Yes indeed. Wellerstein lays out the evidence from that speech in a 2018 post, and has a 2014 post offering an explanation of how Truman got that misconception in the first place. The two of those together convinced me that Truman really was confused about the fact that Hiroshima was a city full of civilians, and thought it was a military base.
The speech was a radio address the evening of August 9, after the Nagasaki bombing. Truman and others wrote and revised it in the days before that, on the ship home from Europe after the Potsdam conference. A draft says, in language which appears to be from Truman:
The world will note that the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima which is purely a military base. This was because we did not want to destroy the lives of women and children and innocent civilians in this first attack.
which is just ridiculously wrong if you know that Hiroshima is a city. (A city which had a military base, but still.)
After that draft, and before it was time to actually deliver the speech, (a) Truman sees an aerial photo of the city with its destruction, and (b) newspapers start reporting that a city was destroyed. The speech Truman delivered says instead:
The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.
Still untrue but less emphatic about it (no “purely”), and hedged with “insofar as possible” for the fact that civilians were indeed killed.
That’s a brief summary of Wellerstein’s post about the speech. For a summary of the other post: Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, thought we really shouldn’t bomb Kyoto. The brass disagreed, and kept proposing to include it on the target list. Stimson went to Truman for backup, and presumably said something about Kyoto’s cultural importance and how it was less of a military target than others. Truman agreed; but what he took from the conversation — we know this from his diary — was that the other targets on the list were purely military, full of “soldiers and sailors … and not women and children”.
I appreciated both posts. Better yet is this 2020 book chapter (paywalled but online) by Wellerstein covering both aspects. I haven’t yet read his 2025 book mentioned upthread, which covers the same material plus how Truman then reacted to his mistake by clamping down to try to ensure presidential control of nuclear weapons for the future.
There’s a potential allegory here. After events ran away from Truman (with a bombing that wasn’t what he expected, and another he didn’t expect at all), he realized there was a problem and responded effectively, making an important contribution to the world’s avoiding any further use of nuclear weapons for the next 80 years and counting. But of course that was only possible because the first mistake wasn’t of a nature that foreclosed any regaining of control.
Yes indeed. Wellerstein lays out the evidence from that speech in a 2018 post, and has a 2014 post offering an explanation of how Truman got that misconception in the first place. The two of those together convinced me that Truman really was confused about the fact that Hiroshima was a city full of civilians, and thought it was a military base.
The speech was a radio address the evening of August 9, after the Nagasaki bombing. Truman and others wrote and revised it in the days before that, on the ship home from Europe after the Potsdam conference. A draft says, in language which appears to be from Truman:
which is just ridiculously wrong if you know that Hiroshima is a city. (A city which had a military base, but still.)
After that draft, and before it was time to actually deliver the speech, (a) Truman sees an aerial photo of the city with its destruction, and (b) newspapers start reporting that a city was destroyed. The speech Truman delivered says instead:
Still untrue but less emphatic about it (no “purely”), and hedged with “insofar as possible” for the fact that civilians were indeed killed.
That’s a brief summary of Wellerstein’s post about the speech. For a summary of the other post: Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, thought we really shouldn’t bomb Kyoto. The brass disagreed, and kept proposing to include it on the target list. Stimson went to Truman for backup, and presumably said something about Kyoto’s cultural importance and how it was less of a military target than others. Truman agreed; but what he took from the conversation — we know this from his diary — was that the other targets on the list were purely military, full of “soldiers and sailors … and not women and children”.
I appreciated both posts. Better yet is this 2020 book chapter (paywalled but online) by Wellerstein covering both aspects. I haven’t yet read his 2025 book mentioned upthread, which covers the same material plus how Truman then reacted to his mistake by clamping down to try to ensure presidential control of nuclear weapons for the future.
There’s a potential allegory here. After events ran away from Truman (with a bombing that wasn’t what he expected, and another he didn’t expect at all), he realized there was a problem and responded effectively, making an important contribution to the world’s avoiding any further use of nuclear weapons for the next 80 years and counting. But of course that was only possible because the first mistake wasn’t of a nature that foreclosed any regaining of control.