The argument is often made that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs “saved countless lives” because they made Japan surrender, thus making an Allied invasion of Japan unnecessary.
But I’m not sure why invading or A-bombing Japan would really have been necessary. What was the point? Why couldn’t a “roll back Japan’s conquests but let their homeland be” approach suffice, like Operation Desert Storm which defeated Saddam’s forces but left Iraq still largely up to its own devices after the war?
By early 1945, Japan had been hit hard, numerous Japanese conquests had been reversed, and Pearl Harbor had arguably been avenged. If the Pacific campaign had been called off at that point, it would already qualify as a US victory.
Why did US planners assume that “Our only two options are a full-scale invasion costing hundreds of thousands of lives…or nukes?”
And if the argument is that, “Japan might attack other countries and continue to pose a future threat if we left it alone,” well then, does that mean the coalition forces should have tried to conquer all of Saddam’s Iraq in 1991?
It might be the influence of World War I: that war did not end with an unconditional surrender; instead it ended with an armistice. The result was World War II; and American planners did not want to repeat that.
You also wanted to destroy the enemy war machine. The bomb was the most efficient method to achieve this.
Iraq was not left to its own devices after 1991. Iraq was forced to comply with international monitoring and this required an international military force remain stationed in the area.
We were in a war and it is more than difficult to simply say, “OK, let’s pause for a while (and probably let our enemy regroup and rebuild).” The mindset would have simply been that we need. To defeat our enemy.
Japan still had large armies in China that were directed from Tokyo; conquering the island would cause them to surrender.
Beyond that, it costs money to keep a large army and navy. Sitting off the coast of Japan doing nothing beyond enforcing an embargo/blockade when there was no way to know how long it would go on would not have been considered an option.
(Some would suggest that we feared that the Soviet Union would acquire “too much” territory or power when they joined the conflict, but I do not recall seeing any contemporary accounts that expressed that opinion.)
The US entered WWII for very different reasons than the Gulf War. The attack on Pearl Harbor was such a shock to the US that “rolling back” Japan’s conquests, as the OP puts it, was never going to be enough. The goal was the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire. Keep in mind that the Allies also fought for unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany – there was simply no place for an armistice, as PastTense mentioned.
The first Gulf War was a very different event. Iraq never tried to conquer more than one country at a time and was defeated on both occasions. It recalled localized wars of earlier generations than the global conflict of WWII. An argument could be made that we “should” have continued rthe first war, but we did not have the support of the other nations in the region who would have seen a further continuation as an American imperial conquest.
It also would have driven a tyrant from power, so there’s that.
The Japanese atrocities didn’t have the shock value of the Nazi concentration camps, but they Pearl Harbored us at Pearl Harbor, and even the Nazis didn’t slaughter and torture POWs the way they did. It may have been racism, or just vengence, but it feels like there was a mood that they had to be punished somehow.
Militarily they remained a threat even if we laid siege to the island. They could send out boats and planes to attack our ships that would have had to guard them. And they extended the war even after Germany fell. Politicians knew they needed to end the war altogether, and that was a large part of the decision to use nuclear weapons in the end.
It would have meant changing the mission in midstream because we weren’t willing to pay the cost. FDR declared that unconditional surrender of our enemies was the objective, and switching from waging war on Japan to a policy that essentially amounts to containment would have been crazy and also more costly than just dropping the bombs or mounting an invasion.
When you have a chance to defeat an enemy permanently, you do it. The total defeat of Japan and Germany enabled those countries to finally come to grips with the parts of their culture that made them so dangerous to the world. When you leave a country embarrassed, humiliated, but still with a viable ability to resist, you get Hitler’s Germany.
Well, we could have. But we wouldn’t have done that. You have to put yourself into the frame of mind of the times to understand why the US wouldn’t have been willing to spend years basically blockading the Japanese islands to starve them out. Because make no mistake, that’s what it would have taken. Hell, even WITH the 2 A-bombs AND Russia finally weighing in and rolling the Japanese back on the main land and preparing for an invasion of their own in support of ours, the Japanese still weren’t exactly eager to surrender. And this was when we finally backed off of the unconditional surrender thing as well.
And, of course, the Soviet factors has to be looked at as well.
We weren’t looking for a qualified victory. We were looking at exactly the same level of victory we (the allies) had over the Germans. Sure, it was about revenge, but it was also about making sure that the Japanese and Germans weren’t going to come back for round 3. Which pretty much worked out exactly as planned…they didn’t.
Because that was the only way Japan was going to surrender and the war would be truly over without having to try and tie up the US and other allies in what would amount to a siege of the Japanese homeland for years to come. No one wanted that…everyone wanted the war to be over by that point. But no one wanted to settle for half measures, and it’s unrealistic to try and look back at those times through the filter of our own view point.
Also, you have to look at what the allies were looking at wrt events that had transpired up to that point. Very few Japanese surrendered. They fought to the death generally for each island we contested. Also, the allies had aerial photos of Japanese preparations to defend the home islands. We STILL were underestimating what all the Japanese had prepared for us. The fact that the Japanese were making such preparations pretty much says it all when it comes to this sort of revisionist history…THEY were preparing to fight to the last ditch, which sort of puts into perspective their supposed peace overtures.
Actually, the Japanese did surrender unconditionally. Afterwards, the emperor presented himself to McArthur, expected to be executed, and even offering to accept it willingly if it allowed Japan to escape some of the American wrath they were expecting. McArthur instead retained a figurehead emperor because it would make occupation and rebuilding easier, but that was never part of the surrender deal.
Prior to the dropping of atomic bombs, Japan offered to surrender on terms that amounted to a rollback to 1935: Japanese troops surrender all possessions and return home; Japan retains the Emperor and Imperial government; Japan handles its own disarmament, and its own prosecution of war crimes; nominal war reparations to be negotiated later. No blockade would have been necessary, because this was basically a get out of jail free position that was totally unacceptable, and just like Germany between WWI and II, everyone’s immediate thought was that it would give them a chance to rebuild and rearm and launch another war. The only acceptable outcome of WWII was the destruction of Japan as a warmaking entity. Japan itself could survive, if rebuilt as an ally, but the Imperial Japan that launched its side of WWII (after a massive, brutal invasion of China) was deemed too dangerous to be allowed to continue to exist.
The comparison to the Persian Gulf War is weak, not least because the Coalition forces were a coalition to liberate Kuwait, not to execute regime change in Iraq, which was explicitly not a goal. Besides being aware that rebuilding Iraq would be as difficult as it turned out to be, the Coalition would have shattered.
In WWII, unconditional surrender of all Axis powers wasn’t just a goal, it was an agreement that was foundational to the alliance: They were scared of one of them negotiating a separate peace with a belligerent, as (newly communist) Russia had done with Germany in WWI, leaving England, France and the U.S. to finish up against a large number of troops freed up from one frontier to reinforce the other. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed at Yalta (?) that no one would stop before destruction or unconditional surrender.
Here are some facts you might like to consider and ponder.
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Japan was already discussing surrender terms. Their one condition was to allow Emperor Hirohito to remain on the throne. US rejected this. (Ironically, MacArthur allowed him to remain on the throne anyway after the unconditional surrender).
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Japanese cities were being destroyed through carpet and fire bombings to such an extent that two atomic bombs didn’t really make a big difference, except that the bombs continued to kill long after the war due to radiation poisoning and cancer.
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The Soviet army invaded Manchuria on August 9th. Up until that point, the Soviets had not been a problem for the Japanese as they were occupied with fighting the Germans in the West. After the defeat of Germany, the Soviets brought their attention to the East and were looking to do some land grabbing. Indeed they succeeded in taking Sakhalin and other smaller islands off Hokkaido. Arguably, this is what really triggered Japan’s unconditional surrender to the US. They feared what would happen if the Soviets continued to advance.
I find it interesting that in the US, there is rarely any mention of the Soviet factor of the Pacific war leading up to Japan’s surrender on August 15th. In retrospect, the absolute horror of the death and destruction of the two bombs made historians claim that the bombs were necessary in order to save thousands of American lives, as it made the Japanese surrender, when in fact the Soviets were already island hopping and were ready to step foot on Hokkaido. Loosing Sakhalin was bad enough, the Japanese did not want to lose Hokkaido in the worst case, or become a divided nation in the best case and surrendering unconditionally to the US helped save the Japanese home islands from becoming divided or lost. Japan’s unconditional surrender was most likely due to the Soviet threat, the Atomic bombs may have played a smaller factor, but frankly it wasn’t the decider.
NiceGuyJack’s post really nails it but I’ll ad that this was a nation that went from feudalism to sinking the Russian fleet in forty years and on to Peal Harbor in less than seventy five.
And they weren’t WHITE. It wasn’t enough to contain them, they needed to be eradicated.
These are not viewpoints that I share, but that’s how I read how things were at the time.
You’re repeating a myth that is largely bullshit. Deaths after the war due to cancer make up something less than 2% of the deaths caused by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Even doubling the chance that someone will die of leukemia still represents an increased chance of death over fifty years of only quarter of a percent.
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Your “facts” are more like fantasies.
The ONLY reason that Japan surrendered even after two atomic bombs was because of unprecedented intervention by Hirohito–and he was almost assassinated for his trouble.
As far as radiation exposure is concerned, the bombings showed that radiation isn’t nearly as dangerous as most people today believe.
They weren’t. Option number 3 was to continue the blockade of Japan and the firebombing of its cities; Japan could not feed itself without large imports of food which it was being denied as a result of the sinking of most of its merchant fleet by that point in the war and the continued submarine blockade as well as the mining of Japanese harbors by B-29s which proved to be extremely effective and was carried out at the Navy’s insistence over the objections of the Army Air Corps which felt it was a wasteful diversion of the B-29s from firebombing Japanese cities. It in fact proved to be the most efficient means of both sinking Japanese shipping and denying the use of harbors. The name of the operation leaves little to the imagination as to what the point of it was; Operation Starvation. Starving Japan out would take an indeterminate amount of time and the effects of starvation alone, never mind the continued firebombing, would have been the deaths of civilians reaching at least one if not several million.
Something to bear in mind is the mindset of the ultranationalists running Japan during the war; they were quite prepared to commit national suicide before admitting defeat. The slogan since mid 1944 had been ichioku gyokusai, literally 100 million shattered jewels, figuratively the 100 million die together.
Something you should consider is that much of what you think are not facts; they are not in fact true.
This is unequivocally false. These were in fact terms that Ambassador [to the USSR] Sato advised Foreign Minister Togo were the best that Japan could hope to secure and were expressly rejected as acceptable by Japan’s leadership. The US was also fully aware of this from Magic decrypts; Japan’s diplomatic ciphers were so thoroughly compromised that they were being read by Washington at the same time that they were being read in Tokyo. See Richard B. Frank’s Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, page 239:
The Soviets were not ‘looking to do some land grabbing’, we had asked for the Soviets to join in the war against Japan, which Stalin agree at the Yalta conference to do within 90 days of the defeat of Germany. Germany surrendered May 8, 1945 and the Soviets declared war on Japan and invade Manchuria on August 8, 1945 (Moscow time), exactly 3 months after the defeat of Germany. The Soviets had been a problem the entire war in that the Kwantung Army was tied down in Manchuria, growing from a strength of 700,000 in 1941 to 1,320,000 by 1945, though as Japan’s fortunes turned more heavily against it many of the higher quality units were taken from the Kwantung Army to be sent to active fronts and were replaced with raw conscripts.
I rarely hear it not mentioned.
The reason is that unlike today, people back then didn’t just *say *they won the war and go home - they actually won the war.
Mind you, part of the reason that cancers deaths were low is because post-war both cities pretty much stripped the top layers of soil and dumped them elsewhere so that the background radiation from the bomb was reduced.