One thing I always wondered is, why did the US and Allies have to face the “Hobbsian” choice of either Nuking Japan, or invading? Japan has limited natural resources, and with a naval blockade shutting down the fishing industry, why not just starve Japan out? No nukes, no invasion.
Were there enough boats in the US navy to do that?
If so, how long could we keep it up?
Would that be long enough?
Because possibly
1 Kills more people than the bombing, and doing it slowly.
2 Leaves their miltary structure intact and with significant face saving, resulting in possible future problems .
3 We have the bombs, fuck this shit, its been 4 long years, lets get it over with.
4 Godzilla
Would shutting down the fishing industry be enough to starve the country? There’s still a lot of farming (eta: in Japan) as well…
I’m certainly no expert on fishing practices in Japan, but in many cases the best fishing isn’t far off shore. If you’re trying to stop every little fishing boat, you’ll need to patrol pretty close to the coast either with ships or planes – and then you’d be within range of coastal defense artillery. There’s over 18,000 miles of coast to patrol – that’s a lot of water to cover. My guess is that the navy would have to be spread very thin to cover that. Plus they’d have to be willing to blow every (civilian!) fishing boat out of the water, or come up with a huge amount of man power to board, inspect, and/or scuttle them.
They did devastate Pearl Harbor our base for defense against the Japanese. Their solders were brutal and would fight to the death. Should we have tried to blockade the Japanese and leave our allies to starve and run out of ammo, because our convoys of food were diverted to Japan.
This was a viable option and it has been discussed at the Axis Forums a lot. Basically it is thought it would’ve taken an additional two years to bring Japan to the point of starvation where they’d surrender.
It also wouldn’t have brought down the Japanese forces in other areas, although those certainly could’ve been defeated conventionally.
Remember that ritual suicide was part of Japanese culture so a slow starvation wouldn’t be the easiest way to bring them down.
Interestingly enough on islands close in, where the Japanese still had air cover, when the Allies invaded those islands, the Japanese government dropped leaflets encouraging Japanese people to kill themselves rather than surrender.
American soldiers tell of stories of Japanese woman and children and old men throwing themselves off cliffs onto rocks and the American soldiers would pick them off with bullets as they considered it more “humane” than to let them hit the rocks and die that way.
On islands without Japanese air cover, none of this ever took place because the Japanese people could not get the leaflets and orders to die.
This shows how fiercely loyal Japanese were to their government, so a slow starvation wouldn’t have been a quick means though by 1945 the Japanese air force and navy were no longer any threat to the Allies.
So yeah it would’ve been easy to starve the main islands of Japan but not a quick end to the war which is what everyone wanted.
Step back a bit.
While Japan endured the two bombs, the Soviet Union saw the results.
Anyone have numbers on domestic Japanese rice production vs. population? How long would it take to starve them out, seriously?
Besides which, it’s my understanding that the decision to bomb was made because the psychology of the Japanese people–death before surrender–made few alternatives appear effective. I would think a blockade would’ve had the opposite effect, in providing an adversary everyone could buck up against for the war effort.
Even so, I don’t see the Japanese military “cooperating.” Once the kamikaze pilots made clear the lengths to which the Japanese were willing to go in order to win the war, all conventional strategies were off the table.
The war was over by then. The US had its eye on the new war, the Cold War.
The bombs were more about informing the competing empire (the Soviet Union) - and everyone else - which nation would be defining the post-war period. Just in case the Soviet’s had ambitions in Europe or elsewhere.
They were about announcing the USA, though I understand that might not be the angle offered in school text books.
One influence on the decision was that Truman wanted to get the war over as quickly as possible to keep the USSR from demanding an occupation zone in Japan (the Russians had just started up their campaign against the Japanese). An argument could be made that it was better for the Japanese people to be nuked and then occupied by the Americans rather than a long siege followed by a divided Japan.
All the other reasons for dropping the bombs were valid, but when you came right down to it, this one was enough.
War is expensive. It was costing the US millions of dollars a day to wage war. The quicker it was over, the better. Besides, the casualties from the bomb were all Japanese. They were the enemy, so who cares?
AFAIK, those leaflets didn’t just encourage the Japanese to kill themselves. At least, not just for some abstract value like “honor.” They were propaganda that suggested the most horrific experiences imaginable for anyone captured by the US, so that suicide was a far better fate.
(See Hell to Eternity, based on the true story of Guy Gabaldon, a Hispanic kid raised by a Japanese-American family who, as a US Marine, had some success in talking the Japanese into surrendering rather than committing suicide.)
Japan’s coastline is 29,751 km (about 18,500 miles). By contrast, the Union blockade of the South in the U.S. Civil War tried to blockade 3,500 miles of coastline with 500 ships, and five out of six Confederate ships got through.
In 1941 the German army surrounded Leningrad and laid siege to the city. It lasted for 872 days and killed 600,000-800.000 people – at least 20% of the total population. Despite continual bombardment on top of starvation, the Germans could never take Lenningrad and the Russians never surrendered.
“Limited natural resources” doesn’t mean none at all. Japan had an agricultural base.
The population of Japan in 1940 was 73 million. They lost between 1.5 and 2 million people during the war, but showed no signs of surrendering until the bombs were dropped (and the Soviet Union declared war on Japan at the same time.) How many would have had to die in a blockade before the government would’ve surrendered? 5 million? 10 million?
By contrast, the combined bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 115,000 immediately. Compare that to the 100,000 dead in Tokyo from a single night of fire bombing five months earlier. Even doubling the Hiroshima-Nagasaki death toll for long-term effects puts the number at less than a quarter-million, or about 1/3 of one percent of the total population.
Do you think either an invasion or a blockade/starvation campaign would have been any more “humane?”
This seems to be a strange question. The biggest complaint people had with the bomb was the death and destruction it caused. Would starving a whole country be more humane?
People forget that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t the most destructive bombing campaigns. More people died in the fire bombing of Tokyo. (We didn’t really understand the radioactivity at that point to understand the true terror of it). What made these bombs so effective is that it only took one plane and one bomb instead of hours of bombing.
The Japanese also had no idea that we only had two bombs. As far as the Japanese knew, we could continue this rain of death for months, maybe years. The whole idea that we could do so much damage with so little effort is what caused the Japanese to unconditionally surrender in days of the bombing of Nagasaki.
The U.S. was also interested in ending the war as quickly as possible. There were a lot of men on duty and they were now heading from Europe over to the Pacific.
Japan still could have attacked American ships. The Kamikazes were quite effective, and it didn’t take a lot of technology. Kamikaze planes weren’t the Zeros. They were made from what ever was available and could stay aloft for a few miles out to sea. It didn’t even have to make the return flight.
How long would it take for the Japanese to starve enough to surrender? Japan could grow food, and that food would go to the military before the civilian population. Japan still occupied much of China and if Japan was short of food, it would be taken from the Chinese.
Truman made the decision to use the Atomic bomb because he felt that it would quickly bring the war to a close, lead to less American deaths, and probably was even better for the Japanese than continuing a destructive war for another two years.
Also there’s the point that there were around 80,000 Allied POW’s in Japan, and we’d be sentencing them to death by starvation also.
The figures I had seen to “blockade” were on the order of 5-10 Millions of Japanese civilian deaths, mostly among the aged and children.
The Invasion was estimated to cost several million Japanese deaths, and up to a Million US casualties. (wiki) “A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s staff by William Shockley estimated that conquering Japan would cost 1.7 to 4 million American casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities.”
The Atomic Bomb was actually more humane than either option.
You also had to include the japanese forces in china which were still very much intact and at least fed. While you probably could have starved the home islands into submission, we needed a viable japanese high command enough to issue the surrender order.
Had those overseas forces gone into guerilla war mode, the war could have lasted into the sixties with occupation losses that might have been huge.
The last thing was that we wanted a quick end , Germany had already been defeated and the population was getting war weary.
Declan
Option 3 sounds quite likely, and since I am a fan of the big lizard I approve reason four just because I do.
I am of the opinion that killing a few hundred thousand people outright is more ethical than starving millions for years, especially if killing a few hundred thousand outright gives the survivors a chance to reconsider the actuality of “death before defeat”. With starvation, more children would have died, the health of an entire nation would have been impaired for years, and any POWs in enemy hands would suffer just as much if not more (and since the liberation of the Philippines, few were inclined to leave their brothers-in-arms) in the hands of their captors any longer than necessary.
This was certainly an important factor. Politically, a decision to prolong the war for a couple of years (or more) when a quick end was a good possibility would have been a really tough sell.
Interesting error in your choice of words.
Hobson’s Choice is often used to mean a choice between unpalatable alternatives, but it apparently originally meant a choice which is between one option or nothing at all.
Hobbesian is a reference to Thomas Hobbes, English philosopher who wrote about the necessity of submitting to strong central government to avoid degenerating into complete anarchy he termed “the war of all against all.” WWII wasn’t such an anarchic state, but the term “the war of all against all” sounds vaguely like total world war, so in a way it’s a fascinating choice of words.
This is an error people make often enough that it’s been noted and discussed before.
.