I thought the victims at, e.g., Suicide Cliff, were primarily ethnic Japanese, not the Chamorro natives?
Not that the IJA had any compunctions outright slaughtering non-Japanese civilians at that point in WW2. Inducing to suicide was ‘gentler’ than typical IJA behavior towards a civilian population.
Glad that Corry El hit the, IMHO, main factor that would have undermined Japanese resistance: the famine resulting from, among other things, the aerial and submarine mining campaign against the Japanese home waters. Japan doesn’t have a lot of arable land, so it supplemented its population’s nutritional needs with sea products. It also relied heavily on sea transport. Mining the hell out of their ports was hideously effective. Even if, like in most sieges, the population gets excluded in favor of supplying the military, plenty of IJA/IJN still ate each other and starved to death on bypassed islands during WW2.
IIRC, weren’t chemical weapons also going to be used during Downfall?
EDIT: Thanks, TokyoBayer, for yet another information-packed post on Japanese subjects. I learn a lot from them and I really appreciate your efforts.
I’m dubious about this. I think it’s too extreme a position to default to. It might end up being correct; it’s highly likely (I acknowledged that in my question) that negotiations could not possibly be productive.
But I don’t buy it that they had to be crushed like bugs. They might have been able to accept terms that we could accept also. The refusal to negotiate, and the unswerving demand for unconditional surrender, might have cost additional lives.
Yes, there had to be regime change. But they might have granted that. At very least we should have heard them out, and listened to their requirements.
(Again, I have very little faith that there could have been any meeting of minds. But I would have liked to have seen it tried.)
By “Regime change” do you mean disposition on the Emperor? That wouldn’t be accepted. I believe most Americans at that time were of Admiral Halsey’s opinion concerning Japan.
I’m not so sure that the US had the will or the money available for such an invasion of Japan.
Remember people and the soldiers were tired after 4 years. Their was almost outright rebellion in Europe with the slow pace of allowing American troops to leave and go back home. An even bigger fight was when some GI’s were told they might have to go to Japan to fight.
And then money. The US war was financed thru higher taxes and the sale of war bonds. How long could that have been kept up?
As for the people back home, it was obvious Japan had no chance of making a comeback so while people would have supported a blockade and continued bombing, I dont see them supporting the massive sacrifices an invasion would have required.
No, the effective rulers. (I don’t even know exactly what the non-imperial leadership was. Everybody know Tojo was the big boss man, but did he rule wholly autocratically, a la Hitler?) Anyway, those guys.
We did, after all, preserve the dignity of the Emperor.
Hirohito was actually pretty involved in the conduct of the war and the running of the Empire. The American occupation authorities sought to obscure this and place the blame on Tojo and others in order to avoid having to put the Emperor on trial.
We faced the same problem in the civil war. Had they gotten the quick victory at bull run that they were expecting, bringing the south back into the union would have been a much harder, kicking and screaming, sort of affair.
I think its clear the reactionary slaver planter class of the South wasn’t thoroughly broken after the end of the war which allowed for the resurgence of white supremacy once the federal government’s interest in Reconstruction faltered. Ideally, the planters should have been liquidated as a class with their land being expropriated and redistributed to poor white farmers as well as freemen thus binding the white lower/underclass to Reconstruction and the Republican Party. Additionally, anybody who served in the Confederate Congress/Cabinet, held a rank higher then say a colonel in the Confederate army, and/or owned more then 50 slaves should have been stripped of citizenship or forbidden from public office for life.
I’m no fan of the slaver class of 1860, but how well do you suppose deBaathification would actually have worked had the North tried to impose it? My bet is not well.
Fortunately, people more steeped in the realities of history and human nature prevailed then & there.
The “Slaver Class” didn’t have many members. Secession was in many states done by the state legislatures rather than popular vote. I think most of the Black hatred was due to laying blame for the war. If you were a poor White guy, at least you weren’t a slave.
MY Mother’s family held slaves. I’ve been in the house were slaves built the kitchen, which the White family moved into while the Blacks built slave quarters before building the rest of the house. It appears there were half a dozen slaves, rather than the hundreds depicted in *Gone With the Wind. *
The Imperial Palace was not a target in the Tokyo raid. I am not sure why. If I were as angry as most Americans in 1942, I would have made it the primary target.
Sure, you might have had to crack a few heads open but given what actually happened in reality its hard to see it being worse.
And the upshot was that the white planter class reasserted its dominance by use of racial demagougery to gain the support of poor whites and then imposed Jim Crow legislation that robbed blacks (and oftentimes poor whites as well) of basic political and civil rights. As a result the South became a corrupt oligarchy where the mass of the population was kept poor and backwards by an utterly reactionary class and the majority of Southern blacks would not even begin to recover their rights until the 1950s and 60s. If that is what being “steeped in the realities of history and human nature” means, I want no part of it.
Apparently on 20 July 1945 1 B-29 dropped a Pumpkin bomb (bomb with same ballistics as the Fat Man nuclear bomb) through overcast aiming at but missing the Imperial Palace.
I’m glad they didnt destroy all of Japan’s ancient and cultural sites. It would have been like the allies bombing the Louvre or the Notre Dame Cathedral in France.
