Blunders and Bluffs
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Blunders and Bluffs Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of WWII on the Eastern Front By Constantine Pleshakov Houghton Mifflin. 326 pp. $26.00. What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of...
...352 pp...
...Fortunately, we already have Frank's book to tell us what really happened...
...Nearly all agreed that absent the atom bomb Japan would not have surrendered...
...382 pp...
...Communists defended the pact by arguing that it brought Stalin valuable territories, putting more distance between the USSR and its likely German attackers...
...Incompetence and self-deception on such an enormous scale is hard to comprehend, but Murphy's thoroughly researched and carefully argued study lays it out chapter and verse...
...General Marshall later told his biographer, Forrest C. Pogue, that the primary reason for dropping the two bombs in quick succession-they fell on August 6 and 9,1945-was to "shock" the Japanese into action and create the impression that the U.S...
...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" Various disputes linger about World War II, including its beginnings and endings...
...Had the Japanese military waited a few weeks instead of losing its nerve after Nagasaki, this would have become apparent...
...Winston Churchill called Josef Stalin and his commissars "the most completely outwitted bunglers of the Second World War...
...IN Racing the Enemy Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara, offers an interpretation of Japan's surrender based on American, Japanese and Soviet sources...
...Those communications, Murphy shows, were far more numerous and detailed than previously thought...
...Soviet forces were deployed all over the region essentially in the open...
...David E. Murphy's Wlmt Stalin Knew has everything Stalin's Folly lacks...
...But he differs with the revisionists in important ways...
...For example, he rejects their argument that President Harry S. Truman dropped the bombs to intimidate Stalin...
...Instead, he ordered the existing Stalin Line inside the old border dismantled and replaced with a line on the new GermanSoviet frontier...
...The author confirms this assessment for the period in question, and also that Stalin alone made every bad decision, beginning with the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact signed in August 1939...
...In addition, he employs the history as a novel technique, telling us not only what major characters said but what they thought...
...But Hasegawa ignores the usual explanation-that the Allies were taking hundreds, sometimes thousands, of casualties every day above and around besieged Japan...
...These barbarous acts created fifth columns in the occupied lands that provided Germany with intelligence and committed numerous acts of sabotage against the Soviet military...
...By June 22 the original Stalin Line had been gutted, though the new defenses had yet to be built...
...Apart from having too few atomic bombs, America had too few targets: All but five of Japan's cities were destroyed by firebomb attacks...
...Constantine Pleshakov relies heavily on memoirs, even though he fully understands their unreliability...
...Stalin's Folly is a freewheeling, over-the-top, gossipy work offering a mixture of fact and speculation about the Soviet Union's initial response to Germany's invasion...
...So it is not surprising that this 60th anniversary year a number of books seeking to resolve them-by presenting newly available material or new arguments-have been slated to make their appearance...
...Any reader familiar with the literature on this subject is bound to find Hasegawa's book confusing, if not downright perverse, for its contradictions, tortured reasoning, undocumented theories, and disregard of evidence that undermines his convictions...
...What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa By David E. Murphy Yale...
...was rushing atomic bombs into production and using them as they became available...
...After quoting Byrnes Hasegawa writes, "But perhaps this statement can best be read in reverse: 'If we insisted on unconditional surrender, we couldjustify the dropping of the atomic bomb.'" When all else fails, Hasegawa simply puts words in Byrnes' mouth, defying the rules of scholarship and demonstrating the poverty of his own contentions...
...But power was in the hands of the military, whose terms for ending the War turned on three points: no occupation, self-disarmament, and Japanese control of any war crimes proceedings...
...Hasegawa claims the document, signed by Secretary of State Byrnes, amounted to a rejection of the Japanese offer...
...It bolsters my ownpersonal speculation as well that the atomic bomb was not a usable weapon of war but a bluff...
...Residents of the new acquisitions, including eastern Poland and the Baltic States, hated the Soviet Union, not least because of the brutal occupation measures Stalin ordered that sent many thousands to their deaths or the Gulag...
...But the atomic bombs appeared to eliminate the Allied need for an invasion...
...This lends some support to another of Hasegawa's contentions, that Soviet entry, not atomic bombs, led to Japan's surrender...
...Racing the Enemy rests on a large body of research and is especially good in tracking what the Soviets did throughout the crucial months and days up to and following Japan's surrender, but it fails to achieve its goals...
...Although not a professional historian, Murphy is, in this instance, something better-a retired CIA officer with a wealth of experience analyzing intelligence...
...throughout the Pacific Ocean, wherever Japanese submarines still operated...
...There is no dispute that the U.S...
...and in China, where Japan still had a million troops...
...he believed Soviet entry into the War would still be needed...
...The Soviet race seems to have been real enough: Stalin moved up the Soviet attack date several times to guarantee that he would get the territories he had been promised at Yalta in return for entering the conflict...
...Hasegawa cannot admit this because it lets Truman off the ethical hook...
...It is also undocumented and involves such absurdities as inverting the obvious intent of a statement...
...It has long been known that Stalin refused to believe reports about the planned German invasion, even from his own spies...
...They did, however, shock not only Japan's civilian leaders but also its military leaders, who had expected to fight to the end, as Japanese troops had always done, in the event of an invasion...
...At a meeting of key civilian and military leaders on the evening of August 9, Hirohito issued a direct order for the first time in his reign: Surrender on the basis of one condition, preservation of the Emperor, as set forth in a communication prepared by the foreign minister that the military allowed to be sent...
...Thereafter production might rise to a handful a month...
...Like revisionist historians, Hasegawa maintains that waging atomic warfare against Japan was immoral and unnecessary...
...Dreadful as they were, the atomic bombs did not change the military equation...
...Soviet intelligence reports preceding Germany's attack on June 22, 1941 lie at the heart of his book...
...If Truman had not used the bomb and the fighting had dragged on for months longer, further Allied losses would still have been considerable...
...He accepted German assurances that the overflights, starting about a year before the invasion and steadily intensifying, were accidental...
...possessed a robust atomic arsenal...
...in Luzon, where a Japanese Army had gone to ground in the mountains...
...They also maintained it bought Stalin time to build up the Red Army and ready defenses...
...29.95...
...Richard B. Frank, whose Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999) is indispensable on the subject, quotes Marquis Kido, Hirohito's closest adviser, saying: "If military leaders could convince themselves that they were defeated by the power of science but not by lack of spiritual power or strategic errors, they could save face to some extent...
...Actually, the third bomb would not be available until the end of August...
...For instance, former Secretary of State James F. Byrnes wrote in his memoirs, "had the Japanese surrendered unconditionally, it would not have been necessary to drop the atomic bomb...
...The peace party drew the correct conclusion from Byrnes' letter and accepted its implied assurances, which the U.S...
...The author devotes many pages to discussing the Allied demand that Japan surrender unconditionally...
...Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan By Tsuyoshi Hasegawa Harvard...
...It was known that civilian leaders-and the Emperor himself as of June 1945-had been looking for a way to surrender...
...Similarly, he bought Hitler's explanation that millions of German troops had been moved to the Soviet frontier to put them out of reach of British bombers...
...Hasegawa tries hard to show that Truman insisted on unconditional surrender because it would delay peace long enough forthe bomb to be deployed...
...Their hope was to inflict enough losses on the Allies to gain a negotiated peace...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...Only one said that the Soviet intervention had been decisive...
...strategist, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, Hasegawa correctly notes, did not share the Administration's confidence that a few nuclear attacks would force Japan's surrender...
...The top U.S...
...They invalidated Japan's defensive strategy, and at the same time provided the military an excuse for surrendering...
...Together with Stalin's destruction of the senior officer corps during the purges of the 1930s, this left the Red Army without competent leaders or defensible positions...
...The Truman Administration was sharply divided between those who advocated unconditional surrender and others who called for one condition: allowing Emperor Hirohito to keep his throne...
...in New Guinea, where the Australians had not finished mopping up pockets of Japanese resistance...
...Given that both sides perceived the letter as meeting Japan's condition, one can only marvel at Hasegawa's insistence that it did not...
...Of the three under review here...
...Murphy blows both claims out of the water...
...But because he had gambled everything on the nonaggression pact, Stalin would not admit it was falling apart...
...Hasegawa ignores this statement and others like it by some of the most important Japanese leaders interviewed after the War by the U S. Strategic Bombing Survey...
...Stalin labeled correct reports German disinformation and accepted only those that were in fact German disinformation, since they supported his delusion that Hitler would not attack...
...To appear consistent with the popular demand forunconditional surrender, U.S...
...subsequently made good on...
...When one chief of Soviet military intelligence persisted in sending him such warnings, Stalin fireu him and appointed another who suppressed most information he knew Stalin did not want...
...What Stalin Knew is a riveting account of one of history's greatest blunders...
...This is completely at odds with his previous argument that Truman wanted Japan to surrender as soon as possible...
...leaders in consultation with the British drafted a reply that, while not speaking directly to the Japanese demand, implied the Emperor would be respected...
...Peace advocates, who understood that the Allies would accept none of those terms, wanted to surrender with a single condition, retaining the Imperial House...
...the creation of the bomb mandated its use...
...Hasegawa knows this because he has read Frank's book, but since it conflicts with his thesis-that atom bombs had no effect on the peace partyhe conveniently disregards Yonai's sentiment...
...Unbelievably, Stalin ordered his air defenses not to fire on German spy planes flying over Soviet territory...
...Soviet entry and the atomic bombs gave them their chance, and they seized it...
...Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, urging Hirohito to give the surrender order, told him the atom bombs and Soviet entry were "gifts from the gods," for the peace party now had the opportunity it had been looking for...
...While this method makes for a good read-except for his incomprehensible battle descriptions-it does not inspire confidence in his scholarship...
...Moreover, Stalin decided not to use the occupied lands for a defense in depth...
...Truman would not have been forgiven...
...30.00...
...The two, he contends, were engaged in a raceStalin to enter the Pacific War before Japan surrendered, Truman to end the War before the Soviets attacked Manchuria...
...But he admits its wording left room for interpretation, particularly in the provision that the Emperor would be subject to the authority of an Allied supreme commander and that "ultimately" the Japanese people wouldbe allowed to choose their own form of government...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
