Posted on 09/02/2015 5:33:02 PM PDT by Retain Mike
One man from Bishop's Cleeve has a very good and personal reason to be thankful that it's VJ Day today.
Seventy years ago, Ken Blake was on a troop ship sailing from India bound for Singapore as part of preparations for an invasion when the Japanese government surrendered to the Allies after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Ken, now 88 said: "There was a bloody big cheer on the ship when we heard. We didn't know what was going to happen. But I think if we'd been in any invasion of Japan, every man, woman and child would have fought us. "We'd have been wiped off the beaches. A lot of the soldiers sent to the Far East had been in the Normandy invasion – they'd been chosen because they were experienced at beach landings. Imagine having to do that twice."
In retirement I am always motivated to study WW II history because of the men like him I grew up around and admired. At about nine my father began taking me out golfing with him on the weekends and most everyone we played with was a veteran. I remember there was a man who used the first golf cart I ever saw, because as a brigade commander of the 41st infantry in New Guinea he was permanently debilitated by sickness. One fairly good golfer had a weird back swing, because he was crippled while serving with the Big Red One in Sicily. Later I often ended up as a dishwasher at our country club. The chef noticed my puzzled look as he limped around the kitchen. He said he got the limp from a wound received when he was with the Rangers at Pointe De Hoc.
There are many other stories I overheard and could relate, but one consistently repeated theme was how their unit or ship was scheduled for the Japan invasion. They always thanked God they didn’t have to become fodder for that killing machine. Therefore I developed and now rework from suggestions I receive and from additional sources the following narrative about dropping the atomic bombs. I also break it into six letters I send to papers.
The partial biography of the sources I used contains a lot of helpful insights and perspectives I didn’t emphasize. The recently published book Hell to Pay by D. M. Giangreco is especially valuable. I was able to find confirmation of so many of my other sources in his book. About 30% of the book is bibliography, appendices, and notes.
Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japan Was Imperative
We now mark the 70th anniversary of VJ-Day preceded by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. The generations which made the grave decisions for that war have left us. The generation which endured the cruel tragedies required for carrying out those decisions is rapidly leaving us.
As this personal knowledge becomes ever rarer, we must increasingly listen without their response to the moral exhibitionism of revisionists. Safely remote in time and space, they present asymmetrical, contra-factual analyses about what a needless and criminal decision the United States had made. These views must be countered by presenting the history that the Greatest Generation, and their parents and grandparents lived into and through.
In support of dropping the atomic bombs, historians often cite the inevitability of horrifying casualties if troops had landed on the home islands. They extrapolate from 17,000 American and over 265,000 Japanese deaths on Saipan and Okinawa to estimates of 500,000 American and millions of Japanese deaths for mainland invasions.
Such estimates arise from studies preceding the full recognition by planning staffs of the American experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Also they fail to account for the probability that Imperial Japan’s War Faction would spirit the Emperor to a remote location and continue the war long after the Tokyo/Yokohama metropolitan area had been conquered. Yet even these estimates are over twelve times the dead suffered by Americans during D-Day, The Battle of the Bulge, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa combined. Through these and other battles the American people had absorbed a profound shock caused by a million combat deaths since June 1944 compared to a quarter million in the previous two and a half years.
Such estimates could have substantially understated casualties. Kyushu and Honshu at over 100,000 rugged square miles mathematically enable at least 500 vast redoubts; complex fortifications comparable to that General Ushijima constructed to inflict most losses on Okinawa. This rapid increase in killing efficiency extended to stubborn defense of major cities just as the Germans carried out in Berlin, where 81,000 Russians died and 280,000 were wounded.
The Japanese would be ready and waiting for the Americans, because the “island hopping” strategy had ended. Hard experience had taught them to identify the few regions within their mountainous country that could accommodate the huge armies and air forces needed to subdue the main islands. American intelligence reports already noted repositioning of divisions into southern Honshu to counter the first phase of the invasion.
The Japanese War Faction resolved to wage a total war of upmost savagery rather than contemplate the shameful reality of surrender. They maintained the honorable sacrifice of 20 million Japanese was essential for planning final mainland battles. This limitless, barbaric, squalid, slaughter would inflict millions of casualties grinding the Americans into a stalemate that would convince them to abandon the Potsdam Declaration. In preparation they had redeployed veteran Kwantung divisions from China, and mobilized home defense armies. They drafted able citizens 17-60 years old into the Peoples Volunteer Corps and Home Defense Units to assume infrastructure duties of army units and stay behind invaders for suicide missions using light weapons and explosives. Any food shortages caused by the blockage would first call for killing of allied prisoners in the home islands, and then as many of their own people as necessary to sustain their armies and civilian militias.
The decision to invade also had to include assessment of Japan’s nuclear program. Here the general thrust of American intelligence analysis said an enemy always pursues the highest use of any capability. If Japanese atomic research had been successful, here was a compelling reason to avoid invasion and drop the bombs. A kamikaze plane or submarine could detonate a bomb within the invasion fleet. Alternatively, devices could reside beneath peasant’s huts to devastate the buildup of forces in southern Honshu or the Tokyo plain.
As WW II began, the U.S. knew Japanese intellectuals included accomplished physicists such as Yoshio Nishina. They knew he was a staunch Imperial nationalist and a capable leader, so capable two of his students later won Nobel prizes. They knew he built Japan’s first cyclotron in 1940.
The next American insight into Japan’s progress came in May 1945 as Germany surrendered. Admiral Doenitz ordered all submarines to proceed to allied ports. The U-234 proceeded to Portsmouth where the Navy discovered its cargo contained 560 kilos of uranium oxide intended for the Japanese army.
However, much was then unknown because America found wartime Japan generally impenetrable except for cryptographic intelligence. Interrogators discovered Nishina was given a substantial budget to build an atomic bomb. Research for uranium extraction and enrichment proceeded in Japan until the Americans reached Tinian and B-29’s could reach Japan. Then further efforts were concentrated at the huge nuclear facility in Hungnam North Korea. Korea was also a source for uranium ore. One day after the Nagasaki bomb, Japan exploded an experimental nuclear device off the coast of Hungnam.
The Japanese had capabilities beyond the speculations of planning staffs. The increasingly feeble response to B-29 bombing missions caused the U.S. to significantly underestimate the swarms of kamikaze airplanes with sufficient aviation fuel concealed for one way trips to attack the amphibious invasion fleet. Only after occupation did the U.S. become aware of a larger than anticipated fleet of suicide boats and mini-submarines stockpiled for the invasion. Americans also faced biological warfare. Occupation searchers uncovered large stockpiles of viruses, spirochetes, and fungus spores throughout rural Japan. These biological pathogens had already been tested on several hundred thousand in Chinese villages and on prisoners of war. Civilian soldiers were to stay behind advancing Americans to infuse pathogens into food and waters sources, to release infected animals and insects into American compounds, and to infect themselves with choleras and plaque germs.
If there was any alternative, Harry Truman, Henry Stimson, and George Marshall were not about to procure countless American deaths in protracted ground campaigns following amphibious assaults matching the D-Day landings. Truman contemplated increasingly dire estimates causing him to reflect on the possibility of “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other”. After VE day Stimson perceived the first signs of war weariness and said, “the country will not be satisfied unless every effort is made to shorten the war”. General Marshall said, “War is the most terrible tragedy of the human race and should not be prolonged an hour longer than absolutely necessary”.
As far as they and the country were concerned, the only innocent civilian lives at stake were the common men become citizen soldiers, sailors, and airmen who would have had to invade Japan. The Greatest Generation and their parents would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war simply to indulge some incestuous moral orthodoxy.
Revisionists claim Japan was seeking surrender, but history reveals Japanese negotiation initiatives proved too vacuous to make dropping the bombs unnecessary. These supposed negotiations cite proposals Foreign Minister Togo directed Ambassador Sato to offer to Molotov. In those proposals, Japan intended bribing the Russians into neutrality with conquered Chinese territory. The Soviets would then mediate settlement terms preserving visions of peace with honor. This vision contemplated maintaining Japan’s Imperial, militaristic national structure and retaining the core empire of Home Islands, Manchuria, Korea and Formosa. The first June 29 contacts ignored attributes of surrender with proposals the Russians considered too vague to answer. The August 2 proposals accepted the Potsdam Declaration as only one basis for further study.
When Ambassador Sato finally saw Molotov on August 8, two days after Hiroshima, he received a war declaration instead of answers to his latest proposals. U.S. cryptologists reading “Magic” confirmed Togo’s Russian contacts were ineffectual. American intelligence also knew those involving Allen Dulles in Switzerland lacked any Japanese Cabinet knowledge or interest.
The pattern of Japanese contacts demonstrated an unwillingness to accept any responsibility for understanding Western expectations for negotiation strategies. The fact America had destroyed its navy, massacred its island garrisons, and bombed its cities into cinders should have prompted Japanese proposals embracing a Western style of clarity. They ignored their manifest obligation to bring forward substantive questions and proposals, and chose to greet the Potsdam Declaration with silence.
Instead the Japanese Privy Council debated the Final Battles arguments into utter physical and mental exhaustion for eleven hours following the Nagasaki bomb on August 9. For the final meeting, Hirohito reluctantly invited Baron Hiranuma, who had always fiercely disapproved of the war strategy ending with Pearl Harbor, but as a renowned prosecutor could also ask hard questions. He asked Foreign Minister Togo to consider whether he had ever made concrete proposals to the Russians. He asked the war ministers if they had any counter measures to the relentless air attacks by the American Army and Navy. Hiranuma reminded Hirohito that the Emperor’s spiritual essence was the foundation for Japan’s future, enduring independent of any government imposed by surrender, and asked whether a final battle necessarily preserved that spiritual essence. There was no rebuttal to his questions, but the War Faction remained unyielding.
Here was illuminated the critical role Kokutai played in surrender. Any prominent Japanese lived within an intimate spiritual three dimensional fabric of Emperor, citizen, land, Bushido, ancestral spirits, government, and Shinto religion. In subjection to this merging of spiritual and political authority, the average citizen forfeited individuality and was drafted into a collective soul defining Japan. All able citizens served as soldiers or as civilian militia and awaited the decision of the Empire’s ruling oligarchy. With such a national unity committed to waging a savage total war, the atomic bombs were no longer indiscriminate or disproportional.
Emperor Hirohito foresaw the probability of defeat during January 1944 and appointed a Peace Faction within the national government. However, he and his government conducted political kabuki through twenty months of continuous defeats, fire bombings of over 60 cities, looming starvation, and 1.3 million additional Japanese deaths.
At impasse the two atomic bombs allowed Hirohito, the Son of Heaven, to speak the Voice of the Crane in the sweltering, underground bunker. The bombs could be regarded as a force of nature equivalent to an earthquake or typhoon against which even a god/king was helpless. Only submission to such a force of nature could be proportional to the absolute disgrace of surrender following over 2,600 years of martial invincibility. Only Hirohito could make that submission, because he held the sacred, heaven created throne inherited from Imperial ancestors. He would bear the unbearable, conclude the war, and transform the nation.
The atomic bombs event removed the Final Battles argument allowing the War Faction to relent, allowing Hirohito to assume his unprecedented roll, and requiring no one to lose face. Their cabal remained within the fabric of Japanese from all eras who had sacrificed for Emperor and Empire. Only then did Japan contact Swiss and Swedish foreign offices to commence the torturous negotiations leading to actual surrender.
In their first meeting, when MacArthur praised Hirohito for ending the war. The Emperor replied others also deserved praise. Yet, as Hirohito confirmed to McArthur, the Peace Faction could not have prevailed until the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a situation which could be dramatized.
The atomic bombs accomplished the requirements of unconditional surrender though Japan was allowed to keep their Emperor. By accepting the Potsdam Declaration, Japan abandoned the militarism that had committed the country to Asian conquest. The Emperor’s and the government’s authority became subject to the Supreme Allied Commander. Their authority was later subject to the Japanese people’s free expression for determining a post war government that eradicated multi-millennial martial and Imperial characteristics.
The American citizens and their leaders who suffered through two bloody deluges in the twentieth century approached the summer of 1945 with several imperatives. They would not tolerate the moral failures of a negotiated peace requiring anything less than total submission, after witnessing the feeble responses to a resurgent Germany. They found intolerable allowing a blockade to operate interminably, while deferring to the War Faction any decision about whether Japanese and allied prisoner deaths met their 20 million standard. They would not accept months of diplomatic dithering to accompany additional hundreds of thousands of civilian and military deaths throughout Asia. Allowing the opportunity for Japan’s nuclear program to produce atomic weapons was frightening.
Allowing the premeditated ignorance of revisionists center stage as the first person experiences of the Greatest Generation and their parents and grandparents dies away must remain intolerable.
Partial bibliography:
Hell to Pay, D. M. Giangreco
The Atomic Bomb and the End of WW II, The National Security Archive
Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the WW II Era, Sheldon H. Harris, PhD
Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, David Bergamni
Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring, Gordon Prange
The Secret Surrender, Allen Dulles
Hirohito, Edward Behr A quote by film director Akira Kurosawa illustrates the transformation of that generation of Japanese people, who before were resigned to the slogan “Honorable Death of a Hundred Million”.
“When I walked the same route back to my home (after the Emperor’s broadcast), the scene was entirely different. The people in the shopping street were bustling about with cheerful faces as if preparing for a festival the next day. If the Emperor had made such a call (to follow the above slogan) those people would have done what they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it….In wartime we were like deaf-mutes.”
Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb, Robert K Wilcox
“Thank God for the Atom Bomb” http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf
Potsdam Declaration http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/P/o/Potsdam_Declaration.htm
Battle of Okinawa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
Cornerstone of Peace (Okinawa) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_of_Peace Over 240,000 names recorded including 14,000 from the U.S.A.
Battle of Saipan http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/battle-of-saipan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Saipan
Battle of Iwo Jima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima
Normandy landings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_Landings
The Battle of the Bulge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge
Battle of Berlin Facts http://www.worldwar2facts.org/battle-of-berlin-facts.html
Japan geography: http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/geography/Indonesia-to-Mongolia/Japan.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html Okinawa redoubt was about 100 sq mi
Allied POWS Under the Japanese http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/rg331-box%201321-jap%20pow%20camps.htm Military prisoners were 34,000 in Japan, 70,000 outside Japan, and 112,000 civilians. There were already 142,000 Anglos and Pilipino victims of criminal killings.
Statistics of Japanese Democide Estimates, Calculations, And Sources* http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM As a tactic of administering conquered lands, the Japanese had murdered 6 million Asians from 1937 to 1945.
Declassified photos - 'B-29' "Enola Gay" ----- WWll http://www.alternatewars.com/Bomb_Loading/Bomb_Guide.htm
Point of No Return by Wilbur H. Morrison Hiroshima 71,379 dead, 68,023 seriously injured; Nagasaki 35,000 dead 60,000 injured More B-29 crewmen died in accidents than through enemy action Largest assembly of U.S. Navy ships ever http://www.warbirdinformationexchange.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=52966
Japan's War in Colour | 2004 Documentary with never seen before films https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJLE2pnN9WY
Once the direct witnesses are gone, the history revision will start.
Within a few decades, schools will be teaching that Japan was trying to surrender but Richard Nixon demanded atomic testing on live human subjects.
The story will be that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because those two cities had the largest populations of orphaned children.
My 90+ father, vet of WW2 and Korean war, said exactly the same thing when I asked him just last week - the bombs saved so many lives.
My father was in an invasion staging area in the Philippines in August, 1945 waiting for the orders to head to Japan. I have no doubt that I would not be writing this if those orders had ever arrived.
My Grandfather was likely saved from death thanks to Truman dropping the bombs on the Japs. He was a Marine, and was island hopping in the pacific.
People forget not creepers but othe folks forget they asked us to dance
Freepers dam auto correct
Let’s save some more lives.
It would have saved a lot more, if we had taken over Russia and China using the bomb.
But, the communist in our government wouldn’t have any of that.
“Once the direct witnesses are gone, the history revision will start. ...”
It’s been going on already. For a generation and more.
In 1994 - 21 years ago - staff at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum were completing the restoration of the B-29 _Enola Gay_, from which the first bomb had been dropped in anger. Someone leaked the script of the upcoming 50th-anniversary exhibit, for which the restored bomber was to be the centerpiece.
Read by an indifferent student of history (that is to say, the average American), the script conveyed the definite impression that employment of atomic weapons in combat was a uniquely cruel and irreducibly racist act, perpetrated unprovoked by the neocolonialist American nation, unjustly, against the unoffending populace of an already-prostrate foe.
No mention of Imperial Japanese expansionism could be found. Nothing about various Japanese adventures across China, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma etc; nor attendant atrocities either.
Led by the Air Force Association, various veterans’ groups made common cause and by spring 1995 succeeded in attracting media attention and precipitating Congressional inquiries. The Smithsonian staff evaded, prevaricated, dissembled, and deflected complaints. In sum, they lied about what they were up to: time after time.
A few whistle-blowers helped get the truth out, and NASM superintendent Martin Harwit was forced to resign.
The revisionist claptrap was jettisoned, and the restored _Enola Gay_ went on display with the simplest, barest explanatory placards.
To this day, Harwit cannot admit the truth of what was going on. He still purports to have no idea what the fuss was about.
Through it all, and in the aftermath, any number of revisionist academic historians voiced this refrain: “You did not win. We gave in, out of respect for the WWII veterans, and in deference to their view of events: a slanted view, understandably. But we’re right and you are wrong; we are patient, and we will wait until after the last veteran passes on. Then our view will prevail.”
Thanks for reminding us of that episode.
Regardless of the multiplicity of points, the argument for using bombs against civilians remains at best a slippery slope. The argument that Hitler did it first was a poor excuse for Dresden, etc. atrocities will always be atrocities no matter how well argued they are. The saving lives argument is an end justifying the means argument suitable for Democrats and Communists.
Here we have typical unsupportable revisionism dependent upon asymmetrical analysis, premeditated ignorance, and moral exhibitionism. I say again.
“In subjection to this merging of spiritual and political authority, the average citizen forfeited individuality and was drafted into a collective soul defining Japan. All able citizens served as soldiers or as civilian militia and awaited the decision of the Empire’s ruling oligarchy. With such a national unity committed to waging a savage total war, the atomic bombs were no longer indiscriminate or disproportional.”
“As far as they and the country were concerned, the only innocent civilian lives at stake were the common men become citizen soldiers, sailors, and airmen who would have had to invade Japan. The Greatest Generation and their parents would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war simply to indulge some incestuous moral orthodoxy.”
By the way the British night raid on Dresden is unrelated and the subject for another essay.
Which may be way Preezy Odumbo wanted to take his apology tour to Hiroshima, until the Japanese told him to " get lost".
The Japanese would rather play the victim in their annual Hiroshima observations than admit that they tortured and killed millions of Chinese, Koreans, Americans, and others in a war they started for the greediest of reasons.
I was explaining to kids at a recent event that the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were a mercy. Fewer than a million Japanese died. And we expected five million Americans and millions of Japanese to die during the invasion of Japan. The kids said nukes were still evil, and we were wrong to drop it.
I said Japan wouldn’t surrender because of military ethical codes. And that’s why we had to drop TWO bombs on them before they surrendered, and they only did so because of a POW who said we had a dozen more. And even after they surrendered, thousands of military men committed suicide instead of surrender.
These kids had heard that we’d dropped bombs, but not the facts that we HAD to for their sake and ours.
I also explained that if we were after the biggest number dead, we wouldn’t have dropped it on Hiroshima but TOKYO, which was a city of millions even then.
“...The argument that Hitler did it first was a poor excuse for Dresden, etc. atrocities will always be atrocities no matter how well argued they are. The saving lives argument is an end justifying the means argument suitable for Democrats and Communists.”
WriteOn is misinformed.
Dresden contained a number of small but vital industrial operations that provided key products for Third Reich weapons systems. And it was a transportation nexus; the merest glance at a map ought to make it obvious that air strikes there would hamper movement of German forces. The fact that RAF and USAAF bomber systems of 1945 were not able to put ordnance on military targets with a precision sufficient to appease the moralistically prissy, 70 plus years later, was not a sufficient reason to forgo the attack.
But historic specifics are beside the point. Those who dilly and dally, leisurely pondering the whichness of the wherefore on moral absolutes, and the justifications for this or that course of action in combat, have it very much upside down: it’s ill-advised to worry about morality when fully engaged against a foe. Win the war first, then address morals.
On This Day in 1945, Japanese Surrender Ends World War II
Of course, I can’t mention this historical event without reminding you of the ignorant and frankly appalling remark about it from the brilliant, Ivy-League educated B.Hussein Obama, who used it to explain that “victory” in Afghanistan is not his goal.
From Newsbusters:
“I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur,” Obama told ABC News.
It is telling that when Barack Obama pictures “victory” he doesn’t see in his head that famous photo of the U.S. Sailor kissing the pretty girl in Times Square on Victory Day. Instead, what is immediately conjured up in Obama’s mind is the bedraggled figure of a beaten Japanese Emperor groveling at the feet of U.S. military might.
Obama’s sympathy seems to be with the Emperor that governed a nation that tried to viciously take over the entire Pacific Rim and enslave many millions of Asian peoples. It is hard to escape the feeling that Obama’s first thought when the word “victory” is broached is of our enemy, his sympathies with them, not us.
But that isn’t even the worst of it. Once again we see another example of Obama’s ignorance of history, even American history. In fact, Emperor Hirohito didn’t even sign the document that finalized the surrender of Japan to General MacArthur. That duty was performed by Japan’s Foreign Minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, and one of its generals, Yoshijir Mumezu.
In fact, we didn’t destroy Japan’s Emperor, rather we allowed him to continue on in a ceremonial role to allow the Japanese to feel as if they hadn’t been entirely crushed and that some of their traditions might live on.
OF COURSE, Obama’s sympathies are with his fellow enemies of RAAACIST, imperialistic Amerika! Frank Marshall Davis is no doubt looking up from Hell, beaming with pride.
http://teriobrien.com/japanese-surrender/
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