Again, the point you seem to be overlooking is that the Potsdam declaration was not created as an academic exercise.
The morality of total war is different than bargaining for cheap trinkets in souvenir shops in tourist traps in third world countries. We did not want to send out boys out to have their guts spilled on the coral reefs of islands no one had ever heard of before just because TV wasn’t invented yet. It is ugly. No one here disagrees. Had there been a way to end it in such a way to prevent a repeat without resorting to bombing civilians, the Allies would have done that.
There were not monsters. They were our parents, grandparents and great grandparents. (Or grand uncles in my case, fighting my ex-wfe’s grand uncles.) For the most part, they did the best they could, and as far as I can tell, the same thing that the vast majority of us living 70 later would do, if we were in the same circumstances.
Ultra/Magic. Japan’s cipher codes, particularly their diplomatic ones, were hopelessly compromised; we were reading their mail, oftentimes at the same time they were. From them it was utterly clear that Japan had no interest in any kind of negotiations that didn’t leave them in control of some of their conquests during the Pacific War, much less any kind of punitive negotiations requiring relinquishing the conquests of the Pacific War. Giving up Korea, Formosa, Manchuria or the occupied part of China wasn’t on the negotiating table for them and was a complete non-starter as a negotiating position.
To see why a peace restoring things to their antebellum state wasn’t something Japan was apt to consider even if they had any kind of rational leadership one has merely to look at the reason they went to war: oil; particularly the oil in the Dutch East Indies. The oil embargo was going to force Japan to quit China as a result of the collapse of their economy unless they could seize the oil they needed to continue the war in China; giving into the American demands and voluntarily quitting China to end the embargo was not an option they were willing to even consider before the war. Restoring things to the state they were at on Dec 7, 1941 would mean surrendering the sources of oil they had conquered, which in turn meant the economy coming to a grinding halt and abandoning China.
I do not doubt that the average Japanese soldier during WW2 was a pure-hearted young man, much like one’s brother, friend, or whatever, who felt it was his duty to go out and fight. I also do not believe the Allies wanted to use the bomb as a way to punish the Japanese further. It was a military decision (the soldiers, Churchill included, saw it as a God-send,) while it was the civilians who had reservations.
And no soldier at the start of World War 2 thought it was going to end with nuclear bombs.
That’s an interesting story because we could tell in real time what the Foreign Minister was instructing the ambassador in Moscow and the ambassador’s repeated responses for clear direction, e.g., something serious to work with.
Another interesting point is that the IJA and IJN weren’t talking to each other, and neither were sharing important information with the civilians in the government. The US was better informed of secret Japanese military information than the Japanese Foreign Ministry. With the extensive bombings, land based communications were often cut so everyone was used encoded radio messages which the US was intercepting.
Apparently, the Empire of Japan had attacked the U.S. military bases at Pearl Harbor and attacked and sank British warships on Dec 7/8 as preventative actions to keep the U.S. and British from interfering with future Japanese military actions in Southeast Asia.
I guess it would have been a whole lot simpler, and certainly cheaper, to just appologize to the Imperial military for any inconvience that the U.S., England, Australia, China, Burma, Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and various Pacific Islands had caused their invaders to suffer.
The Imperial military would have tired of killing and murdering people eventually.
The Allies were well aware of Imperial Japanese actions prior to Potsdam. The surprise attacks, the inhumane treatment of civilians, the cruelty against captured civilians and POWs. Should the Allies have allowed the Imperial military to keep captured territories and rule them as they saw fit? I don’t think so.
What’s the downside to delaying the end of WWII? In May of 1945, the Nazi submarine U-234 surrendered to the destroyer USS Sutton and was escorted to the Portsmouth Naval ship yard, instead of delivering it’s cargo to Japan. It’s cargo included 560 kilograms of uranium oxide, which could/would have been used to create several atomic bombs, Nazi jet engines and plans and two Imperial Japanese Navy Lieutenant Commanders. The Japanese officers committed suicide.
Delaying the end of the war in Europe would have helped Japan create it’s own atomic bombs AND THEY WOULD HAVE USED THEM. (As would Hitler and Stalin if they had the chance. The world would be a whole lot different today if Stalin, Hitler, or Japan had developed a working atom bomb first.)
Delaying the end of the war in Asia meant that millions more would have died through out the region beyond the million or more deaths on Japan itself during the invasion(s).
Plan B included saving as many lives as possible and leaving Nazis or the Imperial military in charge would, based on their own histories, have continued the bloodbath.
