![]() In this new work, she notes, Gallicchio “painstakingly depicts this head-spinning messiness of the battlefield of policymaking into which Truman was suddenly thrust,” and also superbly weaves together domestic politics with the war. Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu praises Gallicchio’s “meticulous research and the author’s erudition,” a combination that results in “an illuminating probe” and “a venerable addition” to recent scholarship on how the Pacific war ended The volume, she adds, also complements the award-winning Implacable Foes that Gallicchio co-authored with his late mentor Waldo Heinrichs. occupation suppressed true democratic revolution. Pyle’s recent argument that unconditional surrender “provoked unconditional resistance” in Japan while the ensuing U.S. And interestingly, Yellen cites Kenneth B. Yellen does complain, however (as does Tsuyoshi Hasegawa in his comments,) that the Japanese side gets “short shrift” in Gallicchio’s book. Yellen emphasizes, as does Gallicchio, the fascinating 180 degree political shift on the unconditional surrender policy that has taken place since the war ended, whereby conservatives today defend the policy that liberals pressed for in 1945 while liberals today attack the policy as conservatives did in 1945. Yellen twice labels Unconditional Surrender a “fantastic book.” He identifies four schools of thought on the war’s end and places Gallicchio’s work in the one that focuses on domestic politics. One, however, finds much to criticize and relatively little to praise. Of the four scholars participating in this roundtable, three highly praise Gallicchio’s book and find little to criticize. In direct opposition to the left-right divide on this issue today, he finds that domestic conservatives pressed for modification so as to allow for retention of the emperor and thereby hopefully obtain a quick and conditional Japanese surrender as a way to limit or prevent Soviet territorial gains, while domestic liberals blamed the emperor as well as the Japanese militarists for the war and sought to remove him so as to totally remake the Japanese government and society. His emphasis is on the domestic debate amongst policymakers and their advisers in the United States over whether or not to modify the policy of unconditional surrender so as to allow the Japanese to keep their imperial system of government. Marc Gallicchio’s Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II is one of the most recent of these new approaches. The tone of the debate has somewhat calmed down since then, as a new generation of historians using recently declassified documents and multi-archival research has come up with innovative approaches that draw upon but greatly expand on the research and the conclusions of both sides in the original debate. invasion of the Japanese home islands, the Smithsonian wound up showing only a section of the Enola Gay bomber that had dropped the first bomb, with no accompanying analysis or explanation at all-a result that appalled many historians and led to charges of ‘politically correct’ vs ‘patriotically correct’ censorship as well as a special roundtable in (and a special Tony Auth cartoon on the cover of) the December 1995 issue of The Journal of American History. ![]() When attempts at compromise over the script broke down over the issue of projected casualties for a U.S. Alperovitz’s thesis came under furious attack by President Harry S Truman’s defenders and, despite attempted syntheses in the 1970s and 1980s, the debate reached a crescendo of sorts in 1994-95 with the heated public controversy over the Smithsonian Institution’s planned exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and the end of the war in the Pacific. Directly contradicting the official and widely accepted belief that the bombs had been dropped to force Japanese surrender and save American lives, Alperovitz argued that the primary motive had been to intimidate the Soviet Union by exhibiting this new and awesome U.S weapon. ![]() Although there had been some early criticism of the American use of this new weapon against Japan, only with the 1965 publication of Gar Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy did a furious debate truly begin. Stoler, University of Vermontįor more than half a century now, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the ensuing Japanese surrender have been one of the most controversial issues in U.S. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |