To add more evidence found this about the invasion of Saipan (I have seen video of the bit mentioned here of a mother clutching her child and leaping from a cliff rather than be captured):
From Wiki here are the totals for the Japanese troops on Saipan (this accounts for all of them on the island):
It amazes me with this and all the other cites that US general were opining on how Japan was close to surrender. Surrender just was not part of their cultural makeup back then.
A survey taken in the heat of the war is cited. Take one now when we have retrospect. That would have been a terrible thing to do. Because some nuts wanted to wipe out the
Thats why I would listen to Ike and McCarthur. The people get emotionally caught up in war. They get war frenzy and are taught to hate the enemy, all of them. We call them gooks, slants, krauts, and pretend they are less than human.
To be fair, the little Korean kid called the Americans arriving in Korea, “migook” first. The American officer just replied, “Yes you are, now get away from me.”
FWIW, My father was in the Army and would have been on the invasion force. After he visited Hiroshima about 15 years ago, he came away saying “that saved my life.”
Believing that does not make it so. Japan had actually offered to surrender but we refused . We were not satisfied with the terms.
The estimates of how many would have died are in disagreement with the army figures of the time. We have cooked the numbers to justify what we did. It was a cruel act of racism and hatred ,combined with vengeance.
http://www.spectacle.org/696/hiroshi.html
We are the only nation to use the bomb and we did it twice. That is nothing to be proud of. We have spent 60 years trying to justify it. We have to. That is what we do.
We have?
It is?
Where do you get this nonsense?
While the Japanese refused to surrender unconditionally they were exploring a negotiated surrender all through 1945. By the middle of the year they were getting fairly desperate and would likely have surrendered with a few conditions like the preservation of the emperor. The idea that the leadership was fanatically committed to fighting till the bitter end no matter what is a myth. It was the US which scotched any meaningful negotiations by insisting on unconditional surrender.
The policy of encouraging the Soviets to declare war on Japan in 1945 led to the Soviet occupation of Manchuria and North Korea. The former was invaded by the Soviets just before the war ended and then became a major staging ground for the PLA in the ensuring civil war. The latter was a result of the decision to jointly occupy Korea taken during Yalta and Postdam. Basically instead of trying to limit Soviet influence in East Asia the US was encouraging it to declare war on Japan and as a result there was a vast increase in Communist power in East Asia. A lot of this could have been avoided if the US had been prepared to meaningfully negotiate with Japan. Obviously there was no question of allowing Japan to keep its colonies but certainly the US could have arranged a more orderly transfer of power with an eye on minimizing post-war Communist influence.
Something similar happened in Europe as well where the policy of unconditional surrender along with proposals like the Morgentheau plan to de-industrialize post-war Germany proved excellent propoganda fodder for the Nazi regime and discouraged internal military opposition from overthrowing the Nazis. It is quite possible that a more reasonable strategy would have led to a successful military coup which almost happened anyway. A earlier end to the war would not only have saved lives but also have limited Soviet influence in Eastern Europe.
Finally invoking the atrocities committed against civilians by Japan in China to justify atrocities on Japanese civilians by the US is pretty bankrupt. Such reasoning could be used to justify an endless cycle of atrocities in most parts of the world. And let’s not forget that the US itself had brutally established its empire in Asia just a few decades before in the Philippines committing numerous atrocities against the civilian population.
Which surrender terms are you speaking of? Is it the 40-page dossier in Jan 1945? Are talking about “The Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War” adopted by five of the Big Six on June 6–the document that stated that the Japanese people would fight to extinction rather than surrender? Are you speaking of the negotiations with the Soviets that Stalin used to buy time so he could build up a military presence in the Pacific? Are you talking about the July rejection of the Potsdam Declaration by four of the Big Six? Could you be thinking of the offer to surrender that might have happened if the Kyūjō Incident succeeded, since it happened almost a week after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because Emperor Hirohito decided to surrender?
Do you have a cite for this?
Certain elements of the government such as Foreign Minister Togo were persuing a negotiated surrender through the Russians before the bombings, but the efforts were not supported by the Japanese government as a whole (especially the militarists). And negotiations unsupported by the militarists had no chance of succeeding because they had the ability to dissolve the cabinet at any time. Togo was fooling himself, something that Sato, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, did his best to get through to him. Even if Russia had actually had an interest in helping the Japanese surrender, Togo’s inability to actually suggest concrete terms for the negotiations would have scuttled the effort.
The minimum conditions that are known to have been sought by the Japanese military go far beyond anything the Allies could ever have accepted: no occupation of Japan, war crimes trials and disarmament to be left to the Japanese, and retention of the imperial system. When Japanese officials mentioned “preservation of the emperor,” they were actually referring to preservation of the entire non-democratic, imperial government. I do agree that the Japanese leadership was not truly planning to fight to the last man. Their strategy at the end of the war was to repulse the US landing attempts and then attempt to negotiate a surrender. They believed that if they inflicted heavy casualties that the US government would soften their demands rather than continue the invasion.
Use of “gook” as an anti-Asian slur predates the Korean War by decades.
I don’t think we can really say what terms would have been accepted after serious negotiations. Obviously the initial negotiating position would have been very different from the final position. Secondly the refusal of the US to negotiate seriously itself would have weakened the peace party in the Japanese war cabinet. Finally the Japanese willingness to negotiate increased as their military position worsened. In June IIRC the emperor himself intervened and pushed for an end to the war.
In the end the Allied bombings were a massive war crime and would surely have been tried as such if they had lost. Those involved in it like Curtis Le May and Robert McNamara have been quite candid about this. The justification for those crimes is that even more people would have been killed during a full-scale invasion which begs the question of why a full-scale invasion was necessary at all. After all most wars don’t actually end with unconditional surrender and full invasions of the losing side. This was a strategic decision made by the Allies not something forced on them. As it happens, it was not only immoral but also strategically foolish and contributed greatly to the chaos and tyranny after the war in East Europe and East Asia.
It’s like talking to a wall, but December 1945 wasn’t in the heat of war, **the war was already over **. Sept. 2 '45 on the USS Missouri and all that. Taking a survey now on attitudes will show the attitudes of people 64 years after the event, very few of whom were even alive at the time.
So you prefer to listen to Macarthur who I guess wasn’t emotionally involved in the war? This is the same Douggy Mac who has been criticized for pointlessly squandering American lives with his insistence that every inch of the Philippines be taken back to fulfill his pledge of “I shall return,” when most of the Japanese forces there could have been left to rot on the vine as they were completely isolated and the war had passed them by? The same Macarthur who was so against nuclear weapons that he had to be sacked by Truman for his continual insistence on using nukes on the Chinese and starting WW3 in order to pull his chestnuts out of the fire in Korea?
The same Douggy Mac who (you’ll like this gonz) earned his humanitarian credentials by disobeying a direct order from the President of the United States to halt in order to put down the WW1 veteran Bonus Marchers since he felt they were dangerous socialists and communists? Bonus march
Well gee gonzo, if you consider attempts to negotiate a peace that left Japan unoccupied, it’s government in place, and maintaining Korea and that part of China that it had taken by force in Japanese hands “surrender,” much less acceptable terms, then sure Japan was trying to “surrender.”
Prior to the bombs, when the Japanese ambassador to the USSR who was conducting these back door negotiations asked his government if unconditional surrender modified only by an assurance that the Emperor would remain in place and not charged with war crimes would be acceptable terms since it was the best that he felt could be hoped for, and was in fact the terms of Japan’s surrender, he was told in no uncertain terms that it was unacceptable to the Japanese government. As the Japanese diplomatic ciphers had been completely broken by the US at this point, they were aware o this as well.
The first use of it being used in English is not exactly known. Some claim it was in the 1920s in the Philippines. However, the American military had contact with Korea prior to WWII (as you seem to assume I was pointing to), for example the General Sherman incident of 1866. Since Americans are called migooks and the unified Korea is called Han-Guk in South Korea because gook/guk means “country” in Hangul, the chances of an American officer hearing migook as broken English for “I am a gook” being the origin of the slur is still pretty high. But this is completely off subject for the current topic, but I had to show that I wasn’t being corrected for being ignorant of the term, although my Hangul is very, very rusty.
What on Earth do the ‘old days’ have to do with acceptable victory conditions in the modern era?
I’ll ask the OP again, since the above posters right now are already assuming a shit load right off the bat.
Are we assuming unconditional surrender is the only Allied option?
Close to collapse - definitely an overstatement on my part. I did some google searching last night regarding this, and turned up a blank, but will try to look more over the holiday weekend. I agree with you that the predicted effect was overstated, and that the reduction in productivity wasn’t delivered, except in short bursts.
But it remains that the Blitz, which was on an order of magnitude much lower than the raids on Germany and Japan, caused social problems in the UK, in particular because of the disparities in treatment based on class. While the Blitz targetted working class areas, the working class was underprovided with protection.
I don’t know if you are right about the effects today - we haven’t seen the level of destruction on built up areas since.
I don’t disagree, but I think you misread me. I actually said:
I wasn’t referencing public opinion at the time, but current views. I certainly can believe those polls.
I dont know enough to comment about the bombing of Japan.
But when I visited the Hiroshima peace memorial museum, I felt really sad.
It is one of the few times that I have cried.
War is a nasty business, for sure.
What I would like to know is, why didn’t America drop the bombs on Germany?
The only thing correct about this is that Japan was prepared to end the war on terms that essentially gave them their war aims, even though they were losing badly. Others have detailed what they were prepared to agree to at different times.
Further, it can be argued, and I think reasonably, that given what was known at the time, Truman gambled with the most humane of three kess-than-satisfactory options… and his gamble worked. The shock of two atomic bombs brought enough of the leadership over to the peace party to enable Hirohito to agree to surrender. Without it, the Gotterdamerung continue-the-war-at-all-costs extremists would have prevailed, so far as Japan’s leadership was concerned.
Given that the Trinity Test, the first atomic weapon explosion was in July, 1945, and Germany had surrended in May, 1945, it would have been considered unnecessary, let alone downright rude, to have nuked Berlin at that point.
Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. The first functional bomb was tested on July 16. The Manhattan Project in fact was intended to develop weapons for use against Germany, but the results of the Europe First strategy led to Germany surrendering before a bomb was ready for use.