Sure, alternatives existed. But they were all worse.
A noble effort, Mr. S (May I call you “twinkletoes?” How about “bunnypants”? “Candydrawers”?) But surely you cannot expect testimony from “Hap” Arnold, Curtis LeMay and Chester Nimitz to stand scrutiny in comparison to the world renowned military expertise of Doghouse and the legendary perspicacity of Sam? You are woefully naive (and, of course, an “ignoramus”) if you think you can offer the pathetic views of wimpy “peaceniks” in evidence against the unimpeachable clarity of such towering intellects.
[hijack]just a personal story. I visited Hiroshima in 1986. Later when i worked in Tokyo my father, who served two tours as a combat vet in the pacific theater and then korea, visited me and also the Hiroshima peace park and some other places. He came back to Tokyo and we were talking about Hiroshima. Me, a child of the 60’s just kenw that nukes were horrible and Hiroshima a human disgrace. My old man said he was really moved by going to the Hiroshima peace park. Why? “Because that bomb saved my life. I was on the invasion crew and probably would have died.”[/hijack]
Ah. So the grounds of the debate shift once again. Now, it’s the concept of total war, and by extension the Allies’ behavior in both theatres of war, that (as of this moment) justify the whining and revisionism that characterize y’alls contingent in this thread. This must be what it was like to debate the Bishop of Oxford
So instead of invading the home islands, you think American men and personnel would have been put to better use in a massive land war in China, in addition to a dozen more Guadacanals and Iwo Jimas? Riiiiight.
Uh, no, the fact that Japan’s aggressive military machine was heavily dependant on overseas resources made it a perpetual threat. And your suggestion that the US Navy could have maintained a continuous long-term presence in East Asia equal to the forces it mustered at the height of the war is ridiculous on its face.
A dogmatic statement without any support or qualification whatsoever.
And anyone who wants to get a sense of what Japanese militarism meant to children of other countries should read Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking.
“So instead of invading the home islands, you think American men and personnel would have been put to better use in a massive land war in China, in addition to a dozen more Guadacanals and Iwo Jimas?”
That may not have been necessary. It is quite likely that towards the end of the war the Japanese would have negotiated away their empire , which was doomed anyway, in exchange for the US not invading their home islands which is what they really cared about. In any case an attack on Japanese forces in China , especially with Soviet help, would have been a lot easier than an invasion of Japan. The Japanese forces there were outnumbered and heavily outgunned by the Soviets alone who had five times more tanks and guns.
“And your suggestion that the US Navy could have maintained a continuous long-term presence in East Asia equal to the forces it mustered at the height of the war is ridiculous on its face.”
Huh? I never said this. The US would only need a naval presence strong enought to contain a greatly weakened Japanese navy.
“A dogmatic statement without any support or qualification whatsoever.”
A dogmatic statement without any support or qualification whatsoever.
See? Anyone can use these cheap shot non-arguments that you are so fond of.
“And anyone who wants to get a sense of what Japanese militarism meant to children of other countries should read Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking.”
It may be a worthwhile book but it isn’t particularly relevant to this discussion. Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians don’t justify American atrocities against Japanese civilians.
I find the whole idea of War abhorrent and yet I understand the motivations of those who decided to drop the bomb.
Think about this debate with the 58 years of data and reanalysis that have come up since the bombs were dropped and you still have no consensus on whether Japan was indeed ready to surrender or not. Should the US have dropped the two bombs or would it have been better to starve them out via blockade? There is no unanimity on whether the second bomb was necessary or overkill.
Now take this very debate with less information on the lasting effects of the bomb, or what that would do to the Japanese government or people (politically). They did not really know what the exact readiness of the Japanese to mount a defence, or how many US casualties and how much longer the war would have continued. They had no idea if a mere demonstration would have been effective and with only two ready bombs available would they risk having to wait for the next one to be manufactured.
After four years of war (and roughly 9 for Japan) with the number of known casualties taking islands close to the home land and the type of enemy they knew they were dealing with, the decision was not based on whether it was morally right or wrong but would it speed up the end of the war.
Yes it was immoral to incinerate innocent civilians, but as has been pointed out WWII was full of incidents of this done by conventional methods. But in their eyes it was more immoral to lose their own civilians if they had a means to end the war quickly.
The politicians and generals debated their options and in their minds at the time it was the best decision they could come up with. Were they doing it to be immoral and evil. No they were doing it to save their own troops and end the war no matter what the cost to the other side.
Yes that is immoral but that was the reality of the times. War is an immoral thing, some may say necessary but that is another debate.
The whole damned war has been glossed over as the noble crusade against the evil of Fascism while we quietly ignore the fact that we used the same tactics to fight them. Yes in the end we brought freedom and prosperity to both the occupied and occupiers and yes we saved millions after millions were needlessly slaughtered by the conquerors, but during the fight you couldn’t tell the difference between the sides military orders. (Yes, even we sometimes did not take prisoners)
I praise whatever maker there is out there that the Allies won, because they did not go about policies of genocide or enslavement as the Axis had practiced. I am proud that we all finally stood up to stop those type of barbarous governments. To pretend We went there and fought in a noble way is a fiction, but to pretend that there was any noble way of fighting is a fairytale.
Mr. Svinlesha:
Do you have citatations for all these quotes. Or are they all in that one book by Herbert Feis?
The Original Points
It is easy to show that Japan would have eventually lost the war even without the US using the Atom Bomb. It is still possible that the use of the Bomb actually saved Japanese lives by ending the war more quickly. The very stubborn nature of Japanese resistance up to that point in the war tends to support this view. It obviously was a surprise to the US that Japan was willing to continue resistance after the use of the Bomb, requiring the US to compromise on the issue of keeping the Emporer.
**Is there any evidence that the would the war have lasted longer if the US had decided not to drop the bomb? **
This is not even an issue. Individual islands in the Pacific took months to subdue.
Did the US have any other alternatives to ending the war rather than nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
This is too easy; use non-nuclear weapons. The questions are poorly phrased. A better question is whether the number of US lives saved justified the use of the Bomb. And whether the total number of Japanese killed would have been even greater had the Bomb not been used.
**Even if the war would have dragged out longer or the US had no other alternatives, do you think either situation justifies the US’s decision use a WMD against Japan?
**
Well, if “The US had no other alternatives”, then it was justified. But alternatives existed. In the context of WWII, the use of the Bomb was certainly justified, at least the first time. The answer also depends on how you weigh the outcome of an invasion of Japan by the Soviet Union. Dividing Japan into a North Japan and a South Japan (like Korea) would have changed history in ways we cannot compute. So the use of the Bomb may have been justified from a US point of view but not, perhaps from the Soviet point of view, and maybe not from a European point of view.
The second Bomb, of course, coming only 2 days after the first, is more suspect. Perhaps it could have been skipped entirely and Japan would have surrendered only a day later. After 4 years of war, one more bombing run probably felt more like insurance than excess.
Mr. Svinlesha I believe the 50k figure comes from MacArthur’s planning reports. This number has been criticized as being extremely low by some (and also to me, although, as elucidator will no doubt point out I was not a flag rank officer (or even alive) during the second world war, a point I will readily concede). The effects of massed (as in thousands) of kamikazes against relatively unarmored, unarmed transports packed into narrow beachheads is one reason for concern, as are the well prepared defenses, * which due to American cryptographic successes, we largely knew about*.
In addition, it should be noted that while Nimitz, LeMay, MacArthur and others are all extremely knowledgeable and all certainly in place to know, they are also somewhat partisan. Nimitz (and the Navy in general) was pretty sure that a naval blockade was the key to getting Japan to surrender, starve - so the Navy solution would involve continued torpedoing of all Japanese vessels, raids by carrier aircraft (and possibly B-29’s) to trash Japans rail networks. The Navy could take care of it
LeMay is similarly confident in the USAAF’s ability to use heavy conventional bombers to force Japan to surrender through repeat bombing of Japan’s cities. In terms of humanitarianism there is little difference between low level incendiaries to incinerate Tokyo or an atomic bomb to level Hiroshima (although that doesn’t make it “right”. However, a discussion of various tactics, moralities, and necessities of the USAAF strategic bombing campaign in Europe, in Japan, and the RAF in Europe is really a subject for a different thread.) Using B-29’s to lay mines obviates even the necessity for the Navy’s assistance. The Army Air Force could take care of it
With MacArthur I am less sure of the source of his statement you quoted from a historical point of view (I am not questioning your quote, I merely do not recall from any of my sources any mention of this.) However, that said, my feeling is that the question being anwered by the gentlemen you are quoting is not “Was the atomic bomb necessary to end the war?” but rather “Given the end of the second world war, and the existance of a new war-winning wonder weapon over which the US has a monopoly (and probably always will), what is the possible continuing relevance of your service?” This latter question has been asked pretty much continously over the last six decades in reference to various changes in the world situation and technology. Only rarely has the answer from the services been “good point, scrap 'em”
I hope to respond to Elucidator’s points shortly, although as I am at work it may end up waiting 'til tonight (flip side is I may have access to relevant sources there).
I at least don’t see myself as missing point on this issue. Total war is a horrible legacy that humanity has been handed down, and unless there is a permanent and lasting change in humanity’s views on war, we are doomed to eventually take total war all the way and annihilate each other.
Well, taking the maximum possible care to avoid hurting civilians has never been a hallmark of war, which is an amoral (if not immoral) and unprincipled event. Deliberately targeting civilians is in fact a war crime, but it is one that all sides in WWII are guilty of, not just the US. The Commonwealth bombed German, Italian, and Axis occupied cities, the Germans bombed British cities in a sustained campaign, and the Japanese bombed Chinese cities. Even in tactical situations cites were bombed all the time by all sides. Targeting civilians is as old as war itself, what made WWII different is that the technology had been devised and matured sufficiently to allow effective long range bombing. Bombing, gassing, or nuking civilians from the sky is as old as the airplane and the dirigible.
All of this had already happened by August 1945, in fact it had happened before then. The Japanese navy was hopelessly outnumbered and on its last legs by 1944, and by 1945 it was essentially gone. Its merchant marine was as well, it had been suffering steady attrition from the beginning, and by mid 1943 the pace of its decline increased sharply. Available merchant tonnage had dropped from 6 million tons in Dec 1941 to 1.5 million tons in Aug 1945. Imports of raw materials had dropped from 22 million tons in 1940 to 2.7 million tons in 1945. Starvation had already begun on the home islands. An attack through China would not have been easier than a direct assault on Japan simply for logistical reasons. The first strategic bombing of Japan started from bases in China as they were the only ones in range, but it was shifted to the Marianas once they had been taken as the logistical effort to supply B-29s in China was huge. Once bases close enough to launch an invasion of Japan from such as Okinawa had been taken, there was no point in launching an invasion against the Japanese forces in China. They had been bypassed and attacking them for their own sake would have been squandering lives in an almost entirely meaningless task.
Maybe we can get to the heart of the debate here and come to some decisive conclusions. Of course, maybe the easter bunny is real too. At any rate, lets give it a shot.
Does anyone know precisely WHAT terms the Japanese were offering to the US prior to the US dropping the bomb? It seems that, if we set aside the other considerations (i.e. the invasion casualties, effect on the population, etc) this is a key to the issue. If the Japanese were offering, say, conditional surrender which allowed their government and key industrial leaders to stay in power, I can see the US rejecting it. If the Japanese were offering pretty much unconditional surrender, with the exception of the Emperor, such as elucidator is hinting at, then he is right…as thats pretty much what we DID accept in the end, then we chould have ended the war much earlier. As I believe that this is the point that elucidator (if I’m wrong about this and its something else, forgive me elucidator) has been trying to make, it is the crux of the present debate IMO. So…does anyone have any information on what exactly WAS proposed by the Japanese to the Russians to end the war?
Mr. Svinlesha: Some very interesting points. I remember actually reading some of those quotes in ROTC in college. I also remember that several of them (Curtis LeMay for instance) had ulterior motives in some cases. Some of them would have dealt with interservice rivalry, and some with the fact that the ‘new’ weapon marginalized their own pet tactics (like in LeMay’s case). Still, I think you made a much better case for the dropping of the bomb being ‘unnecessary’ than elucidator did.
Mr. Svinlehha: The figure of 1 million Allied casualties in the invasion of Japan is often mistakenly taken to mean 1 million deaths, which it of course does not mean. I personally don’t see estimates of 500,000 casualties as being that far over the top, and low end estimates of 50,000 are in my estimation far too low. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria isn’t really relavent to casualty projections for the invasion of Japan, as the US had no intention of taking on Japanese forces in Manchuria. Casualty estimates for the invasion of Japan didn’t take these forces into account. Soviet forces would not have been able to take much part in an invasion of Japan, so they wouldn’t have seriously offset any US and Allied casualties. The USSR didn’t have the navy or the landing craft to conduct its own invasion of Japan, so any Soviet troops would have to have been lifted in by US ships, something that the US was unlikely to do.
The quotes aren’t unimpeachable support that the invasion or the dropping of the atomic bomb were unnecessary or that there was a more pleasant alternative. The USAAF Strategic Bombing Survey had its own axe to grind in claiming the relevance of the USAAF’s efforts in the war. What the USAAF was doing without the atomic bomb wasn’t a pleasant task. From the Strategic Bombing Survey, quoted in J.F.C. Fuller’s The Second world War:
Note that the large majority of bombs were directed not at military targets, but at urban area.
Hap Arnold was simply making a statement of fact that Japans position was hopeless at the time the atomic bomb was dropped. Even without the atomic bomb, Japan was doomed. Another quote from Arnold, from the same source:
I’d have to say the same for LeMay without knowing the context of his statement. At the very least, LeMay is the same ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay who commanded the strategic bombing when the effort was switched from high altitude high explosive bombing to low altitude night firebombing. He also favored a nuclear first strike against the USSR. I’m under the impression that the Nimitz and Halsey quotes (and likely the others) came during the immediate postwar era when Congress was trying to decide the relevance of any military other than one dedicated to the delivery of nuclear weapons. There was a lot of partisan infighting amongst the military to get a share of the budget and keep their service branch from being effectively or completely disbanded.
Side note not directed at anyone in particular: since nobody here is discussing holocaust denial, using the term “historical revisionist” as a slur is irksome to me.
Dissonance,
Actually before the start of World War 2 it was a generally accepted principle among the Western democracies that civilian targets should not be bombed. The Hague conventions of 1907 banned such attacks. The US and other democracies condemned such attacks when carried out by fascist armies during the 1930’s (like the bombing of Guernica). So the tactics used by the US and UK represented a moral regression. Also to say that all sides did it is neither here nor there; the principles of just war don’t justify attacks on civilians just because the other side does it (not to mention the fact that American civilians were hardly under attack during the war).
As for your other point you are right that Japan no longer had an effective navy by Aug 1945. However this supports my point that an invasion of Japan was not necessary to prevent Japanese aggression. As for China the Soviets alone defeated Japanese forces in Manchuria quite easily in August. In any case my main point was that by 1945 Japan would probably have surrendered its empire which was obviously doomed and which it couldn’t reinforce in return for a non-invasion of its home islands. Its past aggressions would be reversed and its capacity for future aggression largely destroyed. That was the right time to stop the war.
To those who support the bombings my question:
When would you justify massive and deliberate attacks on enemy civilians? Just because the other side does it? To possibly save some of your own soldiers’ lives? Until “unconditional surrender”?
Frankly all these answers are morally bankrupt. The bombing of civilians during WW2 was a massive war-crime ,pure and simple, and the fact that this is not widely acknowledged is a classic example of the victors writing the history.
What this says to me is that Walker studied the record and, under entirely different circumstances with nothing at stake except his reputation and a scholarly report, he came to a different conclusion from that of the people who had to make the decision in 1945. OK so there was and is disagreement. However, no one can go back and duplicate the conditions that existed in 1945 and so this disagreement is a long way from being conclusive that dropping the bomb was wrong.
Mr. Feis’ has ESP? The quote doesn’t contain anything that shows why he is “certain” that the war would have ended by 31 December and “probably” by 1 November. Is this with or without an invasion of Japan? Does he mean that all we had to do was subject Japan to another 2-1/2 to 4 months of nightly incendiary raids without an invasion or does he mean the raids plus an invasion? Is this supposed to be a more desirable scenario?
Arnold’s argument, like Le May’s which follows is hardly a moral argument. Arnold’s estimate leaves me a little cold. Hap was always a strong advocate of “daylight, strategic, precision bombing will win the war without the need for messy ground action except mop-up and policing.” He persisted in this opinion and used the 8th AF to try to prove right past the time when the 8th’s losses had become unsustainable, or right next to it, because the pilot training schedule couldn’t provide enough replacements. Only the technological advance of a long range fighter with disposable auxilliary fuel tanks saved his ass And even then strategic bombing didn’t do the job. I realize I’m just a layman but Hap’s opinion carries too much baggage showing him as overoptimistic for me to put a lot of faith in this quote.
I’m not sure why LeMay’s estimate of two weeks is to be accepted without question when the casualty estimates are subjected to a magnifying glass. So there were variances in the casualty estimates. Your own cites contain a variation in estimates from two-weeks (LeMay) to 4 months (Freis) and that’s only two cites.
In essence, to me, LeMay is saying, “If they had let my wonderful 21st AF, of which I was the proud Major General, Commanding by the way, continue to bomb those bastardly Japs back to the stone age for a little while longer you could have walked in unopposed.”
Of course, General, of course. You da man!!!
It’s over. Maybe the decision to drop the bomb was bad but the lessons from it have long since been learned, and then forgotten by many, or never learned by some - GW, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle anybody?
My wife is Japanese. I speak (and read and write) Japanese about as well as I do English. And I lived there for around half my life.
My mother-in-law’s father passed away a couple of years ago. He was part of a regiment in the Philippines that was completely wiped out in a major battle there during WWII. Only 3 of several hundred survived; to the day he died he was embarrassed that he survived. So yes, it is probably true that the Japanese army during WWII would have fought to the death, because it was seen as preferable to the alternative of surrendering.
He and I didn’t talk all that much; not that he didn’t like Americans - he told me that seeing foreigners only brought back hellish memories of war and death; can’t really blame him much for that. But a year or two before he died, while over at his house, we sat for a couple of hours over beers, away from the rest of the family, and talked. And he told me that by the end of the war, everyone, from the army grunt to the housewife back home, knew that they were going to lose the war. See, (and this is true even today) the Japanese don’t really believe everything their government puts out. It is regarded, and generally dismissed. People knew the truth - any household item with any sort of metal was being confiscated to make more weapons. There was no food. Younger and younger boys, children, practically, were being sent off to fight. Not exactly what a winning side does, right?
In his very words: "We would have faced the invading Americans with spoons and bamboo sticks. Would we have died by the millions? No, because the Americans would have just rounded us up and taken away our spoons and sticks. And that would have been far, far worse on our psychy as a nation - being physically invaded and rounded up like cattle - in those days, we would have welcomed death. The eventual surrender by the government was probably better’.
He never mentioned Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese have a bit of a ‘victim’s complex’ about the nuclear bomb; and they (conveniently, perhaps) gloss over the rest of the war in which they were hardly guiltless victims because of it. My grandfather-in-law believed, I think, that the bombs were not required to get Japan to surrender - but I think he also realized that nobody in the US would have realized that at the time. He was a rational guy; indicating in any way or form in Japan that the bombs were understandable (not necessarily justified, just understandable) in the context of the times would not have gone over very well.
Both he, and my in-laws, have mentioned how shocked they were when they first saw movies/tv shows of US television - average people with cars! My father-in-law today just shakes his head and says that the Japanese government leaders of the day were ‘war criminals’, if only for going into a war so far out of touch with reality. He also says, however, that he sometimes thinks that the Western countries (ie., the US) played a somewhat double-standard, because Japan wasn’t doing anything that the other Western countries (Russia, France, England, the US, etc) hadn’t been doing for 50 years in Asia, South America, and Africac
My guess is, they couldn’t think of any other way, and did the best they could…as fucked up as that might have been. There was probably a better way in WWI than charging fixed positions with human wave attacks. Yet they still did it and millions died. There was probably a better way to fighting in the Civil War than outdated Napolionic tactics…yet they still did it, and hundreds of thousands perished needlessly. The history of warfare is rife with commanders and leaders making huge blunders and costing untold pain and suffering. Its so easy, with 20/20 hind sight to think “Why didn’t those stupid leaders of the Union issue Henry Rifles and use the gatling gun en mass?? The Civil War might have been over in days! Idiots!”
Looking back at the tools and tactics then in place, I can’t think of a way that any of the great powers in the conflict (allies OR axis) could have reasonably pursued victory without resorting to mass bombing of civilian targets. It was a war of national survival after all, with the loser knowing that it would be the death of their (concept of their) nation. I can certainly think of several you could use NOW, with the invention of percision guided bombs and such, but even then there are civilian casualties…though not on the same scale (look at Iraq for examples).
So, CyberPundit, let me ask you something. How would YOU have pursued the war in reguards to the bombing of civilian targets? Its obvious that all the leaders and military ‘experts’ on all the sides were too stupid and short sighted to find the brilliant way around the killing of innocent civilians in their desire to win. This is a given since they ALL ‘did it’. So, with the benifites of your vast wisdom and high intellegence (in addition to hindsight), what would YOU have done in reguards to the mass bombing of civilian targets? And would this have furthered the effort to actually win the war? You can be either a brilliant general or the president if you like…what would you have done?
Its easy to say that something is morally bankrupt without giving any suggestions as to what they could have done differently. So here’s your chance to show them all for the fools they were…
-XT
This is again a question of statements rather than actual actions. Britain had no problems bombing Iraqi civilians in the 1920’s, and had plans to deliver poison gas by airplane, something that they had already done with artillery shells, an act prohibited by the Hague conventions. Unrestricted submarine warfare is also specifically prohibited by convention, but the US and Britain (along with Germany and Japan) conducted unrestricted submarine warfare from their first days in the war with no moral qualms about it. This unrestricted submarine warfare was largely responsible for destroying the Japanese merchant marine and cutting Japan off from food imports in sufficient quantities to prevent the onset of starvation, as well as reducing imports of raw materials for the war effort. It is, of course, the victors writing the history books and holding their enemies to task for actions they themselves did. Donitz was charged with conducting unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, while no Allied officer was charged with a similar offense for the submarine war in the Pacific. Trials of Allied soldiers for the execution of POWs, when they occurred, also led to sentences far less that what was handed out to Axis officers for identical offenses.
Japan no longer had an effective navy from October 1944, and had no useful navy at all in 1945. The war continued nonetheless. Manchuria was only part of China that Japan occupied and Japanese forces located there.
Map of the Pacific with area under Japanese control, Aug 15 1945
By 1945, Japan had not surrendered its empire, though it was doomed. You’re placing the burden for ending the war on the US – the US wasn’t simply going to stop the war without a Japanese surrender. Even if the US stopped all actions other than a blockade of Japan, hundreds of casualties were happening daily throughout the Pacific in August 1945. The blockade itself would lead, and was leading to, mass starvation.
In an ideal world? Never. I hope that this is the direction that the world is headed in, but judging the actions taken by those in the past 50+ years later and finding them morally bankrupt is an easy thing to do. One could pose similar questions about, for example, the colonization of the Americas by Europeans. Calling it or the strategic bombing in WWII not widely acknowledged isn’t true. We are here, after all, having a debate about it. Unpleasantness tends not to find its way into whitewashed high school level history books or pop history documentaries, but not elsewhere in history.
Your whole post seems premised on the idea that the Allies were going to lose the war unless they bombed civilian areas. Any evidence for this? This is especially dubious for the bombings in the final year of the war. Are you seriously suggesting that the outcome of the war was at stake when Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed in 1945?
What was at stake was the goal of “unconditional surrender”. Like I said I consider it morally bankrupt to deliberately kill hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians for such a goal.
In any case you still haven’t answered the question of when you consider it justifiable to deliberately kill large numbers of civilians. Just to say that the leadership at the time thought it best isn’t really an answer as it would justify virtually any government atrocity in history.
My previous post was to Xtisme,
Dissonance,
I don’t know the details of the British attacks in Iraq in the 20’s but I don’t think it refutes the fact that the before WW2 the democracies generally opposed the bombing of civilian areas. Certainly they condemned such attacks by the Axis powers in the 30’s. This is important because it shows that the Allies abandoned the norms that they had claimed to espouse.
“You’re placing the burden for ending the war on the US – the US wasn’t simply going to stop the war without a Japanese surrender”
The question is what terms of surrender? Did the US have the right to demand unconditional surrender and kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians till Japan accepted. I say no. Of course the concept of “unconditional surrender” was itself pretty much an innovation.
Bryan:
Cite?
This is a typical non-answer. In order to speak of an alternative, one must anticipate an outcome equivalent to the action under discussion. In other words, “worse alternatives” aren’t alternatives at all – especially in war.
elucidator:
Well, I like “Bunnypants,” but I thought you had that one as a reserve for our ever-so-noble Commander-in-Chief?
Doghouse:
Not as far as I’m concerned.
*That doesn’t sound like much of a winner to me. On the other hand, the Allies had a two or three-step plan that might have worked, and didn’t involve any losses. One could reasonably argue that it was at least worth trying.
kingpengvin:
Good points.
Radon:
Actually, all the quotes are lifted directly from a site I linked to earlier in this thread. You can find them on this page.
More quotes on Hiroshima can be found here.
MMI:
Yeah, I thought the 50k came from some sort of planning document. Still haven’t located it yet, though.
I possess absolutely no competence whatsoever in guessing whether or not the estimate was too low. I only want to point out that those who defend the dropping of the bomb often do so by “exaggerating” the calculated number of casualties a land invasion would incur. There is a tendency in this debate, especially among non-scholars, to ignore the low end estimates. When I first read the 50,000 figure, I was surprised.
As a second point, those who defend the decision tend to set up a false dilemma, by insisting that a land invasion is the only possible option to dropping the A-bomb. There is plenty of evidence that this was not the case, and that most US military advisors did not view it so.
A distinct possibility. In addition, many of Truman’s staff, as well as the President himself, may have considered the opinions of certain members of the the Strategic Bombing Survey – who predicted Japan would surrender by December, at the latest, even without a land invasion – to be overly optimistic.
Even so, we still have the opinions of Eisenhower – who was a life-long opponent of the decision – as well as Walker’s summary of current scholarly consensus (above), along with many more military officials who are on record as opposing the drop. It seems difficult to believe that all of these officials have drawn their conclusions due to partisanship. In fact, according to historian Gar Alperovitz, “The rather stark truth, however, is that with one very “iffy” exception virtually all the important high-level World War II military leaders who had access to the relevant top secret information are on record as stating that the use of the atomic bomb was not a matter of military necessity.” It seemed to be the consensus view of all arms of the military – and of many officials who were not beholden to one of the three branches – that Japan was on the verge of surrender before the A-bombs were dropped. As Eisenhower stated in an interview in 1963, “…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Regarding MacArthur, by the way, Alperovitz relates the following story, told by Richard Nixon:
From CyberPundit
Why pick just the allies? The Axis powers did the exact same thing. But never mind. Thats not my premise at all. My premise is that, based on the tools and tactics of the time, that was the only way THEY thought they could win. Civilians made the tools of war, grew the food, were conscripted into the armies, etc, and were considered valid targets. There was also a cycle of escalating violence (i.e. you bombed OUR city, well, we are gona bomb YOURS). In addition, as with today, war production factories and such are usually close to civilians…thats who does the work after all. Unless you are saying they the leaders of the times KNEW a better way, and deliberately forsook it for the fun and pleasure (or whatever reason you are giving them) of killing masses of civilians that is. IS that what you are saying? If so, do you have a cite to back that up (i.e. That the leadership of ANY of the powers knew a better way to win the war that didn’t involve causing mass civilian casualties)?
Were they (the leaders, the military ‘experts’, etc) wrong? Undoubtedly. Did they know better? I have never seen anything to indicated they did.
I have no doubt that, with 20/20 hind sight, that there WAS a better way to win the war without bombing civilian areas. We have the leasure to be able to sit back, sift through both sides of the conflict in detail, know what the leaders where thinking, the relative state and conditions prevailing economically/socially/militarily, etc.
Thats a luxury that the REAL leaders of the times didn’t have however. What you have to do is, try and put yourself in THEIR place. You have fragementary data on the enemy, you don’t KNOW you are going to win or what it will take to achieve victory, you have new weapons and tactics never used before, of unknown value and untried in combat, you have military ‘experts’ of unproven worth and knowledge with thier own agendas. The major thinking of the day was that stategic bombing was the be all and end all, the thing that would bring a modern industrial power to its knees. All the major powers bought into this. Even though an objective observer (if there had of been one at the time) might have pointed out how much more effective coordinated tactical air strikes were as opposed to stagegic bombing (as an example) most of the major powers were pretty much married to the idea that total stategic bombing would win the war for them.
What I said though was that no one at the time could ‘think outside the box’ so to speak and come up a brilliant way out. If they could have, they would have. So, does it make them ‘morally bankrupt’ because they weren’t brilliant? Because they couldn’t see another way? I think not. It makes them human. They did the best they could, unless you really think they DID know a better way and did it anyway.
Today, what they did would be an outrage. We’ve progressed far beyond that. Even the accidental killing of civilians in Iraq, when the US took pains NOT too do it, is frowned upon (and more)…and rightfully so. But this is TODAY. You are using the standards of today, along with the accumulated knowledge of years about BOTH SIDES, and a large smattering of 20/20 hind sight, to judge the people who were there, and on the spot, and had to make the critical decisions with fragementary information that would either have their countries and their way of life live or die.
-XT