PRIMARY DOCUMENTS
Joseph C. Grew, Report from Tokyo: A Message to the American People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942).
The value of victory increased the tolerance for the human costs of war and U.S. strategists tried to inflate Americans’ commitment to killing and dying in order to win. The most prophetic attempt to brace Americans for the price that the U.S. would have to exact and endure to defeat Japan came from Joseph C. Grew, a Special Assistant to the Secretary of State. One year after Pearl Harbor, Grew published Report from Tokyo, based on his nearly ten years of service as ambassador to Japan. Because of racist and Eurocentric perceptions, Grew worried that Americans did not take the Japanese seriously as a military or political power. He warned Americans that they were “face to face with a powerful, resourceful, utterly ruthless, and altogether dangerous enemy.” Unlike America’s European enemies, he noted, “Japan did not have to turn Fascist or National Socialist; morally, Japan was already both. Japan has needed no Hitler.” What made the Japanese so dangerous, he said, was that they were willing to do whatever it took to win. Grew warned that the Japanese were driven by a “ruthless will” which “knows neither gentleness nor mercy. It is utterly ruthless, utterly cruel, and utterly blind to any of the values which make up our civilization. The only way to stop that will is to destroy it.”
Unconditional Surrender Selected Reading List, 10 February 1944, Unconditional Surrender Folder, Box 9, GMEP, HSTPL.
As a policy, unconditional surrender was “simple, clear, and explicit.” A 1944 Army study explained, “Merely bring your enemy to where he has no further power or will to resist, and he will forthwith surrender without condition… As a defendant at law, when his defense seems hopeless, throws himself on the mercy of the court, so the conquered in the case of unconditional surrender would submit without condition to the will and decision of the conqueror.” But by the same token, a nation at war would only stop fighting “when all means of defense are exhausted or the sentence or terms to be imposed will… outweigh possible advantages of further resistance.” This, then, was the dilemma of unconditional surrender: How far would the United States go and what would it cost to bring Japan to the point where it would cease resistance and submit to the absolute will of the Allies? How far would Japan go to resist “even after defeat is seen to be inevitable, involving loss and suffering both to conquered and conqueror?” How much “sacrifice and suffering” would the defeated be willing to endure, even in a hopeless cause?
Between 1943 and 1973, the United States enacted an astonishing strategic and moral volte-face – from unconditional surrender to peace with honor, from unlimited war to limited war, and from an unwavering will to win against Germany and Japan to a desperate desire to escape Vietnam. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded that the Axis powers surrender unconditionally on January 24, 1943, the United States adopted increasingly lethal means to achieve its ends, culminating with the strategic bombing, firebombing, and atomic bombing of Japanese cities in the summer of 1945 and a planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. Just five years later, however, the U.S. fought a limited war, instead of a total war, in Korea, and negotiated a settlement short of absolute victory. In Vietnam, the American public gradually turned against the war, believing that the conflict was a mistake and that the price of even limited victory was too high. Eventually, U.S. strategists sued for peace short of their war aims and, after President Richard M. Nixon announced an end to the war and “peace with honor” on January 23, 1973, the United States simply left South Vietnam and went home, rejecting war – whatever the cost.