But no one is saying that Truman did drop the bomb to make Japan surrender, and they did surrender because of the bombings, and because of that the invasion of Japan was prevented, yet that still makes it unjustifiable. That’s the only argument that could be countered by bringing up Japanese atrocities in occupied territories.
If (as everyone on the “unjustified” side of the argument is saying AFAIK) that Truman was not motivated by making Japan surrender and/or the Japanese surrender was not the result of the bombs, it a complete non sequitur (or worse it’s an argument in favor of collective punishment and the civilian population of Japan deserved to be attacked with atomic weapons because of the atrocities in occupied Asia)
Just an aside, about the collateral damage the Army and its scientists found acceptable
Thirteen-year-old Barbara Kent (center) and her fellow campers play in a river near Ruidoso, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, in the hours after the bomb’s detonation. Fallout flakes drifted down that day and for days afterward. ‘We thought [it] was snow,’ Kent says. ‘But the strange thing, instead of being cold like snow, it was hot.’ (National Geographic)
She was the only person in the photo to live to age thirty.
I think it’s fair to say that nobody really knew that the plume into that area of New Mexico was going to be that bad. And the middle of the Jornada del Muerto on White Sands Missile Range (though it wasn’t known by that name in 1945) was a perfectly reasonable place to test a bomb that had been made a couple hundred miles away. The real scandal is that the Downwinders were ignored by the government afterward.
Look, until the Russians started the propaganda they they won the war almost single handedly, everyone agreed that the bombings ended the war- gave Hirohito a plausible excuse.
The other two suggested wars of bring the Pacific war to a close was - Invasion, which as LSLGuy said, would have cost many US casualties and also most Imperial Japanese dead that the bombing. #2, suggested by the Air Force and Navy, was continued bombing and a blockade to starve them out- many less US dead, sure, but the civilian cost would have been horrendous, millions. Remember the Firebombing of Tokyo killed more than either bomb did directly. Think of every major city being firebombed. Also either one would doubtlessly caused the death of all Allied POWS in Japan.
Finally the example of using the Bomb was pretty horrific, so it has never been used again. If we hadnt used it on Japan, maybe MacArthur would have got the Okay to use it in Korea.
Not true. There were vague unauthorized peace feelers thru other embassies. But remember, even after the Emperor declared peace, there was a coup to keep the war going- something which had occurred before had anyone in Japan dared talk of peace.
Prior to the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, elements existed within the Japanese government that were trying to find a way to end the war. In June and July 1945, Japan attempted to enlist the help of the Soviet Union to serve as an intermediary in negotiations. No direct communication occurred with the United States about peace talks, but American leaders knew of these maneuvers because the United States for a long time had been intercepting and decoding many internal Japanese diplomatic communications. From these intercepts, the United States learned that some within the Japanese government advocated outright surrender. A few diplomats overseas cabled home to urge just that.
From the replies these diplomats received from Tokyo, the United States learned that anything Japan might agree to would not be a surrender so much as a “negotiated peace” involving numerous conditions. These conditions probably would require, at a minimum, that the Japanese home islands remain unoccupied by foreign forces and even allow Japan to retain some of its wartime conquests in East Asia. Many within the Japanese government were extremely reluctant to discuss any concessions, which would mean that a “negotiated peace” to them would only amount to little more than a truce where the Allies agreed to stop attacking Japan. After twelve years of Japanese military aggression against China and over three and one-half years of war with the United States (begun with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor), American leaders were reluctant to accept anything less than a complete Japanese surrender.
Those elements did not have the approval of the War Cabinet or the Emperor. In fact if it had got out those “elements’ were “talking defeatism” they would have been assassinated.
Correct.
I think they would have, but the Navy and Air Force thought the blockade would work, with minimal American deaths, but much increased Japanese dead. Millions.
Your cite says
As many as 100,000 Japanese people were killed and another million injured, most of them civilians, when more than 300 American B-29 bombers dropped 1,500 tons of firebombs on the Japanese capital that night.
That Army was stopped at the Yalu river. I have no doubt the Soviets could have defeated the Imperial Japanese in Manchuria, and Korea, But China? Casualties would have been high, and the Soviet army was tired.
Good point.
The Allies fire bombed Nuremberg White people there. In fact the Allies killed around 4 million German CIVILIANS during WW2.
Right, We even sent the Flying Tigers over before the war.
Chronos Johnson is right. In 1905 Teddy Roosevelt sent his princess Alice on a Pacific cruise to acquaint her with intended beau Nicholas Longworth. Their real mission, with key people along as chaperones, was to engage and encourage the Japanese as a safe little client state in case things got crazy in China again. Oops.
(Or even further back. “Commodore Perry says they’ll stop killing shipwrecked Americans. Otherwise they seem happy as they are.”
Although there was a peace faction in Japan (a small one) that was attempting to set up some sort of negotiations they did not have the power to offer anything on behalf of the government of Japan. Even there, the US was already calling for unconditional surrender on the part of Japan whereas the peace party, had it been able to get negotiations started, would have been asking for conditions and assurances. See here for a reasonably coherent introduction to the topic. Of course, that is one person’s take on it but that person is an actual historian with sources to back up his position.
Nope. The US had already been demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan since at least earlier in July. Unconditional surrender were the terms under which Japan surrendered. No change whatsoever.
WWII did not have our current distinction between civilians and military. In fact, WWII is one reason we currently try to assert that distinction due to the loss of life and destruction the “total war” approach created. It was a different time with different standards. You can certainly argue they are not our standards, but we can’t go back in time an impose our morality on the past.
A LOT of WWII, on all sides, would be deemed “illegal”, in violation of moderns international standards, atrocities, and war crimes in a modern context. Don’t for a minute think the winners, the Allies, were any more civilized about sparing civilians than the Axis was. Look at the firebombings of Dresden (February 13-15, 1945) and Tokyo (March 9-10, 1945) if you aren’t sure what I’m talking about.
Repeating an untruth does not make it true. Japan never offered a surrender until after the second bombing, and even then doing so nearly cost the Emperor his life.
Was an invasion required? That’s debatable question. What is not debatable is that the US military was getting ready for one. Check out Operation Downfall. Not that there wasn’t some debate - the US Navy was for a blockade to starve the Japanese into surrender while bombing the shit out of them (conventional bombs, which would mean firebombings like Dresden and Tokyo).
While the US was comtemplating having the US Marine storm the beaches of Japan as they had done in Normandy the Japanese government was conducting drills of their civilian populace on how to make bamboo spears to repel the invaders. Yes, you heard that right - the Japanese were planning to repel armed and equipped battle-hardened US Marines with pointy sticks or die trying. On both sides estimates were that US casualties could run to the hundreds of thousands and Japanese casualties into the millions. Well, hell, about 40-50 million people had already died in WWII, what were a few million more, right?
The US produced so many Purple Heart medals in anticipate of Operation Downfall that we’re still using that supply 80 years later and we haven’t run out yet. The military produced about 250,000 body bags in anticipation of Operation Downfall but the rest of the order was canceled after Japan’s actual surrender. These are indications, to me, that the US military very, very much was intending to invade Japan. And if that had happened a LOT of people, even by WWII standards, would have died. A lot would have been maimed for life, too.
Nobody other than the US military, and only a small slice of that, was aware of the small number of bombs possessed by the US, or that we had dropped the entire supply on Japan already. That was a closely guarded secret. No one, not even our allies (well, maybe the UK had some spy reports) knew how many we did or didn’t have at that point. Also top secret is that assembly of the third bomb was probably delayed by Henry Daghlian fatally irradiating himself on August 21, 1945 using a technique so reckless in retrospect that even the soviets wouldn’t go about studying nuclear bomb cores in that manner. Then nine months later Louis Slotin managed to do the same damned thing. With the same damned plutonium core. But I digress…
Oh yeah, there was some speculation that the Soviet army waited until after Hiroshima to invade Manchuria- of course they didnt know that specifically was gonna happen, but they were dragging their feet- the agreement is that the Soviets would attack Japan after the Nazis were beat- but VE day was May 8, and the Soviets didnt attack until August 9, three days after Hiroshima. Some have argued that the Soviets jumped in quickly before the Japanese surrendered, so they could get their hands on more territory. This is just the opposite of “The Japanese surrendered due to the Soviet invasion”. Of course, we will never know, but that last fallacy didnt even start until well after the war.
I wouldn’t say it was entirely unknown, but certainly the effects of it, and radiation in general, were poorly understood by today’s standards. Or by the standards of, say, 1948 when information about the effects of fallout from a nuclear weapon was available, at least to the US military. The hot-shot scientists Daghlian and Slotin I mentioned in my prior post also provided valuable information as they lay dying of radiation exposure in nice, tidy hospitals stateside. Daghlian lasted 25 days before he died. Slotin was dead in 9. With Daghlian, he was dying only slightly behind many of the bombed Japanese.
^ This is a very good point.
Well, it’s not like anybody at the time knew some of the things we know now. But there were reports made to the Japanese command that Hiroshima had, indeed, been destroyed and reports were that it was done by a single bomb from a single airplane. I am reasonably certain that doubts were expressed - certainly March of 1945 had shown that a city like Tokyo could be severely damaged by firebombing and a smaller one like Hiroshima at least theoretically devastated, but the expectation was that it would take hundreds of airplanes and bombs. On the other hand, there was no evidence of a massive number of airplanes at that time and place, just reports and records of ONE. It usually takes a few days for the radiation sickness to really kick in so that wouldn’t have been apparent immediately after the bombing. Just lots and lots of destruction wrought by one airplane. It certainly demonstrated a vastly improved efficiency in destroying cities.
Nagasaki proved Hiroshima was no fluke and that it was, indeed, one airplane and one bomb. Given how many airplanes the US was known to have (roughly), how many cities were in Japan, and nobody knew if the US still had one (or no) bombs or hundreds they could load onto airplanes I think someone did some match and realized it was game over for Japan.
Even so - there were factions determined to keep fighting to the death. After the Emperor agreed to surrender and recorded his surrender speech that night there was an attempted coup on the Imperial Palace. Even after two nuclear bombs some of the Japanese wanted to keep fighting.
So no, I don’t think a demonstration bombing of Tokyo Bay would have done the trick, and if we hadn’t bombed them there would have been either a very bloody invasion or a long, slow, lingering death by starvation. Which way of dying is really worse than the other?
^ And that’s really the core of the argument, at least in my view. Which method of ending the war kills and maims fewer people. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, dropping atomic bombs on Japan was probably the least costly in terms of human life of the alternatives at the time. Which is why those who are pro-dropping say those bombs “saved lives”. They’re not talking about lives in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, they’re talking about all the people who didn’t die in an invasion or as a result of a navel-blockade induced famine. Also all the Americans (and others) from outside Japan who didn’t die in a bloody invasion.
I wouldn’t say any of that was a good thing, at best the two atomic bombs were the least bad alternative at the time.
Most people in the government were completely and entirely unaware of the existence of the Manhattan project or nuclear weapons. If they had heard of the Manhattan project it was as a super-secret project that was no more than a name/label. Just one among hundreds of other wacky, long-shot, crazy projects to government was engaged in looking for an edge against the enemy, most of which never amounted to anything.
The options to using nuclear weapons seem to have boiled down to A) negotiating a peace treaty with a country that wanted to hold on to as much conquered territory as possible B) an invasion, with an army going from island to island or C) a naval embargo combined continuous bombing raids until the Japanese either surrender or starve to death.
I wonder which of those options seems more moral than any of the others.
No, really, the primary reason to drop the bombs were to get Japan to surrender. That really was a desired outcome. The fact that is also demonstrated to the USSR that we had a shiny new horrible weapon was a bonus feature.
Really? People in fire-bombed cities like Dresden Tokyo were just as burned and mangled as those in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time nobody, not even the Manhattan project scientists, knew the real consequences of fallout and radiation (although they had some idea it would be bad). None could be dropped until September anyway due to production bottlenecks. He was in no way “broken” and is on record as those bombings being a necessary evil to end the war.
It’s more like Hirohito carried out a coup against the die-hard military brass who were in control until Hirohito pulled the rug out from under them with his delicately-worded surrender speech “…the war having turned out not necessarily to Japan’s advantage,” the recording of which had to be smuggled out of the palace to the NHK radio station hidden in a laundry basket because there were military hardliners in the palace who were looking for it and would have confiscated it.
If history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. It was like Emperor Meiji getting rid of the shogun all over again.
^ This. My uncles in the European theater of war had zero problem killing German Nazis despite their own father having been born and mostly raised in Germany.
My uncles in the Asian theater of war had no problem killing Japanese soldiers because if they hadn’t those Japanese would have killed them. It had nothing to do with racism, it had to do with being in a shooting war.
I’ll note that Nazis are still considered such villains that it’s acceptable to kill them in droves in all sorts of media. The Japanese not so much. I’m not saying there was no racism - there was, and it isn’t entirely gone at this point - just that a notion of all Japanese being The Enemy did not persist as long as the Evil Nazi meme has.
To be fair, Hirohito was the “supreme ruler” and constitutionally the sovereign and theoretically held absolute power under the Meiji Constitution.
I get as a practical matter it was not like that but not sure how we could say him flexing his power to end WWII for Japan would constitute a coup against the existing government. He WAS the government.
That’s why I qualified it as “more like” a coup in the reverse direction, because Tojo had become a de facto shogun who ran the whole country as well as the war. Hirohito was able to bring down the de facto shogunate by smuggling his surrender speech to the radio station against opposition. It recalls the Meiji Restoration of eighty-some years earlier, when the emperor seized power from the shogun by force.
It also recalls how in Italy the fainéant king, who cared more about his stamp collection than the nation, had de facto ceded all his power to Mussolini and turned a blind eye to all the mischief Mussolini got up to, and he only deposed Mussolini after the Fascist Council had voted to put the king back in charge. After the war the Italian people hounded the king from office and voted to make Italy a republic.
It also recalls the bizarre coup plans of Ngô Đình Diệm to stage a fake coup in which he could seize power from the army by a planned countercoup. But the supposedly fake coup backfired on him and became the real one that overthrew him.
One theory I have read is that the Soviets had a hand in this.
Japan was obviously in bad shape by the beginning of 1945 and there were people in Japan who realized that they weren’t going to win the war at this point. The issue was whether they would be able to negotiate some kind of agreement that let them keep something or would have to surrender unconditionally.
The Soviets had been promised a share in the occupation of Japan in exchange for joining the war against Japan. But even after Germany surrendered in May, the Soviets were not ready to start fighting against Japan. So the Soviets didn’t want Japan to surrender prematurely.
So Soviet agents approached Japanese officials and told them they were speaking on behalf of the Americans. They said that American morale was weakening and that they would be willing to negotiate a reasonable treaty with Japan rather than take the casualties an invasion would bring. But naturally, the Americans couldn’t say this openly so they have asked the Soviets to act as a neutral third party.
This is exactly what the Japanese had been hoping for. So they eagerly began discussions with the Soviets, who they believed were relaying their messages to the Americans and receiving what they believed were responses from the Americans. Several weeks dragged along with the Japanese thinking they were in the middle of real negotiations.
Then the United States dropped the first atomic bomb. And then the Soviets unexpectedly declared war on Japan. And the Japanese realized that the secret peace negotiations they thought they had been engaged in were a hoax.
So it wasn’t just the second atomic bombing that caused the sudden collapse of Japan’s willingness to keep fighting. It was also the the shattering of the hopes for a negotiated peace.
I have read that the Americans might have under-estimated the potential casualty count.
Part of the estimates were based on how much military supplies Japan could still produce. And American intelligence officers had noted that Japanese troops were experiencing shortages of supplies. The conclusion the intelligence officers drew from this evidence was that the American strategic bombing of Japanese industry was working and Japanese military production was dropping.
What they didn’t realize was the reason they were seeing evidence of Japanese supply shortages on the front was because the Japanese military had begun storing up supplies in Japan in anticipation of the invasion. So if American had invaded Japan they would have found the Japanese troops much better supplied (and therefore much more capable of fighting) than they expected.
And five hundred thousand is way low. Estimates ranger for 5-10 MILLION Japanese civilian deaths. So the choice is- 100 dead from the Bomb or millions dead from conventional weapons.
There was too much enmity between Japan and Russia/USSR for this to work, not to mention the Soviets’ well-known history of backstabbing and double-dealing diplomacy.
Japan held out hope for a negotiated peace for far longer than was reasonable, but this is explainable by the distorted information environment that’s typical of military dictatorships. Defeats were downplayed, strengths were overplayed, magical thinking was the norm, skepticism was heresy. Even after Nagasaki, the spell resisted breaking.
