Tuesday, July 17, 1945

FORGET THOSE PEACE RUMORS. Call it the battle of the undersecrertaries. First, Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew said the Japanese are putting out "peace feelers", a statement bitterly mocked by Radio Tokyo. Well, it’s also being mocked by none other than Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson. I think Mr. Patterson has the better argument --

"We must prepare ourselves to win our war with Japan the hard way -- by killing Japanese soldiers right through the ruins of Tokyo and throughout the home islands. . . . [The Japanese army] will not surrender to an inference, the inference that it is beaten."

And yes, it’s true that Japan’s food shortage is getting critical, and the blasting or her oil refining centers at Tokyo Bay (not to mention the loss of Japan’s oil fields in faraway Borneo) will create an oil shortage that will be even more critical to the functioning of her military. But Japan’s growing disadvantages are partially offset by the fact that, as Mr. Patterson says, our enemy has learned to fight smarter --

"On Okinawa they did not attempt a defense of the beaches, where they would be under point-blank naval gunfire: they went back to prepared positions. In other words they picked their battlefield. Their artillery fire is far more effective than a year ago."

Remember this when the headlines announce we’ve invaded Kyushu, and the press is full of glowing accounts of how "amazingly light" Japanese resistance is right after our Marines hit the beaches. And in the meantime, let’s not clutch at any more straws about Japanese "peace feelers." It’s bad enough when the press circulates them -- must Truman administration officials spread them as well?

posted by Michael 8:08:00 AM

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WHAT IS "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER"? Should we demand the right to get rid of the Emperor, dismantle the Japanese dynasty, and eradicate Japan’s long-time political and religious system? Or should we simply boot out the militarists and leave everything else pretty much as is? This is the crux of the debate right now, and I think Walter Lippman’s latest New York Herald Tribune column provides a sharp answer --

"The question . . . is whether it is necessary to demand the liquidation of the Japanese social order, with its peculiar dynastic and religious domination. There is substantial reason for thinking that all Japanese interpret 'unconditional surrender' as meaning just that, and that this is the sticking point when they consider whether they should sue for peace. . . . My own view is that, in determining war aims, that is to say conditions for which we deem it necessary to fight , we should -- if there is a choice -- choose the minimum terms which are certainly necessary rather than maximum terms which may be desirable but are not clearly necessary. The burden of proof, in other words, is on those who wish to go beyond the Cairo terms, and to identify unconditional surrender with a forced internal revolution. In examining the argument, we are bound to ask ourselves whether the Japanese problem is the same as the German. It was certain that Hitler had to be destroyed, and since he had usurped all the powers of the German state, he could not have any legitimate successor. But the Japanese Emperor is not a usurper, and more often than not in Japanese history the Emperor has reigned but has not ruled. It is quite conceivable then that he might continue to reign, but that the country would be ruled by men who had surrendered the conquests and military power of Japan and had given guarantees. If this is the right course, and provided the Allies have reached a strategical and political agreement, it would be no sign of weakness to let it be known in Tokyo."

At the risk of belaboring the point, I don’t think we should get at all hopeful that we can persuade the enemy to "sue for peace" simply by defining surrender by some minimal standard. But a pronouncement of what "unconditional surrender" entails could be a meaningful weapon in the battles to come. If our offer to leave the Emperor in place were to simply reduce the willingness of Japanese civilians to fight to the death, or to erode the influence of fight-to-the-finish militarists, it can save U.S. soldiers’ lives in the weeks and months ahead. That alone makes Mr. Lippmann’s prescribed course desirable.

posted by Michael 8:05:00 AM

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WHERE’S HITLER? The Chicago Tribune says that he and Eva Braun have both made it to South America, via German submarine. From correspondent Vincent de Pascal --

"From information just received from Buenos Aires, I am virtually certain that Adolf Hitler and his 'wife,' Eva Braun, the latter dressed in masculine clothes, landed in Argentina and are on an immense German-owned estate in Patagonia."

The Tribune doesn’t explain how the submarine successfully ferried the Fuehrer and his gal out of battle-blasted Berlin, but I’m sure some creative wordsmith will soon enlighten us. Maybe the Tribune will want to play that up, too.

posted by Michael 8:02:00 AM

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I’LL PASS, THANKS. From Time magazine’s Miscellany section -- "In Springfield, Ohio, hospital attendants reported Willie Martin’s condition as 'good' after he had been treated for absorption of a homemade punch made of iodine, turpentine, kerosene, rat poison, lighter fluid, shoe polish, and wine."

posted by Michael 7:56:00 AM

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Sunday, July 15, 1945

A CLEW THAT SOMETHING’S UP? Like an early invasion of Japan, maybe? The big news this morning is that President Truman has suddenly decided to cut short his European trip and will "hurry back" to the White House as soon as the Big Three conference at Potsdam is over. From Edward Foulliard in the Washington Post --

"The decision of the Chief Executive, reported by a correspondent who crossed the Atlantic with him on the cruiser Augusta, was believed in some quarters here to be linked with the war against Japan. That war is now mounting to a crescendo. American warships and planes are giving the Japanese homeland the most terrible pounding in history, and there is nothing the Japanese can do to stop it except to surrender. In the opinion of some high-ranking officers, the question of whether Japan is going to surrender or fight it out to a bloody and catastrophic finish will be answered soon, perhaps in the next six weeks. If this view is shared by President Truman, it would be explanation enough for his decision to cut short his trip . . . . Certainly he would want to be here if any great decisions had to be made. It is possible, of course, that the President was informed of some important development while he was out on the Atlantic. At any rate, something seems to have come up between the time he left here and the time the Augusta started through the English Channel. The day that President Truman left the White House and started for Newport News, there was no suggestion that he would be in a hurry to return."

It’s tempting, but way too optimistic, to speculate that the "important development" could be a signal from Tokyo that they’re willing to surrender. The Japanese have fought fanatically over scraps of land far from the home islands, and there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t fight twice as fanatically for their own territory. But it is interesting (and maybe not too optimistic) to consider the possibility that the blistering, ongoing assault from U.S. warplanes and naval guns, such as the latest attacks this week-end against the steel city of Muroran, have reduced Japanese defenses to the point that an invasion could be launched much earlier than previously thought. The earlier an invasion can begin, the less time Tokyo will have to coordinate an all-out civilian defense. And the less likely our ground forces will be sucked into fighting a new round of Aachens, Cassinos, and Stalingrads.

posted by Michael 8:03:00 AM

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POTSDAM WON’T SOLVE EVERYTHING. The upcoming Potsdam conference is being hailed in some quarters as critical, historic, determinative of the fate of the world for decades to come, etc. (Remember, they said the same thing about Yalta.) So it’s kind of refreshing to read Herbert L. Matthews in today’s New York Times, who seems to realize that, with all the problems facing the Big Three and the emerging United Nations, there’s only so much a conference can do. There’s the huge issue of how to govern Germany in the years ahead, of course, but there’s so much more. Mr. Matthews identifies some of what the Big Three will be concerned with --

"The problems of Turkey, for instance, directly involve the Balkans and that cockpit of Europe has never been more of a battleground than today. There is Greece frantically worried about her northern frontiers. There is Marshal Tito on something of a rampage, growling about the Greeks and clamoring for Trieste, Venezia, Giulia and Carinthia. And across the Adriatic is Italy threatening to become a major problem through her economic distress and demands for settlement of her status. There are minor questions like Iran, with her oil, her port of Basra and her occupation by armies of Russia and Britain. Just last week the Communist party newspaper Pravda attacked the Iranian government severely. There are the Polish elections. There is German and Polish coal. There are Spain and Generalissimo Francisco Franco. . . . And do not forget that the war is still on. Most people expect the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan and that is certainly something that the Big Three will discuss. And that brings up the vast problem of China and minor ones like Korea, Manchukuo, Hong Kong and foreign investments in the Far East."

It’s no wonder, as Mr. Matthews writes, that "those three master magicians in Potsdam are not going to wave their magic wands and quell the floods. The waters are too deep and turbulent. All they can hope to do is pour a little oil on them here and there, put up a dike at one point and a breakwater at another than then wait, hope and work for things to calm down. . . . One can plot roughly what they will aim at. In general the British must play for international setups, the Russians for as free a hand as possible, and the Americans for their long-term strategic considerations, their foreign trade and finances and their intense desire for a settlement that will safeguard the peace -- a desire shared by the other two."

posted by Michael 7:57:00 AM

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OTHERWISE, IT’S PERFECT. From Time magazine’s Miscellany section -- "In Nora Springs, Iowa, town officials forked over $25 for running a truck with no headlights, no tail lights, no sidelights, no stoplights, no clearance lights, no identification lights, no flares, no red flags, no windshield wiper, no rear-view mirror, no license plates."

posted by Michael 7:54:00 AM

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