¹ Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate for Change (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 380; and “Ike on Ike,” Newsweek, November 11, 1963.

² Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2019), 176-77. See also Sidney Shalett, “Nimitz Receives All-Out Welcome from Washington,” New York Times, October 6, 1945; H. H. Arnold, Global Mission (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 598; and other primary sources noted below.

³ Daniel L. Haulman, “Firebombing Air Raids on Cities at Night,” Air Power History, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter 2018), 41.

⁴ Weldon E. Rhoades, Flying MacArthur to Victory (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 429.

⁵ Testimony of Admiral Halsey, September 8, 1949, File: “Congressional Hearings 1949-57,” Box 35, Halsey Papers, Library of Congress.

⁶ Admiral William D. Leahy, I Was There (New York: McGraw Hill, 1950), 441.

⁷ Stimson memorandum to The President, “Proposed Program for Japan,” 2 July 1945, Top Secret, pp. 3-6 (Source: Naval Aide to the President Files, box 4, Berlin Conference File, Volume XI – Miscellaneous papers: Japan, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library), National Security Archive Briefing Book #716.

⁸ Richard B. Frank, “To Bear the Unbearable”: Japan's Surrender, Part II,“ The National WWII Museum, August 20, 2020.

⁹ Walter Trohan, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, reported that two days before President Roosevelt left for the Yalta conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in early February 1945, he was shown a forty-page memorandum drafted by General MacArthur outlining a Japanese offer for surrender almost identical with the terms later concluded by President Truman. Trohan related that he was given a copy of this communication by Admiral William Leahy who swore him to secrecy with the pledge not to release the story until the war was over. Trohan honored his pledge and reported his story in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald on August 19, 1945. Cited in John J. McClaughlin, “The Bomb Was Not Necessary,” History News Network (2010).

¹⁰ William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 (New York: Dell, 1978), 512.

¹¹ Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 347. In early May 1946, while on a tour of the Pacific, former President Herbert Hoover met with General Douglas MacArthur alone for several hours. Hoover recalled: “I told MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.” Herbert Hoover Diary, 1946 Journey, May 4, 5, 6, 1946, Post-Presidential Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library.

¹² “Minutes of meeting held at the White House on 18 June 1945 at 1530 hours,” Truman Library; also contained in Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers: The Conference of Berlin, 1945 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 909; and Rufus E. Miles, “Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved.” International Security 10, no. 2 (1985): 127.

¹³ Gar Alperovitz, Robert L. Messer and Barton J. Bernstein, “Marshall, Truman, and the Decision to Drop the Bomb,” International Security, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Winter, 1991-1992), 210-11. At the request of the U.S., Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan three months after the end of the war in Europe (May 8). The Soviet Union did so at the appointed hour, sending a massive invasion force to take over the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria). Over the next few weeks, almost 600,000 Japanese soldiers surrendered to Soviet forces in Manchuria, Sakhalin and the Kurile chain. See Mark Ealey, “An August Storm: the Soviet-Japan Endgame in the Pacific War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 4, Issue 2 (February 16, 2006).

¹⁴ Doug Long, “Hiroshima: Harry Truman's Diary and Papers.”

¹⁵ “Potsdam Declaration,” July 26, 1945, Atomic Heritage Foundation.

¹⁶ The United Press Report is quoted in Alex Wellerstein, “Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 4, 2020. The actual number killed in Hiroshima by the end of 1945 was about 140,000, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

¹⁷ The United States Strategi Bombing Survey: The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, June 30, 1946 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1946), page 22. The historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, in Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005), makes a strong case, based on careful reading of Japanese documents, that Soviet entry into the war rather than the dropping of the two nuclear bombs was decisive in compelling Japan's surrender. He did not convince reviewer Marc Gallicchio, however, who wrote, “It seems safer to conclude that the nuclear bombs and the impact of the Soviet invasion were too closely intertwined for historians to disentangle them as neatly as Hasegawa implies.” Marc Gallicchio, “Review Works: Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol, 9, No. 4 (Fall 2007), 170.

¹⁸ Ernest Joseph King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King, A Naval Record (New York: W.W. Norton, 1952), 621.

¹⁹ President Harry S. Truman, “August 9, 1945: Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference,” University of Virginia Miller Center Presidential Speeches.

²⁰ “Notes on the Initial Meeting of the Target Committee [held April 27, 1945],” (2 May 1945), in Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 1, Target 6, Folder 5D, “Selection of Targets”; cited in Alex Wellerstein, “The Kyoto misconception,” The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, August 8, 2014.

²¹ W. H. Lawrence, “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin,” New York Times, September 13, 1945, page 1.

²² See, for example, Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); and Peter Kuznick, “The Actual Reason Why America Dropped 2 Atomic Bombs on Japan,” YouTube video.

²³ James V. Forrestal, The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), 78, cited in Alperovitz, Messer and Bernstein, “Marshall, Truman, and the Decision to Drop the Bomb,” 212-213; and Paul Ham, “Did the Atomic Bomb End the Pacific War? – Part 1,” History News Network, August 2, 2020.

²⁴ V. M. Molotov, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, edited by Albert Resis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 55, 58.

²⁵ “Tokyo Radio Appeals to U.S. For a More Lenient Peace,” New York Times, July 26, 1945.

²⁶ John McCloy, The Challenge to American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 42. See also, John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Mark Selden, “A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities & the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 5, Issue 5, May 2, 2007, reprinted in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History (New York: The New Press, 2009).