Ihyll said:

While I don't agree with the use of nuclear weapons in Japan, the word surrender doesn't exist in the Japanese language

Operation downfall would have taken more lives on both sides

Click to expand...

Team Alucard said:

Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union broke the non-aggression pact and invaded Manchuria. The bomb was entirely unnecessary.

Click to expand...

AlimNassor said:

No justification. It was an atrocity, a war crime if you will. Those who gave the order should have been arrested and imprisoned. Japan was surrendering, it wasn't if, they were but, we wanted to impress the Soviets. Horrific.

Click to expand...

Piecake said:

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, the historian has done the most definitive study on the relationship between the Soviet Union, the US and Japanese surrender (or at least the most research) in this book, argues that "Without the twin shocks of the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese never would have surrendered in August."

There is no evidence that they were contemplating surrender.

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/52502

A staple of Hiroshima Revisionism has been the contention that the government of Japan was prepared to surrender during the summer of 1945, with the sole proviso that its sacred emperor be retained. President Harry S. Truman and those around him knew this through intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, the story goes, but refused to extend such an assurance because they wanted the war to continue until atomic bombs became available. The real purpose of using the bombs was not to defeat an already-defeated Japan, but to give the United States a club to use against the Soviet Union. Thus Truman purposely slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese, not to mention untold thousands of other Asians and Allied servicemen who would perish as the war needlessly ground on, primarily to gain diplomatic advantage.

One might think that compelling substantiation would be necessary to support such a monstrous charge, but the revisionists have been unable to provide a single example from Japanese sources. What they have done instead amounts to a variation on the old shell game. They state in their own prose that the Japanese were trying to surrender without citing any evidence and, to show that Truman was aware of their efforts, cite his diary entry of July 18 referring to a ”telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace." There it is! The smoking gun! But it is nothing of the sort. The message Truman cited did not refer to anything even remotely resembling surrender. It referred instead to the Japanese foreign office's attempt (under the suspicious eyes of the military) to persuade the Soviet Union to broker a negotiated peace that would have permitted the Japanese to retain their prewar empire and their imperial system (not just the emperor) intact. No American president could have accepted such a settlement, as it would have meant abandoning the United States' most basic war aims.

An exchange I had with two revisionists, Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, is revealing. In the December 2007 issue of Passport (newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations), I published a short critique of their Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Among other things, I accused them of resorting to ”semantic jugglery" in falsely equating Truman's diary reference to ”peace" with ”surrender," and pointed out that they had failed to provide ”even a wisp of evidence" that Japan was trying to surrender. In their response, Sherwin and Bird in turn accused me of dismissing a ”huge body of distinguished scholarship," but again failed to include a single example of such evidence.

In particular, Sherwin and Bird berated me for failing to refer to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. ”Hasegawa's research into Soviet and Japanese archives," they wrote, ”is replete with massive new and important ‘wisps' of evidence about the causes of Japan's surrender. It seems telling to us that his work is ignored." What Sherwin and Bird apparently did not know, or hoped their readers did not know, was that although Hasegawa agreed with revisionists on a number of issues he explicitly rejected the early surrender thesis. Indeed, Hasegawa in no uncertain terms wrote that ”Without the twin shocks of the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese never would have surrendered in August." So much for the ”massive new and important ‘wisps' of evidence."

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

KHarvey16 said:

This represents the typically ignorant view of history so many have. The Japanese were not about to surrender, and we know this for a fact given the communications we intercepted from them at the time. Their plan was to prolong the war as long as possible and force an allied invasion. Until that happened, they were not going to give in. The emperor himself had to step in to end it, and when he did there was a coup attempt to kill him for it.

Click to expand...

Snowman Prophet of Doom said:

This is utterly disconnected from reality. Allied intelligence indicated that the Japanese were training their civilians for low-tech kamikaze-like combat, anticipating a landfall of American troops. They had attempted to court the Soviet Union to convince America to negotiate a peace that was favorable to the Japanese and would allow the militaristic and Imperial infrastructure to stay in power, but America balked at this because their very war aims lay in utterly dismantling the militarism that had made Japan such a threat to global security in the first place. The Japanese had no path to victory, but they had demonstrated, on island after island, a willingness to let FAR more of their people die prior to surrendering than any other nation in the war, and the high end of estimates for the cost of the invasion of Japan, which was GOING to happen with or without the bomb as far as allied commanders were concerned, was upwards of a million military and civilian deaths. The bombs were an attempt to avoid that.

There was actually a post by a Gaffer in the thread about Nanking in which he shared a short blog post by a noted historian who utterly dismantles the claim that Japan was on the path to an acceptable surrender prior to the atomic bombings. There simply is no evidence in the record left by the men at the pinnacle of Imperial Japan's regime that they were even considering a surrender prior to the one-two punch of the atomic bombings and the declaration of war by the Soviets.

Click to expand...

pa22word said:

On August 7, a day after Hiroshima was destroyed, Dr. Yoshio Nishina and other atomic physicists arrived at the city, and carefully examined the damage. They then went back to Tokyo and told the cabinet that Hiroshima was indeed destroyed by an atomic bomb. Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, estimated that no more than one or two additional bombs could be readied, so they decided to endure the remaining attacks, acknowledging "there would be more destruction but the war would go on."[164] American Magic codebreakers intercepted the cabinet's messages.[165]

Click to expand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Events_of_August_7.E2.80.939

Click to expand...

ThoseDeafMutes said:

El Topo said:

There really is a defense force at GAF for the murder of ~200,000 civilians.

Click to expand...

You're doing everybody a disservice when you try to boil down a 70 year old historical debate to catty remarks. I could waltz into a vaccination thread and say "wow there really is a defense force for stabbing children with needles" or an Operation Overlord anniversary discussion and say "woah there are people here who think invading foreign countries is a good thing?!" Nobody here is stoked that people died.

The context is key. The United States was making preparations for a land invasion of Japan. Now that it has captured air fields in range of Japan it has initiated a strategic bombing campaign aimed at crippling industry and lowering morale. These weapons are obviously imprecise because the technology for precision bombing doesn't exist. It's common knowledge that strategic bombing will result in large numbers of civilian deaths. Despite this, its military value is considered too important to forgo. At the outbreak of the war in Europe, both Axis and Allies were hesitant to bomb cities, but eventually a series of accidents and changing priorities led to both sides relaxing restrictions and engaging in all out bombing campaigns. Well, I should say the Germans were hesitant to bomb British cities, since they had no problems wiping out Poles en masse with air raids. The Japanese never had any compunctions, really. They started strategic bombing Chinese cities in 1938, before the European war had even started. The efficacy of mass air raids is questionable. Some times the air raids demoralized, and other times they strengthened national resolve. Its effect on war industry is difficult to calculate because there are so many factors at play - in 1944, German total production rose, leading some to believe that it had "no effect". In fact, the rise is attributable to industrial investments from previous years finally bearing fruit, and they failed to meet their projected production by 25-33%. That would indicate a very serious disruption. This is information we have thanks to post-war analysis. At the time, it was very firmly believed by many that strategic bombing would reduce morale, and would damage industry, so this is what the decision makers were basing their actions on at the time, irrespective of what it's "real" effects may have been.

Is strategic bombing, generally, a war crime? We would consider indiscriminate bombing campaigns now to be a war crime. But is this merely because we now have more precise tools and it is possible to wage a war while minimizing casualties? If a JDAM hits a civilian building in the year 2015 that was incorrectly interpreted as a military target because of faulty intelligence, we generally would not prosecute the bombing crew as war criminals. We engage in combat today knowing that a certain number of civilians will definitely, 100% die, despite our best efforts. If at some point in the future we develop some novel technology to guarantee that this doesn't happen, would we similarly look back on the wars of the late 20th and early 21st century as conflicts innately filled with war crimes on this basis? That's possibly an interesting discussion we could have, although as of World War II, all major actors didn't see it that way and considered it a necessary part of waging a modern war. At the Nuremburg trials, Nazi leadership was not put on trial for engaging in strategic bombing.

Back to the narrative. The atomic bombs, originally planned for use against Germany, are instead distributed to the Pacific theatre since the Germans had already surrendered by the time they were ready. At this point, preparations for the land invasion are proceeding rapidly and Operation Downfall's first phase is scheduled for November. Based on experience fighting the Japanese at Okinawa, casualties are anticipated to be extremely high (trivia: the US military still awards Purple Heart medals to this day that were manufactured in anticipation of the casualties from the invasion of the Japanese home islands in WWII). The invasion of the southern-most large Island is allocated between 150,000 and 200,000 people in ground forces, with the next stage after this allocated 300,000-350,000 in ground forces. The Japanese allocated between 350,000 and 500,000 for the defense of Kyushu (the target of the first phase of the allied operation) although some estimates I've seen (which are probably counting all the low quality militias they planned to raise) are as high as 900,000. 40+ aircraft carriers and 20+ battleships were allocated to the invasion of Kyushu. Thousands of aircraft. This was apocalyptic shit for such a geographically small area. Post-war analysis indicates that the Allies grossly underestimated the defenses that the Japanese would have on hand, both number of aircraft and number of troops on the ground. There is a serious chance that the operation could have failed, or at least resulted in a far costlier battle than anticipated and fail to meet its objectives in a timely manner.

What of the Japanese civilians? Another part of war that doesn't get a lot of play because it's not very sexy is naval blockades. The IJN was rusting at the bottom of the ocean for the most part by this point in time, and it won't surprise you to learn that the Japanese home islands were net importers of food. Everyone knows about the famous German U-boats, not a lot of people realize that the US Navy had a shitload of them too and they were highly successful (and didn't wind up being turned into so much pressurized mincemeat). Unrestricted submarine warfare was being waged on Japan from 1941 onwards, and the Rice harvest of 1945 was especially bad, 30-40% lower than normal. Oil imports from the Southern extent of the Japanese empire (note: they still controlled parts of indonesia et al at this stage) were less than 10% of what they had hoped to import and what they needed. To put it bluntly, they're fucked in the long term, and the longer the war goes on, the more people starve. I'm not talking about "a few" here and there, I'm talking about high hundreds of thousands or low millions. The strategic bombing we talked about above would not have ended, either. Tokyo is often mentioned because it's a horrifically bad example of a firebombing, but over sixty cities were hit in the months that the campaign was being waged in real life. These campaigns absolutely would have continued, and possibly even intensified further as more and more air assets transferred from the European front. The thing about the Atomic bombs is that they weren't even unusually bad by the standards of mass air raids on Japan. They were some of the worst hit cities, but not the worst, and contribute only a fraction of the overall deaths caused by this in the general case. So could you really, from the perspective of an American politician or general in 1945, hold some kind of unique moral outrage about dropping superbombs on Japanese cities that were already scheduled for mass air raids on account of housing war industry and military bases?

The ethical calculus is thus as follows - we can drop two atomic bombs on Japan and try to force their surrender immediately. If successful, this would prevent hundreds of thousands of casualties on our side. It would prevent hundreds of thousands of casualties on the Japanese side. It would mean an end to any further bombing of civilians. It would bring an end to the blockade of Japan and the associated breakdown of society and mass starvation. It would bring an end to the mass scale horrors being committed by the Japanese soldiers on mainland Asia. Two horrific shocks to prevent many future evils. This seems so overwhelmingly obviously acceptable in the context of World War II. So what's the big deal?

Well, the historical debate is that some people contend that some other factor caused the Japanese surrender, not the atomic bombs. Some people argue that the atomic bombs in conjunction with these other factors caused the surrender. Some people claim that the Japanese were "about to surrender" regardless of what happened, and thus it was an unnecessary measure for forcing surrender. Further, some people claim that the United States "knew" that they were about to surrender and deliberately ignored this information. I personally believe that the combination of atomic bombs and Soviet invasion ultimately caused the Japanese surrender, although I consider the further conjecture about the US having knowledge of an intention to surrender any day now to be at best weak and at worst deliberately deceiving. But with that said, the great thing is we can sit down and have a discussion about this.

"Defense force for murder of civilians" indeed.

Click to expand...

Dhx said:

Re: Japanese Surrender

I mentioned earlier that I would dig back into the Hiroshima threads of the past to refute the notion that Japan was on the brink of surrender and that the bomb was provably unnecessary.

Here are just a few posts from one of those threads:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1091157&highlight=surrender

STATEMENTS





RESPONSES









And that's just page 1 of a 25 page thread. I'll leave you with what I thought was the best post from the thread then and now. You may recognize the poster:

Click to expand...

ThoseDeafMutes said:

The scholarship in support of the idea that the Soviet intervention was a major factor in the surrender is probably stronger than some people in that thread would admit, but there was a lot of good discussion at least. Wall of text central.

Click to expand...

Dhx said:

Indeed, thus my narrowing the argument to the use of the bomb being "provably unnecessary." While I have yet to see compelling evidence that surrender was imminent, it would be foolish to completely disregard Soviet influence. The difficulty is in quantifying it and more so against the time table of events.

It's been a while since I've dug into the Soviet angle, but I seem to recall debate on their capability to actually transport troops effectively and establish a beach head to mount a significant invasion on a meaningful timetable.

Click to expand...

Randam said:

Did Japan itself ever say the bombs were unnecessary and surrender was already planned?

Click to expand...

Abstrusity said:

We clearly didn't kill enough nazis.

The US was late in the war, sold weapons and machinery and equipment to both sides, was rear guard for the Free French into Paris, steadfastly refused to work with black people, and would have left Europe to its demise if it weren't for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor necessitating a response.

Of course, I distinctly remember the US being touted as heroes, the primary heroes, of WW2, throughout my history classes. Very little about the Free French, emphasis on the cowardice of the Luftwaffe, always described as a Nazi thing, not a German regular air force, the Wehrmacht was never mentioned, the Maginot Line was mentioned as a stupid idea despite its twin to the south keeping Italy in its place.

Nothing but misinformation meant to increase jingoist tendencies.

America was a mistake.

Click to expand...

Randam said:

Did Japan itself ever say the bombs were unnecessary and surrender was already planned?

Click to expand...

Dhx said:

Indeed, thus my narrowing the argument to the use of the bomb being "provably unnecessary." While I have yet to see compelling evidence that surrender was imminent, it would be foolish to completely disregard Soviet influence. The difficulty is in quantifying it and more so against the time table of events.

It's been a while since I've dug into the Soviet angle, but I seem to recall debate on their capability to actually transport troops effectively and establish a beach head to mount a significant invasion on a meaningful timetable.

Click to expand...

michaelius said:

Funny - last time I checked Poland and other "liberated" countries weren't full of German civilians. If you think soviet army raped only Germans you need to change your history books.

Click to expand...

4Tran said:

Sure he would have if there was literally no opposition. But Stalin was a pragmatist and he would have worked with non-Communist powers as well. Again, look to Finland - Stalin was satisfied with the gains from the Winter War and pushed no farther.

Click to expand...

ThoseDeafMutes said:

The scholarship in support of the idea that the Soviet intervention was a major factor in the surrender is probably stronger than some people in that thread would admit, but there was a lot of good discussion at least. Wall of text central.

Click to expand...

ThoseDeafMutes said:

To me, the debate about whether the bomb was required for an imminent surrender has become increasingly uninteresting over time because it becomes more and more apparent the more I delve into it that Roosevelt and later Truman did not really consider the decision to the same degree that we imagine that they did today. The decision was never seriously debated at high levels, it was more a question of "where should we drop them?" than it was "should we drop them or not?" And the more you start to consider everything in the full context of the war the more you can understand why it would have seemed less controversial from the war room in 1945 than it is from the armchair today. By today's standards the use of air power was war crime central and what's one or two more cities when hundreds have been hit? The laser focus on the atomic bombings as ethical or unethical takes away from the broader picture, in my opinion.

Click to expand...

gamechanger87 said:

I've never really quite figured out the Soviet angle. The SU didn't have the ability to land on hostile soil in large enough of a force to hold it. Ignoring the fact that they didn't have to face a major army that wasn't in shambles I'm not sure if they even had the naval capacity to do it. Stalin was planning on invading Japan but it was more a land grab after the war was over so he could have the bases. Stalin was planning to try and muscle in on the occupation of Japan after the shots were done being fired, but before I highly doubt it.

http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/122330

Click to expand...

KillerMan91 said:

Without western front Stalin would had absolutely conquered Finland. Only reason why he didn't was because he was in hurry to Berlin before western allies and needed troops from finnish front to german front.

Click to expand...

4Tran said:

Up until the Soviet invasion, they were a neutral party. Japan had pinned all their hopes of a negotiated peace by going through the Soviet Union, but once the latter entered the war, there was no longer any choice other than to accept the Allies' terms.

Click to expand...

4Tran said:

Why would you make that kind of assumption? Stalin cut a deal with Finland in September 1944, long before he had to worry about that kind of thing.

Click to expand...

MC Safety said:

The simple fact is the United States not only saved the world from Nazism, it also kept most of Europe from out of Soviet hands.

As for the bomb, dropping it was necessary to ensure an unconditional surrender. This surrender paved the way for a lasting peace and the rebuilding of Japan.

Without the bomb, The United States might still be occupying a semi-pacified Japan. Or else there might be multiple occupation zones held by Russia, China, and the United States.

Click to expand...

Chmpocalypse said:

Pffft lol

I'm an American, and it's readily apparent Russia was the country that broke the Nazi back. It's not even really debatable.

Click to expand...

SporeCrawler said:

thank fucking god. i cant imagine what would have happened if imperial japan would rule asia and nazi germany would rule europe. any race except the german would be extinct in europe and in asia all would serve as slaves to the japanese

Click to expand...

ThoseDeafMutes said:

By today's standards the use of air power was war crime central and what's one or two more cities when hundreds have been hit? The laser focus on the atomic bombings as ethical or unethical takes away from the broader picture, in my opinion.

Click to expand...

KillerMan91 said:

Well Normandy landings were in June. After western front was opened everyone with some sense knew that the war will not go for that long.

Click to expand...

KillerMan91 said:

Peace terms that Soviet offered to Finland before start of Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive on Karelian front were unconditional surrender which basically means annexation. Without finns stopping the offensive at VKT-line Soviet would had gone past old borders (like the original objective of the offensive was) and I don't see why they would had stopped before Helsinki.

Click to expand...

4Tran said:

That seems like a good example of how Stalin changed his priorities.

Click to expand...

4Tran said:

And Stalin knew about the plan since 1943 in Tehran.


That seems like a good example of how Stalin changed his priorities.

Click to expand...

Nabbis said:

I find it curious why he did not annex Finland after beating Germany.

Click to expand...

dpunk3 said:

I think it's important to note that Roosevelt supported the war from the get-go, hence the desire to circumvent congressional treaties and laws to sell to Britain and other allied forces in things such as the lend-lease deals, much more so than the export of raw materials to the Nazi state. He couldn't publicly come out as supportive of the war, and especially couldn't tell the US population he wanted to join it, as the majority of the population desired isolationism post-WW1 and had no interest in joining a war that was "across the pond" and didn't affect them. It wasn't until the atrocities the Nazi party were committing during the war started to become public, as well as the attacks on US ships that were neutral, that the American public became more willing to fight back.

I don't think there were any other choices regarding ending the Pacific front that wouldn't have resulted in catastrophic losses for both sides except for the bombs. Was it right? No. Was it the right choice? Sadly, yes.

Click to expand...