—justice...
...At Potsdam, Feis writes, "the only regulated consultations about Far Eastern questions were those between the military authorities...
...The consequence of the desire for Soviet participation on the ultimate outcome in Asia was profound...
...Feis' monumental labors on the diplomacy of World War II, which began with The Road to Pearl Harbor, comes to a close with this book...
...He believes, for example, that Japan should have been allowed to retain control over Formosa, the Kuriles and the Ryukyus, rather than suffer restriction to the home islands...
...Furthermore, as Feis writes, it even showed itself in American reluctance to press our differences with the Soviets too hard on a variety of European decisions, lest we discourage them from joining us against Japan...
...He comprehended the desperate importance of immediate steps to control and possibly banish it...
...The leading political questions, including the call to Japan to surrender, the decision to drop the atomic bomb and the terms on which the Soviet Union would enter the war, "were neither jointly conceived nor conclusive...
...His book is based on a mountain of material, and he demonstrates on every page his mastery of it...
...Yet the manner of winning in the field may foreclose any victory in the writing of the peace...
...Feis is dealing, in the last analysis, not with the actual ending of the War, but with "an imperiled eternity," as he entitles one of his chapters...
...Stimson's role is, to be sure, wellknown...
...But Stimson saw beyond the apocalypse...
...government acted on the assumption (could we have acted on any other...
...Feis is aware of this throughout...
...that "the China upon which we were bestowing many benefits would be a faithful friend and ally in the Far East...
...One figure in this story stands high above the crowd on the American side: Stimson...
...Yet elsewhere, he notes that the U.S...
...He knew that this new weapon was a solvent of the traditional ties among nations —as Truman and the others were less quick to discover...
...Still, we have not learned how to protect ourselves from this kind of historical cruelty in the future...
...Should we have expected a different reaction from a victorious commander-in-chief who knew he held the trump card...
...The President's instinctive response had been sound and in the best tradition of the nation-state...
...Third, in 1945, Americans still were unable to see the inseparable relationship between politics and war...
...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of History, Columbia University It is part of the mystery and terror of modern war that it must be won twice—first in battle and then at the conference table...
...they will find, instead, a masterly exposition of the inexorable historical process...
...Churchill, of course, had been unerringly right and eloquent when he told the Secretary of War: "This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in wrath...
...it bears on every page the impress of high tragedy—and especially the element of inevitability...
...Those who read Feis will find neither consolation nor advice for our predicament...
...In Feis' book, though, Stimson's view of the future is set against a background of one ad hoc decision after another, and we are offered a glimpse of what prescience in foreign affairs can mean to us in the world...
...This complex subject is the concern of Herbert Feis' latest work, Japan Subdued: The Atomic Bomb and the End of the War in the Pacific...
...He told the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting...
...The simple answer Feis supplies after examining it exhaustively is summed up in General George C. Marshall's quotation of General Douglas MacArthur: "The hazard and loss [of the landing on Kyushu] will be greatly lessened if an attack is launched from Siberia sufficiently ahead of our target date to commit the enemy to major combat...
...While traveling on the long and dreary road that has led away from the surrender ceremony on the Missouri, we have lived with the truth that what seemed right at one historical juncture was turned into patent wrong by the passage of time...
...As in the earlier books, Feis has steeped himself in the available documents (although he confined himself to the English language), and has interviewed surviving officials with consummate deftness...
...But there is no point in misleading ourselves or engaging in needless breast-beating...
...A closer reading of the record, as offered by Feis, reminds us that these men brought us military victory with a minimal loss of American lives...
...In 1945, first of all, even the scientists who developed the bomb were extremely conservative in their estimates of its explosive yield...
...This theme, however, is not the burden of Feis' book, although it is an important element in it...
...His concluding section raises the question of whether we should have ended the war earlier by modifying our terms, and thereby have averted Russia's declaration of war and the disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Our overwhelming military strength was all that counted, or was likely to count, for us...
...The last factor proved to be a decisive one...
...Moreover, at each stage of the story, he has asked of the evidence the questions that the sensitive student of affairs should ask...
...He talked of it in his memoirs (on which he had the dedicated assistance of McGeorge Bundy), and his biographer, Elting Morison, has provided further details...
...Second, the demand for unconditional surrender, out of which the particular form of the ending of the war arose—and which lies at the root of many of our subsequent difficulties—seemed to the great majority of Americans to be entirely right and proper...
...It is a fascinating excursion into what Franklin Roosevelt liked to call "iffy history," and should be required reading for those in our midst who talk from the Olympian vantage point of a decade and a half later about the mere men—Roosevelt and Truman particularly—who designed the postwar world...
Vol. 44 • August 1961 • No. 30
