“Indeed, while the surrender was being signed on an American battleship, kamikaze pilots were readying airplanes at a nearby airfield to destroy the signing ceremony and prevent the surrender and the shaming of their nation, their military, and their emperor.”
Whoa! Never heard that before! So what happened? I mean they obviously didn’t attack the surrender ceremony, so who or what stopped them?
What kind of numbers do we mean? Millions of GIs dead/wounded? Also, how many Japanese troops and civilians?
Is it true that they would have armed the people?
IIRC, little man was an uranium bomb and fat boy was plutonium. They were 2 different designs by different teams of scientist. so the testing theory would have some merit. the military (or president) would not have trusted the scientist’s assurances that it would work based on a mathematical equation.
And the difference between fire bombing and A-bombing is that fire bombing had been going on for a while with no immediate effect. fires in Japans’ cities were commonplace and understood. but the A-bomb was a new phenon. The radiation aspect didnt even come into play until after the war. Japan only knew that there was a new explosive device that was powerful enough to take out an entire city.
I don’t have casualty projections in front of me, but for some reason the 2 million figure rings a bell. That’s American killed and wounded. Japanese would likely have been much higher.
Japan was “arming the people” – at least to a certain extent. Civilians were trained with sharpened bamboo poles and such to charge the beaches, presumably in an attempt to drive the Army and Marines back into the sea. The loss of civilian life would have been very high. I don’t know if it would have been higher than the loss of life in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though.
I don’t know if the kamikaze rumor is true, although it sounds somewhat feasible. However, the U.S. was on guard against just such a strike. A massive air armada passed over the bay prior to and during the signing – literally thousands of planes, stretched from horizon to horizon, in a tremendous show of force. Anyone foolish enough to launch an airplane in the face of that would be obliterated before they got fully airborne.
The two devices differed primarily in what their fissile materials were and how the critical mass was assembled.
Little Boy was essentially a cannon. It fired a uranium slug into a socket in a uranium target. It was even at the time considered to be an inefficient, brute-force method for generating a nuclear blast, but one that could be virtually guaranteed to deliver some sort of explosion, even if the theoretical calculations about how the critical mass would behave were off. (They weren’t.)
The more elegent Fat Man worked by compressing a subcritical mass of plutonium into a supercritical state by setting off carefully timed and shaped explosive charges that created a spherical implosion. There were many more ways that it could have been a dud (the timing of the implosion had to be near perfect), but the original Trinity test had also used a plutonium implosion device so the bright boys at Los Alamos already knew the theory was sound.
In a nutshell – there wasn’t any point in doing a comparason of the two types of devices. The scientists already knew that Fat Man was a better design (a bigger bang with less fissile material) and they had proved that it would work with Trinity. Little Boy was a legacy from early in the program when it was intended as a brute-force insurance policy in case the plutonium implosion design hit some sort of roadblock. It wound up being used anyway primarily to give the Japanese (and the Russians) the impression that the U.S. had atom bombs to spare and could drop them at will.
Of course, it is true Hiroshima was left untouched by U.S. convential bombing raids so that the effects of the nuclear blast could be easily studied … .
I find this topic very interesting. I think that when they write histories of the United States in the future they will point to the Manhattan Project and Truman’s decision to drop the bomb as one of the great turning points–right up there with the Civil War and the Revolution. I think it’s the real moment when we made the transition from Republic to Empire.
We had expended so much blood and treasure to make the damn thing, it was ineveitable that it would be used. The most interesting question is why did we choose Hiroshima and Kyoto (Nagasaki, IIRC, was the secondary target. Kyoto was saved because of unacceptable cloud cover) At the time they were described as military targets. War production, etc. But really they were chosen because they hadn’t been bombed much. The generals wanted a pristine city to test out their new toy. Everything of any real value to the Japanese war machine had already been bombed several times over. So why choose civilian targets? Wouldn’t it have been much more effective to choose a heavily fortified target? “Hey! Look what we can do! You can build all the concrete bunkers you want, and we can use just one bomb!” What if an atomic bomb had been used on one of the fotress islands like Iwo Jima? IIRC, there were several more of those close to the Japanese mainland. Wouldn’t that prove the point that the war was lost without killing 200,000 more civilians?
My theory: We dropped the bombs to end the war. We chose the targets to scare the world.
I have GOT to start bringing my copy of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” to the office if I’m gonna respond to this thread any more.
I don’t recall exactly, but I believe the bombs weren’t available for use until shortly before they were actually dropped. They weren’t available for use on islands like Iwo Jima, because Iwo had already fallen.
The theory that we selected civilian targets to scare the world could be accurate; I don’t know. But based on my limited knowledge of the subject, I think the primary aim was simply to shock the Japanese into surrendering. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets, if you consider that much of Japanese industry at the time was small, home-based shops. That was one reason the U.S. used firebombing tactics, rather than traditional bombing; there weren’t many large factory sites left to hit.
I think a big influence was the unfamiliarity and wariness of the Japanese Bushido code. This was the first time the US ( and all western civilizations?) had encountered institutionized suicide. There is a big difference between soldiers off to fight in a war/battle/mission that they probably wont return AND building planes that are flying bombs directed by pilots. These people didnt give up. they just died. after the horrific sites at small islands like IWO JIMA, the task of facing an entire nation was overwhelming.
There was a big difference between fire-bombing and the bomb.
First, fire bombing involved hundreds of planes over several days. The bomb took one plane. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a lone high-altitude B-29 cuased panic in the streets, when before it would have been dismissed as a recon mission.
Also the effects of a fire-bombing could be inconsistent. If you were “unlucky” you only got a bunch of little fires that were easy to put out. If you were “lucky”, you got a firestorm which destroyed whole neighborhoods and melted the asphalt in the street.
At the time the differences in conditions were poorly understood, so firebombing could not be relied upon.
ElDestructo
Your first sentence needs to be turned around. They hadn’t been bombed much because they were being saved as potential targets. Hiroshima (at least) was not a civilian target. It was a major staging area for Japanese troop movements and had a large re-supply center. The submarine war and defensive posture of the Japanese army had rendered the job of moving troops out of Japan rather pointless. (They were not advancing on the battlefields, so they had no need to send out replacements to extend their lines and, while they surely could have used reinforcements to defend their positions, they couldn’t ship the troops without having the transports sunk.)
Had we invaded, they could have definitely used the troops, the supplies, and the organization based at Hiroshima to defend themselves.
On the other hand, Hiroshima was not a manufacturing center, so there was not a need to bomb them to destroy new aircraft or munitions while we were advancing across the Pacific.
On the other hand, your final conclusion is probably accurate.
justinh
I’m not exactly sure what you meant by this. The level of fire-bombing that occurred was certainly not “commonplace” or anything that the Japanese “understood.” The May(?) assault on Tokyo killed more people than the A-bomb. The Japanese had no experience of anything as devastating as the nightly B-29 attacks. It is also not true that it “had no effect.” As a terror weapon it probably did not make the people want to simply give up (any more than German strikes on Britain or Allied strikes on Germany or U.S. strikes on Hanoi made people want to surrender–for some reason, “terror from the skies” simply never has had the demoralizing effect that its planners assume), however, Japanese industry was totally disrupted, despite an excellent move to distributed manufacturing.
You are misinformed.
Kyoto was taken off the target list due to political objections over bombing one of the primary centers of Japan’s religious history.
Nagasaki was bombed, but due to clouds over the target, the bomb missed and landed just over a ridge of mountains, in a suburb of Nagasaki. This shielded Nagasaki from the brunt of the blast, and ironically, the bomb landed right on top of surburban industrial areas which were slums for forced-labor workers (primarily koreans and chinese) and also a large enclave of Japanese christians.
For more details about Nagasaki (which IMHO has been largely ignored compared to Hiroshima) look at this site:
Mr Wagner’s point about having an illustration of the horror of the a-weapons is well taken. HAd we not used it then, we’d probably have used it in Korea. Or Vietnam, or somewhere. And by then, it wouldn’t have been a comparatively small 20kt “firecracker”. Imagine instead a 15 megaton “city buster” --the biggest the US has ever had, or the 50 megaton monster the Soviets developed.
Truman’s decision was easy IMHO because had he decided not to do so (drop the bomb) how would history and the American people view a President who chose NOT to use a weapon that could have saved any number of American soldiers’ (and Japanese soldiers’ and citizens’)lives or shortened a totally horrible war by even a day?
There were proposals and plans (in the absence of more general knowledge of atomic weapons) in the works to use posion gas and biological weapons on the Japanese people. Articles like “Cook 'em better with gas” were even published in the general press. The thought was that Japan had set a precedent by using such weapons in China (quite true), so their use “in retalition” was OK.
“Regular” bombing was seriously hurting the Japanese, and also (and often unmentioned) the losses due to American submarines and (sea) mines had considerably reduced the Japanese ability to wage war effectively. Probably anyone else would have given up sooner, but the Japanese were determined to wage war INeffectively, if need be. They did issue instructions and provide training to the civilians on how to kill and destroy the American invaders. They also had their own version of Gotterdammerung, which I forget the word for, but it translates as “Shattering of the Jewel”. That speaks for itself.
Projected casualties for the overall invasion of Japan were in the millions of dead on the Japanese side; I believe 4 to 5 million initially. Estimates for the allied side started at 100,000 killed and wounded, but were raised and raised again in the aftermath of Okinawa (50,000 casualties) and Iwo Jima (I forget how many, but way too much for a tiny island). I do know invasion plans basically wrote off at least one of the US divisions slated to be in the first assault as it was assumed that after two or three days of fighting, it would essentially cease to exist as a viable force. Just the blood necessary for transfusing the wounded was to require three entire ships.
Additionally, troops were scheduled to be transferred from the European theatre for the invasion. Many of these felt they’d already done their bit and would not survive another campaign. Allied commanders were very seriously concerned about the possibility of munity among these guys. The saying “Golden Gate in '48” was somewhat common as the thought was that the war would run at least that long.