I thought he was calling your argument wacko, not you.
I don’t know. Why don’t you ask a mod and see?
The answer I gave is a legitimate response to the question posed.
Being as I gave you those cites, yes, I know what they say.
I think you’re reading too much into what I claimed. I didn’t say that the “bureaucratic” explanation was the only one, and that no other reasons played a part in the decision. The scientists and some of the military people knew that the Bomb was unlike anything that had come before, and many of them debated the issues that you and other posters have raised here. I have not disputed any of them or said they’re wrong and I have the only answer.
My point, once again, was that today, with the hindsight of seeing what happened at Hiroshima and all that followed, most people find it hard to imagine a president being as hands-off in the decision making on the use of nuclear weapons as Truman was in 1945. We now have a horror and respect for nuclear weapons that Truman (and especially Byrnes) had little or no glimmer of. They thought the atomic bomb was just a bigger conventional bomb, and didn’t oversee Groves’ deployment of it as any president since would have.
For instance, as noted at the site I quoted above, Stanley Goldberg believed that Groves ordered the Nagasaki mission without any further approval from anyone. I haven’t studied these issues closely for many years, but I don’t recall reading anything that contradicts that claim. That’s what I meant when I said that Truman “essentially left it to Groves to use them has he saw fit.”
No, not according to me, but according to Stanley Goldberg, the scientist and historian I cited above and with whom I worked in his research on this very issue. He was working on a biography of Groves, never published apparently, at the time of his death in 1996. He was not a conspiracy theorist.
I will make one minor correction to my original post. I wrote that Groves “said fairly early on that it would take two [bombs] to end the war.” According to the same site with the other Goldberg quotes, Groves made that statement after the Trinity test.
Robert Frank concluded, on the basis of secret intercepted Japanese message traffic, that Truman had already concluded that only the bomb could force a Japanese surrender. Operations Olympic and Coronet had already been decided against, only MacArthur dissenting, due to poor odds of success and extreme losses. If the bomb hadn’t worked, then yes, blockade, bombing, and famine were going to be the strategic weapons used next.
The Conventional Wisdom on the A-Bombs is that it was a great evil, and however we made that decision, it was a wrong decision.:dubious:
However, as has been showed- it was actually the humane decision. The others would have cost easily 10 times as many Japanese lives- not to mention many more Allied casualties.
Sure, dying in a Atomic blast is a horrible way to go. Is it any more horrible than firebombing?
To return and refocus on the OP’s original question:
The answer is, why not try all three?
That, in fact, was what the United States was doing. Unless I missed it, no one in this thread has shared the fact that the most effective naval blockade in history was conducted by the U.S. Navy against Japan. See here for a helpful Wikipedia link on the submarine campaign against Japan; the U.S. aerial bombardment did the rest.
Also a useful link:
Bottom line, Japanese merchant shipping was decimated by 1945.
Arguments that since Japan was largely an agrarian country ignore that at no point during the war were the Home Islands capable of feeding their population-- let alone fueling their industry and equipping their military-- without constant imports from abroad. A modern war machine required these imports to sustain it. The most rudimentary industrial economy required these imports to sustain it. Without fuel, without rubber, without steel for parts, Japan’s transportation infrastructure would breakdown. You can keep villages thriving using oxen and horses, but oxen and horses aren’t going to work enough food and transport it to keep then-modern cities running.
Essentially, the blockade was essential to Japan’s defeat for three purposes. The first-order effect was simply denying Japan’s ability to deploy and supply forces abroad, whether on Pacific islands or in mainland China. The second-order effect resulted in the elimination of the resources necessary to operate and sustain the Japanese military, particularly the resource-intensive Navy and Air Force.
The third-order effect-- the material effects on the survivability of the Japanese population on the Home Islands-- was obviously much slower than the first two, but it was also undeniable.
The U.S. expected the atomic bombs to be effective against Japan, perhaps even enough to convince them to surrender. But no one could guarantee that; in reality, no one planned for it. Instead, the blockade was going to continue, the conventional bombing campaign would continue, and preparations for Operations Olympic and Coronet continued.
If the atom bombs ended the war early? All the better. If they didn’t? Well then, it’ll help take apart Japan’s war machine, enhancing the effectiveness of the other military operations.
So, long story short: the “either/or” choice between blockade or nuclear bombardment was never a choice seriously considered by U.S. commanders. Instead, it was always a case of using every tool in the arsenal in the hope that their effects would combine to either force Japan to surrender, or enable their conquer and occupation with the fewest expenditure of lives lost (especially Allied, obviously, but many in hindsight forget that an invasion of the Home Islands would almost certainly have killed far, FAR more Japanese than the two atomic bombings, almost certainly by *at least *an order of magnitude).
I hadn’t heard that Olympic and Coronet were definitely ruled out, but the troops themselves believed they would be sent in. I’m sure it would have been a horrible bloodbath for both countries.
My father was in the infantry in Europe at the end of the war, and he was certain he would be sent over to die on a beach in Japan. He agreed heartily with another old soldier we saw interviewed on a documentary, who said (and I’m going from decades-old memory here, but the sense of the quote is accurate) with a catch in his voice, “When we heard about the bomb, we didn’t think about the people who died. It meant we were going to live.”
I myself have a harder time justifying the bombs (especially the second one), but I wasn’t there. The people who were there seem to have felt, “It meant we were going to live.”
Right. It’s been said that what unrestricted submarine warfare failed to do for Germany in both world wars, starve an island nation into submission, was (perhaps for the only time) effectively accomplished by the US submarines against Japan. And US carrier airpower and surface forces were sinking huge quantities of shipping on top of the submarine campaign. Naval mines (deployed by sub, air, and sometimes surface ships) were a big part of the campaign too.
By the summer of 1945, Japan had a sizeable proportion of the population dedicated to digging up roots in the countryside in an attempt to synthesize some kind of fuel for the Kamikaze aircraft. Large scale Malthusian population reduction was looming in the near future.
Here’s a link suggesting that more effort and coordination in the anti-shipping campaign could have starved Japan out of the war substantially earlier.
It’s a fascinating document, Elvis, but I think you’re misinterpreting that “Operations Olympic and Coronet had already been decided against…” The way I read it, Truman had already (reluctantly) approved the planning to go forward, with King opposed to it (but agreeing so the recommendation would be unanimous) and MacArthur strongly in favor. But, those discussions were still ongoing even as the bombs were being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I read Frank’s article and infer that he believes Olympic would not have gone forward, but I’ll be damned if I can see where he connects A and B to prove what he believes.
And I have to echo Sailboat. My father was a desk sergeant in the Air Force in 1945. He was also training in marksmanship, infantry and all those other things a stateside desk jockey wouldn’t ordinarily be involved in. Whatever the Chief of Staff thought at the time, the troops sure as hell thought they were going in.
Frank says that happened back in June. By August the assessment had changed. At any rate, Frank concluded flatly, and ISTM convincingly, that Olympic wasn’t going to happen. But it’s true there was not yet a formal decision.
Sure, nobody had publicly said otherwise yet.
[Moderator note]
Notassmartaithought, personal insults are not permitted in GQ. (And particularly from the second quote, it appears to me that you indeed intended to insulting commasense rather than just his argument.) This is not an official warning, but further insulting behavior may result in one. Don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
More on that from writer Paul Fussell:
The whole essay, “Thank God for the Bomb”, is well worth reading.
Yes, in the excellent Quartered Safe Out Here, about his wartime exploits in Burma, George McDonald Fraser said that in July 1945, he and his buddies were packing up and preparing to be sent to take part in the invasion of Japan.
Yes! Darn, always forgetting about mines.
Then again, that makes me like every other navy that’s ever sailed 
Thet’s a very good “big picture” take on it. A strategist has to take into effect all the component parts of the scene, and in war one goal among many is to NOT drag it out. Supreme commanders (usually) prefer to not go on prolonged, slow-or-static attrition campaigns that will cause heavy casualties either military or civilian, and that’s not out of the goodness of their hearts but because that’s a damn inefficient way to go about the mission.
Also, like he said, it was a matter of counting on every tool in the arsenal.
The idea that somehow the leadership at the time should have tried anything, just anything but the Bomb, is applying our parameters and our idea of what the goals should have been, to their situation and what their goals were.
…Y’know, as an aside, there’s people who seem to believe the key ingredients of nuclear weapons is Satan’s Own Concentrated Distillate of Evil. The Bomb is a specially powerful weapon that does a huge amount of harm and has terrible persistent effects, so people take it extremely seriously, but by itself it is merely an application of technology. Eventually, at some point in the 20th Century, it WOULD have existed (and IMO very probably would have been used somewhere if only to prove the point).
I’m sorry I’m being late in answering this, but I disagree with that. Japan was suffering from major food shortages and rationing by the end of the war, due to both labor shortages and shortages of fertilizer and in fuel for farming machinery. I don’t believe that returning to preindustrial farming methods and lake fishing would have produced enough food to feed the entire population.
That’s true ONLY as long as one side has the bomb and nobody else does.
Under current conditions where many sides have the bomb (and delivery systems), considering it a mere application of technology is highly likely to kill everyone on earth. In fact, to date, we’ve always used every new weapon to the limits of our ability…except weapons that were morally proscribed, like poison gas.
Going solely by history, the only thing that has retarded or restricted the decision to use new weapons (aside from technical and logistical considerations) has been moral suasion, and despite the fact that that doesn’t work sometimes (The Pope banning crossbows) or only works in a limited way (international agreements banning poison gas) it still works sometimes.
I agree that nuclear weapons, viewed in cold logic, have no moral component significantly more evil than weapons in general.
However, I also agree with political and scientific thinkers who feel that we must cultivate the belief in others, and in ourselves, that nuclear bombs ARE evil, off-limits, and qualitatively different than other weapons because it offers at least a chance we will survive in the long term.
Human nature being what it is, the sheer necessity of the situation imposes a logic that the technical mechanics of fission and fusion do not.
And well after it, too. The internal transportation infrastructure was destroyed, and soldiers and civilians were coming back from the formerly occupied areas of Asia by the hundreds of thousands, further stressing the food supply. Famine had killed so many Japanese in the months after the surrender that MacArthur was forced to go to Congress and say “Give me food or give me bullets”.
I have to say this all reads quite morally and justifyingly (sic) parochial
Like the USSR and post-war empire building couldn’t be further from the mind.
A. What evidence is there that it was?
B. Would the decision have been different?