Marc Gallicchio - Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II

PIVOTAL MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

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James M. McPherson

David Greenberg

James T. Patterson

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Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800

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Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

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James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights

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The Bay of Pigs

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The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation

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The Battle of Midway

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Roosevelts Second Act: The Election of 1940 and the Politics of War

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A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience

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Lincolns Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion

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Braddocks Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution

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The Far East and the Pacific. Areas Under Allied and Japanese Control, 15 August 1945. Courtesy of Department of History, U.S. Military Academy.

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Marc Gallicchio 2020

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For Sam and Isabelle, unconditionally

I have worked on this project on and off for many years. I was able to present a very early version of it at Tohoku and Doshisha Universities in Japan as Fulbright Lecturer in 19981999. Other projects intervened, and in 2014, when I had started up again in earnest, I was called away by the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to work with my mentor, Waldo Heinrichs. Waldo was also my friend and my first reader for nearly forty years. He passed away while I was working on this book. My enjoyment in finishing this project has been greatly diminished by not being able to seek his advice and share my findings with him.

I am very grateful for the funding I received to conduct the research for this project. I wish to thank the Provosts Office at Villanova University for two faculty research grants, the Department of History for use of the Albert Lepage faculty research fund, and the Harry S. Truman Library.

Two of my graduate assistants at Villanova, Thomas Foley and Christopher Mengel, were a great help in locating materials for this book. I am thankful for the support of my colleagues in the Department of History at Villanova who have made working there such an enjoyable experience. In particular, I want to thank Lynne Hartnett and Paul Rosier for their advice and wise counsel at the very last stages of this project, Vicki Sharpless for help with computer-related questions, and Frances Murphy for her invaluable assistance with the photographs that appear in this book.

I also want to thank my editor at Oxford University Press, Tim Bent, for being willing to take me on for a second book. I appreciate his toleration of my delays, his editorial judgment, and his careful attention to every line of the manuscript.

Finally, I am eternally grateful to my wife, Lisa Ross, for her support, encouragement, and sound advice. Lisa is the intelligent reader we all write for, but with a better sense of humor. Thank you, dear, for helping me through another of these books.

Visitors to Pearl Harbor today often begin their tour with the USS Missouri, the last battleship commissioned by the United States in World War II and now a popular museum. They learn about the elaborate ceremony staged in Tokyo Bay in September 1945, when Japanese officials capitulated to the United States and its allies on the hulking vessels deck. On this historic spot, visitors can take in the full course of the waror at least the American experience of the warfrom start to finish.

Most Americans generally know that Japans surrender was unconditional. Yet few give much thought to what that freighted word means, beyond its connoting the decisive victory of liberal democracy over fascism and imperialism. But why was the completeness of the Allied victory and the abjectness of the Japanese defeat so necessary? And why is it so important?

Marc Gallicchios book recounts the full story behind the Japanese surrender. From Harry S. Trumans ascension to office in April 1945, through the Potsdam Conference of July, and on into Japans August decision to surrender just days after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the narrative involves the concurrent military, diplomatic, and political developments with which the new American president had to contend. Braiding together these multiple threads, Gallichio allows us to understand the controversy that perpetually surrounds Trumans choices, and in turn to see why the question of unconditionality has remained central to our thinking about war and how to end it.

The original call for unconditional surrender came from Franklin D. Roosevelt. In Casablanca in January 1943, the thick of the war, FDR held a press conference after meeting with Winston Churchill at which he foresaw absolute victory for the Allies, explaining that the Axis PowersGermany, Italy, Japanwould ultimately need to accept without reservation the terms the Allies would set down for concluding hostilities. Americans readily accepted this policy. Given the stakes, why should the Allies settle for less?