My Testimony Concerning WWII Japanese Surrender Offer

My Testimony Concerning the World War II Japanese Surrender Offer

By Michael Hoffman

Former reporter, New York bureau of the Associated Press
www.RevisionistHistory.org

During the observation of the 75th anniversary of the atomic incineration holocaust of Hiroshima, the corporate media have been circulating various allegations that the Japanese had not attempted to surrender prior to the bombing.

 One of these disgraceful justifications for the American government’s Machiavellian extermination of Japanese civilians is titled, "Back to Hiroshima: Why Dropping the Bomb Saved Ten Million Lives."

The following is my testimony.

The problem with the claims that the Japanese were not going to surrender is that they contradict first person testimony.

Walter Trohan, White House correspondent and Washington D.C. Bureau Chief for the Chicago Tribune

In the course of my career in journalism I was privileged to come to know Walter Trohan, a star reporter for the Colonel R.R. McCormack newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. He was its Washington bureau chief. Mr. Trohan covered the White House and had known and interviewed every president from FDR to Nixon.

In a conversation with Walter Trohan, he told me about information disclosed to him by FDR’s Chief of Staff, Admiral William Leahy, who served in the same position under President Truman. 

As early as 1943 Leahy informed Trohan that the White House was receiving peace feelers from the Japanese and a surrender offer, predicated on the exemption of the Emperor from any punishment or incarceration. 

Leahy also told Walter that if he printed those facts before the war ended he would be imprisoned. 

One week after the Japanese surrendered, the account of Japan’s surrender offer was published on the front page of the Chicago Tribune.

In his memoirs, published in 1950, Admiral Leahy wrote that prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs: 

"The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.” 

Few people were in a better position to know.

Attempting to justify the deliberate mass murder of men, women and children establishes one of the most frightening, depressing and barbaric precedents for future wars. What is more, the justification furnished — that Japan adamantly refused any surrender terms prior to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki holocausts — is a pathetic, flimsy lie.

Excerpt from an Interview with Walter Trohan by Jerry N. Hess for the Truman Library, October 7, 1970

[59]

HESS: Speaking of General MacArthur, what was your reaction to the firing, or to the dismissal of General MacArthur?

TROHAN: To tell you the truth, I was flabbergasted because I didn't think he (Truman) would do it. I didn't see how he could do it, because he had in the White House Admiral [William D.] Leahy, his aide and Mr. Roosevelt's top military

[60]

advisor, and Leahy was very high on MacArthur. He said MacArthur was our greatest general, not excepting Robert E. Lee. I didn't see how Truman could fire him. 

MacArthur was a hell of a guy, because he pulled that Inchon landing, you remember, and got back in behind the enemy and he was running here, there, and every place doing a terrific job. He was doing a great job in Japan and I just couldn't believe that Mr. Truman would fire him. However, Mr. Truman got the idea, rightly or wrongly, that MacArthur was considering himself bigger than he was and he had to remove him. He felt that he must do it. And I will say for him it took courage when he did it. I don't agree with it even to this day.

HESS: You think it was an error?

TROHAN: I think he -- see, I think -- unlike most of my colleagues who think that Mr. Truman's going down as the greatest President of this time -- I do not. And I'll tell you why I do not. One, is the firing of MacArthur which I think is going to be held to be a mistake, they should have left him in there and they should have let him win that one and we wouldn't have this one (the war) in Vietnam. Also the other

[61]

one (there's no malice on this on my part), he dropped that pineapple on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and we've got...

HESS: What's your opinion on that?

TROHAN: We've got ourselves a guilt complex about that and always will have and we will not make a great man out of Mr. Truman because of that. I don't think he should have dropped that bomb. 

End quote

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Obama in Hiroshima

Obama in Hiroshima: The Right Thing to Do

By Michael Hoffman

www.RevisionistHistory.org

Neocon super-patriots are outraged that a US President would lament the American massacre of tens of thousands of civilians at Hiroshima and by implication, in the Japanese city of Nagasaki as well (the latter was the capital of Catholicism in the Far East at the time it was incinerated). General Curtis LeMay’s air force, using conventional bombs, had earlier incinerated the largely wooden city of Tokyo, killing some 100,000 civilians. These massacres were supposed to be reprisals for Japan’s attack on an American military base at Pearl Harbor.

The signature alibi for the atomic barbarism is that it “shortened the war and saved American lives.” In 1985, while a reporter working in California and writing a story on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I spoke on the phone with Walter Trohan, a former journalist for Colonel Robert McCormick’s populist newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. Trohan covered the White House. He had been close to all of the American presidents from FDR to Reagan. He knew the lesser fry too, such as Admiral William Leahy, Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff. Mr. Trohan informed this writer, with some indignation in his voice, even though the incident he was about to relate had occurred 42 years before, that Admiral Leahy told him as early as 1943 that the Japanese had been trying to surrender to US forces. He warned Trohan that if he printed that classified information before the war ended, Trohan would be imprisoned on a charge of espionage. 

Trohan and his boss McCormick sat on the story until the Sunday in 1945 after Japan had been blasted with atomic bombs and had surrendered unconditionally. Then they printed the facts on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. From 1943 onward the government of Japan had sought a negotiated peace that would leave Emperor Hirohito on his throne and a caretaker Japanese government in Tokyo intact. All Japanese armed forces would be surrendered and American soldiers and Marines would enter Japan without a shot being fired. This was to be the conditional surrender.

After this peace deal was rebuffed by President Roosevelt, tens of thousands of US Marines and sailors, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were killed, sacrificed on the altar of Roosevelt’s doctrine of “unconditional surrender.”

Franklin Roosevelt was the presidential criminal who had allowed Pearl Harbor to be attacked. He knew in advance that the attack was coming in December 1941. Incredibly, nearly 75 years later much of the US intelligence on Pearl Harbor remains classified and not subject to Freedom of Information Act disclosure. What is “our” government hiding? Much of what can be pieced together was compiled by Robert Stinnett in his indispensable book, Day of Deceit; also worth reading is James Perloff’s report, “Pearl Harbor: Hawaii was Surprised; FDR Was Not,” in New American magazine, Dec. 7, 2015.

The Palestinians in particular and Muslims in general are students of history. They have noted that the U.S. and its Allies resorted to any means available, no matter how monstrous, to defeat what the Allies considered to be their “monstrous” foes, Germany and Japan. Terrorism against German troops (“partisan warfare”) as well as civilian populations (the civilian center of every major German city was bombed, and in many cases fire-bombed by British and US forces), was a routine occurrence. The goal was to exterminate, as far as possible, the men, woman and children of Germany and Japan.

When Palestinians shoot and bomb Israeli troops, or ISIS militants target French theaters and Belgian subway stations, they are merely adopting the same tactics the Allies used during the “Good War.” This is the terror contagion which we, in our boundless arrogance, have spread.

However cynical Mr. Obama’s ulterior motives for visiting Hiroshima may be, the fact is that his visit should serve as a reassessment of the Allied doctrine of justified terrorism inflicted on civilian populations residing in nations with which the US is at war. Otherwise, we can expect no less inhuman treatment from the Sunni Wahhabist/Salafist Muslims who are at war with us and who are following our inhuman example.

Obama’s next conciliatory visit should be in Dresden, Germany, the site of yet another genuine holocaust on par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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