It may have saved hundreds of thousands of allied lives, but it saved millions, maybe tens of millions of Japanese lives.
I saw that one on the histroy chanel one night. It had a section where the general made the statement that it took 1000 planes over Tokyo with plans on repeating the next day.
As Little Nemo said in post #4, there was a lot of speculation among people who knew something about modern physics about the possibility of an atomic bomb. The most famous example of this was the story “Deadline” by Cleve Cartmill in Astounding in 1944:
The editor of Astounding, John Campbell, told the government agent that came to talk to him after he published the story that any information about the atomic bomb in the story could be found in unclassified sources. He then agreed not to publish any further stories about the subject for the rest of the war. Discussion of possibility of an atomic bomb and the results of a war in which atomic bombs were used were already common in science fiction by that time. Apparently Campbell also guessed that something must be going on in Los Alamos, since a significant number of his readers had sent in changes of address when they moved there.
So while the vast majority of the American public were completely surprised by Hiroshima, a fair number weren’t.
Here’s an article by Robert Silverberg about the “Deadline” affair:
http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0310/ref.shtml
http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0311/ref2.shtml
A famous story published in 1937 about the aftermath of what certainly appears to be a war in which atomic bombs were used is “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benét, which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post:
According to blogger Bill Whittle, this was a quote from Hirohito:
Although the USSR’s declaration of war may have been a factor, it appears that the biggest factor was the perceived ability of America to rain nuclear destruction down upon Japan.
I’ve said this before but I think the Japanese surrender was based on two shocks.
Japan, like a lot of other countries, believed in its own exceptionalism. They believed that Japan was special and that somehow the Gods or history or fate was treating Japan differently than other countries.
By any objective standard Japan was losing the war by 1945. But they refused to admit this - they were Japan and Japan was special. They told themselves that as long as they didn’t lose their faith, something would happen that would turn the war around and make them the ultimate winner.
Meanwhile, on what appeared to be a slightly more realistic plane, Japan was trying to negotiate an end to the war. However, their negotiating position was pretty unrealistic - they basically wanted to put everything back to where it had been in 1941 and pretend the war had never happened.
The Soviet Union had been promised a share of Asia as part of an agreement for them to declare war on Japan and help in the conquest. But the Soviets needed time to finish the war in Europe and bring their troops to Siberia in order to attack the Japanese. They were worried that Japan might surrender before the Soviets had a chance to join in and they would be denied their victory prizes.
So the Soviets played into the Japanese hopes. They established some unofficial diplomatic lines and convinced the Japanese that the Americans were on the other end, indirectly negotiating with them. They strung Japan along with promises that the negotiations were going well and they would probably be able to get easy terms. This kept Japan from surrendering because they thought they they were negotiating a better deal.
Then came August 1945. Within the space of four days, two cities were destroyed by atomic bombs and the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The Japanese realized that everything they thought had been true was false. There was no hope of a negotiated peace - the Soviet Union had been lying to them. And worse yet, the big last minute surprise - the atom bomb - had gone against Japan not in its favor. Fate had apparently chosen the Americans not the Japanese.
So Japan quickly fell from thinking “things are bad but we have hope that they’re going to get better” to “things are much worse than we knew and there’s no hope at all”.
My father was a Navy recruit when the bombs dropped. He’s always said it was a complete surprise to him. And put him (and all his descendants) on the list of people who were very thankful for it - he was Pacific fleet and probably would have been part of the invasion.
You’re a history teacher, right? I will forever now picture you as Sam Kinison’s character in “Back to School”. And I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.
My thoughts exactly!
I remember reading in Issac Asimov’s autobiography that he had gotten hints about the work on an Atomic Bomb when he was a chemistry grad student at Columbia. He said his first reaction when hearing about Hiroshima was how it would effect his draft status.
There were, in fact, continuing big bombing missions even after Nagasaki, but not 1,000-plane sorties. The largest I could find was 302 B-29’s on a single mission on August 14.
Yeah, it’s not like he was important or anything.
Stalin thanked him for the information, but displayed no other curiosity about it. Either he knew already and was keeping a poker face, or just distrusted and discounted all such reports from the West.
Suggested reading (background on invasion of Japan and dropping of the bombs, not on secrecy.)
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire [Paperback]
[Richard B. Frank](http://www.amazon.com/Richard-B.-Frank/e/B001IXS1MM/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1)
**
2001
**ISBN-13: 978-0141001463
Was Japan made aware before the bombings, that they were going to be bombed?
My Dad once told me that the US told Japan, look we have this atomic bomb and if you don’t surrender, we’re going to use it on you. Obviously we know what happened next. Then, the US said, look we have more of these and if you don’t surrender we’re going to drop them on you. We all know what happened next.
It was only after Nagasaki that Japan reluctantly agreed to surrender, but twice they were given that option. That’s the story pops told me, at least.
Referencing this site, re: leaflets dropped on numerous Japanese cities (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki) on August 1, 1945:
They weren’t warned specifically that they would/could be attacked with a nuclear bomb, but they were warned before the fact that they would/could be bombed. Prior to the nuclear attacks, the target cities were spared conventional bombing runs so that accurate BDA could be conducted after the nuclear bombs were used; it’s possible this lack of conventional-weapon attacks led those cities to develop a false sense of security, leading them to ignore the leaflets.
Referencing this PBS website, re: leaflets dropped on Japanese cities after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima:
I had to look and see that there is indeed a San Antonio, NM. I thought geography might have run amok again.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was U-235 gun type bomb that was called Little Boy. Hiroshima was the first test of this design. The other approach was a Pu-239 implosion type bomb that was tested at the Trinity site and used at Nagasaki was called Fat Man. The Little Boy design was a lot less sophisticated and they probably thought they could get away with not testing it first.
This raises the question of what history would have been like if the Commies had never gotten the Bomb.
Would the Cold War have ended much sooner, to everyone’s delight? Or would the US have used more than 2 in combat?
US casualties, NOT Japanese casualties, were estimated by some (Joint Chiefs) at over 1,000,000 for an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Remember, a half million Purple Hearts had already been made. Japanese casulaties would have been in the multimillions.
Part of the reason for the high estimates for Allied casualties was that the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had, by and large, chosen to fight to the death even when their situation was hopeless and they had nothing to gain by continuing to fight. It was assumed that this would be even moreso in a battle on the Japanese mainland AND also involve civilians doing much the same - fighting to the death. Moreover, at Okinawa (and many other sites), the arrival of Kamikaze planes demonstrated the profound will of the Japanese to defend their island. The Japanese were also known to have begun the formation of ‘Kamikaze’ boat units (I am too lazy/busy now to get a cite)
Finally, and not too relevant, but to anticipate those who lament the casualty rates caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Tokyo fire raids killed as many in one night.
(snippage for length)
Campbell can’t possible have known that anything was going on in Los Alamos - the name was unknown to the general public and to a large extent unused even inside ‘The Project’ - insiders referred to it ‘The Hill’ or ‘Site Y’. And there was no ‘Los Alamos’ mailing address during the war; all mail for anyone working on The Hill went to a PO box in Santa Fe. This address even went on drivers licenses and birth certificates.
It’s a niggle I know. I’m sure Campbell did figure out something was up when he got several change of address notices all to the same PO box, but the name ‘Los Alamos’ wouldn’t have been in play until after the war.
It was tested on a small scale: two pieces of HEU were brought together briefly at criticality. (IRC, it was a slug that was dropped through a larger cylinder). A prompt burst of neutrons and some Joule heating gave the scientist some empirical numbers to match up to the theory.
This is where Richard Feynman famously coined the phrase, “Tickling the tale of a sleeping dragon.”