why did we drop the Atomic Bombs on Japan

Great Debates
21

We were at war and our objective was to destroy the warmaking potential of the enemy.

Hiroshima was the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Shunroku Hata’s 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. It was also a communications center, a storage point, an assembly area for troops, and was a military-industrial center powered by the mass-scale forced labour of Koreans known as hibakusha. The Hiroshima island of Edajima hosted the Navy Elite Academy. Kure, around 20 km from Hiroshima, was also known for a military port and navy factories. The famous giant warship, Yamato, was constructed in Kure. The material and labour for Kure came from Hiroshima.

Nagasaki was one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and had wide-ranging industrial importance. Ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials were manufactured there. The Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works was located there. Mitsubishi produced over 10,000 Zero fighters and the battleship Musashi.

Both were legitimate strategic targets.

22

Yeah, but the war WASN’T over. The Japanese hadn’t surrendered after the firebombing of Tokyo. They rejected the Potsdam Declaration. They didn’t surrender after Hiroshima, they didn’t surrender after the Soviet Union invaded, and the government was still divided over surrendering after Nagaski. When the Emperor ordered surrender, a group of officers attempted a coup d’etat.

Two days after the surrender, a group of Japanese fighters attacked a bomber on a reconnaissance mission.

Japan’s coastline is longer than that of the U.S. or Australia. You would have needed more ships than the entire U.S. Navy to enforce a blockade.

23

Which answers a question that wasn’t asked. Nobody has ever questioned the strategic value of the targets.

24

There were active arguments about precisely this.

The Army Air Corp was adamant they could bomb the cities into the stone age and force a surrender. The use of the atomic bombs were simply one more weapon in their arsenal. Of course this proved to be at least part of the solution. It is hard to imagine that non-atomic bombing was going to end the war. As it was at least 500 thousand Japanese were killed and 5 million rendered homeless by conventional air raids. There was no sign either evident to the allies at the time, nor any discussion ever recorded that the Japanese were considering surrender prior to Hiroshima.

Portions of the Navy and the Army Air Corp argued a tight blockade could, as you say, starve the Japanese into surrender. By early '45 Japanese ports were functionally closed. Aerial mining (sea mines dropped by planes) and naval blockade combined to bring transportation to a virtual standstill. And yet the Japanese didn’t surrender. They had been stockpiling food and military resources to allow an active campaign to defend Japan. In order to make sure that the soldiers had enough food, all the civilians were on a starvation diet. The leadership had decided to sacrifice the population to defend the country if necessary. And given what the allies had seen on Guadalcanal and Okinawa (among other places) they fully believed that the country was going to commit collective suicide to defend the Home Islands. To wait for the blockade to work would probably run into '47, if not even later. And it would probably cost millions of civilian casualties, a point the allied commanders were uncomfortable with.

And don’t forget, there was a lot of war fatigue. The US had been at war since late '41. The UK for a couple years more. The US had spent $288 billion on the war. The national debt was at $251 billion or 112% of GDP ($5 trillion when adjusted for inflation). In 1944 the minimum income tax (and this was back when there were few to no deductions) was 20%. The marginal rate was 94%. There was no more money to borrow, and tax rates have never been higher. The US had to end the war quickly. They didn’t have the money to run the war any longer. And the British were even worse off… and the Soviets were a shambles, a disastrous zombie of a country that was only moving out of habit.

The only assured way to end the war “quickly” was to defeat the enemy on his home turf. The only way to do that was to invade the Home Islands. A rational Japanese government would have surrendered months before it did historically. And once you know you are dealing with an irrational body, you have to plan for them to stay irrational. So the Army and Navy approved every other plan that might cause the Japanese to surrender while preparing for the only plan that would guarantee the surrender. So they bombed and blockaded. Fortunately these did work before an invasion was launched. But it is hard to see how long term the allies had any option other than to invade or give up and go home. They were out of juice. And continuing indefinitely simply wasn’t economically achievable.

25

Correct. I’m not making judgements. I’m just saying that at the time, Japanese defeat was a foregone conclusion. How that defeat would play out became a horrific act of war that will be remembered forever.

The US could have tried harder at diplomatic resolution, but at that point in history, I don’t blame Truman for the orders he made. Hirohito could have much more easily brokered a surrender that didn’t result in the annihilation of two great Japanese cities. I do believe that other factors were in play, beyond the defeat of Japan, when Truman gave orders to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I’m not saying that Truman was a monster. I’m just saying that I think his orders were based more on the future of world politics than the logistics of ending WWII.

26

This Cracked article claims that there was actually a mistranslation in the Japanese response to Potsdam and that played a part in the allied response, what should have been “no comment” became “we’re ignoring it in contempt”.

Oops.

Yes it’s cracked but here’s the source that the article is based on:
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/mokusatsu.pdf

27

There really isn’t. The Japanese weren’t trying to surrender. They were trying to negotiate a “cessation of hostilities.” They wanted to not only preserve the emperor and the current government, but also the borders as they existed. Namely they wanted to negotiate to keep Japan, South Sakhalin, Korea and hopefully Manchuria. They were willing to give up the parts of China they conquered in the '30s and later, the Caroline Islands and the other Mandate territories. They knew how to surrender and once they actually decided to do it, it was pretty easy to do, no correspondence via the Swiss necessary.

Here was Admiral Toyoda response to the Potsdam Declaration, “the government regards the declaration as absurd and will not consider it.”

This was the response printed in the Asahi Shimbun, “It is a thing of no great moment, it will merely serve to re-enhance the government’s resolve to carry the war forward unfaltering to a successful conclusion!” The government had released statements via the paper before, and they weren’t allowed to editorialize without government approval. So this was viewed by the Allies as an official statement. There is disagreement on whether it was. But Togo for one thought it was.

The final official declaration released by the government and read to reporters by Prime Minister Suzuki is as follows, “The Potsdam Proclamation, in my opinion, is just a rehash of the Cairo Declaration , and the government therefore does not consider it of great importance. We must mokusatsu it.” Evidently it was supposed to be translated as “no comment,” but a strict English translation of mokusatsu is “treat with silent contempt.”

So basically the allies released a modified demand for surrender that implicitly would allow the emperor to stay. And the only (official or unofficial)… only response from the Japanese was that it would be treated with silent contempt. The decision to drop was based partially on that response.

28

[QUOTE=Lazlo Hapsburg]
I have never understood why it is estimated that so many American lives would be lost.
[/QUOTE]

Because most people at the time and even today, leaving aside revisionist history, understood that the invasion was going to happen. We weren’t going to blockade the Japanese home islands and extend out the war for months or, more likely years more. The Russians were already moving into position to take part in the invasion, and so was the US and other allies. Had we chosen not to use the atomic bombs we’d have been sending our troops into a meat grinder (it’s pretty obvious, after looking at what the Japanese were planning to do in their defense, that they had figured out what WE were going to do, and had prepared some really nasty defenses). I’ve seen estimates that range from half a million to nearly 2 million ALLIED causalities. Gods know what the Japanese would have suffered, but I’d guess that those figures would be ‘dead’ instead of ‘casualties’, and many times that more in wounded.

Leaving aside the technical challenges, as well as the financial ones, the trouble with this is that we weren’t planning to do any such thing. You need to really get that in your mind…the invasion was going to happen.

Grow food, I suppose. They did have farms, after all. They would have been on short rations, no doubt, and a hell of a lot of people, especially older and younger folks would have died. But, it’s harder to starve out an entire nation than you think. The big issue would have been the lack of materials to drive their technology, but again they would have been on strict rationing…and, more folks would simply have died.

And, on the allied side of the house, we and presumably the allies would have had to foot the bill for all the manpower needed to enforce, for months or years, the blockade…plus fight all the battles in the former Japanese possessions where Japanese troops would have fought on, without the Emperor to tell them to lay down their weapons and surrender. I don’t think the American people (or the UK, Aussie, Canadian or even the Russian people) would have been too keen to have to keep paying for this indefinitely.

.

It’s harder to starve than you seem to think it is, and the Japanese had more resources to feed themselves than, say, the North Koreans do.

Well, discounting the fact that a hell of a lot more Japanese would have died (do you not count them as ‘lives’?), so what? What’s wrong with a desire to save money? All of the allies, even the US who came late to the war, had populations that were tired of the war and wanted to go back to a peace time footing…and get on with recovery and their lives.

Why would the Japanese have surrendered? Do you think ALL of them would have starved to death? :dubious:

No, we wouldn’t have, because the Japanese wouldn’t have surrendered in the face of a blockade…in the end, we’d have still had to invade. And, it’s moot anyway, since we (the US and our allies) were GOING to invade, had the army and logistics in place to invade. It was going to happen, so your speculation is more along the lines of some sort of alternative history. Which gets back to the answer to your original question…‘I have never understood why it is estimated that so many American lives would be lost’. What you don’t seem to understand is that your alternative fantasy history isn’t the real history.

Again, you seem to have trouble distinguishing your fantasy alternative historical timeline from reality. We had ALREADY spent the money on making those bombs (which were intended for Germany, primarily, btw), so unless they had a time machine that money was a sunk cost. We weren’t planning to blockade the Japanese home islands in some effort to starve them into submission, we were planning to invade. Plausibly, had the Japanese really bloodied us and thrown us back completely from the initial invasion, we might have rethought that and gone for a blockade for a while while we rebuilt our invasion (btw, I doubt this would have happened), but it would have only been long enough for us to put together a larger force…and we’d have lost 10’s of thousands or even 100’s of thousands of troops in the failed invasion.

29

I will not claim that Truman never gave a thought to showing the Soviets that we had the bomb, but a lot of the claims made regarding the U.S.S.R. are misplaced. We could hardly tell the Soviets to “fuck off” for joining the war when they were acting in exactly the way that we had asked them to act at Yalta, in February. With the European war winding down, Roosevelt had pressed Stalin to open a second front against Japan. Stalin replied that he would be willing to do so, but that he could not move his armies in fewer than three months. The Germans surrendered on April 8 and the Soviets declared war on Japan on August 8.

This is not a claim that the Soviets were not eager to avail themselves of any booty they could secure from Japan, but they were not simply trying to get in on the end of the war solely for their own gain; they were honoring a commitment that we had pressed them to make.

And, while we might have dropped a second bomb as a demonstration to the Soviets, it was hardly prompted by the Soviet declaration of war.

30

And I see that coremelt already brought up the mokusatsu translation issue. But I think it is wrong to consider it a mistranslation. Especially in light of the other official and semi-official statements on the matter. When you have officials calling it “absurd” the more contemptuous meaning is very reasonable.

31

You have to look for the one ‘if not for …’ factor here. And that was bringing the war to a rapid close. If Japan surrendered before Hiroshima, we would not have dropped either bomb. If Japan surrendered before Nagasaki we would not have dropped a second bomb.

32

XT,

Good post. Well argued.

Thank you for the info.

33

Hiroshima was decimated by a nuclear bomb early on the morning of August 6. The Japanese leadership woke up the following day, presumably reflected further on the matter and decided they didn’t even need to meet to discuss the event. Osaka radio reported that train services in the Hiroshima area had been canceled. And the Japanese Imperial Army fought on.

Then next day, August 8, Japan’s “big six” military leaders did get around to meeting and after carefully considering the situation they made the decision to . . . um . . . er . . . keep fighting.

Then, on August 9, the Russians declared war on Japan.

And the Americans dropped another atomic bomb, this time unleashing history’s greatest destructive force on Nagasaki.

So what did the Japanese leaders do?

They had a meeting. In the middle of the meeting they received confirmation that Nagasaki’s destruction was due to a second atomic bomb. They discussed accepting the American’s call for surrender. The discussed suing for peace in hopes of more favorable terms. They discussed heading for a remote location where they might regroup and fight again another day. And then they voted on a surrender and it was deadlocked, 3-3.

So they kept fighting. And they destroyed evidence of war crimes. And they reviewed plans to eliminate the thousands of POWs they hadn’t already murdered.

And on August 12, the emperor was worried there would be no empire for him to lord over. Japanese Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa said to the emperor that the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war were divine gifts, which would give him an excuse to end the war. So the emperor called the big six together and asked them to consider surrender once again, and on August 13 they voted and . . . were deadlocked.

Again.

So the emperor did the only thing a living god on earth could do. He begged. He implored the military leaders to agree to surrender.

And even with a groveling god before them, their allies in ruins, the Soviets also committed to fighting them and the Americans dropping a hellish new weapon on them every few days, they didn’t all agree. But thankfully, enough agreed to allow a surrender. Which guaranteed one thing: an attempted military coup to stop the surrender. Fearing the surrender would never be enacted, the emperor made two recordings of his surrender announcement, figuring it would double his chances of the thing actually making the airwaves. The coup fell short and one of the recordings made it to the airwaves at noon on August 15.

But there are surrenders and there are “surrenders.” Even after the broadcast, the Japanese did not discontinue fighting the newly minted enemy, the Russians, or their long-time nemesis, the Chinese. And they continued to hold the allied POWs at the point of a rifle, denying them necessary food and medicine as they died needlessly.

The emperor sent his military another message on August 17 (interestingly, he didn’t even mention the atomic bombs, but rather cited Russian’s entry into the war). Even then, POWs still being forcibly held by the Japanese guards feared they would die awaiting liberation in the weeks to come.

And indeed, freedom came too late for some, with the rest back in allied control by early September.

Some Japanese soldiers, their commitment to persevere so great and their disbelief so firm that the emperor would ever end the war, still refused to give up. For decades, such soldiers were still found hiding in the jungles across the Pacific. Amazingly, the last known Japanese solider was coaxed out of the Philippines in the 1980s. Apparently, there’s no Japanese equivalent to “ollie ollie outs in free.”

In 2009, a few dozen of the last living American POWs of the Japanese stood in the ballroom of a San Antonio hotel. There, they and their families listened to the Japanese ambassador to the U.S. acknowledge and offered condolences for the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army against the American POWs during WWII – atrocities that began at Bataan in the Philippines and which continued through the following 3-1/2 years. This was the first such official acknowledgment of these events from the Japanese government. Ever.

These heroic men and women – and their children and grand children – lived to witness that day only because the war was ended when it was. Setting aside the sobering thought that the entire war was unnecessary but for Japan’s imperialistic ambitions and sustained aggression against its neighbors, many more lives could have been saved, including countless Japanese citizens and others, had the Japanese military and emperor made a choice to surrender earlier in the war.

August 5 would not have been too soon.

34

Frisco,

You obviously put a lot of time and effort into your post and I don’t want to argue against what you have said except for one thing.

When you say, “the entire war was unnecessary but for Japan’s imperialistic ambitions and sustained aggression against its neighbors”, I would replace the phrase, “Japan’s imperialistic ambitions” with “the ambitions of a few high-placed military officers”.

I cannot know for certain exactly who was the driving force behind Japan’s war.

I believe it was a few of the military officers in some war cabinet.

But, it seems to me that like most wars around that time, it was a very small number of militant war-mongers who were really caused and sustained the war and although it seems like it should be reasonable to blame the entire country, you really have to wonder how some individual citizens could have possibly stood up the the Japanese war-mongering element of the government and the same goes for individual German citizens. How could some individual German baker or candlestick maker done anything to prevent the war besides get themselves locked up in some terrible camp and be made to suffer and/or die?

How?

And can you really fault the entire population of the country for the acts of a tiny handful of crazy militants?

I just don’t get it. I mean, I just don’t understand how that could happen.

35

How can we find fault with the entire population of a country when no individual citizen had any hope in Hades of ever stopping the tide of war - even standing up to the proponents of the war?

36

The same way all americans were responsible for the Iraq invasion I suppose, and responsible for the torture at Guantanamo Bay.

37

Wow - I read all 36 posts and I’m surprised to see Pearl Harbor not mentioned.

I’m not saying that Dec 7, 1941 was the primary reason nor do I think the American mentality has ever had a revenge taking component.
However, being one of the older SDMB members (I’m 61 :eek:), I can remember people of my parents’ generation discussing WW2, Pearl Harbor, etc. The amount of anti-Japanese sentiment expressed in those conversations was incredible.
My point being, anti-Japanese sentiments were extremely prevalent and must have had some effect in making the dropping of 2 A-bombs on Japan seem more favorable.

38

In 1996 dollars, the US spent 20 Billion dollars on the Manhattan project. There was no way that the bombs weren’t going to get used.

39

The highest priority to the people making the decision.

40

To be fair to moonshot925, the refrain ‘civilian target atrocity!’ comes up a lot in these discussions, though they were intentionally neglected targets beforehand so the full damage of nuclear weapons would be accessed which leads one to believe they weren’t a strategic priority or at least measuring nuclear damage on virgin cities was higher.