BOOK REVIEW: Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan
By Richard Overy / W.W. Norton
Reviewed by: Sonya Seunghye Lim
The Reviewer — Sonya Seunghye Lim is a former Chief of Station with the Central Intelligence Agency. Before retiring from the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, she had a 24-year distinguished career in the Directorate of Operations, to include two assignments as Chief of Station. She served as Chief of Operations Iraq Operations Group at CIA Headquarters. During her service, she developed substantive expertise on geopolitical and transnational issues related to Russia, China, counterterrorism, and counterintelligence. She is a Cipher Brief expert.
REVIEW — Three generations have passed since the end of the Second World War, the deadliest conflict in history with a death toll approaching 85 million. Despite this staggering statistic, since the end of that global conflagration, wars have continued unabated. Humankind’s paradoxical fascination with and revulsion to violent conflict have also continued apace.
As a result, bookshelves are crowded with books about wars, and the Pacific War and Japan’s surrender in 1945 are no exceptions. With this surfeit of literature, how might Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin contribute a new perspective? Overy tries to differentiate his book with this question: “Why was [the dropping of atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima] thought to be necessary at the time?”
Overy’s well-sourced research renders the perspective that Japan’s surrender resulted from numerous internal and external factors that were not directly related to the atomic bombings. Rain of Ruin depicts Imperial Japan as a juggernaut propelled by perceived external threats and concomitant survival instincts. The U.S.’s relentless area bombings—using conventional munitions—resulted in a severe food crisis, and the Japanese Privy Council saw domestic unrest and the specter of the regime’s internal toppling as urgent factors in seeking an end to the war.
Rain of Ruin dispenses equal serving of objectivity to the U.S.’s wartime decision-making. Facing a recalcitrant enemy and the prospect of rapidly mounting casualties, the U.S. increased the intensity of its aerial bombing campaign. Simultaneously, the U.S.’s race to develop, test, and deploy atomic bombs became an end in itself, possibly engendering a belief that these weapons were a singular necessity to win the conflict. To explain and contextualize this tempestuous climate, Rain of Ruin expounds on the flurry of activities that led to seminal scientific breakthroughs and a perceived sense of collective self-righteousness by strong-willed and egocentric characters.
As was the case in his previous book Why the Allies Won, Overy provides poignant details in Rain of Ruin’s fourth chapter, “Surrender: The ‘Sacred Decision.’” Emperor Hirohito’s historic 15 August 1945 surrender broadcast distorted reality, portraying Japan as the victim and the West as the belligerent. Hirohito made no mention of defeat or surrender but conveyed the emperor’s desire to end his people’s suffering from bombs, hunger, and exhaustion. It was in this moment that Japan began creating its role as a victim of horrendous bombing campaigns and as the first casualty of diabolical atomic bombs—implying that these offensive actions were visited on a peaceful and undeserving Japan, not provoked by a hostile and expansionist Japan. The West tolerated this twisting of the truth—which was propagated for decades in Japan—as part of the exigency to contain the looming communist threat. As Rain of Ruin stresses, Japan was suspended between reality and typical postwar expediency: “…the myth of the ‘sacred decision’ as an act of imperial benevolence...” Overy notes that Japan asserted in The Nippon Times on 15 August 1945, “Japan has made this decision which will contribute immeasurably to the future welfare of humanity.”
Rain of Ruin provides yet another explanation for why armed conflicts will continue to plague the world: dehumanizing the enemy, depersonalizing killings by making attacks as remote as possible, and glamorizing combat serve to palliate our collective conscience and to justify the persistence of jingoism. But these concepts are not new. Even the ancient world grappled with them. Concerning a nation’s right to survive, the Melian Dialogue in the Peloponnesian War echoes through our history: “…the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must….”
Rain of Ruin is a thought-provoking and disturbing book.
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