Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan

There is a lot of meat in this book. The author reviews the documentary evidence on the end of WWII. Japan was still battling the United States, China, and Great Britain. The Soviet Union had just ended its war in Europe and Stalin was interested in spoils in East Asia. The book's title is how America and Russia raced to end the war in East Asia to enlarge and protect their geopolitical interests. The other race was between the peace party and the militarists in Japan. Would Japan fight to the very end, or would they capitulate as Germany did in WWI. Truman used the atomic weapons in the hope they would end the war, but also had other reasons. Truman's use of these weapons was also linked to his revenge streak for Pearl Harbor and as a demonstration of his secret weapon to Stalin. The Japanese were shown as facilating beteen fighting to the end or seeking peace. When the Potsdam accords were published, they chose not to answer and their silence resulted in the atomic bombs.

This is a nice academic read on the end of World War II. The author has done ground breaking research on the principal characters of Japan, USA, and the Soviet Union during July and August of 1945.

"Racing the Enemy" is a meticulous yet gripping reconstruction of the three-sided diplomacy surrounding the surrender of Japan in 1945. The author's basic aim is to recreate the perspectives of policymakers in Tokyo, Washington and Moscow. For the most part he is successful, as he takes the reader on a fascinating day-by-day, memo-by-memo tour of decision-making in the three capitals.

The storyline: By the summer of 1945, Japan was isolated, blockaded, and in ruins. The end was near. However, America was still smarting over Pearl Harbor, and Truman was eager to defeat the Japanese quickly without Russian involvement; as a result, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated even though Washington knew that Tokyo was looking for ways to exit the war. Meanwhile, Moscow fooled Tokyo into thinking it might broker peace talks with the U.S.; in reality, Stalin was planning to betray Japan and grab territories in Manchuria and the Kuriles. Finally, military and civilian leaders in Tokyo were hopelessly divided about how to save Japan and its monarchy from destruction, even though it was clear (to the civilians, at least) that the war was lost. The upshot was lost diplomatic opportunities, atomic warfare, massacred innocents, and Soviet power grabs. The collapse of the would-be "Moscow connection" probably did more to cause the Japanese surrender than the atom bombs did. No one comes off well.

"Racing the Enemy" is clearly written and informed by the latest archival discoveries. The author has a sharp understanding of how decisions are made (or not made) in government bureaucracies. It is truly a tour de force. However, I gave the book only four stars for two reasons: First, it needed more biographic information on the principal decision-makers; unfortunately, most of them come across as names and titles, not as flesh-and-blood personalities. Second, the book needed an appendix containing the full text of documents such as the Potsdam Declaration or the Byrnes Note; the absence of these key texts is a bizarre omission in a book that depends so much on the careful reading of memos, cables, and demarches.

I think that this book is certainly researched thoroughly and he takes a great deal of time to step by step cover what many books involving this war only touch upon at this stage: the political chess game leading up to the eventual capitulation of the Japanese.
The only downfall that I find is that it appears from time to time in the text that Hasegawa sometimes falls into the trap of having the luxury of the passage of the last 62 years to judge the actions made by the individuals in power rather than judging it from the perspective of the time.
Still, it is a very interesting and thought provoking read.

By 1945 Japan seemed well and truly beaten. Its navy and merchant fleet were on the bottom of the pacific. Its air force lacked fuel and was limited in what operations it could launch and its cities were being destroyed by Curtin LeMay's fire raids. One would have thought the unconditional surrender in 1945 unremarkable. The story was however more complex. Japan had only committed a small fragment of its army to the South East Asian and Pacific theatre. Most of its troops were in China and Manchuria. Even in 1945 it controlled a considerable empire including Malaya, Vietnam, what was to become Indonesia, Korea and a good deal of China. The Japanese Army had been transferring its army to the homeland. In addition it had some 9,000 aircraft which could be used as Kamikaze bombers. What the army hoped to do was to inflict a defeat on the American force that would invade Japan in 1945 and then obtain a favourable peace.

In August the Japanese government tried to manoeuvrer the Soviets into acting as intermediaries in a negotiated peace. The Soviets however had other intentions. Stalin wanted to grab large parts of what had been the Japanese Empire. He was keen to intervene in the war so that he could extend his empire. He however kept these aims from the Japanese till he was ready to move.

The strength of this book is that it shows that rather than the surrender of Japan resulting from one cause such as the dropping of the Atom bomb it was a combination of that and the Soviet attacks. The Soviets attacked the Japanese army in Manchuria with one and a half million men thousands of tanks and aircraft. The Japanese forces collapsed with the Soviets talking over Manchuria and North Korea.

With this attack the hope that the Japanese had of inflicting a defeat on the Americans and using the Soviets as intermediaries collapsed. While that was happening two bombs were dropped that killed 150,000 or so people. It was this that led to the decision of the Emperor to back those in his cabinet who favoured peace.

The book is one of the fullest outlines of the last days of the Japanese Empire. It also explodes a number of myths. For instance it is clear that Truman did not make a decision to drop the bomb. What he did was not to prevent the military making the decision to drop it. It would appear that he was keen to do so for the reasons of avenging Pearl Harbour and demonstrating to the Soviets the power of the bomb. Truman also had hoped that the existence of the bomb might have led to the end of the war before the Soviets could intervene. Stalin however was keen to get into the action and to grab parts of the far east. Thus it was a race to get into the war before Japanese resistance collapsed.

:"Racing the Enemy" makes a strong, though very strange, contribution to the endless controversy about the end of World War II, the use of atomic bombs, the deals cut between the democracies and Communism and -- not the least interesting in the early 21st century -- how repressive societies can be turned around.
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is unusually well equipped to investigate this complex issue, beginning with a command of most of the relevant languages and extending to access to archives, mainly Soviet, that have not been used before.
He makes the least of his advantages, starting with the incomprehensible title. The dust jacket shows Harry Truman and Josef Stalin, and the subtitle singles them out. The book is about an alleged race between enemies -- who are never specified.
It looks as if he means the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., though they were not enemies at the time. Japan was the enemy of the United States, yet it is ridiculous to claim, as Hasegawa does, that in May 1945, America began "racing" Japan to wind up the war.
The United States had been going all out for three and a half years by then, especially in producing an atom bomb, which was planned to be used against Germany.
Hasegawa makes a better case that the U.S.S.R. hoped that Japan would not surrender before it got itself redirected from crushing Germany and could start grabbing provinces in East Asia.
His case, though, is tendentious. The words he applies to the United States and especially Truman, are absurd: "Diabolical" might rightly be applied to any of several national policies in the 1930s and '40s, but not to America's. Nor does he offer any evidence to support his repeated allegations that Truman was motivated by "revenge."
Hasegawa's contention that the A-bombs did not shock the Japanese into surrendering is more interesting. He contends that it was the sudden attack by the U.S.S.R. on Japan's army in Manchuria two days after the Hiroshima bomb that was decisive.
This point has been argued before. It isn't a question that demands an either/or answer.
Like all controversialists who are determined to fault the use of the A-bombs, Hasegawa has to contend that Japan would have surrendered without them. The usual argument, and the one Hasegawa favors, is that the men controlling Japan would fight no matter how hopelessly to defend the "national polity" so long as the alternative was unconditional surrender.
Hasegawa does a good job of exploring the ambiguities of the term "national polity," which was not merely preservation of the emperor system.
But his own evidence explodes the idea that an American offer to accept less than unconditional surrender would have shortened the war.
It is not overstating the facts to state that, with one exception, all the leaders of Japan in mid-1945 were barking mad. The exception was Naotake Sato, Tokyo's ambassador in Moscow.
When the (mostly irrelevant) Japanese Foreign Ministry attempted to maneuver Stalin into helping Japan extricate itself from its war, Sato "requested specific information about conditions that the Japanese government wished to present for the termination of the war. Sato put his finger right on the problem. But from (Foreign Secretary Shigenori) Togo's standpoint, what Sato requested was an impossible task. He could not give any concrete proposals, since there were none. Such proposals would surely split the cabinet, wrecking any chance for peace."
This happened on July 13, three weeks before Hiroshima.
In that one paragraph, Hasegawa consigns a shelf of revisionist histories -- and a good part of the subsequent chapters of his own book -- to the scrap heap.
Very strange but all the more valuable because of it.