ABSTRACT
The preceding pages have closely followed the gradual deterioration of Japan’s military situation until the nation was “naked to its enemies,” unable to defend with their own aircraft against sustained allied bombing of the home islands unleashed daily at the enemies’ will. The historical phenomenon of the Japanese government’s refusal to submit to surrender before the final cataclysmic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the indispensable factor in studying the possible justifiability of Truman’s decision to exterminate these cities. The American decision to go forward with these cruel bombings was dictated by the resolute public refusal of the Japanese cabinet to seek a timely escape from their looming fate of physical destruction within the coming months. Only those few Americans who deeply understood Japan were able to grasp this invincible preference for national death over the dishonor of surrender. Those few commentators saw early the historical inevitability of the Yamato nation’s death wish. As early as 1943, however, responsible Americans had warned their fellow citizens about this national suicide wish. For in that year an Associated Press correspondent, Russell Brines, had warned, on his release from imprisonment by the Japanese in Manila, and later in Shanghai:
“We will fight,” the Japanese say, “until we eat stones!” The phrase is old; now revived and ground deeply into the Japanese consciousness by propagandists skilled in marshaling their sheeplike people … [It] means they will continue the war until every man (perhaps every woman and child) lies face downward on the battlefield. Thousands of Japanese, maybe hundreds of thousands, accept it literally. To ignore this suicide complex would be as dangerous as our pre-war oversight of Japanese determination and cunning which made Pearl Harbor possible … American fighting men back from the front have been trying to tell America this is a war of extermination. They have seen it from foxholes and barren strips of bullet-strafed sand. I have seen it from behind enemy lines. Our picture coincides. This is a war of extermination. The Japanese militarists have made it this way.1
