WWII: Why, *exactly* did the Japanese surrender?

Factual Questions
1

The conventional wisdom here in the U.S. is that the Japanese surrendered because of the two atomic bombs. I wonder about that. As no one knew much about the radiation and fallout, the bombs were just another way to destroy a city - something we had been doing for awhile. What I wonder is: Just how much did the Russian entry into the Pacific theater (one day before the second A-bomb) played into the decision to surrender? The Russians and Mongolians dealt the Japanese a significant military blow along the Manchurian border in 1939, which IIRC, was the first time in modern times the Japanese had suffered such a defeat. I can’t help but wonder whether the Japanese would have surrendered at all if you remove the Russians from the picture.

So, the factual, GQ question is: Do we know for a fact what the reasoning was on the part of the Japanese for the surrender?

2

They surrendered because they were already on the edge (supply lines cut, constant harrassment from air strikes, industries in ruins, general infrastructure bombed out and wrecked, etc) and the ‘moderates’ and the emperor used the shock of the bombings to assert himself and avert the bloodbath that the militarists had planned (the Japanese were gearing up for a fight to the death if the main island was invaded).

Also, IIRC, Russia had recently and overwhelmingly attacked the Japanese in Manchuria completely routing them, so coupled with the atomic bombs it provided just enough to allow the emperor to end the war before more blood could be shed…and on more favorable terms than Japan would have gotten had Russia joined in the invasion (as was originally planned).

-XT

3

Well, at some sub-atomic level I guess we have to say “We don’t know.” But we can say with certainty that Japan was taking it on the chops in August, 1945. One darn thing after another. All these things had a cumulative effect.

Would they have surrendered if they got zapped with:
…Two nukes but no Russians?
…Three nukes, plus Russians plus the blockade?
…No nukes, no Russians, but poison gas?

Who can say? It is all very speculative. We do have to realize that the Japanese did not know we did not have a limitless supply of atomic weapons. For all they knew, we were ready to zap every post office in the country with a couple of Little Boys.

Further, they did not know where (or if) the Russians would stop.

But still the exact reason that pushed them over the edge is not too clear, nor too important.

4

That’s exactly what I’m thinking. The Japanes had to be concerned about the Russians having a part in any occupation effort - successful or not. However, do we know this from the Japanese leadership itself? In other words, is anything documented along the lines of: “The Russian entry into this war caused us to surrender, otherwise we would have continued to prepare for an American invasion.”?

Any good books on the subject?

5

Actually the bomb didn’t do it. I’ll probably start a debate here in the wrong place, so I’ll back this up with any evidence I can find: *Japan tried to, and wanted to surrender before * the bombs were dropped.

First, Japan sent people to the West to see about surrender terms as early as 1942.

In ‘The Enemy at His Back’, Elizabeth Churchill Brown wrote and supplied enough evidence to prove “Here was an enemy who had been trying to surrender for almost a year before the conflict ended.” She wrote that Japan was kept from surrendering until the Soviets were ready to enter the war and we had dropped both bombs.

In ‘No Wonder We Are Losing’ by Robert Morris writes the following:

The Soviets refused to meet with them until they were able to enter the war themselves (for 6 full days). We had already dropped both bombs by then.

The bombs caused an unconditional surrender, not a surrender. We already had that.

6

CanTak3 you are certainly moving this into the realm of debate and away from a factual answer.

Conditional surrender was not acceptable to the US (certainly not on the terms that Japan was ‘offering’ which was status quo ante IIRC) so I’m not sure why you even brought it up. As it turned out we DID make the surrender partially conditional (we allowed the Emperor to remain for instance), but thats another story.

Its unsure whether the hardliners would have gone along with even a conditional surrender…again, IIRC peace ovatures were coming not from the formal government but from the Emperor and the moderates.

-XT

7

But an unconditional surrender was necessary to completely dismantle the Japanese war engine.

The conditional surrender they were seeking would essentially have been a cease-fire, under which they’d make some kind of reparation for attacking the US but would get to keep at least asome of their colonial conquerings and their power structure intact. That’s what the Japanese were seeking – an “out” that didn’t involve letting go all of their military gains or infrastructure.

8

Which brings up a related question. It seems to me, that we have much, much more insight into the German thinking of WWII, than we do of Japan. Is this accurate? And if so, is it because of the different situations with regards to the leadership in those countries?

9

At the time, the belief was that the Japanese were about to dig in and fight hard against an invasion of their mainland, probably in hopes of forcing some sort of stalemate on the ground or inflicting U.S. losses high enough that the U.S. would agree to a conditional surrender and withdraw, allowing the Japanese government to remain intact with whatever was left of its war machinery. The U.S. had recently suffered horrible losses on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, lending credence to the belief that the Japanese would fight to the last man. Numbers like 1 million U.S. casualties for an invasion of Japan were being tossed around.

Nukes did change that. It showed the Japanese (who didn’t know there were only two bombs) that the U.S. did not have to invade - it could simply turn the island into a parking lot from the air. There’s a fundamental difference between destroying a city with wave after wave after wave of bombers over a period of weeks, and destroying a city by having one aircraft fly over and dropping a devastating weapon. Psychologically, this may have broken the back of the hard liners and made them realize that there was absolutely no way they were getting out of this short of total surrender.

But as others have said, this is all speculation now. The people who made the decision to drop the bombs (the correct one, IMO) did not have the luxury of hindsight, and when faced with a choice between using a new weapon on the enemy or perhaps losing hundreds of thousands of their own soldiers, chose the former.

10

One issue to which posters have alluded but I think needs to be made explicit is that the Japanese government was divided. There were hard-liners who were willing to fight to the last drop of the entire country’s blood and there were men who saw no reason for such an outcome who wished to spare their people such misery. The two sides battled it out in discussions for almost a year before August 1945 and it was only the final decisive act by the emperor that allowed the anti-militarists to finally win–and following that act by the emperor, there was an attempt to capture him and reverse the decision “for their own good.”

We can post all the surrender offers and fight-to-the-death plans until this thread extends into next March, but the reality is that we do not know for certain what would have happened if we removed the atomic bombs from the equation or removed the U.S.S.R. from the equation or removed an invasion from the equation.

One source that might have helped resolve this would have been Hirohito, himself, of couirse, but there is no evidence (that I have seen) that he even kept a diary or wrote memoirs, even secretly, and I doubt that we will ever know exactly how he intended to behave under alternative scenarios.

11

I’m sure you could find lots of authors with lots of theories etc.
Having endoured fire bombings, losses at sea and on the ocean islands they were fairly easy to convince, following two atomic bombs, that surrender was the only viable option.

12

I’m not sure if we had any more insight into German thinking at the highest levels than we did for Japan. Obviously, from a cultural perspective, Germans were closer historically and culturally to the western allied powers than Japan was…so, at least in theory we had a better idea of what they would do in a given situation. Japan was more of an inigma to the US…it was hard to judge what they would do in an extreme situation, and we based a lot of our assumptions on their past actions. I’m unsure how well understood the various factions (or the real role of the emperor for that matter) were understood at the highest levels of our own government.

If you are refering to tactical/strategic information gleened from enemy transmissions, afaik we were equally successful in breaking Japans codes as the Brits were in breaking Germany’s.

-XT

13

Until the emperor decided to throw his support to the peace party, they had and prepared for a much different “viable” option: fight to the last person in an example of Okinawa writ (horribly) large.

14

My thanks for all the replies. I think my original question is answered: We just don’t know for sure. Anything further I’d like to ask along those lines would be GD material.

Actually, I’m referring to our insight now, not as events were happening. I ask based on my reading of several books, one of which was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It seems that in the years since the war we’ve been able to scrutinize every scrap of paper written by the high command in Germany and there’s no shortage of insight as to what was happening behind the scenes. I haven’t read or seen anything that approaches that level of insight for the Japanese. I was wondering if that was an accurate observation. And if it is, is it due to the fact that the Emperor was allowed to remain?

15

Well, no, we do know for sure. Paul in Saudi already explained it; it was the combined pressure of the atomic bombings AND the Soviet invasion AND the war generally going terribly, which allowed the civilian half of the Japanese government to prevail.

I’m describing this from memory, so forgive me if I’m oversimplifying, but the manner in which the Japanese government functioned was structurally flawed; the civilian cabinet was supposed to run the country, bu in practice the military reported directly to the Emperor and so could perpetually circumvent the civilian cabinet. The result, as tomndebb points out, was a divided government, but it wasn’t just divided by opinion; it was actually systematically divided in the way it worked. It became possible for the military heirarchy to hide the truth from their own civilian government, to an often ludicrous extent; the catastrophe at Midway was not revealed to any civilian cabinet minister, for instance. The military by 1944 was dominated by officers so obsessed with the death cult of “Yamato damashii” that they were willing to go to stupid extents to keep the war going.

So when CanTak3 claims the Japanese wanted to surrender, and Sam Stone says they would have fought to the death, you have to understand that they are literally talking about two different groups of people; part of the Japanese government which wasn’t insane knew damned well by 1944 that the war was hopelessly lost and wanted peace as soon as it could be arranged, and part wanted to fight to the death. Japan was structurally, organizationally incapable of making the decision to end the war prior to 1945, at least on any terms the Allies could conceivably have accepted.

However, by summer of 1945, the ability of Japan’s military junta to control the country was becoing tenuous, in large part because the country was being destroyed. Even before the A-bombs, entire cities were being annihilated; millions of civilians were simply fleeing into the mountains, and the government’s control of the country was slipping away inasmuch as there was less and less to control. On August 1, five days before Hiroshima, fire bombing destroyed three entire cities. Big ones, mind you.

The August 9 annihilation of Nagasaki, which was the day AFTER Fukayama had been incinerated by conventional bombs, coincided with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Prime Minister Suzuki informed the combined cabinet that the war could not continue, and the following week Hirohito broadcasted the defeat speech.

It’s clear from the fact that Japan simply broke under too much straw; specifically, the astounding level of destruction on the week of August 5, combined with the Soviet attack. Had they happened separately, it’s quite likely surrender would not have come at that time; happening at the same time, the civilian arm of government was finally in a position to prevail over the Emperor to overrule the military and accept reality.

As it turns out, of course, quite a lot of military officers were thrilled the war was ending. Hell, a lot of Japanese officers opposed the war in the first place. But the hold of the hardliners over Japanese life was brutal and terrifying; not until the camel’s back broke would anyone dare to oppose them.

16

And as also stated in this thread, other groups were willing to surrender but not unconditionally. Some were also attempting to actually work through the Soviets to negotiate a surrender to the U.S. (which was pretty much a dead end, as surprisingly, Stalin didn’t really give a damn about Japanese suffering, but did care about picking up some Japanese territory).

It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, but I recall a book by Akira Iriye, Power and
Culture: The Japanese-American War 1941-1945 discussing the issue with slightly greater sophistication than some of the standard, “We needed to nuke da’ sonsabitches,” histories.

17

The Firebomb raids should be considered as a major influence.

18

Most of the history books I have read over the years tend to lean toward the ‘just one more thing’ analysis than holding up the A-bomb as the proximate cause of surrender. For one thing, the Japanese leadership weren’t totally dumb and were aware that something as devastating as a nuke couldn’t exactly be assembled in a garage, therefore it was reasonable to assume that the US wouldn’t have a huge number of the things. For another, as the OP points out it makes no difference if a city is obliterated by incendiaries or an airburst - the damage is identical.
However, while much of the military (and from what I’ve read, much of the general population) were preparing to defend the homeland from invasion, it had by that point in the war become obvious that the situation was hopeless. Germany had been defeated, US battleships were sailing along the coast shelling anything they could reach, B29s and carrier planes were roaming the skies, cities were being pounded to dust, food and strategic materials were unavailable.
I don’t personally believe the manhattan project made much of a difference at all to WW2 - Japan would have folded anyway, probably to much the same timescale. In fact, the massive resources diverted to research and construction might have been more efficiently used on conventional weapons.

The Wikipedia article on this is very good linkparticularly the opinions of the military men, even if coloured by hindsight.

19

That might be true but it seems to me to be one hell of a coincidence that the Japanese government decided to surrender the day of the second atomic bombing, AND that Hirohito cited the A-bomb in his defeat speech. Too coincidental, I think.

20

It was almost a week after Nagasaki that the Japanese surrendered. (14 Aug) Which is a small part of the reason I question how much the Russians influenced that decision. At any rate, I can see how the totality of the situation would have made the decision an easy one at that point.