Was MacArthur a Japanese Agent?

Was MacArthur a Japanese agent?

For my generation, clickbait.  For the younglings, it’s “Who’s MacArthur”?

Douglas MacArthur was, in the words of an admiring biographer, “the American Caesar”, the brilliant military commander who won the Pacific War (the Japanese end of World War II), ruled postwar Japan with a sure imperial hand from 1945 to 1951, and orchestrated the 1950 Inchon landing master-stroke that turned the tide in the Korean War.

MacArthur was also notoriously vain, vainglorious, manipulative, insubordinate, and ambitious.  Truman relieved him of his command in Korea in 1951 for coloring outside the lines and wanting to take the war up to the PRC border and possibly beyond.  Back home, MacArthur had ambitions of becoming president of the United States but found the road cut off by another triumphant general, Dwight Eisenhower and, in his own words, MacArthur “never died; he just faded away”.

So, that’s MacArthur.

My thoughts turned to MacArthur because of two books.  While prepping for a clutch of pieces I wrote on Charles Pellegrino’s account of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, To Hell and Back, I spent some time slogging through the Japan atomic bombs denialist/revisionist fever swamp.  At the same time, I was also rereading Sterling and Peggy Seagrave’s 2003 classic of Asian conspiracy theory, paranoia, and fact, Gold Warriors.

“Denialists” is my personal terminology for people who deny that the atomic bombings were in any way unjustified or unnecessary; “revisionists” is a widely accepted term for people who assert the opposite.  To further complicate matters, “revisionists” come in lefty anti-US imperialist and righty anti-Communist flavors.

I don’t know how to classify my position in the denialist/revisionist debate.  Put me down as “humanitarian”, I guess: the bombings were inhumane, disproportionate, and useful but not indispensable in ending the war.  In the pure, legal sense, they skate pretty close to acts of terrorism as the U.S. Code defines them today: assaults on soft, primarily civilian targets with minor military value (the US Army Air Force had refrained from bombing Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and two other locations at the direction of the Manhattan Project Target Committee so the power of the atomic weapon could be demonstrated on relatively undamaged cities) with the primary objective of terrifying and demoralizing the target population and government as much as possible.

Or as the Code puts it, "terrorism" involves crimes that:

Appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. 

A major preoccupation of denialists is parsing and dismissing the indications that the Japanese government was seriously attempting to negotiate an end to the fighting as early as 1944 when it was clear that the Japanese imperial project was going nowhere, indeed going backwards at an accelerating rate.

This state of affairs was brought to my attention by a civil yet heated dustup on my Twitter timeline concerning the relative merits of analyses of the role of the atomic bomb in the Japanese surrender offered by denialist Richard Frank in his 1999 book Downfall (hadda drop ‘em!) and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s 2005 neo-revisionist Racing the Enemy (Colonel Mustard with a candlestick in the library!, I mean, Soviet declaration of war against Japan and advance toward Manchuria).

By 1945, Japan was getting its ass kicked, the overseas empire was disintegrating, the home islands were going to get bombed to flinders to soften them up for invasion, occupation and a round of war crimes trials & executions by the bloodied and vengeful U.S. conqueror. 

 

Plenty of incentive for the Japanese elite to cut a deal, in other words. 

One of many flash points for contesting the sincerity and capacity of the Japanese “peace faction” in negotiating a surrender with the United States (and justifying the use of the atomic bombs) for denialists is questioning the authenticity and value of what one might call the “MacArthur memo”, allegedly a 40-page summary of as many as five seemingly viable Japanese peace initiatives transmitted through various third-party channels, prepared by MacArthur and presented to Roosevelt in January 1945, just before the president left for Yalta.  

The existence of this memo was reported almost immediately after the surrender in 1945 by Arthur Trohan, who covered Washington during the FDR years in an adversarial way for the isolationist, anti-Roosevelt Chicago Tribune.

The Trib piece is preserved and enthusiastically glossed on a revisionist/holocaust denial website, IHR.  Apologies!  Trohan, under the headline Japs asked for peace in Jan. Envoys on way – Tokyo; Roosevelt Ignored M’Arthur Reports on Nip Proposals wrote in August 1945:

President Roosevelt dismissed the general's communication, which was studded with solemn references to the deity, after a casual reading with the remark, "MacArthur is our greatest general and our poorest politician."

The MacArthur report was not even taken to Yalta. However, it was carefully preserved in the files of the high command and subsequently became the basis of the Truman-Attlee Potsdam declaration calling for surrender of Japan.

…

Now that peace has been concluded on the basis of the terms MacArthur reported, high administration officials prepared to meet expected congressional demands for explanation of the delay. It was considered certain that from various quarters of Congress charges would be hurled that the delay cost thousands of American lives and casualties, particularly in such costly offensives as Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

According to Trohan, “The Terms [outlined in the MacArthur memo] were identical with those subsequently concluded by Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman” i.e. we could have already gotten the same deal in January 1945 that we eventually got in August 1945 after kayaking the four final cataracts of corpses: Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

 In Trohan’s twenty-year anniversary retrospective, he advanced the argument that responding to the Japanese overtures would not only have averted the butchery of the final island battles and the atomic bombings; it would have kept the Soviet Union in its place, both by pre-empting the Soviet declaration of war against Japan that triggered the Red Army advance in Manchuria, and by enabling a transfer of U.S. troops into the ETO so the U.S. could have made a better show of it in the struggle to control post-war Europe.

Or, as the subhead in Trohan’s 1965 piece put it, Earlier V-J Day Might Have Kept Russians Out of Berlin and Averted Cold War.  

That’s probably what MacArthur felt, and members of his large and influential military and political coterie.  Reading Trohan’s pieces, you get the clear picture that the story was leaked to him by people in tune with MacArthur’s views.  It should be said that MacArthur’s disdain for the significance of the atomic bombings is legendary; in fact, he is the grandpappy of the right-wing revisionists.

On one level, MacArthur’s grumbling is part of the right-wing revisionist narrative: that Roosevelt was a tool of USSR-adoring comsymps who obsessed about defeating Japan and unnecessarily prolonging the war so Uncle Joe could glom onto more of Europe and Asia, instead of winding down the Pacific struggle quick, clean, and early on in anticipation of utilizing Japan as an asset in the real war--the upcoming Cold War with the Soviet Union and world communism.

On a second, more disturbing level, one gets a hint that MacArthur felt that Roosevelt and his strategists brought about seven months of unnecessary slaughter by persisting in the military campaign instead of negotiating an end to the war in early 1945.   

So when Truman’s team was hyping the indispensable, unavoidable A-bomb, MacArthur’s team leaked the story to Trohan that the bombs were totally unnecessary.

There you have the right-wing revisionist case in a nutshell.  

Too bad, the existence of the MacArthur memo can’t be confirmed.

Trohan describes in 1965 how in 1953 Herbert Hoover “asked MacArthur for a copy of the original.  MacArthur verified the story” i.e. the existence of the memo…but to the delight of conspiracy theorists everywhere, MacArthur said he didn’t have a copy since he had sent his papers to the DoD where, per Trohan, the memo “was lost or removed from the files.”  

Understandably, interest in the purported MacArthur memo drives the denialists crazybananas.

I will now provide an extra helping of crazybananas as part of my effort to make the Internet more interesting: the suggestion that MacArthur’s inclinations in favor of a negotiated peace that found expression in the 40-page memo were colored by Japanese gold as well as more world-historical concerns like nobbling the Soviets, saving Americans lives, and keeping the atomic genie in its bottle.

That’s what comes of reading the Seagraves’ Gold Warriors.  Gold Warriors is an absolutely gonzo tale of thousands of tons of gold and treasure systematically looted by the Japanese imperial family in parallel with the Japanese military advance into East Asia, shipped to imperial vaults in Japan and, when transport to the home islands became too risky, hidden in 175 underground caverns in the Philippines.  It's sensational popular history, but with a couple CD’s worth of documentation; to provide some scholarly cred, Chalmers Johnson reviewed the book favorably with some caveats over at the LRB.

According to the Seagraves, MacArthur became aware of the existence of these troves in late 1945, while interrogating the erstwhile commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines, General Yamashita, and seized the gold on behalf of the United States.  The Philippine stash, combined with hidden treasure acquired after the fall of Japan, served as a massive off-the-books slush fund exploited by MacArthur and U.S. strategists for decades afterwards to secure the rule of pro-US/anti-Communist conservatives in Japan and engage in skullduggery worldwide.

Here’s my serving of alternate history: 

The reliance of MacArthur and, particularly, his intelligence czar, Charles Willoughby, during the occupation of Japan after World War II on Japanese right-wing military and civilian officials, spooks, and gangsters, well, the total, obscene symbiosis between parasite and host, is notorious and pretty well documented.

What if the cooperation with MacArthur began before the surrender, when the Japanese East Asia project was clearly foundering, rats were preparing to leave the ship, and the imperial family had to secure its future?

In my alternate universe, Japanese agents reach out to MacArthur clandestinely in 1944 to negotiate an early, more favorable conclusion to the war and an easy, low-friction occupation, more like a trusteeship.  They increase the attractiveness of the initiative by offering a game-changer: the prospect that MacArthur might have unrestricted and unaccountable access to enormous financial resources-- the wealth plundered from East Asia-- for the use of the American Caesar as his discretion to properly order the peace in Asia...and keep the Soviet Union in check, a joint obsession of Japanese conservatives and MacArthur.

It’s not an issue of bribing MacArthur, in other words; it’s offering him a throne of pure gold as imperator reigning over Asia (discretely assisted by a grateful Japanese elite), as an alternative to ruling Japan from a palace of corpses built by an apocalyptic battle for the home islands and endlessly enlarged by a bitter, region-wide insurgency driven by Japanese military dead-enders and local anti-colonialists.

Wouldn’t be easy to resist, would it?

In my legend, MacArthur finds the offer attractive.  And he supports the peace path by writing his 40-page memo to Roosevelt.

Roosevelt summarily dismisses the memo.  Maybe Roosevelt is in thrall to his advisors and a strategy of conquest and unconditional surrender premised on total military victory.  Maybe he knows about the peace proposals already, resents MacArthur’s presumption, and wants him to butt out of diplomacy and stick to soldiering.

Or maybe Roosevelt knows, through Magic intercepts or some other intel, that MacArthur is playing footsie with the Japanese.  And he finds the idea of MacArthur conducting an independent foreign policy with the enemy intolerable and borderline treasonous. 

 

So Roosevelt goes to Yalta and pre-empts the MacArthur route by publicly demanding unconditional surrender with no allowance for retention of the emperor, pushes the maximalist military strategy leading up to invasion of the home islands and, as insurance against footdragging by MacArthur, solicits the USSR’s entry into the Pacific War.

When the end comes, it’s not through a peace negotiated by MacArthur; it’s through a post-bomb public capitulation by the Emperor delivered via radio as the Soviets are poised to sweep into Asia.

In the end, Japan gets half a loaf.  Or maybe 90%.  Okinawa, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are devastated, half a million Japanese citizens die, and the USSR occupies the northern islands.  But the ruling Japanese elite gets MacArthur, retention of the imperial family, and a seamless restoration of conservative Japanese rule facilitated by the captured gold MacArthur is willing to place at its service.

Outrageous?  Yes.  But impossible?

That's a real Time Magazine cover, by the way.  May 9, 1949.  The caption reads "MacArthur of Japan: A decision for the next 1000 years".

To Hell and Back: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Update: Here's a link to an interview with Charles Pellegrino that aired on May 26, 2016 on the John Batchelor Show.

I thank Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus for posting an expanded version of this piece on its website on June 1, 2016.

I have a piece up at Asia Times To Hell and Back: Obama, Hiroshima, and Nuclear Denial and a companion piece, To Hell and Back: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, up at CounterPunch, just in time for President Obama’s visit & promised non-apology at Hiroshima.

“To Hell and Back” is a phrase that can bear a pretty heavy metaphorical load when it comes to talking about the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  It’s also the title of a book by Charles Pellegrino that is the subject of both of my pieces, and which I quote extensively at AT.

Pellegrino’s book is a moving and grueling close-up look at the horrors experienced by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both on the day of the bombing and in the days and years afterward.  I have the heart of a dried-up raisin but even I got a little teary in places.

There are few opportunities for inspiring “triumph of the human spirit” narratives amid the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The bombings were titanic, apocalyptic events that mock human scale and comprehension.  Pellegrino depicts dazed “ant-trails” of survivors threading through the instantaneously blasted landscapes and past heaps of the dead, dying, and horrifically maimed in the shadow of an eight-mile high radioactive cloud. Fate and the desperate efforts of the rescuers saved some, but many lives literally disintegrated in seconds, minutes, days, and years after the bombs were dropped.

Near the hypocenter, the experience of death was overwhelming and random in a dehumanizing way.  For some, it came down to the decision to wear a white shirt or a dark shirt.  The white shirt might reflect the intense, instantaneous radiation of the blast with remarkable efficacy; a black shirt absorbed the radiation and incinerated the wearer.

The bottom line for many survivors is that their families, their communities, their city, most of the world they knew, their health, their spiritual equilibrium, even their social status had been annihilated in an event of overwhelming horror.  The survivors experienced physical and mental trauma; ostracization; guilt; shame; and lingering illness.

Nevertheless, Pellegrino does document instances of courage, compassion, and ingenuity and people sustaining their humanity through acts of love and sacrifice.  

 An inspiration for the title of the book is the “double” hibakusha, people who experienced and survived both the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  One survivor of Hiroshima goes back home to Nagasaki and tells his co-workers of the awful weapon he had experienced; he warns them if they see a blinding flash—the pika—they must use it as a signal they have a few seconds to seek shelter before the don—the crash, the massive shock wave created by the bomb, arrives.

And so “duck and cover” was born.  

A document of human horror, To Hell and Back is also a memorial to the survivors and their struggle to restore sanity and meaning to their lives with little outside help.  And it also sounds like a backhanded reference to Pellegrino’s own travails at the hands of the nuclear denialists.

His book was originally published in 2010 as The Last Train to Hiroshima.  But the book—and Pellegrino himself-- became a piñata for indignant veterans, nuclear denialists, and atomic bomb fanboys.

The relatively substantive problem with Last Train was that a guy, who claimed to have been part of the squadron of planes escorting the Enola Gay and provided several pages of gripping detail, had made up his story.  

Pellegrino acknowledged the error and retracted, but it became clear that the intention of his opponents was not to correct errors; it was discredit Pellegrino, the book, and the idea that the sufferings of the victims should be remembered when considering the bomb and its legacy.

The attacks on the book went beyond scientific nitpicking along the lines of “could a human really be vaporized by an atomic bomb?” and snowballed into attacks on Pellegrino, his credentials, and his integrity.  The New York Times provided a platform for the anti-Pellegrino crowd, helping stampede the publisher, Henry Holt and Company, into withdrawing Last Train to Hiroshima.  

The battle continued on various message boards;  Pellegrino held his own, especially after it transpired that the New York Times and other media outlets, while pursuing their ambitions to serve as journalistic gatekeepers and bring a literary malefactor to justice, had themselves been gulled by a series of malicious forgeries supplied by Pellegrino’s enemies.

The attack on Last Train appears to have been very much of a piece, both in themes and protagonists, with longstanding U.S. government and military veteran groups' efforts to suppress the more disturbing issues and viewpoints surrounding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On the scientific side, the US government had a vested interest in suppressing the details of pervasive and persistent radiation effects that undercut the usability of nuclear weapons and threatened to deliver a gigantic bill for human and environmental remediation.  

Here’s one of the first important U.S. military documentaries on Hiroshima/Nagasaki, A Tale of Two Cities from 1946.  There’s a lot of image management going on; for instance, the Nagasaki bombardier missed the designated bull's eye by 3 miles, which is spun as a judicious decision to drop the nuke right between two major targets to git ‘em both!

What’s very interesting is the very early interest in poo-pooing radiation effects.  Physicists suspected from the outset that radioactive contamination from a nuclear blast was a pervasive, unmanageable problem; the Pentagon has always been, in a rather unscientific and immoral way, committed to advertising the fiction that contamination issues are manageable and the health impacts minimal.

The movie pushes the “clean blast” story (bomb detonated above ground to minimize fallout, which is I think a bit of a stretch; some scientists decided a ground detonation would soak up too much of the shock wave to yield a psychologically satisfying degree of devastation & proposed an airburst instead); presents the statement of a Jesuit priest that he worked in Hiroshima with no ill effects after the attack; and offers the reassuring observation that that it was back to business as usual on the roads of Nagasaki after the massive radiation release: “people using them without ill effects shortly after the explosion”.

Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US military has been kept busy in its crusade to assert the sanitary and housebroken character of nuclear events.  In 1954 it faced a particular challenge when eggheads miscalculated the yield of the Castle Bravo shot, a sizable chunk of Bikini Atoll was vaporized into radioactive dust, the Lucky Dragon No. 5 got contaminated, and Godzilla was born (no lie; read it here).  

Managing and covering up the consequences of atmospheric nuclear releases is also very much a contemporary problem for the US, as I’ve discussed in my CounterPunch piece on the U.S. apparent coverup of the radiation problems of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, which was contaminated offshore of Fukushima during post-earthquake/tsunami rescue operations.  

My piece picks apart the peacetime radiation effects issue in history, from one of the most significant fallout events in U.S. history—in Albany, New York, of all places!—and the Chernobyl disaster, in addition to Fukushima, to describe the U.S. government “long war” on unfavorable radiation effects science and its concerted effort to minimize the accounting of radiation casualties to the absolute, irrefutable bare minumum.

The Reagan has never been completely decontaminated, several hundred members of the crew and other U.S. military personnel are suing for compensation for medical issues, and the Reagan has been sitting in the naval base at Yokosuka for a suspiciously long time for an aircraft carrier that’s supposed to be pivoting all over the western Pacific at this crucial juncture (the USS Carl Vinson John Stennis out of San Diego & aircraft carriers transiting from the Middle East are picking up the d*ck-swinging slack).

But Hiroshima/Nagasaki denialists are only peripherally interested in issues of radiation effects.  They want to suppress or minimize all accounts of human suffering in order to pre-empt discussions of the morality of U.S. tactics in the ultimate “good war”.

Like the coverup of radiation effects, feel-good denialism has been a factor in attitudes toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the git-go.

Douglas MacArthur believed that the A-bomb got too much credit, especially since it threatened to dilute the glory of Douglas MacArthur’s victory in the Pacific, and his team devoted a significant effort to poor-mouthing the strategic significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as dismissing the magnitude of human suffering it caused.  In the words of MacArthur’s point man for spinning the public health effects of the attacks, Crawford Sams, the A-bomb was “a poor killer”.

Milestones in U.S. denialism include MacArthur’s imposition of censorship on reporting from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the suppression of gruesome footage of the medical consequences of the bombings, recorded shortly after the surrender both by a Japanese newsreel company and the U.S. Army’s own lavishly-funded Technicolor documentary unit.  

As chronicled by Greg Mitchell, the footage has emerged fitfully and incompletely. 

Erik Barnouw of Columbia University edited the two hours and forty five minutes of the Japanese footage into a 15 minute piece shown on US television in 1969:

Some of the U.S. Army footage, known as the McGovern footage after the unit director, found its way onto the Internet: 

Be warned before clicking: these two videos, especially the McGovern footage, are essentially medical atrocity videos.

But also, if you can sit through the videos, you notice that to the amateur observer much of the movie documents horrific burn trauma that, aside from footage of people whose eyes got melted by the flash, doesn’t look demonstrably and exclusively like radiation effects.

It just looks awful and inhumane.  And that’s probably why it was suppressed.

Key punctuation points in the war against humanitarian and pacifist attempts to detail the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the campaigns against plans for a revisionist setting for the Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute in 1994 and 2003.

Many of the same protagonists emerged with the same themes to savage Pellegrino in 2010.

One of the interesting and melancholy developments is that the denialist campaign to minimize the human consequences of the atomic bombings seems to be losing some of its heat in 2016.  Not necessarily because understanding, reflection, and compassion (in Japanese omoiyari, a concept embraced by some hibakusha that Pellegrino celebrates in his book) are finally prevailing; it’s because the World War II generation is dying and it’s easier to ignore a bygone horror when the living, human legacy of injury and suffering is no longer before our eyes.

The good news is that Pellegrino’s book is back, new and improved, expanded, documented, fact-checked, and footnoted and published by Rowman & Littlefield thanks to the efforts of Mark Selden of Cornell.  You can do the publisher a solid by buying the book direct from the R&L website.  And for the most complete and authoritative reporting on nuclear/radiation issues in Japan, bookmark Selden’s Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus e-journal.

The Atom Bomb: “A Poor Killer”

Crawford Sams and the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Japan

General Crawford Sams reconstituted or, to be more accurate, recreated the Japanese public health system after World War II. No stranger to pride or self-confidence, he characterized himself as one the six men who ran Japan under MacArthur.

With good reason, Sams credited himself with decreasing mortality by five million lives through application of his exemplary professionalism, energy, and focus to the prevention of epidemics, upgrading the health care system, and improving nutrition during the occupation.

As a military medical man, General Sams had a healthy respect for epidemic disease as the leading cause of casualties and degraded fighting ability of armies amid the chaos and destruction of wartime. According to his experience, World War II was the first war in which actual fighting produced more U.S. casualties than disease.

His respect for the atomic bomb? Not so great.

General Sams also ran the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, charged with evaluating the mortality and morbidity associated with the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

According to an oral history Sams recorded in 1979, his first job was to collect the data; the second job was to hype it:

There was a letter brought over by this first group that came up to Japan from the Philippines with me, from the Manhattan Project, in which the President was looking for a new deterrent against a future war…So the object of this instruction, called Letter of Instruction, was “You will play up the devastating effect of the atomic bomb.” All right?

So I was the one who set the deadline this time. Anybody who had been in Hiroshima and died within six months, whether they got run over by a bicycle or whatnot, would be credited to the atomic bomb. We had to set some kind of order to this…all the reports that came back were the result of these studies that came over my desk.

The atomic bomb went off and that city had about 250 thousand people in it…When the bomb went off, about 2 thousand people out of 250 thousand got killed – by blast, by thermal radiation, or by intense x-ray, gamma radiation.

Then, what happened is like an earthquake. The blast knocked down houses, hibachis had turned over and started fires. When you have an earthquake or an atomic bomb, you start fires and then people are trapped in the buildings.

And again, by endless interviews, “Where were you?” “Where was your great uncle?” “Where was grandma when this occurred?” We built up the evidence to show on a cookie-cutter basis that it took about thirty-six hours for about two-thirds of that town to burn.

You see, it wasn’t “Bing” like the publicity here [said]: a bomb went off and a city disappeared. No such thing happened. That was the propaganda for deterrent. They’re talking about after that, “One bomb and away goes Chicago,” you know? All you’ve got to do is look in Life magazine and whatnot back in ’45, ’46, and so on. ... Well, you have to keep your feet on the ground.

As near as we could figure then, about twenty-one thousand people died in thirty-six hours as a result of being trapped and burned and so on. It’s like those who died in the ’23 earthquake [and subsequent] fire.

Then, as I say, I set the six months’ deadline for anybody who had been there, even though they went away and so on, to put a deadline on deaths from delayed radiation effects as far as it takes six months or so for deaths from (what do they call it?) delayed effects.

One of us …got a priest there to say he guessed 100 thousand people died when the bomb went off. Well, you see, it didn’t. There never was 100 thousand people [who] died. I recall the figures to the ultimate, six months’ deaths from untreated burns, thermal burns – they didn’t have any drugs or anything else, except what we could get in to them – and the delayed effects of radiation which take several months. …It was about 76 [thousand] [who] ultimately died in six months, out of 250 thousand.
…
Actually, the atomic bomb was a poor killer.

Indeed, according to Sams, the only reason that the casualty numbers in Hiroshima were as high as they were was because the Japanese government had taken no measures to disperse the population there—as it had done in Tokyo in anticipation of the devastating U.S. incendiary raids of 1945.

Sams was even less impressed by the atom bombing of Nagasaki.

Down at Nagasaki, they missed the ground zero they tried to hit, but there’s still the fact that it hit Nagasaki Medical School and Hospital there and killed a lot of patients and so on – from the _____(?) of the concrete building. But the blast effected [sic] this and knocked down part of the concrete and so on. But you don’t hear much about the effects of Nagasaki because actually it was pretty ineffective. That was a narrow corridor from the hospital in _____(?) down to the port, and the effects were very limited as far as the fire spread and all that stuff. So you don’t hear much about Nagasaki.

Indeed, the structure of the Nagasaki Medical School and Hospital—700 meters from the hypocenter-- was still standing after the attack.

Sams had also participated in the famous post-World War II Strategic Bombing Survey of Europe, which concluded that Germany’s industrial output had simply increased as the U.S. and Great Britain had pounded its factories and infrastructure with huge bombing raids.

He placed the Truman administration’s need to exaggerate the destructive effects of the atomic bomb in the context of the desire to create a new, more credible deterrent now that the strategic bombing boogeyman was a thing of the past:

After each war, for political reasons, you’d try to find a deterrent to prevent the next war.

After the First World War, it was gas warfare and people – you probably wouldn’t remember – but after that we even had motion pictures (the movies) about gassing New York City and so on till somebody figured out the air currents were such [that] you couldn’t hold a concentration of gas to gas New York City if the people stayed in the buildings and closed the windows. So that failed.

The next deterrent was air power, and so from the time of Billy Mitchell in 1925 to the Second World War, [the belief was that] if we ever had another war, air power would destroy civilization. Sound familiar? So, the theoretical production of air casualties, the catching of troops in defiles and their obliteration was the thesis in which we were all indoctrinated up until the beginning of the Second World War.
…
As you know then again, the myth of strategic bombing carried on and finally “Tooey” [Gen. Carl A.] Spaatz, who was an ex-classmate of mine and so on, was given [command of the] Eighth Air Force [with] the authority, together with the RAF, to bomb Germany. And Germany industrially was to collapse. But of course it failed. ..

I was part of the Strategic Bomb Survey Group in the theater to assess damage as we progressed across where we had been bombing Tobruk, for instance, and supposedly had cut off [the enemy’s] oil supply. When we got there, we found, of course, we had knocked down the warehouses and so on, but he dispersed his supplies in the desert, so we hadn’t cut off anything.
…
So the casualty factor was – I sent back reports on this – that air power was not a major casualty producer. But when you have a whole senior echelon, like in Washington, indoctrinated over years, growing up with the idea that you could stop armored columns with air power and so on, it’s hard to get that reversal.

I had to do the same thing with the atomic bomb when I came back.

To Sams, the atom bomb was nothing new. It was a new form of strategic bombing, but the Germans and the Japanese had already figured out the appropriate countermeasure: dispersal.

Sams believed that the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, had made drawn the correct lesson from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: that the casualties and damages from an atomic attack could be mitigated by a strategy of dispersal and atomic attack was therefore survivable.

Interestingly, the Chinese government drew the same conclusion and engaged in a massive dispersal of industrial and military assets to remote areas of the country—primarily as a countermeasure to an anticipated atomic attack by the Soviets—during the 1960s.

Sams was a loyal MacArthur man and left Japan for reassignment (the Army had rejected his attempt to retire) when Truman relieved MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

Back in the United States, Sams proselytized for a policy of strategic dispersal which seems to have run afoul of the U.S. military’s addiction to the doctrine of deterrence and the intoxicating effect of the budget-busting pursuit of Mutually Assured Destruction.

When I came back to this country, I was appalled, from a military standpoint, to find that our major planners in the War Department were using their own propaganda, 100 thousand deaths, Bing!

It took me a couple of years to get that comparison straightened out in our official training doctrine in this country. I used to tell them back in the general staff and so on and including the chief of staff, “...if you can deter a war, for God’s sake, let’s do it and blow up the effects all you want
…
It’s all right to put out propaganda, but don’t believe your own propaganda. That’s what happens too often in this business. That’s why you had the hysteria about this radiation thing up here. So I had a job of de-glamorizing, if you like, no that’s not the word – debunking the myth that air power alone could win a battle against ground troops, or that air power could win a war…

It took me about four years to get some facts straightened out about the atomic bomb at Hiroshima with our high echelon people and now you’ve got a generation of diplomats who still are swallowing the old nonsense and putting it out.

But anyway, this has been the kind of a thing I’ve gotten into, not because of choice, but because when I found something that doesn’t fit the generally-accepted thing, I try to find what’s true and what’s fallacious.

In that Valhalla reserved for military men of the Sam-Browne-belt wearing, polo-playing persuasion, Sams is probably grumping, Suck on that, Wikipedia!

Sams may have been right about the survivability of nuclear war, but I suppose we can be grateful that his energetic debunking only took hold in the military sphere and not in the civilian/political realm. Otherwise we probably would have gotten into a few nuclear scuffles by now with the Russians and Chinese. And our muddled and partial peace is preferable to a nuclear exchange--even if it's survivable.