This is a good point. Can we apply it to the Allies’ insistence on on conditional surrender? The the Japanese government was looking for ways to end the war before the atomic bombs were dropped, but the stumbling block was unconditional surrender, something that any government would find very hard to accept. Japan’s government perhaps more than most, given the veneration of the emperor and his huge role in Japanese culture.
As for the point above about the invasion and continuing the blockade and bombardment would have have cost even more lives, thus justifying the use of the bomb, again, there’s some evidence that Japan would have surrendered in August 1945 regardless, if not for the insistence on unconditional surrender.
But FAFO seems to be the operating principle of empires and militarism, or rather, those who head them, whatever flag and principles they bandy about, until they lose. This is in part because, as you say, they are unwilling and unable to apply their logic and assumptions to themselves.
Then add the fact that it isn’t the mass public deciding to wage war, but rather some handful of supreme leaders up to at most an inner circle of ~50 people. In an authoritarian regime those folks got there by being all about themselves and only themselves. Starting a war fits well with the sort of self-centered narcissism or psychopathology those folks necessarily exhibit.
And once they’re up there, their world is real comfy pretty much no matter how badly the war is going for the masses and the country. But … If the war ends badly, they’re going fall especially far and especially hard. Better to fight on to the last peasant than to voluntarily surrender and thereby volunteer to hang from a lamppost or worse.
“In for a penny, in to the death” is about how the psychology of an authoritarian regime must break out.
That wasn’t my point. I think it was moral for the reasons given by many posters. I was just noting that I might be biased.
Given the odds against any of us being born, almost any change to history would have resulted in a different sperm hitting the egg. If you want to create a time paradox you don’t have to go back in time to kill your grandfather. You can just ring the doorbell at the wrong time.
I’ll look for it in the library, but I suspect they would also be looking at the example of Germany, which also got severely bombed, and had no uprising. The Japanese state was far more autocratic than the German one in WWI or even the Russian one.
I’m not aware of conventional air power ever winning a war, are you?
While I’m throwing out platitudes about context, I need to remind people the context of WWII, namely WWI.
The “war to end all wars” didn’t work out that way. The vengeance wrecked by the winning European countries led to the conditions that spawned Hitler a few years later.
The thinking for the second war was, broadly, totally destroying the capacity for future wars but rebuilding the countries into stable democracies who would reject totalitarianism.
That amazingly worked. Both Germany and Japan forswore armed forces, and have only recently been considering rearming for a different world. America poured tremendous amounts of resources into them to help the countries recover. It did so against much internal pressure to punish those countries because the politicians, especially Truman and Eisenhower, saw a different possible future and strove for it. How rare is that in world political history!
To get to this end - which admittedly is imposing a winner’s will over the losers regardless of their opinions - unconditional surrender was the necessary precondition. Anything less would have given Germany and Japan choices that might conflict with America’s vision. A vision, it must be remembered, that deliberately opposed the vision of the other winner, the USSR.
“Strip them to the bones and then rebuild them in our image” might appear to be grossly amoral at best when expressed that starkly. Another alternative might have turned out better. Fortunately, the known history of Germany and Japan since was more positive than anyone in 1945 expected. That’s hard to set aside for abstractions, especially when compared to the aftermath of the USSR’s alternative.
Plus, authoritarians are even worse than leaders in general are about being surrounded by toadies who tell them what they want to hear. And are psychologically used to the idea that they can make everyone act if what they believe is true if they “insist” hard enough. That’s not a situation that primes people to willingly acknowledge the reality of forces outside their control, like an enemy nation that’s winning the war. As we saw with both the Japanese military leadership and Hitler, who were sure that if they were just stubborn enough the weak and soft Allies would inevitably relent. Triumph of the Will and all that; such people tend to think that reality must bend to their will if they try hard enough.
Which screws them over when they run into something they can’t out-stubborn, whether it’s an enemy nation or a virus.
You make it sound like the Japanese government was working in lockstep with one another and officially looking for ways to surrender. They were not. What you had were a faction within the government putting out unofficial feelers through backchannels.
The conditional surrender sought by the Japanese included:
They keep the emperor.
They deal with their own war criminals. Given that some horrendous military leaders were able to escape Allied prosecution, one can imagine Japanese prosecution would be more lenient.
The Japanese disarm at their own pace. Sure, their military-led government would have been happy to get this done quickly.
No allied occupation.
The Allies were right to insist on unconditional surrender.
We’ll go home now and act like it never ever happened. As long as you all leave us alone.
Fat friggin chance of that flying.
Which is essentially the problem in Ukraine right now. Russian peace proposals amount to freezing the status quo, a sub rosa “Oopsie”, and immediate continuation of hostilities.
Would not have worked in 1945 and should not work in 2025-26.
You are correct. So the Koreans, having suffered 400,000 WW2 deaths due to Japanese rule, would continue their decades of 2nd class citizenship under the Japanese.
I think a key factor is that the officials in an authoritarian government place their own personal well-being above the well-being of the country.
Absent the atomic bomb, Japan probably could have held out for another year or two before the country was overrun by allied military forces. But the cost of fighting for that extra time would have been massive Japanese casualties and physical destruction as the home island became a battleground. Japan would have been far worse off after a 1947 collapse than they were after a 1945 surrender.
This was probably apparent to the people running Japan. So why did they want to keep fighting?
Because of the personal cost to themselves. The people who were running Japan knew that they were going to be held responsible when they fell into their enemies’ hands. They knew that their future after Japan surrendered was going to be war crime trials and executions.
The question they were asking was not “Would it be better for Japan to surrender now in 1945 or keep fighting for another two years?” They were asking “Which works out better for me? Getting captured this year or getting to live another two years?”
This is why, IMHO, there is no debate. If the alternative to not using the bombs is Japan in the present day being another North Korea, then obviously it was worth it. And yes, my guess is that this is likely what the outcome would have been with some sort of negotiated surrender, as opposed to the total surrender and de facto imposition of Douglas MacArthur as the ruler of Japan for a few years until they rebuilt their government along the lines of a standard western democracy.
Extremely rare. Which is mind boggling, because the fact that it worked (twice!) suggests that it’s something that should be tried more often.
By “Japanese inhabitants”, do you mean Japanese garrisons commanded to hold out and die to the last man, taking as many Allied soldiers with them as possible in a glorious tribute to the Emperor, rather than surrendering?
After the Hiroshima bomb there were some special news broadcasts with man on the street interviews. None of the respondents voiced issues of justification or ethics. Even when prompted with questions about alternatives the answers were consistently ‘we need to keep going even if it means killing every Jap (then current term) alive’.
I think they were both necessary in light of what happened previously in the war, the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were dying every month in Japanese occupied territory and how fanatical the Japanese leadership were. The Allies had no plausible option in the summer of 1945 that wouldn’t have resulted in mass death. The bombings were the best and least costliest way to induce the Emperor to surrender and he even cited them in his surrender speech to the Japanese people. The alternative would have meant hundreds of thousands to millions dying from the ongoing Allied blockade and bombing campaign, the ongoing Japanese occupation in much of Asia and the Allied invasion of the Home Islands (Operation Downfall).
Read Downfall by Richard Frank and Hell to Pay by Dennis Giangreco for a comprehensive explanation of the last year of the war, what led to the atomic bombings and how the Japanese leadership responded to the atomic bombings (the Emperor had to break the deadlock after Nagasaki). If you read those two books and come away thinking the atomic bombings weren’t justified, then I don’t know what could possibly convince you otherwise.