Doesn’t mean there weren’t any. The ones there were made an impact, ok?
[hijack]
I was working in an office when we hired a new coworker. His last name was Halsey. I asked him if he was related to the famous admiral. He said he was his great-uncle, once removed. I said if it wasn’t for people like his uncle we’d all be working for the Japanese.
We were at the Mitsubishi Electronics of America headquarters.
He didn’t get the joke.
[/hijack]
Now there’s some nuclear strength funny. I had to step away and get something to drink to compose myself.
The amount of short term radiation casualties (those who died within a month of the bombings) was between 15-20% of the total casualties - not a majority but hardly a trivial percentage. If you consider the long term casualties (those who died within five years of the bombings) then radiation exposure was the cause of the majority of deaths.
Presumably the effects of fallout on a population are very hard to quantify when you take into account birth defects and cancer.
Regarding the internment of Japanese people (or people with Japanese parents etc.) in the US, surely those people did not, in general, integrate as well as Germans and Italians. European cultures are a lot more similar to American ones, and the US was built by a lot more German and Italian immigrants than Japanese. It’s somewhat understandable that this would cause far more Japanese people to end up in prison camps. I’m not saying it was the right thing to do, but I don’t think simply comparing numbers, and drawing conclusions from that, is giving the whole picture.
So, as long as we set up a situation in which we prevent people from assimilating, then it is OK to punish them, later, for not being assimilated?
That certainly explains why it was OK to perpetuate Jim Crow laws for as long as we did.
Note that the post to which I responded did not merely offer an explanation for the internment camps, it made two separate claims: that most of the Japanese Americans were simply resettled, not interned, (a statement that is incorrect); and that the only moral issue was that the internment camps were not nice enough, (a statement I would also characterize as wrong on two levels–they were far worse than not sufficiently nice and the U.S. had no right to take the action that it did).
The lack of assimilation does provide part of the explanation for internment of U.S. citizens, but it also highlights the fact that that purported failure to assimilate had a lot to do with the ways in which those immigrants were prevented from assimilating, to begin with.
Well, yeah. Just on the chance that you’re being sarcastic, in a war, the people on your side are always going to take a higher priority. Obviously, you want to minimilize civilian casualties as much as possible. But when it comes to the military, the people on your side (in this case, the Americans, or the Allies) are DEFINITELY going to come first. Even your own civilians. It has nothing to do with the other person being inferior. It has to do with winning the war. Your own people come first. I’m sure the Japanese people felt the same way.
What do you think war is all about? It’s not supposed to be pretty. As the old saying goes, war is hell.
Or, as Patton was supposed to have said, “you don’t win wars by dying for your country. You win them by making some other poor bastard die for his.”
…And that’s what’s wrong with middle school today.
(I added the bracketed part above.)
So? You think that’s a bad thing?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what I said.
It’s meaningless to talk about “the Japanese” in this context as if they were a monolith of the same opinion. The decision to surrender or not lay in the hands of the War Council and then the cabinet to approve. The “will” of the people and whatever they thought nor didn’t was irrelevant for that particular decision.
Within the Supreme War Counsel, there were three factions, the ones who were in favor of accepting the Potsdan Declaration, including the one civilian the Minister of Foreign Affairs Tōgō Shigenori, Prime Minister Admiral Suzuki Kantarō and Minister of the Navy Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa; those imposed lead by Minister of War Anami Korechika and Chief of Naval General Staff Admiral Toyoda Soemu and Chief of the Army General Staff General Umezu Yoshijirō, and the emperor.
The emperor’s role in WWII has been whitewashed, starting back with GHQ, so it cannot fully be ascertained. The Japanese leaders themselves conspired during the war trials to keep any blame from being placed on him.
My impression is that Hirohiro was like the Pointed Hair Boss in Dilbert, someone making key decisions but clueless without his underlings. That comparison is a little unfair, because he wouldn’t be that incompetent, but he wasn’t a Truman or a Lincoln who were willing to fire generals who he didn’t like.
The military reported directly to the emperor, and as he wasn’t that active in leading it, it was pretty much a ship left to itself. The Minister of War had a stronger position than the Prime Minister. Amina believed that the Japanese could fight so hard that the allies would agree to better terms. Like all ultra-nationalists, he was deluded. He was joined in this belief by General Umezu.
While Admiral Toyoda had opposed the war prior to Peal Harbor, once he was in, he was in all the way. He was pushing for better terms, and apparently then shifted to even greater opposition.
The three who wanted to surrender had all be opposed to the war from before it started. They pretty much understood it was all over.
The Big Six had been deadlocked over the surrender: Three wanting to accept it, two opposed and one wanting to push for better terms. They were negotiating with the Soviet Union to intercede to obtain better terms, and the USSR was stalling them. As long as the USSR didn’t come back with a firm answer the deadlock continued.
The US needed to continue the war. It had no indication what was playing out. Were the Japanese negotiating in good faith? Were they stalling for time? They didn’t know. They needed to win the thing.
The Japanese were preparing to kill the Allied POWs. Allied solders where dying. Chinese (Allied) civilians were dying. I’ve never seen any estimates of how many Chinese civilians would die if the war had been prolonged, but there is no doubt it would be higher than then the number of Japanese civilians killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not incidentally, there would have been more Allied POWs killed than this number as well, which removes any question of morality.
The reason that Japan surrendered was that the emperor finally decided to break the tie. Why? No one really knows, but my guess is that he had been listening to the people who were saying that the Russians would help get better terms. He wasn’t a great leader. Even though he had more responsibility for the war than is generally acknowledged, he wasn’t a leader with a strong enough personality to push his will all the time.
No doubt that the army had been saying that the US couldn’t develop the atomic bomb. No doubt that the army was saying that they, the elderly men, and the women and children, could punish the enemy so hard that the devils would give up.
The combination of the two bombs and the Soviet Union’s entry into the war got Hirohito to make up his mind. He broke the tie and decided that Japan must surrender.
Anyone who claims to know what exactly he was thinking, which percent either of these factors were weighed, is a fool. We don’t know.
My guess is thatm with Japan broken, its people dying, its navy sunk, its army in tatters; as both events occurred together, it was just too much and Hitohito finally said “No más.”
Or, as we learned in junior high school, maybe not.
Me
You can take it even further out. There’s a large spike in leukemia cases in Hiroshima survivors at about the ten year mark, which the experts attribute directly to radiation exposure. This stuff was studied extensively; the data from the Atomic Bomb Casuality Commission (ABCC) work is still considered invaluable in understanding the effects of radiation exposure in humans.
An interesting sidenote; one of the only studies on radiation effects on living animals prior to Hiroshima had been work done with rabbits by a Japanese doctor. When word trickled to Tokyo about the odd symptoms being seen in some survivors, he had a pretty good idea what was going on. Radiation sickness had been very little studied and no one knew anything about it.
Attempting to decipher other people’s motives is also fraught with danger, but it’s interesting.
Russia’s entry into the war would have caused major concerns for Japan. First, this eliminated any remaining hope that the Soviet Union would persuade the Allies to change the terms of the Potsdan Declaration. Those who were holding out for better terms would have now suddenly lost their position, and would have to decide it they supported continuing or surrendering. There are those who went either way, so it wasn’t necessarily a slam dunk that everyone would agree to a surrender.
The second point is that now Russia’s sudden attack was directly threatening lands which many Japanese considered Japan proper. They had annexed Korea, and there were over a million Japanese citizens who had migrated to Manchuria, parts of which there were more Japanese than Chinese. Russia has spent the three months getting a strong army in place. There could have been concern by some Japanese that the USSR would become even stronger post war. This is speculation on my part, so this isn’t a hill I’ll die on.
It should be noted that looking at a map of the Pacific from the Allies’ point of view, they had pushed Japan back considerably. However if you’re looking from Japan’s view, they were only a little less (Okinawa, Iwo Jima) than where they started. They still had Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, and a lot of China. They even had a lot of Indochina as well. Suddenly Russia was threatening Manchuria and Korea.
Another point is that with the Soviets in the war, it took away from the delusion that the Allies would give up after a rough fight. The Japanese leaders would have been aware of the punishment that the Soviets had taken, but had continued to fight. The premise for the war had always been that the West would lose a big battle and give up. While most wars prior to WWII weren’t fought to the bloody end, a good portion of the leaders convinced themselves that the soft West would give up any day now. Japan just needed to fight that one more extremely bloody battle and then settle on better terms than what was on the table.
Hirohito must have been getting tired of his army advisors, and their constantly overly optimistic predictions. The point that the US actually did have atomic bombs when the army had claimed the US could never develop one may have been a factor in Hirohito’s decision to abandon the Imperial Army. Anami, for one was convinced that the US only had one bomb.
Within the Army, there were the ultranationalists, people who were fanatical, in complete denial and absolutely fucking bonkers, and not in any good sense of the words. They believed in fantasies, and would never have surrendered on their own. Two of the war counsel were such. There were some “moderates” in the army (sort like the joke we would say in Salt Lake, that the Democrats in Utah would be Republicans anywhere else, most Japanese moderates would fanaticals anywhere else), but there weren’t enough to pose a challenge to those who were. Unlike Nazi Germany, the moderates couldn’t pose a real challenge to the leadership.
When you look at the groups, you have to consider the individuals’ self-interests. It would be pretty hard to escape the realization that if Japan accepted an unconditional surrender, then the army leadership was going to lose all their privileages, if not face accountability for war crimes The army had held a special place within the Japanese society, and it would be the end of this, not only for themselves but also everyone they know and worked with.
Certainly there were some who were true believers, waiting for a miracle, and willing to allow hundreds of thousands of people to die and millions to suffer in the meantime. How many simply equated their positions and privileges and placed them above the good of the nation?
Hirohito was good at taking care of Hirohito. Regardless of whatever he thought of the people of Japan and what was good or bad for them, he managed to come out with was seems to be the best possible position for him and his family.
For the Allies, no one knew that the Japanese were planning. Pretty much any other country would have already called uncle. The destruction to Japan was much greater than to Germany. An invasion would have been ugly and costly, and the US public wanted the war to be over. Any government which allows its civilians, men, women and children to be needlessly sacrificed at that great level holds the moral responsibility for the deaths.
There is absolutely no indication that the US would have continued fighting or bombing had the Japanese surrendered. They had been warned repeatedly, and give numerous chanced. Any possible need to “show” the Soviet the atomic bomb or to “test” was so minimal compared to the need to end the war now.
The only difference between the atomic bombs and the firebombs was that it only took a single plane to do what normally required squadrons. The US did what they had to because everything short of that had been tried and failed. Truman had a responsibility to the world to end the military dictatorship of Japan at whatever was at his disposal. A decision made in the context of a total war cannot really be fairly criticized by future generations.
I just find it amusing that in one instance you referred to the Japanese emperor as “Hirohiro” and then the next as “Hitohito”.
Carry on.
I hate typing Japanese names in Roman letters, always do that.
Anyway, the tread seems to be winding it’s way down, but a couple of last thoughts.
Reviewing some of my books and reading a few new things, I’m reminded again how US centric our studies are. To be fair, the whole manufactured debate about the use of atomic bombs for anything other than to beat country which didn’t know how to quit is something which was encouraged back in the cold war, when we needed Japan as an ally. The Soviet Union’s contributions to both fronts was probably downplayed for both reasons.
Some people have attempted to make the case that the atomic bombings on their own ended the war, but the evidence against that is pretty persuasive.
The other thought is wonderment again on how the Japanese got as far as they did without any real strategy and with such insufficient planning. I see that I lot now in corporations. People work so hard, and with some better strategies and planning, they could do so much better.
If I may hijack slightly:
What was wrong with Japanese strategy? I suppose attacking American forces was probably a pretty big strategic error (even if the tactics almost made up for it) but what else? I don’t know much about the subject really. Did they not learn from the Germans?
I have read the following in many places but can only provide a wikicite for it, if this is incorrect the person who points it out has my thanks in advance. From wikipedia:
If true it would seem to put something of an exclamation point on the argument. Surely it wasn’t the intent of the military in 1945 to create a more than 67 year supply of Purple Heart medals, they had a reasonable expectation that those medals would be needed in their foreseeable future.
I’m a peaceable person and profoundly regret that my nation dropped atomic bombs on human filled cities. But doing so most likely saved more lives than it cost.
simple. There wasn’t a strategy.
OK, for the little longer answer, the Europeans had been beating each up for a long time, and had developed some ideas about what was necessary to win wars. Hitler and the High Command had differing ideas, and sometimes Hitler’s were clearly wrong or widely overly optimistic, but overall, they had a fighting chance. There were various ways they could have done better, which is why it’s interesting to talk about alternative histories for the European theater, where Japan had done about the best they could have.
Japan was nuts. Specifically, there were an ultranationalist group within the army which believed that they were destined to rule Asia. They had silenced their critics and drove foreign policy, which in and of itself wasn’t the problem, the Nazis in Germany and the Communists in Russia had done the same, it was that they were only the army and weren’t in complete control of the country.
They started off in Manchuria and then got entangled in China, but without a plan on how to pacify the country. Pretty standard problem for occupying countries. The British got it right in India, play one group against the other; but many other armies haven’t. The Nazis failed to take advantage of the various groups which hated the Russians, for example.
The Japanese grew their industrial might tremendously in the 1930s from almost nothing to pretty large, but they were still nine times smaller than the US. You can’t win a war of attrition that way. They didn’t have any oil and other valuable natural resources and the closest source was the Dutch East Indies, but the US and Britain stood in the way.
They had gotten down as far the Indochina without getting into a war, but then the US froze their assets in the States and placed an embargo on oil to go along with the controls over scrap iron. They had failed to diplomatically get the US to not place the embargo or to obtain alternatives.
This really is the critical point, where they needed to make a choice of backing out of China or going to war with the US. The choose to prepare for war, but instead of developing a long-term war strategy, they elected to go with wishful thinking.
With the belief that they could engage the US navy in a decisive battle and knock it out, they talked themselves into the idea that the allies would give up relatively easily. With that, they failed to develop tactics which would have hurt the US harder, but wouldn’t have contributed to their master plan. For example, rethink their submarine warfare, both offensively and defensively, and realize that subs do best against transports. They could have attacked the US sub and dry dock facilities in Hawaii which would have pushed the war back another year.
When they got lucky and caught not only everyone sleeping at Pear Harbor, but in the luckiest break of WWII, found Douglas MacArthur and company in a state of shock, they got six months of freedom to run around the Asian islands and set up a perimeter.
The negatives outweighed the positives. The army and navy wouldn’t talk to each other or coordinate strategies. No one was in charge. They had millions of troops tied up in China. etc., etc.
The fundamentals never changed. They were attacking a nation which was an order of magnitude stronger in industrial might. Their “strategy” was to have a bloody fight with the US, which they thought would make it pack up and go home. Whatever they did may have postponed the inevitable, but with the US able to attack the Japan homelands and destroy its industry, and with the Japanese unable to do anything in return, it was a matter of time.
Had the attack on Pearl Harbor not been so one-sided and not knocked out the fleet combined with the forces in the Philippines putting up more resistance (War Plan Orange 5) while preparing their strategic retreat back to Bataan (reverting back to war Plan Orange 3), the US wouldn’t have had as bloody of a fight, because Japan would haven’t been able to invade as many countries. It probably would have taken about the same amount of time in order for the US to defeat Japan because of the length of time for building ships, armies and armaments, but less US lives would have been taken.
Moving forward in time, the Imperial General Headquarters had no plan on how to fight the Soviets if they joined the fight. None. You don’t win wars that way.
It’s impossible to adequately condense years of fighting into a couple of paragraphs, and this is simplified, but these are the basics.
This is where they needed a real strategy.
I think war is a horrible, but there were no other options.
Perhaps the origin of Hara Kiri entering the English lexicon incorrectly as Hari Kari? My experience with Japanese language is limited to an introduction to Japanese course, which while it was certainly enlightening and useful in no way makes me an expert.
To add to the points you’ve made Japan has serious logistical problems. Their merchant marine could ill afford any substantial attrition. They were lucky in that US submarine torpedoes had serious problems with them for the first few years of the war. Every time a problem was identified and corrected, it would turn out that the problem fixed had been concealing an even bigger problem. The magnetic influence detonators turned out to be hyper sensitive causing premature detonations which were often mistaken as hits. Once that was corrected by disabling the magnetic influence detonators and relying on the back up contact detonator, it was discovered that torpedoes were routinely running to deep and would pass under the ship rather than hitting. Once that was fixed, it was found that the contact detonators were liable to be crushed on impact without detonating the torpedo; worse what would be the best hits if they had worked were the most likely to crush the detonator and cause a dud.
Japanese anti-submarine doctrine wasn’t very good at the start of the war though efforts were made to improve them they were never as good as Allied ASW doctrine. Worse, anti-submarine duty was looked down upon so it tended to get the least skilled commanders. The Japanese merchant marine was hard pressed to try to meet the demands at the beginning of the war and as the war dragged on and losses began to mount and unable to be replaced with anything like enough fresh construction the problems became very serious. Even as early as Guadalcanal from Aug 1942-Jan 1943 the Japanese were losing more soldiers to starvation than to enemy action. The logistical problems were somewhat hidden early on when they were able to rely on the Churchill ration, captured Allied supplies, but the folly of this was probably best exemplified by the U-Go offensive and the Battles of Imphal and Kohima where the Japanese were unable to provide enough supplies to prevent rampant starvation from occurring.
As I said recently in the kamikaze thread, Japan also had serious problems with the ability to provide adequate pilot training as the war drew on. Pre war they had been turning out small numbers of extensively well trained pilots, but this could not hope to meet the demands of the continual attrition during the war. As a result pilot training time continued to decrease as they war dragged on, leading to a self feeding downward spiral as less trained pilots didn’t last as long and needed to be replaced even faster resulting in even less training time; compounded by a growing lack of fuel with which to provide flight training. The fuel was being produced in the captured fields in the Dutch East Indies, but less and less of it was being transported as the merchant fleet was being sunk faster than it could be replaced.
It is a big topic and that’s just scratching the surface.
Excellent post but I have to disagree with you here. Nazi racial policies and plans which were the entire point of invading the USSR severely hampered what they could do; and these policies to take lebensraum in the east was the whole point of invading the USSR in the first place. Even still, the German Army employed huge numbers of former Soviet POWs; roughly 1 million Hiwis and Osttruppen served in the German Army though the extent of their motivation was largely to avoid being starved to death by the Germans in POW camps. They were also to take some advantage of groups with hatred of the Russians; a good number of Cossack, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, even some Ukrainian and at least ostensibly anti-communist formations served in the German Army, or more often in the SS. Himmler wanted to expand the SS as his personal Army and it largely took control of all foreign formations serving the Germans. The impression of the SS as tall blonde haired blue eyed Aryans was certainly not the case by the end of the war. While the premier SS formations tried to maintain this as best they could, it ironically had divisions composed of Russians, untermenchen in Nazi racial ideology by late in the war.
It even contained a very small number of former British POWs, the British Free Corps, the leader of which, John Amery, pled guilty to high treason after the war and was hung.