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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?
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Yeah, that worked great, didn’t it?
And Saddam didn’t have a largely intact overseas empire to fall back on.
I suppose we could have tried a long-term air and sea blockade to slowly starve millions of Japanese to death, which would’ve been more humane that using the A-bomb. :dubious:
Racism and the Soviet threat seem to be obvious factors, but this thread and elsewhere I’ve never seen that backed up by evidence. Not that I’ve looked that hard either, and those things may not appear in documents, but if someone has some evidence that these things played a part in the military/government decisions it would be useful to see it.
Damn, I screwed up the editing on my previous post. It should have been:
In August of 1945, there were 3,450,000 Japanese servicemen occupying a considerable amount of territories in many countries, including China, DEA, Singapore, Indochina and many Pacific islands. How does the OP propose freeing those? It was much easier to fight on Japanese homeland than beat them in each and every territory they occupied.
Some comments on various posts.
The problem was the ultra-nationalists who controlled the IJA and many other institutes. It was necessary to defeat them for good.
Who was that?
Racism fails to account for the similar conditions imposed on Germany.
Vengeance was not a particularly large factor. The Allies simply decided they could not allow the militants to remain in power in Japan, any more than they would have allowed Hitler to remain once the German army was back in its own country.
The US public would not have allowed the war to end in a position where we would have had to fight again, either.
Nope. It was not an unconditional surrender and allowing the Emperor to remain in a limited role was actually the key part of the deal which led to Japan accepting the deal.
One August 9, following the two bombs and the Soviet declaration of war, Japanese had a counteroffer
There was considerable debate within the Supreme Council on what exactly was meant by “the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers.” The hardcore militants chose a stronger Japanese word in the translation than the Foreign Ministry, and argued that the Emperor would have less power, hence they should continue fighting. The Foreign Ministry put on the best spin and eventually the Emperor decided to push for surrendering.
No, as noted above, this was their position on August 9th and the decision was made by the Allied governments. MacArthur wasn’t consulted.
Others have noted the lack of facts in your post, so I won’t bother saying that again.
So much misinformation, so little time to correct. (OK, I lied about not commenting about the made-up facts. It’s just so ironic that this is called "facts.)
The Soviet Union would have loved to have sat this out, but the US offered enough concussions to obtain the promise in intervention within three months of Germany’s defeat.
Japan and the USSR had a neutrality pact which was to have expired in April of 1946. The Soviets informed Japan that they would not renew the pact, but the pact was still in effect at the time the Soviets attacked Japan.
The Japanese were hoping that the Soviets would intervene on their behalf, and Stalin basically stalled them until the end.
The two bombs and the Soviet entrance to the war forced the hand of the Emperor. The militants had refused to look at surrender until the discussions with the Soviets had progressed and once that was known, the decision came down to the question of surrendering or fight to the bitter end.
The IJA was making plans to impose martial law, which would have placed them in a position to control the Emperor. He really had no other choice.
It’s still extremely dangerous in exactly the ways people think, but the thing is that most people don’t quite understand dosages and radioactive decay. High radiation tends to decay relatively quickly, and low radiation tends to cause things like cancers.
Handy chart comparing the intensities of various sorts of radiation exposures.
The events ending WWI lead to the events beginning WWII. The U.S. didn’t want to fight in another bloody European war and an unconditional surrender would insure that Germany would not be able to wage another war. The difference would be that the U.S. would help rebuild Germany with capitalism, not conquest, as it’s primary motivator. Germany has become a pretty good friend and trading partner to the world.
Most people in the U.S. had no idea where or what Japan was. It was a mysterious, far-away land. Until Pearl Harbor. Imperial Japan could not be left intact. Why risk the 2nd rise of an Imperial military. Unconditional surrender was the only way to eradicate the conquest mindset.
An invasion of Germany was necessary because Hitler and his Nazis would not surrender.
An invasion of Japan was necessary until Imperial Japan unconditionally surrendered.
I feel the claims that an invasion of Japan was racism is redickuless. Hatred? Yes. Racist? No. The Allies were supporting China’s defense. Japanese-Americans were fighting in Europe with other Allied troops. Imperial Japan was hated because Imperial Japan had invaded it’s neighbors, had attacked British warships, and had bombed Pearl.
This is well worth repeating. All the time we were bombing the Japanese homeland, they (the nation of Japan) still controlled vast amounts of territory. We could have methodically fought our way through all that territory until only the island of Japan was under their control. That would have taken millions of lives and destroyed thousands of cities and towns in countries other than Japan. Or we could bomb the piss out of the island until they were willing to give up those vast territories, which is what we did.
I did ask if there was evidence of racism, but ‘redickuless’? There wasn’t as much support for China as there was for England before we entered the war, and it seemed to be mostly strategic. We let a handful of Japanese Amercians to fight in Europe while putting a lot of them in internment camps at the same time. Maybe there’s no written evidence, but there was plenty of racism at the time.
Still, the general racist attitude of the time may not have had anything to do with our decisions at the end of the war. But it’s reasonable to ask about it.
Ask away. No one said you couldn’t ask questions. I provided my opinion of the situation.
Racism was well established in the 1930s. However, Imperial Japan didn’t invade Manchuria or China because of racism. Imperial Japan didn’t start a war with the West by sinking British and American warships because they were racist. The U.S., Australians, New Zealanders, and British didn’t attack Japanese because they were racist.
The world was at war and the Imperial Japanese chose to fight and would not surrender.
There was a very good reason not to invade Iraq after liberating Kuwait. Iraq serves as a buffer between the mostly-Shi’a Iran and the mostly-Sunni Saudi Arabia. With Saddam Hussein in power, Saudi Arabia had a Sunni state on its border. (Note that Sunnis are in the minority in Iraq, but Saddam filled government positions with Sunnis.) Removing Saddam from power in Iraq would have destabilised the region, resulting in an explosion of well-armed terrorist groups with a profound hatred of the West, which is why it would have been unwise to remove him from power.
Yes, as per prior agreement they stopped at the 38th parallel leaving southern Korea under the administration of Japan until American forces arrived at Inchon on September 8th:
To comment further on the subject of the subject of the Soviets looking ‘to do some land grabbing’ the southern half of Sakhalin and the Kurils had been agreed upon to be given (returned, actually, in the case of Sakhalin which Japan had taken the southern part of in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War; the Kurils gets a bit more complicated but it too was originally Russian territory for the most part) to the Soviets at Yalta. None of the other territory taken from Japanese forces by the Soviets was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Per wiki:
Japan officially renounced its rights to Sakhalin and the Kurils (along with Korea, Taiwan, and other parts of the Empire) in the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco. Only 4 of the 56 islands of the Kurils are disputed, and in part the Japanese claim is that the islands in question aren’t part of the Kuril Islands.
yes, they simply would not have given up these territories, including Korea and Taiwan, the former they claimed as part of Japan.
The whole point of the US strategy of island hopping was to avoid all of those bloody fights with the enemy dug in and willing to fight to the death.
While the original plans for the invasion of the homeland included both attacks on Kyushu and then onto the Kanto plain, some were pushing to change or forgo the invasion of Kyushu because of the recognition of the large number of tokko (kamikaze) planes and the size of the army there. Mac wanted to attack, for his personal glory, I’m sure, but Admiral King and others wanted to rethink the plans.
Also, as a nitpicky point, US planners thought a full scale invasion would cost millions of lives. They actually ordered (from memory) over 500k purple hearts for US troops alone in the expectation that we would sustain at least that many causalities in a forced entry invasion. The Japanese causalities were expected be be several times that, at least (and doesn’t count British, Russian, Canadian, etc causalities, which would be equally heavy).
The atomic bombs, nasty as they were, were an order of magnitude less costly all around to what would have happened had we tried an invasion. And, as noted by several posters up thread, it was a hell of a lot less costly to the Japanese in terms of lives than attempts to starve them out while also continuing conventional bombing, which we certainly would have been doing.
Just adding that a major reason the Soviets were “not…a problem for the Japanese” was that the Japanese scrupulously avoided antagonizing them after having encountered the pre-Barbarossa Soviet military machine at Khalkhin-Gol. I stressed pre-Barbarossa because by 1945 the Soviet army was vastly better-equipped, better trained, and immeasurably better-led than it had been when it had crushed the best part of the Japanese army in 1939.
And is there any evidence of differences between how Germany and Japan were treated in the Allied approaches to the end of the respective, which could possible be due to racism?
Not that I know of. The situations were different, but all I’ve seen about this indicates ending the war was the overriding concern. Racism as a factor in using Abombs is often speculated, but there is no real evidence of racism in those decisions that I know of either.