As I’ve discussed on the boards in the past, this is a persistent myth. The transfer of the crucial parts of another bomb from Los Alamos were interrupted by Groves and Oppenheimer in the hours following the attack on Nagasaki. Tinian was expecting to deliver this within a week or so, weather depending. And with the plutonium production chain up and running, there is documentation by Groves promising his superiors to supply further weapons at about the rate of one a week.
I’m also somewhat dubious about the notion of specifically reserving weapons for use on the invasion beaches. This was discussed by the likes of Groves and Oppenheimer, but they weren’t privy to the invasion plans. Conversely, those who were weren’t in general aware of the Bomb. No doubt if the Japanese hadn’t surrendered then some sort of such plan would have emerged. As it was, the initial speculations didn’t get the chance to evolve into specific plans.
Regarding the OP’s question: essentially complete surprise.
Famously, the supply of Purple Heart Medals manufactured in anticipation of casualties from the invasion of Japan lasted the U.S. military all the way through the end of the century; in fact, there are still tens of thousands of those medals left over from 1945.
My parents were on their honeymoon when they heard of the bombing. It was a complete surprise - and my dad’s roommate (before the wedding, obviously!) was in the Manhattan Project!
I thought I read somewhere that when the Russians were told by Truman about the bomb that they were not actually as surprised as was thought they should have been, and that the Russias actually had a good deal of information from a mole inside the Manhattan Project. Or am I remembering wrong?
Atomic bombs were a suprise to most, but the idea of a “Superweapon” to end the war was not. The Germans have the V1 and V2 rockets that were billed as such, but the V1s were too easy to shoot down and the V2 rockets came too late to help the Germans much.
The August 7, 1945 issue of the Chicago is full of stories that indicate the bombs were well kept as a secret but the idea of a Superweapon rumoured to end the war was all over the place.
But no one knew what that weapon would be or if it was ever gonna happen.
The Russians, the Germans, and the Japanese all had atomic bomb research programs going that had varying degrees of success. (Some historians think Japan had two atomic weapon research programs going, but there’s no real evidence for this beyond gossip.) The Russians and the Americans were the most well-funded and successful. The Russians did rely to some extent on espionage info from moles in the American program (such as Klaus Fuchs) to speed their program up, but they did have resources and gifted physicists and would have have succeeded on their own eventually even without the American information. The world’s major physicists of the time certainly understood an atomic bomb was theoretically possible; the development into something that could be used was the issue.
The Japaneese did not give up after the bombs were dropped. There was a large faction of the military that wanted to fight on. The day they did give it up was when the Army Air Force put 1000 planes over Tokeyo and planned on repeating it the next day.
It’s scary to think the U.S., Germany and Japan were all racing to perfect an Atomic bomb.
The U.S. had one major advantage because of the limitless power generators from the TVA dams in Tennessee. I’ve seen documentaries where they said the Calutrons at Oak Ridge required staggering amounts of power to enrich uranium. Power demands that could never be matched in war time Germany or Japan.
I’ve also heard (in the documentaries) that the German Physicists were not eager to give Hitler the A Bomb. They did everything possible to delay research without actually getting arrested. At the end of the war Germany sent a U Boat to Japan with their uranium, heavy water etc. Thankfully, the U Boat was intercepted.
It’s also worth mentioning that between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, the USSR declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. The Japanese were well aware of just how effective the Red Army was in 1945, and avoiding that particular fight was very persuasive to the Japanese.
My understanding is that there were discussions about how to best use the available bombs. One option was to use them for strategic city bombing. Another was to use them against built-up military targets like an invasion site.
Strategic bombings against cities won out as the first plan for relatively pragmatic reasons - the bombs and the means to drop them on a city were ready but the invasion forces were not.
Hirohito ordered the military junta to surrender immediately after the bombing of Nagasaki and invasion of Manchuria by the USSR, which both happened on August 9. While there was some back and forth and, allegedly, a half-assed coup attempt, there is no doubt whatsoever that the events of August 9 are what triggered the desire to surrender. The USAF suspending bombing operations on August 11 in an effort to convince Japan of the Allies’ willingness to conclude peace negoatiations.
Japan had for months been begging the Soviets to intervene and help arrange a peace with the Allies; the USSR’s declaration of war ended that faint hope.
There was an attempt by some junior officers to find and destroy the audio recording Hirohito made. They actually invaded the palace, ransacked it searching for the recording. Then the officer in charge went to the radio station the next day and tried to stop the broadcast of Hirohito’s surrender.
There was a history channel special that covered this.
Had this guy been successful. Who knows whether the main military would have supported him in a coup? This one military zealot could have extended the war and cost perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.
I can’t find any reference to such a thing; there were some massive air raids on Tokyo months before the atomic bombings (this is not a picture of Hiroshima or Nagasaki; it’s a picture of Tokyo from March 1945). There were also “1,000 bomber raids” during the war, as early as 1942 in Cologne in Germany.
The way I’ve interpreted this is that it was just a lot easier for the scientists working on the bomb to imagine it being used on the battlefield than on cities, especially earlier in the project when some of the German scientists’ home cities might have been on the target list. Groves and the others trying to corral the scientists didn’t know better than anyone else how they would be used, but they probably didn’t discourage the notion that they would be used on mainly military targets.
