I’d say that it really wasn’t a question of need, it was going to happen. Wars develop a momentum of their own, and the invasion was on. The Japanese were producing a terribly low-grade fuel from pine trees, and willing to fight to the bitter end. Not any good for the engine in the long term, but enough for 10 hours of flight training and a one-way ticket to oblivion. Any remotely vague hope of even a negotiated surrender evaporated in October 1944 at Leyte Gulf when what was left of the Japanese fleet was defeated in a completely lopsided battle under circumstances very favorable to Japan.
Why do you say this? The US definitely did NOT want Russia in on defeating Japan. We were allies with the Soviet Union but more because the “Enemy of your enemy is your friend” than any love between the US and the USSR. As it is the Russians STILL possess the Kuril Islands (how did they manage to nab those anyway?).
The US and Great Britain had to share the division of Eastern Europe with the soviets but we didn’t want to. General Patton was chomping at the bit after the defeat of Germany to continue on against the USSR.
The bulk of the fighting done against Japan was by the US alone (I know other countries participated and I am not trying to belittle their contribution but it was mostly the US). Japan made peace overtures to Stalin as they knew the US had an axe to grind and they thought they might get better terms from Stalin (as an aside I wonder what would have happened if the USSR had negotiated a peace treaty unilaterally…I suspect the US would have told them to shove it up their ass but I don’t know). Although the USSR faced the bulk of the German army (and suffered hugely disproportionate damage compared to the rest of the allies) Stalin owed his survival to the other allies (without our supplies the soviets probably would have lost).
In short, Truman wanted the Soviets to have no part in the final defeat of Japan. It helped that the USSR declared war as it added more weight to the Japanese need to surrender unconditionally but thankfully the war ended shortly after.
I meant to add after the bit above:
I think Stalin would have liked his shot at Japan but the allies backed off to let the soviets get their piece of Germany and then some (IIRC the other allies intentionally held off on taking Berlin to let the USSR finish it off). As a result I think Stalin felt he had to waffle a bit on Japan and let the US have a shot and finishing it. If the US couldn’t put the whole thing to bed in short order then Stalin would step in to ‘help’ at the first opportunity.
This actually came up again in amusing conspiracy theories that allege that the U.S. took over these weapons programs and even tried to use the fruits of them in Korea. My favorite is the supposed attack where they airdropped hundreds of thousands of diseased rodents on North Korea.
This is a question I don’t think there is a good answer for. It is certainly not rock solid true that unconditional surrender was impossible or even unlikely. All the stories about the fanatical Japanese aside, the reality was that Japan was not actually as proud when it came to the absolute destruction of their nation as they were made out to be. If they were really so fantatical, then why would the atomic bombs have made any difference at all as to whether they would surrender? So the strong form of that argument basicaly refutes itself.
It’s not clear why we dropped the second bomb certainly. There are certainly indications that it was mostly buerrecratic hubbub that kept up immediate surrender, and not any real lasting opposition. Nor is it entirely clear why we picked the targets we did: or even refused the idea of doing a demonstration test. We could have put on a huge show out at sea in view of Tokyo: showing off the explosive power of our weapon and sending tidal waves to cause major (but not quite city ending) destruction. We wouldn’t even have had to announce it prior on the off chance that it was a dud.
Read your history. A coup was attempted after the emperor decided to surrender. It very nearly worked. Certainly there were people in Japan who had decided the gig was up and it was time to end it all but there was most assuredly another faction that wanted to fight to the bitter end.
The second a-bomb was dropped because after the first one Japan kept making noises that a surrender would be forthcoming tomorrow…(tomorrow arrives) well tomorrow…(the following day) actually it’ll be tomorrow…(the day after that) ok we’ll surrender tomorrow…(yet another day passes) seriously, tomorrow we’ll do it (and so on). After a bit the US got tired of it all thinking it was just a delaying tactic and decided to send another ‘message’. It seems that Japan did not intend the promises to surrender as a delaying tactic but they couldn’t get themselves around to the actual surrender either. It took a unanimous vote from the ruling cabinet to surrender and there were some in the cabinet vehemently opposed to surrender.
As for a demonstration offshore that would be hugely risky. The US only had two bombs and IIRC it would take several months to produce another one. As such each a-bomb was incredibly valuable to decide to go fishing with it and in that day it wasn’t guaranteed the thing would even work. Besides, even after losing two cities the Japanese very reluctantly surrendered…why would you think and offshore blast would have improved matters?
As to target selection there were actually several cities in the list and which one got nuked depended on the weather. As it turned out the weather over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fine (they were each the first tartget on the list for the day). As I heard it once(don’t know if it is true) part of the selection was due to the geography of the cities. They were in ‘bowls’ between mountains and for some reason this was deemed favorable. That’s a dim memory though so don’t beat me up on it if that’s wrong.
Uh yes… but it didn’t.
Delaying tactic for what? To give the Japanese to develop anti-nuclear bomb umbrellas?
You’re being goofy. We ran exactly the same risk of it not working on the cities. So what?
You’re playing a “what-if” game complete with hindsight. The fact is, it would have been an incredible display of might right in the front yard of the people actually making major decisions, rather than two mostly civilian cities. For all we know that could have been much MORE compelling than the vaporization of a distant city that took days to even properly confirm the fate of and let it sink in.
The question is not: would it have been more compelling given how we know the Japanese reacted, but rather: why didn’t the people making the decision think it wasn’t compelling?
It is known why we picked those targets. Both targets we’re relatively in tact cities that were major weapons production centers for Japan. We wanted a relatively undamaged city to show the true destructive power of the weapon.
As far as a demonstration - japanese observers were invited to the trinity tests. I can’t recall if any actually came - but if they did, they were obviously ignored.
Also, we only had 2 atomic bombs to drop, with a decent bit of delay until the third. The first one was a test and demonstration - the other two had to be used effectively as weapons - both for shock value and because we had a need to destroy the industrial centers of Japan. Spending half of our remaining nuclear arsenal on a fireworks show wasn’t as efficient as destroying a war production center and sending an even stronger message.
And had we not dropped the second one, they might’ve thought it was a one off fluke. By dropping the second bomb, we made it very clear that we meant business and planned to destroy Japan unless they surrendered.
Delaying tactic for trying to get something a bit better than unconditional surrender terms?
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Speaking of goofy. Dropping it in the sea near Tokyo would have been ridiculous. War is a deadly serious business; Using the most devestating weapon ever created to maybe kill some fish, while the enemy is still fighting, would have been a criminal waste.
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Given what the fighting tenacity of the Japanese, even the mass suicides by civilians when facing US occupation, it more than makes sense to see how the decision was made.
It was the obligation of the US (to its citizens) to end the war as expediently as possible, with as little loss of American lives as possible. The Japanese brought the war upon themselves, and could have ended it whenever they choose.
Yes.
And?
The point here is that there was clearly a faction within the military and government (essentially the same thing) that absolutely did not want to surrender under any circumstances. This was after two nuclear bombs flattened two cities. There were some in the government who did not want to surrender but were waffling. Two nukes may have changed their minds. Remember, it required a unanimous vote of the cabinet to surrender. It is unclear in the end if one (in particular) of the members who till then had vehemently opposed surrender eventually signed the decree because he felt it was the best thing for his country or because he knew of the impending coup and figured is acquiesence didn’t matter. I think he committed suicide shortly afterwards so history will never know what he thought.
The point is, with the horror of two nukes annihilating two cities, the government just barely managed to surrender.
Yeah…it was an outgrowth of their bio-weapons program code-named Godzilla :rolleyes:. They had already been trying to broker a unilateral peace with the USSR that the US did not want to see happen. At this point however I think it was just in-fighting within the Japanese government. The doves and the hawks were having at it and seemed at an impasse. Once again remeber it took a unanimous decision to surrender…just one hawk could put the kibosh on the whole thing. The second bomb sent a message that the first wasn’t a fluke so (hopefully) even the most diehard military type would face reality and agree to surrender.
If the nukes we dropped didn’t work who’d know? A single bomb would have dropped and exploded (a nuke uses conventional explosives…even if you don’t get a nuclear blast you still have a fair sized regular bomb). Would it be better to call out the populace for a spectacular display that fizzles? That would almost certainly encourage them to keep fighting. And again…two CITIES were annihilated and they only just surrendered…why would you think vaporizing some seawater would have worked just as well.
Ahh…this is why you think that making steam would work as well. This may have been over half a century ago but they knew what had happened. They still had radio and telephones. The government in Tokyo was well aware of what happend to Hiroshima and Nagasaki within hours of the explosion. I don’t know for sure but it is not beyond their capabilty for someone to film the devastation and fly the film to Tokyo for their viewing pleasure also within a day of the bombing. I have seen nothing to suggest the government had no real clue as to what had happend to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Because the Japanese didn’t surrender after the first one. Maybe it’s a cultural gap Americans can’t understand.
Say you are Japanese living at the end of WWII. Your military has been beaten back all across the Pacific and Asia. Your enemy’s infrastructure is intact and running full-bore (indeed it had never been touched except for Pearl Harbor). Your infrastructure has been smashed. You are an island surrounded. If nothing else starvation on a massive scale is facing your populace. You have no access to fuel for your military. Your cities are being bombed mercilessly…100,000 dead in Tokyo alone from one such raid. You now find that your enemy can literally obliterate a city with a single bomb and as far as you know they have dozens such bombs. Radiation sickness wasn’t immediately apparent but it didn’t take too long for that ugliness to rear its head too.
Under those circumstances you have to be positively whacked in the head to think of keeping fighting. I would chalk this up to a ‘no-brainer’ for surrender but even with all those circumstances Japan just barely managed to do so.
How anyone can think anything less than what happened would have worked is beyond me.
By a series of amphibious assaults, working south from Kamchatka, between the 23rd and 28th of August and reaching Uruppa, followed up another series launched from Sakhalin on the southern few islands through September 1st. The degree of resistance varied from island to island. A complication is that Tokyo had issued an order to its troops in Sakhalin and the Kurils not to fight, except in self-defence, which seems to have been interpreted differently in different cases.
Stalin had previously demanded that the Kurils become Soviet in any postwar settlement and planning their seizure had been done well in advance. Furthermore, US planning for Olympic had envisaged a two-pronged assault, with the Russians seizing the islands simultaneously with the main landing in the south. Once in Allied hands, the problem of ferrying US supplies in support of the planned Russian assault on Manchuria would have been greatly simplified. They were thus intended to be seized with US help.
In the event, Stalin seems to have simply taken the opportunity to launch these plans on his own when he had the chance.
Piffle.
We dropped the second bomb because we had decided in advance to drop the second bomb. I’m not saying that we would have bombed Nagasaki if the Japanese had surrendered on the seventh or eighth, but there was no “Gee, they’re stalling, let’s hit them again” discussion in Washington.
You’ve got four tomorrows and an “and so on” in your scenario and we only let three days elapse between the two bombs. The devastation of Hiroshima was so complete on August 6 that the stories of the attack were not believed before the morning of August 7 when the cabinet dispatched someone to get a firsthand l;ook at the damage. It took until August 8 for the cabinet’s agent to return. On August 9 we hit Nagasaki.
This is usually presented as the only alternative was invasion by Americans or bomb. The US could have set up a naval blockade and just bombed their industrial base to rubble with conventional weapons. Used incendiaries on crops, starve the country.
An argument against this was the Russians were threatening to enter the theater. Fine, let the Russians invade Japan. Let the Russians waste lives and treasure and never let them know what the atomic bomb could do. Let the Russians think we were wimps while they bleed their economy.
Alternate historical path.
Dal Timgar
One misaprehension a lot of people have is that the Russians snuck into the war against Japan against American wishes. This is untrue. Citing the casualty figures mentioned in previous posts, it was very much an American goal to ensure that some of the estimated hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died in Japan would be Soviets. The United States very strongly pushed for a Soviet declaration of war against Japan followed by active combat at the earliest possible date. This was definitely one of the reasons the US and UK minimized complaints about the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.
It was only after the atomic bomb was successfully tested (at the same time as the Potsdam conference) that the US realized they didn’t necessarily need the Soviets for the war against Japan. There was not a complete turnaround; inertia and the realization that Japan might resist after the atomic bombings maintained some value to Soviet assistance. But that value was severely diminished.
Dropping the atomic bomb potentially saved countless lives, because the world saw the horrible effect of nuclear weapons and that probably prevented the cold war from getting hot.
As for a hypothetical invasion of Japan: It wasn’t necessary, so dropping the bomb didn’t save lives in that light. Quite the contrary.
All these projections into history are moot though and the key question remains, whether committing a crime of war can and / or should be justified with a “But hypothetically it saved lives, so it was a good thing!”. I for one believe that people should be aware of all the crimes of war in the past and learn something from those occurances, instead of trying to find justifications for side X or act Y.
The firebombing (conventional weapons) of Tokyo killed more people than in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki (IIRC around 100,000 were killed in Tokyo). Perhaps you maintain that any attack in war beyond strictly military targets is a crime but that’s another debate. As hideous as the atomic bombs were they ultimately were just a more efficient weapon (one bomb versus several thousand). In the end the effects were largely the same…tens of thousands dead and a city in ruin.
I realize that the a-bombs carried with them some ‘unique’ hideous effects such as radiation but don’t think the firebombings were much less terrifying. They had hideous effects galore all to themselves. It is nasty business all around.
Further you need to look at the actions in the context of the time and circumstances under which they were committed. Today the wholesale destruction of civilians and cities is considered a crime…in WWII it was business as usual for all sides.
To call the atomic bombing a war crime makes me roll my eyes. Sure, by modern sensibilities, perhaps, nuclear weapons are considered illegal, but at the time, they were just one big ass bomb.
Modern, “smart” war has given us hugely skewed perspective as to what war is. The idea that the killing of civilians being a war crime would be considered ridiculous, unless of course it was done as torture or genocide.
War is ugly. It still is, despite the fact that we’ve fought a lot of relatively unimportant (compared to WW2), very clean wars. The atomic bomb blew the hell out of an enemy city - most of the population working towards supporting the war.
Both cities had considerable military production capabilities - offhand, IIRC the major naval ordnance factory that produced the torpedos that sunk our ships was located in Nagasaki. Their population was working in support of the war effort. Given the views and knowledge of the time, there was nothing really special about an atomic bomb - it was just considered a really big bomb. And to win the war, we had to bomb the hell out of them.
It sometimes aggrivates me to see people apply the standards of modern, easy war (where we freak out if there are dozens (dozens!) of casualties in a war) to a time with entirely different, and far more reasonable, sensibilities.
Which is, by all means, a pity, imho.
I just recalled a previous debate, where people argued that the atomic bomb wasn’t specifically targeting civilians and consequently wasn’t a war crime. Perhaps you are right, that unless the sole intention is killing civilians, any attack wouldn’t be considered a crime of war.
As for the firebombing with more casualties Wack-a-mole mentioned: Since that was done with the intention to kill civilians (at least against Nazi Germany), it clearly qualifies as crime of war.
Japan doesn’t have significant land based resources to sustain a war effort after losing the war at sea. Without the raw materials, they simply wouldn’t have been able to fight on.
I just googled around a bit and found this interesting page with quotations from US military leaders of that time and their opinion on dropping the bomb:
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/atomicdec.htm
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By modern “sensibilities” only.
The targetting of civilians wasn’t considered, in itself, a war crime at the time by any sides of the conflict.
So what are you saying? We packed up and went home and gave them the chance to rebuild? If we instituted a naval blockade, the starvation deaths would’ve dwarfed the atomic bomb deaths, most likely.
I should add that technology has changed the pace of war and the positions of civilians in war.
In the WW2 era, weapons production was a huge factor in the outcome of the war. Modern war is so fast by comparison that actual production during the war is essentially meaningless.
In WW2, how many tanks, rifles, trucks, etc. a country could output over a long period of time (several years) could dictate it’s fate in the war. As such, killing civilians achieved a practical military goal of reducing the industrial capability of your enemy, and that could change the outcome of the war.
In modern times, it doesn’t really matter. For the most part, civilians are by-standers when it comes to war.
Ah, but that is also another debate. Besides, nobody has to include food and medicine in a naval blockade, that’s absolutely optional.
Besides, the quotations in the link above suggests, that Japan was already contemplating surrender, so I think the hypothetical “indefinite hold out of Japan” is as likely as a quick surrender.
What’s done is done though, the only thing we can do now is learn from past mistakes.