On the 58th Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima

Great Debates
121

David:

Just to clarify: you have not indeed, and I didn’t mean for you to interpret what I wrote as being directed at you specifically. Rather, I was referring to others in this thread who have made such claims. Sorry if that was unclear.

Maybe I’m picking at nits here; I think you ( and Dissonance) have a strong argument, but as far as I can tell it isn’t based on the line of reasoning I object to, if that makes any sense.

If you say to me, “Truman had absolutely no other alternative; he had to chose between the A-bomb and an invasion of Japan that would have cost the lives of at least a million soldiers and civilians,” I would disagree.

If you say to me, “Truman was constrained by the imperfect knowledge he had at the time, and a lot of other factors, and I feel that given all of those factors he made a morally correct choice,” I would respond, “Yeah, there are strong arguments both for and against that view. I’m in no position to make a judgement myself, since I wasn’t there and I’m not a specialist.”

You see, I agree completely with this reasoning and after having reflected deeply on this question over the weekend, come to the conclusion that it might not be possible to even answer the question of right and wrong with regard to this issue.
Dissonance:

Me neither, but I’m not the one who introduced it. Doghouse Reilly wrote, in response to Cyberpundit:

  • 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.*

“Y’alls contingent,” by the way, was a reference to those who had the temerity to suggest that the decision to drop the A-bomb could be viewed as immoral. I’m trying to defend myself against such accusations, not making them, you dig?

122

I think there is a consensus of two, or maybe three. I can go along with this although I would question the “morally correct.” As I said, I think this was just the lesser of the two evils that were on the table at the time.

There were of course other options. We could have not invaded and continued the incendiary bombing and naval blockade into the indefinite future. We could have done either of the aformentioned without the other. We could have decided that Japan was no longer a threat to us and just loaded everybody up and gone home. We could have stepped aside and let the Soviets take over the Pacific war. (Those last two might just possibly be equivalent.)

And there are probably some others that I can’t think of.

123

Mr. Svinlesha

Unfortunately, the dropping of the atomic bomb does get highly politicized and has a number of spurious arguments used on both sides, so the line of reasoning that you’re objecting to does make sense to me. I know that you didn’t inject ‘revisionism’ into the debate, sorry if you thought my objections to it were directed at you; they weren’t. It’s a pet peeve of mine, Alperovitz’s work indeed is revisionist, but the term itself isn’t derogatory, at least not outside of politics. Works produced in the 1970’s incorporating the previously classified knowledge that the Allies were extensively reading German and Japanese codes were revisionist.

I wouldn’t defend Truman’s decision as being morally correct any more than I’d defend strategic bombing as moral, the question of morals takes a decided back seat during wartime. Both of them were, however, to be expected in the context of the times.

124

Dissonance:

As I wrote earlier, I think both you and David have made some presented some strong arguments that don’t rely on the sort of rhetorical dismissal employed by Doghouse (and some others in this thread).

If you are familiar with Alperovitz’s work, and you have the time, I would be interested to read your refutation of his arguments. Barring that, if you could direct me to any internet resources that refute the “A-bomb wasn’t necessary” argument, I’d be interested in looking at them.

By the way, speaking for myself, one of the real weaknesses I see in Alperovitz’s thesis is the idea that the US opposed Soviet entry into the war against Japan. As I understand it, Truman traveled to Potsdam with the hope of convincing Stalin to join the allies, and was apparently overjoyed when Stalin agreed to do so. Then, upon hearing that the test of the A-bomb was successful, he suddenly changed his mind? I guess it’s possible, but it seems far-fetched; he must have known prior to Potsdam that the test was under way, and that there was a good chance it would be successful.

Perhaps Byrne convinced him afterwards that the US, in possession of the A-bomb, no longer needed the Soviet Union in order to force a Japanese surrender?

125

I’m only familiar with Alperovitz to the extent that I’m familiar with the gist of his argument; I haven’t actually read his book. From my understanding (and I could be somewhat mistaken), he takes the position that Japan either was or was about to be driven to the point of surrender without the atomic bomb. Japan was interested in surrender, but not unconditional surrender. The terms it wanted were at best a rollback of its aggression (possibly not including Korea or Formosa), no occupation, and holding its leaders accountable only to itself. These terms were a non-starter; the Allies weren’t going to entertain listening to them. I’m away from sources at the moment, but Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, who was leaning on the cabinet to end the war, rejected the idea of floating a proposal to Russia that went along the lines of the only condition being the preservation of the Emperor. The three military members of the cabinet, who had de facto control over any decision with regards to the three civilian members, were fully committed to continuing the war to improve Japan’s position even after the shock of the bombs and Russia’s declaration of war. It was only the pleading of Togo, Privy Seal Kido and Premier Suzuki to Hirohito to have him voice his desire for the acceptance of the Allied terms that caused the cabinet to go along with it. Hirohito addressing the council to give his views on national policy was practically unheard of prior to this.

I don’t know of any online sources that specifically address Alperovitz, but Richard B. Frank’s Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire takes on arguments that the bomb and/or invasion weren’t necessary and that Japan was about to cave in. Among other things, he points out that there is no evidence that any of the eight people making the decision in Japan (the 6 council members, Kido who had the Emperor’s ear and Hirohito himself) showed a willingness to accept Potsdam or any terms likely to be considered by the Allies prior to the dropping of the bomb. While I’m floating recommendations, Fussel’s Thank God For the Atom Bomb gives a good, somewhat personal account from a ‘leftie’ who would have taken part in the invasion of Japan. John Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War gives a good feel for public attitudes, propaganda, and racism towards each other during the war, something that’s often overlooked. And, well, no list of recommendations dealing with the Pacific war is complete without E. B. Sledge’s memoirs of his time as an assistant gunner in a Marine mortar team: With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, it’s not for the faint of stomach and is about as close to the real war getting into the books as it gets.

126

Dis:

Thanks muchly for the recommendations. I’ll see if I can find the time to read one or two of them.

127

Mr. Svin

No problems, I’m happy to oblige. Not wanting to leave something uncited, and again assuming that I’m correctly interpreting Alperovitz having not actually having read him, this is from Frank’s Downfall; chapter 14 is more or less a refutation of the idea that Japan was on the very brink of collapse (which it wasn’t, or at least I’d argue for the case very extensively) and that the US knew it based on Magic decrypts:

128

Perspective
It has become apparant to me that the amount of effort, intellect, and analysis utilized by Aperovitz, Feis, Mr. Svinlesha, and the rest of the posters to this thread, added up, is considerably greater than that expended by the decision makers themselves in the midst of the war!

It should not surprise us that we like our opinions better than theirs.

129

Congratulations to Mr. Svinlesha on an quantum breakthrough in the construction of understatement:

I suppose though, in an area where any mortal praise is doomed by the limitations of language to understatement, it was to be expected…

130

Actually, the US had to delay the war in order to drop the bomb. The Japanese were beaten and were trying to surrender. The US didn’t let them, because they needed to test their new weapons. It was a scientific experiment, a uranium bomb on Hiroshima and a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. It also had the effect of scaring the shit out of the Russians, who had just declared war on Japan.

As for memorials to Hiroshima, there is one right here in Honolulu, Hawaii.

131

I’d be very interested in a cite to back this up, Roger_Mexico, because it is grossly untrue. For a refutation of this, please read others posting of mine in this thread.

132

Sure, it’s all right here:

http://www.oneworld.org/news/world/bloomfield.html

"We now know that the allies were aware by May 1945 that the Japanese were attempting to make contact in order to negotiate a surrender and that Japan was being overcome by conventional might. According to Admiral William D. Leahy, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Truman’s Chief of Staff:

“The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons… In being the first to use it [the atomic bomb], we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

133

Here we go again, the terms that Japan was willing to accept were completely unacceptable to the Allies. They were making efforts to negotiate with Russia, but not for unconditional surrender or unconditional surrender modified to allow the preservation of the Imperial Institution, in fact these terms were expressly rejected by Togo, who was trying to bring an end to the war. From Frank’s Downfall, bolding mine:

What Japan wanted out of surrender was no occupation, probably no withdrawal from Korea, Formosa and possibly Manchuria and other places, and war crimes trials of its leadership conducted by itself. Even in this, there was disagreement within the council over even attempting surrender at that juncture. Sato himself could see this, his exchanges with Togo during the period contain statements such as these:

Even after the dropping of the bombs and the Russian invasion of Manchuria, the cabinet could not accept surrender. The military members all wanted to continue the war, and they held the power to make the decision. It was only Hirohito’s intervention that allowed the cabinet to agree on surrender.

Your claims that “the US had to delay [ending] the war in order to drop the bomb,” and that “The Japanese were beaten and were trying to surrender. The US didn’t let them, because they needed to test their new weapons.” are at complete variance with the facts. Japan made no efforts to negotiate with the Allies, all it did was sound out the views of Russia. There was no agreement within the cabinet itself on the necessity for surrender, or even what terms should be offered.

134

Bah! That’s just a bunch of revisionist history. From the same cite as above:

"Truman postponed meeting Churchill and Stalin to discuss post-war territorial control until after July 16, when the first ever atomic explosion took place as the US tested its new weapon in New
Mexico. Truman went to Potsdam, Germany, the very next day buoyed by the conviction that he had a weapon which would, as predicted by his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, “make Russia more manageable in Europe.”

"The Hiroshima bomb was dropped on 6 August. The message to the Japanese must have been unmistakable and it is difficult to imagine why a second one should have been used on August 9. Except that the Soviet Union was due to enter the war in that week and the US wanted to demonstrate to the Soviets the awesome power that they would be dealing with once the war was over.

In part because he wanted to wait until the bomb was ready, President Truman ignored advice in May 1945 from Acting Secretary of State Grew that changing the surrender terms might well halt the fighting. Some came to believe that this actually cost lives. Stimson, Secretary of State for War, said: “History might find that the US, by its delay in stating its position, had prolonged the war.”

Why 2 bombs? Why a uranium bomb and then a plutonium bomb? It was obviously an experiment to test both weapons. This is consistent with the post-WWII US policy of starting wars for the purpose of testing new weapons, as in Panama and the first Gulf War. Hell, the Pentagon tested nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons on US soldiers and US civilians, what would stop them from testing weapons on Japanese?

135

Please refrain from using this term as a slur, it doesn’t score any points with me. Again, please read my prior posts for clarification.

The easily imaginable explanation for the dropping of the second atomic bomb is that Japan didn’t surrender after the first one. A claim that a website finds it ‘difficult to imagine’ isn’t proof of anything. You’ll need to do much better than that. The US was already dealing awesome power in the form of mass firebombing of Japanese cities, and in point of fact, both bombs didn’t move the Japanese cabinet to surrender. From here:

These modifications are the exact same ones that Togo, who was in favor of ending the war, expressly rejected as being acceptable under any circumstances.

Panama and the first Gulf war were started as a policy of the US to test new weapons? :rolleyes: I had no idea. You do, of course, have actual evidence of this, or you wouldn’t have restricted it just to post-WWII. There must be some reason that the Civil War wasn’t just a plot by Lincoln to test the use of railroads and rifled muskets in war.

136

I’ve often thought it would have been nice if we did that. The flaw in that logic was the reliability of the weapon, which was questionable at the time.

The Japanese soldiers were told they the United States didn’t take prisoners. It was common place to commit suicide rather than surrender. It was a great motivator to succeed.

From a technological position, the Japanese had developed mini suicide planes to be used against tanks on their soil. They also had glide-to-target/rocket assist kamikaze planes (imagine trying to shoot down a flying torpedo that was coming at you from the position of the Sun at 600 mph) They had an active biological weapons program, which included live vivisections on Chinese soldiers. They had plans to launch bio attacks from submarines against the West Coast. This would imply that the mindset of the Emperor was success at any cost.

I would say, conservatively, that it would have been a blood bath for both sides if it became an island hopping conquest.

137

All very good points. To expand on these a bit, while the Okha suicide rocket bomb (dubbed the ‘Baka’ or ‘Fool’ bomb by the Allies) was extremely difficult to shoot down once launched, it’s mother plane, the G4M ‘Betty’ was extremely vulnerable by 1945, especially when laden with an Okha. It did meet with some success during the war, though, and being able to launch from at ships close to the Japanese coast while flying over Japanese territory would have reduced the vulnerability. There’s a fairly good summary on Japanese ‘special attack’, i.e. suicide weapons here. Vivisection of prisoners wasn’t just restricted to Chinese prisoners as part of Japan’s biological program, there’s a link on it here. Japan also conducted firebombing of the Pacific Northwest through balloon bombs, though with extremely little success. Personally, I wouldn’t say Hirohito’s mindset was success at any cost, but it clearly wasn’t peace at any cost either, he was willing to go along with continuing the war through the firebombing and early starvation. In his monologue Showa Tenno Dokuhakuroku in which he expounds on his feelings during the war, nowhere does he claim to have been in favor of an immediate end to the war prior to the bombs, though for his legacy it clearly would have been in his interests to do so.

Very true, but the US and Allied troops frequently didn’t take prisoners, even when they had the chance to. Ground combat in the Pacific was extremely brutal. Wounded Japanese soldiers would frequently attempt to kill Allied soldiers trying to bring them aid, so often Allied soldiers wouldn’t attempt to take prisoners and those that did were sometimes shot on the spot or before they wound up in POW cages. Again, I don’t intend this as an indictment of Allied actions, Japanese treatment of Allied prisoners was certainly no better. The flip side to this was that Japanese prisoners were far more willing to give up militarily useful information than Allied prisoners. They received no training on what conduct was expected of them as prisoners, since becoming a prisoner was not supposed to occur as it was the worst disgrace that could be brought on oneself. Providing information on their comrades couldn’t bring any more disgrace on them than being taken alive already had.

138

Oh boy. Where to begin?

How about, first, that there were, after all three bombs made; one using U-235 and two using Pu-239. In terms of whether or not they would work, the theory was good enough to go without testing or was proven. After all, the first atomic bomb exploded in the world was right here in America, in the middle of nowhere outside Alamogordo, on what is White Sands Missile Range.

Second, the reason the first plutonium bomb was dropped here in New Mexico instead of on Japan was that not only was it untested, but the theory saying that it would work wasn’t as tight as the uranium design. If you know anything about nuclear weapon design (and this is pretty basic; the only real hurdle is getting enough fissile material), Little Boy was a rail-gun type, where half the uranium was accelerated into the other half to reach the critical mass, while Fat Man reached critical mass using implosion. While it’s fairly simple to smash stuff together, getting it to implode properly is more difficult and required a test. The plutonium imploded properly, so we already knew its effects, explosive power (19 kilotons, about the same as Fat Man), and when you get effects like this

[quote]
Others were impressed by the heat they immediately felt. Military policeman Davis said, “The heat was like opening up an oven door, even at 10 miles.” Dr. Phillip Morrison said, “Suddenly, not only was there a bright light but where we were, 10 miles away, there was the heat of the sun on our faces … Then, only minutes later, the real sun rose and again you felt the same heat to the face from the sunrise. So we saw two sunrises.”

Although no information on the test was released until after the atomic bomb was used as a weapon against Japan, people in New Mexico knew something had happened. The shock broke windows 120 miles away and was felt by many at least 160 miles away. Army officials simply stated that a munitions storage area had accidently exploded at the Alamogordo Bombing Range.* ([url=http://www.wsmr.army.mil/paopage/Pages/trinph.htm]link[/url) you generally have a pretty good idea of what you’ve got there.

As for the rest of your quote, I am not even going to bother.