Even beyond that I think people are underestimating racism against the Japanese, remember it was not controversial to throw american citizens whose parents or grandparents had come from Japan into concentration camps but did that happen to citizens of german descent?
This link makes it sound like the final decision was a foregone conclusion:
Cracked is pretty good when it comes to these kinds of things.
Funny as well.
I liked this: http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/4/7/7/50477.jpg?v=1
I wonder why people focus on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The incendiary bombing on Tokyo 10 March 1945 killed at least 100,000, injured many more, and left another million homeless – far more damage than Hiroshima. The destruction of Japan’s cities – yet still with no Japanese interest in surrender – was so severe that special attention was given to ensure targets remained for the A-bombs.
Are those who say invasion casualty estimates were inflated aware that 22,000 Japanese died just defending the tiny island of Iwo Jima? That 31,000 Japanese died defending the the tiny island of Guadalcanal?
Bloodshed would have continued even in OP’s blockade scenario. Please note that Japan still occupied Indochina, Korea and the most productive parts of China at the time of their surrender.
200,000+ actually, but firestorms (be it Hamburg or Tokyo) are a meteorological event too, it requires favorable weather. Perhaps its the thought of concerted plan, one plane delivering one bomb to a specific target that jars people.
Which means fuck all in a secure blockade.
Except I didn’t blame the entire Japanese propulation. As the quote you cited indicates, I stated it was Japan – which is the nation. I don’t dispute the possibility of your point. I, like you, have no way of auditing which members of the population had which beliefs at that time.
Well, they needed to import food before the war; with their transportation infrastructure shot to hell, I imagine there would indeed have been mass starvation.
Good summary!
So they expected the US to fight an unlimited war for a limited objective?
If you think the Nagasaki bomb started the Cold War, you are in for a surprise. Several tens of millions of Eastern Europeans want a word with you.
I saw a documentary in which they asked some US Marine what he’d thought about the atomic bomb. With great earnestness, he said, (and I am roughly paraphrasing from memory):
“It meant we were going to live. It meant we were going to go home, get jobs, marry our girls, and not die in the rubble of some foreign city.”
My grandfather’s too. He was actually in California in an Army amphibious tractor battalion gearing up for the invasion of Japan. He’d have literally been one of the first on the beach.
Like others have said, the experiences earlier in the war at Iwo Jima, Okinawa and places like Peleliu, as well as the Japanese resolve against the incendiary raids convinced the US leadership that any conventional invasion would be extraordinarily costly, in a way that would make Normandy or the earlier Pacific island invasions look like tea parties.
In addition, the Japanese treatment of POWs, civilians and wounded allied troops had pretty much hardened American hearts against any sort of mercy; they’d gone outside of what we considered acceptable in warfare, and the “gloves were off” so to speak.
Combine that with the existence of an astoundingly powerful new weapon that promised to take out an entire city in one big bang, and it’s pretty easy to see why the decision was made to use them in combat after the Trinity test.
Not only that, but it was expected (and confirmed later on the Japanese side) that all American POWs would be executed at the start of the invasion. Which also tends to imply that captured Americans during the invasion would be killed.
In other words, no mercy, no prisoners, no civilians on either side during said invasion, just a bloody slog to conquer the islands piece by piece, slaughtering millions in the process.
And you gotta wonder how the Japanese troops in those still occupied territories would react. They’d probably start their own mass slaughters of civilians.
You have to understand it wasn’t just a tiny cabal of crazy militants. The war had broad popular support in Japan. And a crazy militant philosophy had taken deep root in the national psyche.
In the '20s there had been a wave of political assassinations. Generally hard right wing militants killing liberal or moderate government officials. This included Prim Ministers and other cabinet officials. For one group of conspirators they decided to have a huge show trial. Unfortunately this allowed the defendants a chance to broadcast their philosophy and beliefs. In response thousands of Japanese men sent the judge one of their pinkies in a pickle jar, to show their support of the defendants.
While planning the Pearl Harbor attack Admiral Yamamoto had to be kept in relative isolation. The Navy was afraid he would be killed for speaking against opening up new wars against the west. It was a common joke in Naval circles that one should always decline the Admiral’s offer of a ride, because his car was so likely to be attacked or bombed.
Even after the announcement surrender there was an attempted coup to try and prevent it from being enacted. Tens of thousands of soldiers joined the coup. It was a true popular uprising against the weak generals who allowed a surrender to take place.
The crazy militarism wasn’t coming from the top. It suffused the entire country, military and civilian alike. There were always dissenters, but unlike Germany or Italy this wasn’t an imposed dictatorship. This was an active democracy, if not as democratic as the UK or US. OK that may be an exaggeration. The '42 elections required you to either be a member of the unity party (Taisei Yokusankai) or of the not-unity party. But the Non-Taisei Yokusankai still won about a quarter of the seats. And there were four changes of government between Peal Harbor and the surrender. There wasn’t a single dictator, no Hitler or Mussolini. There wasn’t even a small cabal. It was a broad movement.
I understand the argument; I just don’t see what difference it makes.
They were negotiating the end to a war they started. The notion that Japan would be able to keep any of the territory they conquered is a non-starter.
When a country is in the position Japan was in, and the other side offers terms of surrender, the possible responses are [list=A][li]Yes []No[]Here is a counter-proposal.[/list]Both “no comment” and “we are treating your proposal with contempt” are functionally equivalent to B. Because both mean that Japan is going to continue to wage war, and that’s the part that had to stop. [/li]
I think the Japanese were stalling in hopes of wearing down the Allies in order to get a better deal than was on the table. They were hoping their warrior spirit of “fight to the last man/woman/child” and kamikaze and Okinawa-blow-yourself-up-rather-than-surrender would allow them to keep some remnants of their empire. Unfortunately for them, the Americans had a bomb that would allow the step-by-step destruction of every significant city in Japan, and *the Japanese would not be able to kill even one American in return. * It was sort of the flip side of kamikaze - not “blow yourself and a lot of the enemy with you”, but “get blown up without the enemy getting his hair mussed”.
Regards,
Shodan
I think the point is that even if you blockade the Islands, they still had significant control of significant territory that would require invasion. At hard cost. The surrender shortcut most of that.
I know I’m hitting on several points other posters have already made, but
Dropping the second bomb on Nagasaki had absolutely nothing to do with the Soviet entry into the war. Stalin had agreed at the Yalta Conference to enter the war against Japan within 90 days of the defeat of Germany. Germany was defeated on May 8, 1945; Soviet entry into the Pacific war was expected by the US on Aug 8. Stalin was fulfilling a pledge he had made to the US and UK by entering the war on Aug 8, Nagasaki was in no way a means of kindly telling the Soviets to fuck off and the bomb would have been dropped with 100% certainty regardless of Soviet actions or inactions.
There is a world of difference between ‘almost over’ and ‘over.’ Japan’s situation had been irrecoverably hopeless for at least a year with the defeat of the fleet at the battle of the Philippines Sea and the capture of Saipan and Tinian putting all of Japan in range of strategic bombing by B-29s. That didn’t prevent the next year of war, and didn’t make the Japanese leadership willing to even consider surrender.
Again, Nagasaki had nothing to do with the Soviet entry into the war, which was something we had asked the Soviets to do.
I’m sorry but this is completely untrue. They were prepared for more than every able bodied male to die in the war; the propaganda slogan as the war drew to a close was:
Additionally, the claim that Japan was ready to concede defeat or trying to surrender is completely untrue. From Richard B. Franks Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire
Quote:
This is also not true, but often repeated. For starters ‘no comment’ isn’t an acceptable reply to an ultimatum, which is what Potsdam was. For another the meaning of Mokusatsu isn’t ‘no comment’, it can be translated as ‘to ignore’ or ‘to treat with silent contempt,’ a far cry from ‘no comment’. The word Mokusatsu comes from 黙 (moku, literally “silence”) and 殺 (satsu, literally “killing”); the word literally means to kill with silence, i.e. the ultimatum at the Potsdam Declaration was not worth responding to. Not ‘our response is no comment at this time’.
Regarding the
slogan:
It’s difficult at this remove for Americans, especially younger Americans raised since the Sixties (which altered our willingness to take government claims at face value), to realize how effective wartime propaganda was in Japan.
All nations of the time period used some degree of propaganda, information control, and/or exhortation, but the Japanese traditions of obedience and sacrifice – coupled with the fact that the rapid modernization of the country had given the ruling classes a reservoir of extra credibility – made the Japanese people fairly susceptible to believing their own propaganda, and (significantly, IMHO) their notions of monolithic social cohesion made it difficult for individuals who did have doubts to express them – so everyone who had doubts was alone in those doubts, unable to tell if others secretly felt the same way.
This propaganda had some negative consequences for the Japanese war machine. They repeatedly announced and celebrated the (fictional) sinkings of American aircraft carriers and entire fleets, and some of the island garrisons were shocked to find huge, still-floating American fleets on their doorsteps.
When the US invaded Saipan, the civilian population had been intensively indoctrinated in the propaganda that US soldiers and marines would rape, torture, and kill them upon capture. Many, many of these civilians sought death (by grenade or, more famously, by hurling themselves off cliffs) rather than capture; this horrified the Americans and made a big impression on them. The Americans brought in interpreters to try and counter the propaganda, and tried to be seen feeding and caring for civilians, in the hopes that more people would come into custody peacefully. Some did.
I saw actual footage of some of these encounters; most horrifying of all was a father who had killed his own children to protect them from the Americans – and then watched the Americans take other families into custody, feeding and clothing them and treating them kindly…you could see, dawning on his face, the unbearable, searing realization of what this meant.
When the American government expected the Japanese to resist bitterly to the last few survivors, soldiers and citizens alike, it was based on real experiences like this, not on racist caricatures or propaganda.
Ultimately, the atomic bombs saved Japanese “face” – who could be blamed for surrendering when war is no longer war? – and millions of Japanese lives.
And I say that despite profound personal misgivings over the use of the bombs.
An excellent post. It’s hard for people today to get their heads around the concept of total war, but the fact of the matter is that all the major combatants were engaged in massive attacks against targets that contained millions of civilians. Dresden was firebombed, as was Tokyo. The technology of the time required carpet-bombing of industrial targets, which were invariably located in large cities.
Today we see nuclear bombs as something specially horrible. And they are - not because of the destruction they can cause, but because they can cause it so easily. What once took a sustained campaign involving massive logistics and hundreds of heavy bombers could be done by one aircraft (and eventually, one missile).
But the powers of the time were capable of nuclear-level destruction, and they used it. Waves of bombers dropping incendiary loads on wooden cities will do as much destruction as a nuclear bomb, and we were doing that routinely. So from the perspective of a 1945 strategic planner, the use of a nuclear bomb was an easy call if it could possibly end the war.
As for why the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki - there were three reasons. First, the Japanese didn’t surrender after Hiroshima. Second, the U.S. only had 3 nuclear weapons. And third, Nagasaki was an important industrial target. I’ll elaborate on these issues:
The hope was that Japan would see that the nuclear bomb changed the game. So long as it took waves of bombers to do the same amount of destruction as a nuclear bomb, the Japanese military could convince itself that if it could just push back the U.S. fleet or disrupt the supply chain to the bomber bases, the bombings could be stopped and Japan could regroup and possibly sue for a peace on better terms. Hence desperate measures like the Kamikaze attacks. But if just one plane and one bomb could do that damage, then there was no hope of stopping the destruction of their country. It was this fact that the U.S. was hoping to drill into the heads of the Japanese Emperor and military leaders with the bombing of Hiroshima.
On the second point - how do you use a weapon like this if you only have three of them? Had the U.S. stopped after Hiroshima, the Japanese might have reasonably wondered if the Americans only had that one weapon. Perhaps they had engaged in an all-out push to make a bomb, could only make the one, and had shot their wad. If the Americans had delayed the bombing of Nagasaki for a month while negotiating, the Japanese might have convinced themselves that the Americans could only build the bombs very slowly, and therefore they might still have time to turn the war around. So instead, you drop the second bomb a few days later, and promise that the third is on the way if you don’t get an immediate surrender. This gives the impression that you have a large supply of these weapons. And it needs to be pointed out that this strategy worked.
Third, it was entirely possible that Japan wouldn’t surrender at all. In that case, the U.S. would be out of nuclear bombs and have to continue carrying out the war. In that case, make sure that the bombs you use do great damage to the enemy’s war-making capability.
It may also be true that the advance of the Soviets forced Truman’s hand a bit. No one was fooled by Stalin’s status as an ally. They knew he was going to be trouble after the war, and even though his entry into the Japanese/American war had been requested, it was still pretty clear that the territory he was claiming as the Soviets advanced would be hard to reclaim.
As for blockading the country or waiting for a longer period of time before a second bombing, you also have to remember that the war was still continuing in other theaters in Asia and on the open seas. Thousands of people were still dying every day. Merchant ships and military vessels were still being torpedoed. American prisoners of war were being brutalized and murdered.
Truman took the most humane action possible, with the best chance to stop a war that had already resulted in 40 million deaths. And regardless of the handwringing that is written into his memoirs, in the end I think it was a pretty easy call at the time.
What Dissonance posted is worth reading twice. And FWIW, at the end of the war, Japanese women and children were being trained to defend their nation with sharpened sticks, and millions of pounds of acorns (yummy) were being collected to use as food for the general population. These are not the actions of a nation preparing to surrender.
Dropping the bombs was the worst possible choice, except when compared to all available alternatives.
The notion that the U.S. dropped the bomb on Hiroshima to ‘test’ it is flatly ridiculous. First, the U.S. had already tested a nuclear bomb in New Mexico. They knew what its destructive capability was. And a ‘test’ over an enemy population is useless because you’re not going to be able to instrument and measure it anyway. What exactly were the Americans expecting to learn from this ‘test’? They already knew the energy output of the bomb, its blast radius, its effect on buildings, vehicles, and hardened targets. There was nothing to be learned by dropping a bomb on a city, other than that you could kill a lot of people. And we already knew that. I suppose you could claim that they were ‘testing’ the long-term effects of nuclear radiation, but we already had people who had been exposed accidentally to large doses of radiation, so we knew a lot about that as well.
It’s not really accurate to portray it as “invade or use nukes”. Operation Downfall would’ve used multiple nukes on Japanese positions anyway. The choice was use them in lieu of an invasion, or use them during an invasion.
There weren’t really moral qualms about radiation, as it wasn’t understood. Col. Seeman “advised that American troops not enter an area hit by a bomb for “at least 48 hours””. Imagine Hiroshima x10, this time with our own soldiers also dying of radiation sickness. :eek:
Another factor is that the American estimates on military casualties actually underestimated the amount of Japanese resistance. In the early months of 1945, American military intelligence began seeing a drop in Japanese military supplies on the battlefield. They interpreted this as evidence that Japan’s industrial base was reaching its limits and Japan was running out of military supplies. In reality, what was happening was Japan building up its reserves in Japan in anticipation of the invasion. And Japan guessed the American invasion plans correctly - they were building up the most in the areas where the Americans planned to invade.
When Americans occupied Japan after its surrender and saw the defenses it would have faced, the overwhelming consensus was that Japan had been stronger than any Americans had realized when they made their casualty estimates. In retrospect, they felt their million casualty estimate was too low.
Yes, many Germans were interned, as were many Italians. It was only Japanese on the West Coast who were relocated, and most of them were not sent to internment camps. They were simply resettled in other parts of the country. The only serious moral failing here is that conditions in the internment camps should have been much better than they were. Compared to the atrocities our enemies committed against civilians, this barely even makes the scale.
