Ok there is no connection. But it has been said that Turings code breaking machne saved 2 million deaths in WW2 and that the atomic bombs dropped In Japan also saved millions of lives. Just 2 examples that come to my mind.
How do they come to this conclusion.
Six million Japanese were at risk of starving to death in 1946.
There’s some debate about it, but many people think that a US invasion of Japan would have been hard fought every inch of the way, resulting in huge casualties on both sides. The atomic bomb killed a whole bunch of people in a very short amount of time, but it killed a lot fewer people than were expected to die in the conventional war alternative. So the people that weren’t killed in a hard-fought invasion are the “lives saved”.
Turing’s contributions maybe aren’t so direct, but his code-breaking is often cited by some as helping to end the war with Germany a lot sooner. There were a lot of other things that all worked together to end the war with Germany (especially a huge effort by the Russians which is generally overlooked in Western histories) so I don’t know how much of this can be realistically attributed to Turing, but if you say the war would have gone on for a couple more years, then all you need to do is multiply the monthly casualty rates at the time by the appropriate number of months and you have a total of lives saved.
Operation Landfall, the Allied-led land invasion of Japan, was predicted to result in at least a half million dead. Over half a million Purple Hearts were made, resulting in a supply which is still being used to this day.
no reason to think the Japanese would not have fought to the death like they did before the invasion of Japan.
This seems very, well, either vague or confused.
With Turing, the oft-quoted claim, following Harry Hinsley, the official historian of British intelligence during WWII, is that Bletchley shortened the war in Europe by a year or two. See, for example, this 2012 BBC article, by a leading Turing specialist. But that’s Bletchley as a whole and Turing’s personal contribution has to be somewhat less.
Yet that article also suggests that seven million were dying in Europe per year of the war.
Numbers saved by Hiroshima and Nagasaki are intrinsically horribly controversial and rather depend on who you count, by whatever method. For example, Japanese military and civilians deaths vs. American invasion deaths. (Seems obvious as a choice, except that large numbers of people were dying elsewhere in the Far East post-VE-Day. On both sides.)
Vastly different numbers for all sorts of such (potential or otherwise) deaths can be thrown about, often for political and partisan reasons. I’m not sure that the OP has indicated any sort of clear path though the morass.
In early 1942, the German Navy began using a 4-rotor Enigma machine to communicate with its Atlantic U-boats, and the messages could no longer be read by Bletchley Park. In just the two months of May and June, 1942, 234 ships with a total gross weight of over 1.2 million tonnes were destroyed by U-boats. Recall that Great Britain is a crowded island and would be literally starved without a regular supply of goods from across the seas.
The 4-rotor transmissions were much harder to crack than 3-rotor traffic, and required insights of great ingenuity. Turing was of course not the only genius at Bletchley, but he was the smartest of all, produced several inventions of both hardware and software, and specialized in the Naval Enigma problem.
One eye-opening aspect of the Ultra secret is that it remained secret for 35 years (until Winterbotham’s 1974 book), despite that hundreds or even thousands of people were aware of it.
Exactly. The precedent demonstrated to the US forces was situations like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The cost to take care of a small defence force was huge. Then consider trying to clean defence forces out to the mountains in central Japan; or the mess of trying to control conquered cities (think how much fun Iraq was). It would likely have been a year of hard-fought guerilla warfare and possibly sucker-punch attacks by suicidal fanatics.
All of the Japan/nuclear bombs saving lives information is in the recently published book; “Flyboys” by James Bradley 2006 (get the most recent 2006 book, not the 2003 version).
As time progresses, things which were secret in wars are declassified. Typically 50 years seems to be the magic number for releasing this information. And this is certainly the case with the information in the book Flyboys!
Basically a LOT of information about the Japanese and WWII was hidden from you and I. And it is still somewhat hidden because no where on the front or back of that Flyboys book does it say what is REALLY in that book!
The REAL story is not about the downed flyers the book claims to be about, rather it includes shocking details about cannibalism, torture, the horrible treatment of Japanese solders by THEIR OWN MILITARY. Even the Japanese leaving thousands of their men without food or water and not thinking a thing about it!
But the most important part about that book is the information about how radically different the Japanese culture was than that of America or Europe. EACH AND EVERY citizen of that country was more than willing to fight to the death to save their country. They would rather die than surrender! Fact!
They would rather their country no longer exist that be invaded by a foreign power. The details of what is behind this thinking is all in the book.
I’m not talking just the military, I’m talking every man woman and child! This book is eye opening about what Americans were not told!
I don’t know how to do one of those spoiler things to hide unpleasant facts, but there are some things in that book as to what happened with some of our solders remains that I will not discuss.
Also the details of how they practiced bayoneting prisoners to train their men.
Here is the book…
Despite the exclamation marks, there exists the possibility that this is not actually a fact. For example, at the very bloody Battle of Okinawa, about 12% of Japanese troops surrendered to the US.
We know it’s not a fact, since the Japanese did surrender after the atom bombs were dropped.
The problem with the “[dropping the atom bomb] saved X million lives” claim is that the comparison is between an actual known event, and a speculation. The speculation picks only one possible alternative history, and then makes unprovable claims about what would have resulted if history had unfolded that way. If I want to justify the dropping of the bomb, I’ll simply pick one alternative history and make pessimistic assumptions about how it would have played out. If I want to attack the dropping of the bomb, I’ll pick a different alternative history and make optimistic assumptions about how it would have unfolded. Whichever course I take will tell you a good deal about how I feel about the dropping of the bomb, but it won’t tell you much else.
I once saw a quote by a Japanese General that “the suicide of the Japanese nation would be like a beautiful poem.” (I’ve not been able to recover this quote via Google.)
The naval codes, and the period when they were not cracked is a very clear indicator of the value of breaking Enigma. It is very likely that Turing made all the difference here.
As smart as Turing clearly was, he had nothing to do with breaking the Lorentz machine codes (the “Fish” codes.) used by the German high command. Tilley, Neumann and Flowers were key here, and Neumann clearly ranks with Turing. Ultra is not just the Enigma crack, it is the Lorentz cipher crack that used the colossi.
The Lorentz codes were being systematically cracked in an operationally useful form just in time for D-Day. Launching the D-Day attacks with the full ability to read the high command communications made a huge difference to the counter-invasion. The speed of its movement clearly saved many lives, both military and civilian. It also contributed to the final location of the Iron Curtain, which could easily have been on the French German border, or even further west.
of course nothing is provable in a “could have been” scenario.
I have a theory that every British war film ends with a short scene involving Winston Churchill saying “with your bravery/cleverness/determination you have shortened the war by 6 months”.
Yes that was the entire country’s thinking as described in the book. Something I was never told when learning about the war. I was only told about the suicide dive bombers.
In particular, it was noted that the resistance went from intense on islands such as Saipan, Guam, Peleliu, and in the Phillipines, to fanatical during the assaults on two islands the Japanese considered part of Japan, i.e. Iwo Jima and Okinawa. There was every reason to believe that any landings in Japan proper would be at least as fanatical as Okinawa or Iwo Jima, Plus, at the time, the USAAF was engaging in hideously destructive firebombing raids over Japanese cities, in some cases killing and destroying as much or more than the nuclear weapons did. This no doubt would have continued until the Japanese surrendered, killing many more thousands of people who otherwise lived.
So basically the grim calculus comes down to the nuclear weapon raid casualties vs. the expected casualties from an American invasion (both US and Japanese), as well as the ongoing casualties from Gen. LeMay’s strategic bombing campaign. When looked at that way, it’s fairly clear that as horrific as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, they were still less destructive overall than the alternative of continuing the strategic bombing campaign and engaging in large scale invasions of the home islands.
Turing’s contributions were in the realm of breaking the Enigma codes, which basically meant that the Allies tended to have a huge advantage in terms of knowing what the Germans were going to do, how many they were going to do it with, and when they were going to do it. It wasn’t perfect, but light-years ahead of anything that the Axis knew about the Allies’ intentions, and helped the Allies prevail many times when the outcome might have been much less decisive.
But it’s really hard to quantify that sort of thing. How does one quantify how many lives the Enigma decryption saved in the Invasion of Sicily, by telling the Allied commanders the German strength and dispositions, and that they had swallowed the elaborate Allied strategic ruses hook, line and sinker? That’s the kind of problem that you’d have to solve in order to actually come up with a reasonable estimate, and you’d have to do it probably thousands of times- there were a LOT of *Ultra *dispatches to field commanders over the course of the war.
That’s a rather deceptive figure; 110,000 Japanese were killed and 7,401 were taken prisoner. That even this small percentage were taken prisoner was taken to be a sign of a weakening of Japanese morale, all previous fighting had resulted in casualties more in the range of 99% KIA and 1% POW. The 12% figure is reached by including the 3,400 Okinawan conscripts taken prisoner in the fighting as well as those captured months after the fighting was over. From wiki:
There’s no reason the number has to come from a single outcome. Practically everything in life is driven by expected value calculations.
I agree that IJA surrender rates were minuscule. My disagreement was with the assertion that the entire Japanese nation was prepared to throw away their lives rather than accept defeat.
I remember reading something about Okinawa, where the civilian locals were told by the Japanese military what horrible fates awaited them when the Americans captured them. they were then given grenades and other weapons and told they had one chance to make their death quick and painless an make it count. So, a number of locals did suicide grenade actions against US troops while pretending to surrender. Now imagine that scenario multiplied by the millions on the main islands. The US high command certainly imagined it. That’s just the civilians.
Also, a lot of the “left without food or water” was a supply problem, compounded by the “never surrender” principle.