In Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, it was Truman who insisted on unconditional surrender, which the Japanese were willing to accept as long as the emperor was spared, apparently because the people worshipped the emperor as a god.
Parenthetically, when Hiroshima was bombed, there were 45,000 Korean “slaves” living there who also died.
Wasn’t the US pretty determined to use the bomb in order to demonstrate the power it had (a demonstration over the ocean wouldn’t have had nearly the same impact)? With that in mind, was it even possible for Japan to negotiate a surrender before the U.S. dropped its weapons?
Again, my point. Considering the closest Japan got to trying to negotiate was discussions from Japan’s Moscow ambassador with the Russians, which didn’t even have the backing of the full government - what was the USA supposed to do? How long should they have waited? If Japan intended to surrender with “one simple condition” they never told the USA that they would, nor even tried to discuss terms.
The bomb was the next logical step - considering what happened on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, two relatively insignificant islands, the atomic bomb was a pretty good means of persuasion. If you think it was uniquely horrific, you have to read about firebombing Tokyo or Dresden.
IIRC, the discussion about demonstration bombing an uninhabited island was considered not worth it because (a) it would not necessarily demonstrate the power of the bomb and (b) would tell the Japanese what to defend against. Enola Gay went in basically almost alone (just a chase plane) because the Japanese assumed it was a reconnaissance flight which they ignored by then.
Then even a week after Hiroshima the Japanese still hadn’t surrendered. Why would you think they would surrender before Hiroshima? Nagasaki was to show that the Americans could keep this up over and over every few days (they couldn’t, IIRC the third bomb was more than a month or two away) and to incentivize the Japanese government. Even then, some elements of the military tried to stop the surrender.
Any suggestion they were willing to surrender on the final Allied terms before Hiroshima is wishful revisionism. They never even tried. (That’s not to say some of the high command were unaware the situation was hopeless. Some recognized it was only a matter of time.)
Also telling nobody bothered to ask “Why didn’t Japan negotiate a ceasefire with China?” considering most of their troops were tied up in China at the time.
Indeed the fire bombing of Tokyo was so intense that it exceeded the damage done by either of the atomic bombs. If that didn’t get the Japanese to the negotiating table, it’s hard to believe anything short of nuclear weapons AND a Soviet declaration of war would.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 3 days apart. According to this transcript of a conversation about bomb readiness, the next one was going to be ready to be dropped on Aug 19 (10 days after Nagasaki) then 3 or 4 more in September, 3 in October, then 3 a month for the foreseeable future. They also discussed stopping using them as a way to force Japan to surrender, and saving them to use all at once as part of an invasion.
Oops yes… my misremembering. It was the Little Boy bombs that were in short supply; no more until December that year. The Fat Man bombs were coming off the assembly line fairly fast.
But still, for 2 days after Hiroshima the war council still could not reach a decision. According to Wikipedia, the emperor unilaterally told the foreign minister early Aug 10 to tell the USA they accepted, without the decision of the war council to ratify this.
Thank you for sharing that, it’s interesting to consider what would have happened if the United States had saved up a dozen or so atomic bombs to use in support of an invasion. From the transcript it looks like they were planning to use them on forward divisions and command posts just a day or two before U.S. troops would enter the area. The massive radiation poisoning this would have caused among U.S. forces likely would have thrown the entire invasion into disarray.
That’s not how I read that article. The Cabinet met with the Emperor late into the night on August 9, and into the morning on August 10, but were deadlocked, so they asked the Emperor to decide:
That wasn’t a unilateral decision by the Emperor, but a tie-breaking decision when the Cabinet couldn’t decide.
And that was right after the USSR declared war, and the bombing of Nagasaki - word of which reached the Cabinet as it was debating in the afternoon of August 9. If the Cabinet still could not reach a consensus on the day of the second bombing, it’s pretty hard to see how Japan was ready to surrender at any time prior to that in 1945.
Ehhh… not so much.
If we assume that the U.S. would still use air burst detonations of follow-on Fat Man and Little Boy-type bombs, the bombs would produce basically no fallout (except for the vaporized matter of the devices themselves). Nearly all the radiation effect of bomb detonations would have been in prompt radiation, with some neutron activation of nearby materials leading to some radiation still being emitted a couple of days later.
The amount of radiation soldiers encountered would have been very small, but enough to make them more likely to develop leukemia and various other cancers some time later. The VA would have had its oncology wards busy in the 50s, but the impact on the invasion itself would have been almost nil.
The U.S. was determined to not use a demonstration detonation as an attempt to convince the Japanese to surrender. It was thought that no demonstration could be made convincing enough for that end, the technical issues involved (foolproof detonation of an air-dropped device, bringing Japanese attention to the event without arousing air-defense preparations, and the paucity of bombs available for use) made a demonstration too risky, and the shock effect of the actual military use of the bombs would have been eroded by a demonstration if the latter had not been enough to compel surrender.
But it does not follow that the U.S. would have ignored a surrender offer made by the Japanese before the bombs were dropped. Considering that U.S. and Allied lives were being lost every day that the war went on, for Truman to have rejected an acceptable offer of surrender would have been presidential malpractice.
In the event, there was no Japanese offer of surrender, even under unacceptable terms, before the bombs were dropped. It seems rather odd to accuse the U.S. of bloodthirstiness based on a complete hypothetical, as this post seems to be doing.
I wasn’t trying to categorize the US attitude as “bloodthirsty”. Rather, I was seeking to confirm what I thought was the actual historically correct viewpoint, which was that the US would benefit from demonstrating to the world (and especially the Soviets) what the newly developed bomb was actually capable of.
Moreover, I had understood that Truman was essentially told of the bomb, and its planned use, very late in the development of the Manhattan Project. Basically, as VP he wasn’t privy to it, but when he became President it was presented as something already ready for deployment, as if a foregone conclusion.
I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, but I had no ulterior motive in asking the question.
How does “ready” imply “forgone conclusion”?
The fact is, it wasn’t “ready” when he became President in April 1945. Trinity wasn’t until July and, as has already been discussed in this thread, our production capacity was very low, even then.
The entire point of this thread is to address (one aspect of) the common unsupported narrative that U.S. use of nuclear weapons was not justified (and thus the worst of all war crimes) and people have done so with extensive citation of evidence. In that context, well into the thread, a vague unsupported assertion that the U.S. was simply “determined to use the bomb in order to demonstrate the power it had” is going to get short shrift. There’s already historical evidence cited upthread contradicting you.
3 cities a month, at essentially no risk/no cost to the attacker, isn’t really that low. If the USA had stockpiled the bombs and used them as part of the invasion, there likely wouldn’t be a Japan as an independent nation anymore.
If the home islands were defended the same way as Okinawa or Iwo Jima, I’m not sure how much utility those bombs would have had in an invasion. They were great for terrorizing a nation into capitulation or, at best, destroying its infrastructure (which was pretty much already done) but would have been pretty impotent against dug in military forces.
See, we have been subjected to 70 years of people telling us how very evil nuclear bombs are, and sure, once the USA and USSR had enough nukes to destroy the world, it became necessary to abstain from any use.
But in 1945, it was just another weapon. WW2 was total war and there was no more moral qualms about using it than firebombing a city.
If you read the memoirs of Manhattan Project scientists you will find plenty of moral qualms existed before the bombs were dropped. Everybody knew atomic bombs were a game changer and anybody who thought about it for even a second knew that the rules of engagement for such weapons would have to be totally different than those that existed for other kinds of warfare at the time.
I don’t think that’s true. Everyone knew that this was a qualitatively different weapon. Certainly many of the scientists in the Manhattan Project agonized over the prospect of ever using the weapon.
But I agree with you that condemnation of the U.S. is based largely on a distorted modern perspective in which the U.S. wields such disproportionate power that the prospect of losing a war, or even of the U.S. suffering massive casualties, is almost unimaginable.
While some have quibbled with certain of his takes on the evidence, Gar Alperovitz’s masterfully researched and written book boils down to this.