I was flipping through a book that mentioned that there had been intrigue and murder in the Imperial Palace to secure a recording of the emporer to the public that announced the surrender. Anybody know the details?
Well, when the generals in the army got word that the Emporer was going to announce juapan’s surrender, a number of them hastily crafted a plan to pull off a “palace coup” of sorts, which I believe did involve killing the Emporer. But the plot was found out and the generals didnt have as much support as they thought they did, so the coup never came to fruition.
After Japan’s surrender General Tojo tried and failed to commit hari-kari managing only to severely wound himself, and was nursed back to health just in time to go to the gallows after being convicted of crimes against humanity.
Junior officers as well, actually. They couldn’t accept the humilation of surrender. There was intrigue with at least one general trying to march on the Imperial Palace with some troops, in order to depose the civilian government and the surrendering generals. The mutineers would have “saved” the emperor “from himself.”
By the end of the war, Tojo had been removed as prime minister. The replacement PM (name escapes me but he was a civilian) wanted to surrender, but he couldn’t get the army to go along with it. Without the army, he had no real authority to do anything. The army at first refused to surrender at all, then it suggested a compromise with the famous “4 conditions”: No war crimes trials, no surrender of officers to Allied officers, no handing over of weapons, emperor to remain in charge (I think that’s them; I’m working from memory here
:rolleyes: ) The US of course refused, sticking to “unconditional surrender.” The army was also holding out for one last mass banzai charge at the water’s edge, against the invading force.
Many things influenced a change of attitude, but the big ones were 1) the second atom bomb, which proved that the US could deliver a steady stream of them, and 2) US tacit acceptance that the emperor could stay. The civilian government could now show that the army had no real arguments, and was only leading the country into absolute ruin. The government got the emperor behind them. Most of the generals were torn between the humilation of defeat and the importance of obedience to the emperor. Many generals committed suicide.
The government finally surrendered.
An addition influencing factor was the firbombing raids on Japanese cities, which in fact killed more people than the atomic bomb…by a factor of better than 5 to 1.
I highly recommend The Last Mission (2003) (TV). Not sure if it’s available on video, but it was shown about a year ago on Discovery Channel/History Channel/TLC (I can’t remember, sorry).
Oh, and the documentary was based on Jim B. Smith’s book by the same title.
Whatever became of the Kamakaze’s? I’m sure that there were some that were still in training when the actual surrendering of Japan took place, and therefore were never given the opprotunity to die for their country, but whatever became of those that still existed after the war?
I thought the PM who announced the surrender was a prince: Prince Higashi Kuni, aka Naruhiko Higashikuni.
However, I also think that there was a much older civilian politician who became foreign minister who had made some earlier surrender overtures to the Allies.
Japan had its share of realists.
Some killed themselves rather than face the “shame” of survival.
Other continue to live today.
Another interesting point about the Emperor’s recording is that it was so vague and general that many Japanese hearing it didn’t realize he was saying Japan had surrendered. Some thought they had won!
It was also the first time his subjects had ever heard his voice.
The Russians, at one point, took a lot of credit for bringing about the Japanese surrender. They claimed that it wasn’t so much the second atomic bomb, but their invasion of Manchuria that inspired the Japanese to surrender.
For the straight dope on this topic, get yourself a copy of “Imperial Tragedy - Japan in World War II: The First Days and the Last” by Thomas M. Coffey. It’s based on Japanese documents and interviews with Japanese officials after the war. An excellent telling of the Japanese side of the story.
I think that more recently declassified MAGIC decrypts and other intelligence have belied this claim. The Soviets did in fact spank the Japanese all over Manchuria, but Japanese communications were so poor and the rout so complete that the news of anything past very early optimistic reports never reached Japan proper.
It was a little more sophisticated than that; it was not intended as a symbolic gesture. A lot of people fail to appreciate that the kamikaze attacks were actually relatively effective. The Japanese plans for resisting an American invasion were designed so that suicidal attacks would inflict the most damage possible against the landing forces. The American planners failed to realize how serious the threat was; they assumed intelligence of diminishing Japanese attacks indicated the Japanese were running low on supplies. While this was true to an extent, the Japanese were also stockpiling equipment for the anticipated invasion. The plans anticipated that they would destroy at least half of the invasion force as it landed. After the war, when Americans had an opportunity to see what was there, they had to concede that probably would have happened.
One of my friends had to re-do the electrical wiring in his house. The electrician, an older man, was trained as a kamikaze pilot but the war ended before he got sent out on a mission.
As it took a bit of time, they chatted. His two reasons for joining the suicide squads? First, the education. “Nowadays, you’d call that brainwashing” were his words. The second, and probably most important, was that the barracks for suicide pilots were much, much better than regular ones. They were sort of given the royal treatment before they were sent off. The Kamikaze tactics didn’t start until the end of the war, when things were going pretty badly for the Japanese. Since you’re going to get killed anyway, you might as well live comfortably before you do.
Well, it implied it. It couldn’t prove it as it wasn’t so; the US actually had no more ready-to-go atomic bombs.
Some kamikaze pilots did commit suicide, as did many other members of the military, through the shame of the surrender. But it wasn’t because they had failed to complete a kamikaze mission against the Allies; in fact they were trained to not go through with the mission if there was not a suitable target. There was no shame in returning to base and saving yourself for a better occasion to die for your emperor.
True. In fact, General LeMay was advised that after the delivery of Little Boy (U235 gun bomb dropped on Hiroshima) and Fat Man (Pu implosion bomb dropped on Nagasaki), he would not have any more until mid-August, after which he could expect to receive one Pu bomb every two weeks.
I’m a little confused by the meaning of your post. The two atomic bombings were on August 6 and August 9. If more bombs would be ready by “mid-August” and every two weeks thereafter, that seems a pretty steady supply.
A poor choice of words on my part; I should rather say a “large and convincing supply.”
The two bombs were indeed dropped on the dates you quoted. After that, LeMay could not expect another bomb to arrive at Tinian until August 15, which meant that he couldn’t drop it before the 17th at the earliest (the bombs were delivered disassembled). Then after that, early September.
That’s steady, all right, but not large or convincing. By late fall, the US could hope to have enough bombs to do multiple drops in one day or one per day over several days. Until then, they could drop one every two weeks.
A fundamental tenet of war is that the enemy surrenders when its will to fight is gone, not when the “facts” suggest that it can’t win. The Japanese had the will to keep going in the face of overwhelming facts:
*The navy was completely destroyed.
*Oil supplies were cut off
*Food supplies were dwindling
*Thousands of people were dying every time the US mounted a major air strike.
*Every piece of land that the Japanese had invaded was lost (except for a few bits of China), and Okinawa which had been in Japanese control for centuries was taken.
In similar circumstances, German troops had surrendered in the thousands. Japanese troops were not surrendering. Nobody will ever know, but it’s conceivable that the Japanese would have simply held on, daring the US to drop atom bombs until the entire population was gone. Wiser heads prevailed.
The Museum of Edo-Tokyo has some rather grim photographs of Tokyo taken after some of the raids; square kilometres of nothing but ash. As well, there’s a tank trap that’s rather alarmingly melted and distorted, despite being made of massive iron girders. Rather a sobering realization that the atom bombs weren’t the only devastation that Japan suffered from the war.