We had 3 bombs, including the trinity test. We had 2 bombs the day before the Hiroshima bombing. Nagasaki was the last bomb until another one was scheduled to be produced sometime in late August.
Look for “The American Experience” Truman http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0326315/
It was filmed in 1997 and has interviews with many people who were alive and present when that decision was made.
The impression I received was that the military, Truman, et. al., viewed the bomb as just another weapon to be used to defeat the Japanese. I don’t think FDR’s views would have been different.
However, the documentary made a point that Truman did not know the reservations that the bomb inventors had in the use of it. Would that have changed his mind? Who knows. But he wouldn’t let MacArthur use the bomb in Korea.
IIRC -The best estimates by the military - based on the battles like Iwo Jima - were that about half a million people would die in the invasion of Japan. I think I also saw 100,000 as the estimated US casualties.
Also, the horror of the atom bomb was NOT known. ye, there were radiation deatchs during its development. The problem was that the idea that dust could kill, and a bomb would distribute that dust widely. The US tested above ground at first. Even into teh 50’s they were killing sheep in Nevada with fall-out; rumor has it that’s what got John Wayne’s cancer started, filming downwind from a test. The Navy brass, with their brass minds, reacted to warnings about fall-out dust at the atoll blasts by orderring the men to sweep each other down with brooms.
So at the time, it was basically a bigger more effective bomb. A bad-weather day could mean that a hundred-plane conventional raid would leave the mills or docks intact; the A-bomb would guarantee nothing was still standing for a mile around. As for warnings - why tell the Japanese “this one plane is the only one that will hurt the city” so they could concentrate their entire fire-power against it? The Hiroshima plane was ignored because a solitary plane was expected to just be doing harmless aerial photography.
The Japanese knew exactly what hit them. I recall an interview with a Canadian POW; he said the day after, the guards were very somber and talking among themselves. He asked one of the camp workers what happened, and the guy said “Hiroshima - awadi.” (gone).
“You mean a firebomb raid like Tokyo?” he asked. The guard told him no - put a piece of paper on the table, said “awadi” and brushed it onto the floor. He meant the whole city was “gone”.
A Japanese physicist writes about being sent to see what happened the day after Hiroshima. He looked at the trees by the airport, saw the raiation burns, and realized immediately that the Americans had made the atomic bomb work. He reported this to the high command - this was something new, not a simple trick with firebombs.
IIRC, the coup attempt against the emperor and the high command happened AFTER Nagasaki, in the few hours before the emperor went onto the radio to announce surrender. Even after two cities had been vaporized, a significant group of the military command felt the battle should continue. This is the mentality that the Americans were sure they would face if they invaded with conventional forces.
The people who describe the decision to surrender pretty much admit it was a convenience that the atom bomb was dropped. There was no face-saving way to surrender at the time, even though everyone realistically recognized the war was long lost. Even so, they dithered so long that the Americans dropped a second bomb within 3 days, with the hope that the Japanese would not realize that there would be a month or more before the next one was ready. they wanted to look like they had an endless supply and would drop therm daily until the Japanese surrendered.
I had never heard this before. I looked around a little to read more about it, but couldn’t find anything (I only did a brief search). Where could I learn more about this? It kind of seems to go against the whole secrecy of the Manhattan Project.
In our last go-round on this, linked on the first page, it was established pretty conclusively that a half million was the predicted figure for U.S. deaths alone. Among other things, the U.S. ordered half a million purple hearts in preparation for Operation Coronet.
It was also established that there were at least 900,000 Japanese troops on the main island, and that they were reasonably expected to fight to the last man, as evidenced by Okinawa and Iwo Jima, where Japanese casualties exceeded 90%. Less than 5% surrendered, and those were basically ones too wounded to keep fighting. Given that on Okinawa, civilians joined in the fighting for the Japanese or committed suicide to avoid capture, the reasonable estimate of Japanese casualties was over a million.
Lastly, there were only two possible landing points on the main island, and they were obvious to anyone looking at a map, so the Japanese would have a maximal defender’s advantage. The landing battle alone would have been terrible.
Whatever you think about atomic bombs, an invasion of Japan would have been worse.
Earlier discussions of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings can be found at:
Was the US attack on Hiroshima justified?
How many American lives were saved with the dropping of the atomic bomb?
Japanese surrender of WWII
WWII: Why, exactly did the Japanese surrender?
Rush Limbaugh–Atomic Bomb a “win-win” situation for Japan
Atomic Weapons and The End of WW2
Atomic debate: bombing Japan
Hiroshima & Nagasaki
(Interestingly, the last survivor of both bombs just recently died of old age:
Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivor dies aged 93 | Japan | The Guardian )
The problem with modern industrial war is that it involves everyone. The factories that make armaments are a target. The factories that make ball bearings or wire for the military equipment are a target; the mills and smelters that make steel, the trains that deliver supplies, the power plants that power the factories, the refineries, the food processing plants… Pretty much the whole industrial society is to some extent involved in an all-out war. This is why city bombing raids were considered logical in WWII.
No real beef with your post, but the half million figure was for casualties, not deaths…two different things. I think the expect deaths of US soldiers was around 100,000, and several million Japanese (and this doesn’t count how many allied troops, especially Russians, would also have either bought the farm or at least a large piece of it). It would have been ugly, and I don’t think anyone who has looked at this seriously and has a grasp of the realities is going to argue that a forced entry assault on the Japanese home land wouldn’t have cost everyone, including the Japanese, more lives lost.
-XT
IIRC the US is still handing out those Purple Hearts (for current casualties as they happen) from that stock to this day.
Kerry has three.
The projections have a dramatically wide range and depend on how much you think the Japanese civilian population was going to participate in the defense. Given the history of mass suicides in places like Okinawa of civilians, they seemed sufficiently fanatical that I think many millions would fight to the death.
The US invasion force would’ve been well supplied, well armed battle hardened vets - and they’d be fighting what remained of the Japanese military, plus women, kids, and old men armed with everything from improvised explosives to sharp sticks. The casualties would’ve been disporportionately heavy on the Japanese, but it would still have been a costly for the US - costing them possibly as many casualties as they’d suffered in the war to this point. But if the Japanese continued their fanatical ways, we’d be looking at several million, possibly tens of million casualties. It could’ve been almost unlike anything the world had ever seen before.
As I said in post #30, I was wrong. I got it from a message board argument years ago and never fact checked it myself. Sorry.
Edit: Casualties include injuries and fatalities - basically anything that would keep a soldier from immediately returning to battle.
The Hiroshima bombing bothered the japanese military not one bit-Marshall Hata had convinced his superiors that the Hiroshima bomb was nothing special-he was ordering the civilians to resist the American invaders with bamboo spears!
If a few million died, it didn’t matter-Japan’s “honor” was more important.
Take a close look at a timeline of combat from August 1945.
August 6 - Hiroshima bombed
August 6 - Almost 400 fighters, bombers and attack aircraft hit targets on Kyushu
August 6 - Almost 100 fighters attack locations around Tokyo
August 7 - B-24s and B-29s hit targets on Kyushu
August 7 - 124 B-29s hit the naval arsenal at Tonokawa, south of Tokyo
August 8 - Soviet Union declares war on Japan
August 8 - Medium and heavy bombers again strike Kyushu
August 8 - 221 B-29s firebomb Yawata, between Kyoto and Osaka
August 8 - Fighters strike targets at Osaka
August 9 - Soviet troops invade Manchuria
August 9 - Medium bombers again hit targets on Kyushu
August 9 - Nagasaki bombed
August 10 - 80 B-24s bomb Kumamoto, on Kyushu
August 10 - 70 B-29s bomb targets around Tokyo
During that period the Japanese government was still split over the question of surrender. Does anyone really believe a demonstration would have made a difference?
And would FDR have acted the same way as Truman? You bet.
Nor was the Atomic Bomb anything “unthinkable” at that time. It was just another weapon. Why not use it? We only think it was a horrible and momentous decision as we have been brought up with 50 years of how world destroying and unthinkable Atomic warfare would be. Then, we had the only bomb, and it really wasn’t that big of a deal. I mean, if we can order the firebombing of Tokyo, why not bomb Hiroshima?
Actually it was my understanding that if the US had invaded (Operation Olympic and Operation Coronet.) that before the invasion begain we’d soften up the Japanese with atomic bombs. In that light there’s another reason for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to get real world battle data to know how far in front of the troops to drop the bombs so as not to hurt your own troops.
As I’ve written before, I think three things were sustaining the Japanese war effort by the summer of 1945.
The first was the sense it didn’t matter to the leaders of Japan if the nation of Japan won or lost. The leaders knew they personally were defeated - like the Nazis, they were going to be held accountable for their actions. If they surrendered early, it might have saved their countrymen a lot of suffering, but it would have moved ahead their own fate. So they were willing to postpone their own personal retribution by a few months by sacrificing millions of others first.
As I’ve cynically noted in the past, Hirohito didn’t announce Japan’s surrender until after it was declared that he would be given personal immunity. Japanese officers, who weren’t included in on this deal, then tried to overthrow their Emperor and keep fighting.
The second factor was the Soviets - they were playing the Japanese. Stalin wanted to get in on the Asian war at its end so he could claim a piece of the prizes that would be awarded after Japan’s defeat. But he knew he would need some time to get his army moved and ready for a new offensive. He was worried that Japan might surrender before he got a chance to declare war on them. So the Soviets opened a covert diplomatic channel to the Japanese. They told them that the United States might be willing the negotiate a compromise peace. This, of course, was exactly what the Japanese leaders wanted to hear so they convinced themselves it was true. They believed they had a chance of negotiating an armistice which would allow them to surrender some of their captured territories in exchange for leaving them with safe in Japan itself.
So proposals were being forwarded to the Soviet Union which the Japanese believed were being sent on to the United States and given serious consideration. The Japanese thought they were involved in real negotiations. Which is why the Soviet declaration of war on August 8 came as such a shock. The Japanese suddenly realized that they had just been strung along and there was no prospect of a negotiated surrender.
The third factor was the belief in Japanese exceptionalism. Many nations (certainly including the United States) have a belief in their exceptionalism - the idea that they are different from other countries and the rules that apply to other countries don’t apply to them. This was certainly the case in Japan. It was an accepted part of Japanese culture that Japan had never been defeated in a war. Even when things looked most hopeless, some last minute miracle had always saved Japan from defeat. So the Japanese had come to believe that they could not be defeated - as long as they maintained faith and kept fighting, something would save them in the end.
The atomic bomb shattered this belief. It showed that fate or the gods or the forces of history was not on Japan’s side - it was America not Japan that had been given the miraculous new weapon. The Japanese were forced to the awareness that they could lose a war - and in fact had lost the war they were in.
couldn’t we have just “threatened” Japan with it first?
My grandfather who was in Okanawa at the time would say- REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR, MOTHERFUCKERS!
Marie Curie died from radiation exposure. Nasty, but nothing like seeing that all that is left of a person is a shadow on a wall.
I’d count that person as lucky versus a lingering death from radiation poisoning.
Ever read about the fire bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo? People died from having their lungs burned out. Wars are a terrible thing and a lot of people die horrible deaths in them. I don’t see the logic of saying it’s okay to kill people as long as it’s done in an acceptable manner. Why is killing people with bullets or bombs or fire or starvation any better than killing them with poison gas or radiation?