First off, let me establish my bona fides for writing this review. I majored in Asian History at college and then spent a year as a Special Research Fellow in Japanese History at Kyoto University, so I’m quite familiar with the field. I lived in Japan for 18 years and speak the language, too.
This is a splendid book. It could hardly be more timely, following President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima, which reopened the question of whether the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified.
In an age when people are more and more certain of right and wrong, when grey areas and compromises are not to be countenanced, Henkoff manages to present the controversial events of this time with sympathy and understanding for all involved. He describes people’s choices not as we see them now, knowing how it all came out in the end, but as the people at that time saw their choices given the information that they had available then. He makes us understand as best we can today the calculus that led the US to drop the bombs. He balances that detailed discussion of the US’ actions with an equally full examination of the Japanese side, showing convincingly that the moral dilemmas and responsibility were not just on one side. At the same time, he describes in horrible detail the devastating impact of the bombs so that we can feel compassion for the thousands of people who died in dreadful conditions as a result.
This important little book should settle some of the discussion concerning this controversial decision. The US authorities did discuss whether to drop the first bomb on an uninhabited place first to demonstrate its power, but rejected the idea. We can debate today whether their reasons were right, but Henkoff makes clear that they were deciding against a background of war that we in our comfortable homes today can barely fathom, much less replicate. He also clearly demonstrates the impasse that was driving the war inexorably towards invasion, with all the loss of life (particularly on the Japanese side) that that decision would have involved. (I personally know a Japanese woman who said when she was in elementary school, they used to go outside and poke upwards with sharpened bamboo spears to practice attacking paratroopers as they land. Elementary school children!) For those who still believe that the US should have dropped one bomb in an uninhabited place, he demonstrates how even the two bombs obliterating two cities almost failed to convince the Japanese to surrender. Finally, he points to the fact that the Imperial Statement of surrender specifically attributed the surrender to the atomic bombs. It’s hard to argue today with what the Emperor said at the time.
The book is neither an apology for the bombs nor a whitewash of them – it’s a full description of the situation that led to their use and the impact that they had on the progress of the war. Although the book does demonstrate, in my view, that dropping the bombs hastened the end of the war and probably saved millions of lives, Henkoff does not shirk from a full description of the horrible suffering that they inflicted on the population of the two cities that were obliterated. He is fair and sympathetic to all three sides of this terrible event: the US administration, the Japanese government, and the Japanese victims of the bombing.
After reading it, one can only think: let us hope that no one ever has to make that decision again.
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![Inferno: The Fall of Japan 1945 by [Ronald Henkoff]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/IMAGERENDERING_521856-T1/images/I/51oPmkudvvL._SY346_.jpg)
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A quite a few years ago but still fascinating.
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 24, 2016
