April 11, 2006
Whose Prize Is It Anyway? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:15 AM EST The historian D. M. Giangreco, and friend of and contributor to American Heritage, tells us about a rather spectacular mishap, if that’s what it is, that has just happened with the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, which is awarded annually by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Ferrell is an esteemed diplomatic historian and professor emeritus at the University of Indiana; the prize was established in his honor in 1991. Giangreco wrote to us: “As you know Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is receiving SHAFR’s Robert H. Ferrell Prize for Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. . . . Around Christmas, I suggested to Ferrell that he move his comment on Hasegawa’s book from a footnote and up into the text in his own new book, Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. Bob’s response: ‘A footnote is all it deserves.’ “Well, I’d thought that Bob’s book would not be out for a little while yet, but I found it in my mailbox a few moments ago. How ironic. The gentleman for whom the award is named says in a note on page 114 that the Hasegawa book is an ‘unfortunate contribution’ to the atom bomb debate and castigates it mightily in a 24-line endnote. It’s too bad that someone on the awards committee didn’t touch base with Bob first. Now they have a bit of an embarrassment on their hands if this attracts any attention (and, being in a Ferrell book on a rather contentious subject, it very likely will).” This was soon followed by another message from Giangreco: “It’s quite a mess, really. Bob didn’t know that Hasegawa was getting the prize until I called to tell him about it. Prompted quite a belly laugh. Laughed even harder, and harder, as I read to him the note I sent to you. He finds this all extremely amusing, but I rather doubt that some at SHAFR will find it very funny. Since sending the note to you, I’ve been informed that the good Dr. Ferrell is being honored at the same conference. Oh, my! “Anyway, in Bob’s book, he notes that ‘The literature in English regarding the effect of Soviet entry upon [Japan’s World War II] surrender is slight’ and adds that Hasegawa maintains the surrender came ‘because of the shock of the Russian entry.” Ferrell, however, gently suggests that ’Hasegawa may have speculated in this regard.’ He goes on to say: ‘The Hasegawa book seems an unfortunate contribution in another way, for it places the responsibility for use of nuclear weapons evenly on Japan, Russia, and the United States. The author ignores the behavior of the Japanese Army in its conquests beginning with the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, in which the death toll of prisoners and civilians alike ran into the millions; the United Nations figure is seventeen million, the Chinese thirty. For the Americans this meant the Bataan death march, among many other hostilities. In 1945, with the imminence of the attack on Kyushu, the vice minister of war sent out an order that when the first American landed on one of the home islands there should be the immediate execution, by any means, of all Allied prisoners held within the empire, whose numbers were estimated at one hundred thousand.’”
|
