Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan.

Allison, William Thomas

Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2005. ix, 382 pp. $29.95 US (cloth), $18.95 US (paper).

Racing the Enemy is a compelling work of scholarship on the end of the Pacific war. This provocative book challenges current paradigms explaining the use of the atomic bombs and Japan's decision to surrender in August 1945. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a Professor of History and Director of the Center for Cold War Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, offers a new and intriguing framework to reconsider the final months of the Pacific war from the viewpoints of the United States, Russia, and Japan. This is a very significant book and should be read by all specialists in international relations and diplomatic history.

Rather than massive destruction of the two atomic bombs, Hasegawa argues that the looming threat of the Soviet Union's entry into the war instead forced Japan to capitulate. Further, Hasegawa suggests that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin intentionally misled members of Japan's "peace" faction, who put out feelers for a Soviet-brokered peace, in order to buy time to deploy military forces to ensure rewards promised at Yalta. Fearing the Pacific war might end too soon, Stalin manoeuvered to maximize his spoils, while the United States hastened to end the war as soon as possible to deny Stalin his Yalta rewards and a role in post-war Japan. For Japan, the massing of Soviet forces in the East, according to Hasegawa, ended all hope of a negotiated end to the war. For the United States, the atomic bombs served much less to intimidate Stalin than to simply limit Soviet influence in the East by ending the war sooner rather than later, when Soviet forces would have made such advances as to warrant a greater role in the post-war settlement. Such conclusions place the impact of the atomic bombs in an entirely different light.

Hasegawa convincingly outlines the Truman administration's internal discussions about how to end the war against Japan. The principal catalysts for debate were the desire to avoid an invasion of the Japanese home islands and the question of whether to allow the emperor of Japan to retain his throne. Intensive discussion about these two issues were further complicated by the imminent Soviet entry into the war. Likewise, Hasegawa reveals the deep divisions within the Japanese government during 1945 over how to end the war and details how the "peace" and "military" factions within the Japanese government argued over how to ensure the best end in a war both factions conceded was more or less lost.

Hasegawa's most significant contribution, however, may be his discussion of the inner workings of the Soviet government during the last weeks of the war. Stalin played both ends at once by simultaneously keeping the door for mediation just open enough for Japanese diplomats to maintain hope for peace. In the meantime, Stalin swiftly moved military forces from west to east in preparation for offensive operations against Japanese forces in Manchuria. In many ways, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the Empire of Japan were indeed "racing" each other to end the war on the best terms possible.

Hasegawa masterfully uses primary material from American, Soviet, and Japanese archives. Much of the material from Japanese and Soviet archives is new and enlightening. This is the first major work to effectively bring together such research from the three languages--this alone is a significant achievement. Hasegawa ably weaves together this complex story in a cogent, lucid manner that illuminates the many perspectives, as well as personalities, represented in the Japanese, Soviet, and American governments.

Make no mistake, this is revisionist history, but it is well-grounded revisionist history with sound interpretation based upon solid research. Hasegawa's conclusions will certainly stir debate among historians, as already evidenced on online discussion lists such as H-DIPLO, and this may have been an underlying purpose. Whether or not Hasegawa's ideas are completely acceptable, his work will force reconsideration of the end of the Pacific war. Along with Richard B. Frank's Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York, 1999), Racing the Enemy is essential reading on the end of the Pacific war. Hasegawa has offered a major contribution that sers a new benchmark, not only for scholarship on the end of the Pacific war, but also in the research of and approach to international history. Read this book.

William Thomas Allison

Weber State University