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On 6th August 1945, the city of Hiroshima in Japan was decimated by ‘Little Boy’, the first atomic bomb to ever be used in war. Just three days later, on 9th August, another Japanese city, Nagasaki, was attacked with a second atomic bomb nicknamed ‘Fat Man’. These two bombs wrecked unprecedented damage, and caused the estimated deaths of 210,000 people within the year.
This attack was a result of America’s belief that even if the Japanese Emperor Hirohito agreed to end hostilities, other members of the Japanese military and leadership would never accept the humiliation of unconditional surrender. For years the allies had been secretly researching and developing nuclear weapons, codenamed the Tube Alloys programme and the Manhattan Project, and on 16th July 1945 this culminated in the successful ‘Trinity’ test, when the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated in the New Mexico desert. Just 10 days later the US President Harry Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President of China Chiang Kai-shek issued the Postdam Declaration demanding the unconditional surrender of the Japanese government, and warning of ‘prompt and utter destruction’ if they did not.
When there was no reply, eleven days later, an American bomber plane called the Enola Gay flew towards Hiroshima to drop the first bomb. Three days after that, the second bomb was detonated above the city of Nagasaki. The utter devastation of these two cities led to the Japanese government’s unconditional surrender on 14th August, which was officially signed aboard the USS Missouri on 2nd September 1945.
These documents show the correspondence between Winston Churchill and Lord Cherwell in January 1953, some 8 years later. Churchill asks Cherwell for clarification about how and when the British consented to the use of these weapons, asking ‘What did the Americans tell us’? ‘When was this decided by the Cabinet’? Lord Cherwell seems certain that Churchill had been informed of progress at multiple stages of the process; ‘In April 1945…the Americans proposed to make a full-scale test in the desert in July and to drop a bomb on the Japanese in August and I told you about this’. According to this document, Churchill was certainly aware of what was about to occur; ‘the Prime Minister confirmed the agreement given by Field Marshal Wilson at a meeting of the Combined Policy Committee to the use of the weapon within the next few weeks against the Japanese.’ Clearly, Lord Cherwell felt that Churchill played an active part in the decision to launch the bombs.
Sadly, these documents also suggest that this act of war and destruction may have been avoided altogether. Lord Cherwell wrote, ‘As you know it has now been proved that the Japanese asked the Russians to convey an offer accepted the Potsdam terms of unconditional surrender to the Allies on August 2. The Russians did not pass on this message’. The consequences of this lack of communication were colossal.
We cannot know how Churchill truly felt about the part he played in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While publicly he maintained that they were necessary to end the war and save the lives of allied soldiers, his private writings suggested more complex and conflicted feelings. Knowing, in hindsight, that the immense destruction and loss of life could have been avoided altogether would undoubtedly have played on his mind.
