The Potsdam Declaration

On the evening of 26 July 1945 in Potsdam, where the leaders of the three great powers had been meeting for nine days, a document officially entitled the “Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender” was issued. It has gone down in history as the Potsdam Declaration. In it the President of the United States, Harry Truman, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the Chairman of the National Government of the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek, called on the Japanese government to proclaim “the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces”. The alternative was to be “prompt and utter destruction”.

The declaration had thirteen points. For the first time the Allies told Japan publicly, in a single text, what would become of it after surrender: who would be removed from power, what territories it would lose, and what awaited its soldiers, its industry and its war criminals. It made no mention, however, either of the Emperor or of the new weapon that the Americans had tested ten days earlier in the New Mexico desert. The Japanese government did not accept the ultimatum, and on 28 July Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki described the government’s attitude to it with the word mokusatsu. What exactly that meant was argued over for decades afterwards.

The road to the ultimatum

The demand for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers was announced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in January 1943 at the close of the Casablanca Conference. In November that year Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek met in Cairo, and in the declaration issued after the meeting they announced that Japan would be stripped of the Pacific islands it had seized since 1914, and that Manchuria, Formosa (Taiwan) and the Pescadores would be returned to China. After Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 Truman upheld the unconditional surrender formula. After Germany’s surrender in May 1945 Japan fought on alone.

By the summer of 1945 its position was hopeless. Okinawa had fallen in June after nearly three months of fighting. B-29 bombers were burning one city after another – since the raid on Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March they had largely destroyed the country’s biggest centres, and from June they turned to smaller ones. Submarines and mines had cut the islands off from raw materials on the mainland, and American and British carriers attacked targets on Honshu almost unopposed. Even so, the Japanese army still numbered several million men, and its leaders were preparing for a “decisive battle” on the home islands. The Americans planned a landing on Kyushu for 1 November 1945, the first stage of Operation Downfall.

In Washington some of the President’s advisers believed that Japan could be brought to surrender sooner if it were made clear what “unconditional surrender” meant – and above all that it need not mean the removal of the Emperor. On 2 July Secretary of War Henry Stimson presented Truman with a memorandum containing a draft warning to Japan; according to the surviving text, the draft allowed for “a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty”, provided the Japanese government gave guarantees of a peaceful policy. Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew, a former ambassador in Tokyo, took a similar view. The new Secretary of State, James Byrnes, however – after consulting, as he later wrote, the former Secretary of State Cordell Hull – concluded that such an assurance would be seen in America as a concession to the Japanese Emperor, and the sentence about the dynasty was dropped from the final text.

A text drafted at Potsdam

Stimson brought the draft proclamation to Potsdam, and during the conference the Americans, chiefly Byrnes, reworked it. The matter was closely bound up with the atomic bomb: on 16 July, the day before the talks opened, the Trinity test had been carried out in New Mexico, and in the following days ever fuller reports of its results reached Potsdam. On 24 July, when the chiefs of staff had agreed their strategy towards Japan, Truman passed the draft to Churchill. The American delegation accepted all the British amendments. That same day, after the plenary session, the President mentioned to Stalin a “new weapon of unusual destructive force”, without saying that it was an atomic bomb.

China did not attend the Potsdam Conference and took no part in drafting the text. On 24 July the draft was cabled to Chongqing, where the next day the American ambassador, Patrick Hurley, handed it to Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang agreed to its content, asking for only one change – that his title should be listed before that of the British Prime Minister – and replied by cable before noon on 26 July. Churchill had left Potsdam on 25 July to await the results of the general election in London; he managed to approve the text as Prime Minister before he tendered his resignation to the King on the evening of 26 July, following the Labour victory. The signatures of Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek were written on the document – with their consent – by Truman himself.

Joseph Stalin was missing from the signatories. The Soviet Union was not at war with Japan – the Neutrality Pact of April 1941 was still in force; Moscow had denounced it in April 1945, but formally it was due to expire only in 1946. At Yalta Stalin had undertaken to enter the war in the Far East within two or three months of Germany’s surrender, and at Potsdam he confirmed that the Red Army would be ready in August. The Americans did not consult the Russians on the content of the declaration; the text was sent to the Soviet delegation only at the moment of its release. According to Byrnes’s memoirs, Vyacheslav Molotov asked that same evening for publication to be postponed by two or three days, but by then it was too late. The American Secretary of State later explained that there had been no wish to put the USSR in an awkward position towards a country with which it was not at war.

The declaration was released to the press in Potsdam on the evening of 26 July. It was not handed to the Japanese government in the usual diplomatic form. The American Office of War Information broadcast it from transmitters on the West Coast of the United States – first in English, and two hours later in Japanese – and in the following days bombers dropped millions of leaflets bearing its text over Japan. In Japan anyone who reached for them was committing an offence: listening to foreign broadcasts and picking up enemy leaflets was forbidden.

Thirteen points

The first points were a warning. The three powers declared that their land, sea and air forces, reinforced by armies and air forces being transferred from the West, were poised to strike the final blows against Japan. They recalled the fate of Germany, whose land, industry and way of life had been laid waste by its resistance to the same power, and announced that its full application would mean “the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces” and the “utter devastation of the Japanese homeland”. Japan was to decide whether it would go on being ruled by “self-willed militaristic advisers” or follow “the path of reason”. The fifth point read like an ultimatum: these were the Allies’ terms, they would not deviate from them, there were no alternatives, and no delay would be tolerated.

Then came the terms themselves. The authority and influence of those who had deceived and misled the Japanese people into embarking on world conquest were to be “eliminated for all time”. Points in Japanese territory designated by the Allies were to be occupied until “a new order of peace, security and justice” had been established. The terms of the Cairo Declaration were to be carried out, and Japanese sovereignty was to be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku and such minor islands as the Allies determined. The Japanese armed forces, once completely disarmed, were to return to their homes with the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives.

The declaration gave assurance that the Allies did not intend to enslave the Japanese as a race or destroy them as a nation, but it announced “stern justice” for all war criminals, including those who had mistreated prisoners. The Japanese government was to remove all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies; freedom of speech, religion and thought, and respect for fundamental human rights, were to be established. Japan could keep such industries as would sustain its economy and permit the payment of reparations in kind, but not those that would enable it to rearm; it was to be given access to raw materials – as distinct from control over them – and eventually a share in world trade. The occupying forces were to be withdrawn once these objectives had been achieved and “a peacefully inclined and responsible government” had been established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.

The last, thirteenth point contained the demand itself. It called on the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces and to give proper and adequate assurances of its good faith in the matter. The alternative for Japan was “prompt and utter destruction”.

Compared with the Casablanca formula, the text was milder in one important respect: unconditional surrender applied to the armed forces, not to the state or the nation, and the terms were spelled out. Some Japanese diplomats noticed this at once – the minister in Switzerland, Shun’ichi Kase, cabled Tokyo that the signatories had evidently tried to let Japan “save face” on many points. At the same time the declaration was silent on the matter most important to the Japanese. It did not make clear whether Emperor Hirohito was among those who had “misled” the nation or whether he could be part of a future “responsible government”; nor did it say whether Japan would keep its own government under occupation or be placed under a foreign military administration. The threat of “prompt and utter destruction” was widely read – by those in the know at the time and by historians later – as a veiled announcement of the atomic bomb, but the weapon itself was not named in the text. The Japanese, who knew nothing of it, could take the threat to mean further incendiary raids and invasion.

Japan waits for Moscow

The declaration reached Tokyo at a time when Japanese diplomacy had for several weeks been seeking Soviet mediation. Since February 1945 the former Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe and the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Kōichi Kido, had been urging the Emperor that the war must be ended. On 12 July the Foreign Minister, Shigenori Tōgō, instructed the ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Satō, to tell the Russians that the Emperor desired a speedy end to the war, but that as long as Britain and the United States insisted on unconditional surrender, Japan had no choice but to fight on. Hirohito wanted to send Prince Konoe to Moscow as a special envoy. Satō put the request to the Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Solomon Lozovsky, and on 18 July the Russians replied that the proposal was too general for them to respond to. Stalin told Truman about the Japanese approaches at Potsdam. The Americans knew of them anyway: for months they had been reading Japanese diplomatic cables enciphered in a code they had broken under the Magic programme.

Satō, who judged the situation soberly, cabled Tokyo that Japan could hope at best for “unconditional surrender or terms closely equivalent thereto”, with only the preservation of the imperial house reserved. Tōgō replied that the government was not seeking Russian mediation for anything like unconditional surrender; on 21 July he repeated on behalf of the cabinet that Japan would not agree to unconditional surrender under any circumstances. According to historians who have studied these cables – among them Tsuyoshi Hasegawa – the government in Tokyo had no agreed peace terms it could have put forward, because the army would not agree to anything resembling surrender.

The text of the declaration, picked up from the American broadcasts, was on desks in Tokyo on the morning of 27 July, Japanese time. According to the account of the Chief Cabinet Secretary, Hisatsune Sakomizu, Suzuki, Tōgō and he himself concluded that in the last resort it would have to be accepted. Tōgō, however, felt that the declaration was unclear about Japan’s future form of government, disarmament and the fate of those accused of war crimes, and he still hoped for Moscow’s mediation – wrongly assuming that the Russians had not seen the text in advance. He advised the Emperor to treat the declaration with the utmost caution and to hold back a reply until the Soviet reaction was known. According to the Foreign Ministry official Toshikazu Kase, Hirohito considered the declaration “acceptable in principle”.

At a meeting of the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, the so-called Big Six, the War Minister Korechika Anami, the Army Chief of Staff Yoshijirō Umezu and the Navy Chief of Staff Soemu Toyoda demanded that it be openly rejected as “too dishonourable”. Suzuki, Tōgō and the Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai leaned towards acceptance, provided the Emperor’s position was clarified. Tōgō’s proposal not to reply for the time being was adopted. The cabinet agreed to publish the declaration in the press without comment, but in a censored version: among the passages removed were the threat to devastate the Japanese homeland, the “stern justice” for war criminals and the promise that disarmed soldiers would return home.

“Mokusatsu”

On the morning of 28 July the newspapers, including the Asahi Shimbun, published the abridged text and implied that the government attached no importance to it; some wrote openly of rejection. Under pressure from the military, who wanted a firm stance, Suzuki spoke at a press conference that afternoon. He declared that the joint declaration of the three powers was a rehash of the Cairo Declaration, that the government saw no significant value in it, and that there was nothing to do but mokusatsu it and fight resolutely on to a victorious end of the war. The expression was reportedly suggested to him by Sakomizu.

The word mokusatsu (literally “to kill with silence”) is given in dictionaries as “to ignore”, “to pass over in silence” or “to treat with silent contempt”. The Japanese news agency Dōmei rendered the statement in English as saying that the Japanese government “ignores” the declaration, and the Allied press and the American government understood it as a rejection of the ultimatum. Tōgō later complained that the Prime Minister had broken the cabinet’s decision to refrain from comment. In 1950 the Japan scholar Kazuo Kawai advanced the thesis that Suzuki had merely meant to say “no comment”, and that an unfortunate translation had contributed to the dropping of the atomic bombs. The thesis still circulates, but – as Chalmers Johnson and other scholars have observed – the prevailing view is that the Allies understood Suzuki essentially correctly: whatever the Prime Minister’s intentions, the Japanese government had not accepted the terms and had announced that it would fight on, and the ultimatum allowed only one answer. Historians also note that the word was chosen chiefly with a domestic audience in mind – an army that would not hear of surrender.

On 30 July Satō cabled from Moscow that if Japan wished to prevent Russia from entering the war, it had no choice but immediate unconditional surrender. The government in Tokyo, however, went on waiting for an answer about the Konoe mission, which Moscow had no intention of giving.

On the American side the decisions had been taken earlier. On 25 July, the day before the declaration was issued, the acting Army Chief of Staff, General Thomas Handy – with the approval of Stimson and of the Chief of Staff, George Marshall, both in Potsdam – ordered the commander of the Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, General Carl Spaatz, to drop the first “special bomb” after about 3 August, as soon as the weather permitted visual bombing, on one of the targets Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata or Nagasaki. Truman noted in his diary that day that the weapon was to be used against military targets and that the Japanese would receive a warning calling on them to surrender. The order was not made conditional on Tokyo’s reply, although at Potsdam the rejection of the ultimatum was regarded as confirming the need to carry it out; at the same time, components of the Little Boy bomb were already at sea on their way to Tinian. The assessment of this decision – whether the war could have been ended otherwise, and whether a clearer assurance about the Emperor would have shortened it – is among the longest-running debates among historians of the twentieth century. Some point out that Japan’s leaders then had no intention of surrendering on any terms acceptable to the Allies; others argue that a guarantee for the dynasty might have strengthened the peace party in Tokyo.

What followed

The threat of “prompt and utter destruction” was fulfilled in August. On 6 August an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and Truman, in a statement, called on Japan to accept the Potsdam terms, threatening “a rain of ruin from the air”. On 8 August the Soviet Union acceded to the declaration and declared war on Japan, and the next day the Red Army struck into Manchuria; on the same day a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. On 10 August the Japanese government offered to accept the declaration with one reservation – that it did not prejudice the prerogatives of the Emperor. Byrnes’s reply gave no such guarantee: it stated that from the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the government would be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, and that Japan’s ultimate form of government would be determined by the freely expressed will of the people. On 14 August, after Hirohito’s intervention, Japan accepted the terms, and on 15 August the Emperor announced this by radio. On 2 September, aboard the battleship Missouri, the instrument of surrender was signed, in which Japan undertook to carry out the provisions of the Potsdam Declaration.

The Potsdam Declaration became the legal basis of the occupation of Japan: demilitarisation, the war crimes trials, the democratic reforms and the new constitution of 1947 all rested on it. Its eighth point, which referred back to the Cairo Declaration and limited Japanese sovereignty to the four main islands, was later invoked in disputes over Taiwan and over islands on Japan’s borders. The Emperor kept his throne, but – in keeping with Byrnes’s reply – as a monarch subject to the occupation authorities, and later as the constitutional symbol of the state. The thirteen points proclaimed at Potsdam on 26 July 1945 thus set not only the terms for ending the war in the Pacific but also the shape of post-war Japan.