Hell, WE were going to be too depleted to do it. The Allied High Command had just about decided to abandon Olympic and Coronet anyway when the surrender came. Updated intelligence, not only about the new defenses on Kyushu but about the militarization of the entire populace of the home islands (mentioned already) made it possible to estimate that it would take half a million Allied casualties (mostly American) just to take a third of Kyushu in Olympic, with essentially nobody left to make the last island-hop to Honshu. Perhaps you’ve heard that all Purple Heart medals awarded even today were made to cover just Operation Olympic - the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars combined didn’t use up the supply.
If the bombs hadn’t gone off, or hadn’t succeeded in forcing a surrender, the next weapon of mass destruction used by the Allies was going to be famine. The ports were going to be blockaded, and internal transportation lines from the farms to the cities were going to be shut down by repeated bombing. And yes, that was with the knowledge that the first people to starve would likely be Allied POW’s.
My understanding is the the Allied High Command didn’t have any serious reservations during the war. Their intelligence was that the Japanese were running out of material.
What they didn’t realize was the reason they were seeing less material was because the Japanese were stockpiling reserves for the expected invasion. The Allied High Command was astonished after the war to find out how much the Japanese had ready for the battle.
True. The Japanese government had made plans for drastic rationing. Part of it was executing all POW’s (which they also planned on doing following any invasion). Going beyond that, Japanese civilians were divided into categories based on how useful they were to the ongoing war effort. Old people and children were judged to have no use in continuing the war - so they would have been denied all rations and allowed to starve to death.
It amazes me that some people still claim that blockading Japan would have been more “humane” than using the atom bombs.
Depending on which historian you want to believe, it took both atomic bombs AND the Soviet invasion of Manchuria AND the prospect of one or more additional atomic bombs to push the Emperor into urging surrender – and the Japanese cabinet was still divided on the question. But the prspect of invasion didn’t faze them.
My father was also set to be in the invasion force. Like the others, he was convinced he wouldn’t come back.
I thought quite a few of HM’s navy needed to fire their guns at Exocet missiles fired from Argentine jets. Radar chaff and fancy machine guns were needed to shoot the things down as they approached the ships.
Russia not only declared war on Japan, there’s a simmering dispute to this day because they took a few of the northern islets from Japan, still hold the, and consider them Russian territory.
Yeah, I had heard that one motivation to use the bomb was to prevent having to divide Japan with any other allies.
Ah, but my comment was in reference to a Royal Navy battleship, not just any ship of the Royal Navy. The last battleship of the Royal Navy, the Vanguard, was scrapped in 1960.
But shame on me for not using the more precise “main battery” rather than “guns” in my original comment.
For an overview of the whole picture of what was going on I would recommend Nemesis, the battle for Japan 1944-45, by Max Hastings (for some reason renamed as “Retribution” in the States - is Nemesis really not a word understood by Americans likely to read a 700 page history book? :dubious:). This covers the whole war against Japan - Burma, the Pacific, and - most important - China. As well as the discussions aroung Olympic and the decision to drop the Atomic Bomb it covers the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in detail - something I knew next to nothing about. Hastings makes the point that one reason there was little debate about using the bomb was that the 20th Air Force was already destroying Japanese cities at will - with the Tokyo firestorm of 10 March killing more people than died at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. There is a good review here.
Others have already mentioned Hell to Pay and Nemesis/Retribution. So I’ll add that Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank is another good book on this subject.
Vichy being a continuation of the Third Republic? Not really a mainstream opinion.
As for Vichy being an ally of Nazi Germany, I dont think Vichy ever comitted to that. Maybe the US considered differently (might explain why the same President talking about “This day in infamy” would do a Pearl Harbor himself by invading North Africa and attacking France without any declaration of war). If so, would you have some docs for that? I’d be interested.
France did have troops by that time, but was totally dependent on the US for weapons, supplies and transportation. So, contributing to the war against Japan, halfway across the world was out of question. Unless the USA wished it so, and it wasnt going to share the future control of conquered lands with a declining colonial power.
As people are recommending books, I’ll through in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan which does an excellent job of covering many things from the Japanese perspective.
The firebombing was horrible, and I know people who were almost killed in them. Among them, one told about a napalm bomb that dropped directly into his family’s dugout bomb shelter. As the oldest boy, all of 6 years old, he grabbed the bomb and threw it out into the street where it blew up. His wife, who was also about the same age at the time of the attack fled with her family hear the Sumida river. Their neighbors went one direction, they another. They survived and the neighbors didn’t. Remarkably, they didn’t have any animosity toward me.
Don’t forget that the Soviets invaded and took over the southern half of Sakhalin, which had been ceded to the Japanese after the 1905 Russo-Japanese war (I think) and had been made a prefecture of Japan.
As I understand it,the US and Britain declared war on Japan on Dec 8, 1941, immediately after Pearl Harbor was attacked, and Germany declared war on the US on Dec 11, 1941. I assume that many US supply ships and merchant marines were killed prior to 1941, so why wasn’t a German U-boat sinking a US ship, whether directly aiding the British or not, considered an act of war? Was the US afraid/unwilling to attack Germany until it was attacked by Japan?
Unwilling for certain. Remember that most Americans of that time didn’t want to get involved in world affairs (actually, a lot of Americans still don’t want to). FDR had to drag the US into the fighting, and it finally took an attack on home soil to do it. Even then, there was still a good portion of the population that thought we should have limited involvement to Japan only.
To the extent that there were hostilities between German and American naval forces before Pearl Harbor, a lot of the folks at home thought we brought it on ourselves for getting involved in any capacity. For all that, the German Navy never attacked American soil directly in the lead up to US involvement.
Also, there was more native sympathy for Germany than you would think. People of German descent were a not insignificant portion of the population (aside - Benjamin Franklin was more than a little worried at the influence of the upstart Germans in Pennsylvania). There wasn’t nearly that sort of sentiment for Japan.
Didn’t the main Japanese Airforce dude hide away several thousand aircraft for suicide attacks against the invasion fleet? Heard that but not sure of its truth.
I’ve seen an interview with a kamikaze pilot. The reason he was able to give the interview was that he was held back for use against the expected home invasion fleet and never had to fly his mission.