Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japan Was Imperative

Self | August 10, 2012 | Self

[Retain Mike]

We now mark the 67th anniversary of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II. The generations which developed the information and made the decisions for World War II, including dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, have passed away. The generation which faced the tragic violence required for carrying out those decisions is rapidly leaving us. As this personal knowledge becomes ever rarer, we must listen increasingly to revisionist contra-factual analyses as they expound on what a needless, tragic and profoundly immoral decision the United States had made.

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 48,000 American and 230,000 Japanese losses on Okinawa to estimates of 500,000 American and millions of Japanese casualties for mainland invasions. However, even these optimistic figures arise from studies preceding the unfolding recognition of American experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Such estimates could have vastly understated casualties, because Japan at 374,000 mountainous square miles mathematically enables over 500 defensive redoubts; fortifications comparable to that General Ushijima constructed to inflict most losses At Okinawa. This rapid increase in killing efficiency extended to planned stubborn defenses of their major cities just as the Germans had maintained in Berlin. The American “island hopping” strategy had ended, because the Japanese had determined the few regions within their mountainous country that could accommodate the huge armies and air forces needed. Harry Truman contemplated increasingly dire estimates causing him to reflect on the possibility of “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other”.

The Japanese War Faction maintained the lavish standard of 20 million Japanese deaths for planning final mainland battles; battles intended to inflict millions of casualties, and to convince America to abandon the Potsdam Declaration. The Japanese had concealed vastly underestimated quantities of kamikazes and aviation fuel, redeployed veteran Kwantung divisions, mobilized home defense armies, and distributed suicide bombs and bamboo spears to civilians become soldiers.

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 Chinese civilians. For Japan one delivery system directed citizen soldiers to infect themselves and stay behind the advancing troops.

The Greatest Generation and their parents would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war just to indulge some personal moral orthodoxy. If there was any alternative, Harry Truman, Henry Stimson, and George Marshall were not about to procure the deaths of countless Americans in protracted ground campaigns following amphibious assaults exceeding D-Day.

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 Barron Hiranuma, who had fiercely disapproved the war strategy. Hiranuma maintained the Emperor’s spiritual essence was independent of any imposed government. He reproved Foreign Minister Togo for never making concrete proposals to the Russians and Minister Anami for accepting limitless nuclear warfare deaths without any opportunity to retaliate. The ministers had no answer, but remained unyielding.

At impasse Hirohito, the god-king, spoke the “Voice of the Crane” in the 30’ by 18’ sweltering, underground bunker. He would bear the unbearable, conclude the war, and transform the nation. Only then did Japan contact Swiss and Swedish foreign offices to commence negotiations with allied belligerents.

Here was demonstrated the critical role Kokutai played in surrender. Any prominent Japanese lived within an intimate spiritual three dimensional fabric of Emperor, citizen, land, ancestral spirits, government, and Shinto religion. Emperor Hirohito foresaw the probability of defeat and had appointed a Peace Faction in January 1944. However, he and his advisors conducted political kabuki through twenty months of continuous defeats, fire bombings of over 60 cities, and 1.3 million additional Japanese deaths. The atomic bombs removed the Final Battles argument, allowing the War Faction to relent, Hirohito to assume his unprecedented roll, and no one to lose face. Their cabal remained within the fabric of Japanese from all eras who had sacrificed for Emperor and Empire.

Another point says the bombs accomplished little. Supposedly Roosevelt’s decree of unconditional surrender was compromised away by allowing Japan to keep their Emperor. However 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 post war government that eradicated multi-millennial Imperial characteristics.

The moral failure to leave an Imperial Japan undefeated to prosecute a nuclear war generations hence was intolerable. The expectation of continuing 400,000 civilian and military deaths throughout Asia while diplomats dithered was 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 was intolerable. Allowing the premeditated ignorance of revisionists center stage as the institutional knowledge of the Greatest Generation dies away is intolerable.

[zipper]

Great thread. I wonder if you’ve ever come across the Australian journalist Murray Sayle’s writings?

He claimed Japan surrendered because they were more afraid of Stalin than us, and therefore the atomic bombings were unnecessary atrocities.

My own reflexive view is, that since we demanded “unconditional surrender”, Imperial Japan had no guarantee that we would have spared them (and the Emperor) any more than the Soviets would have apared them in the event of surrender. The bombs were important precipitants for their decision.

Sayle lived in Japan for 30 years starting in 1972. He died in 2010.

His claims, according to New Yorker magazine:

“From Japan, Sayle contributed several long pieces to The New Yorker, including the Letter from Hiroshima “Did the Bomb End the War?,” from 1995, which questioned the military necessity of employing the atom bomb against the Japanese and argued that fear of a Soviet invasion—and not the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—prompted Japan’s surrender”

From a 1995 article he wrote for New Yorker magazine:

“...the bombs promised only to kill more Japanese, whereas the Soviets, possibly allied with local Communists, threatened to destroy the monarchy, which almost all Japanese, and certainly those in the government, viewed as the soul of the nation. A surrender with some guarantee for the Emperor thus became the best of a gloomy range of options, and the quicker the better, because every day that passed meant more gains on the ground for the Soviets, and thus a likely bigger share of the inevitable occupation. Recognition that a surrender today will be more favorable than one tomorrow is the classic reason that wars end.”

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September 23, 2010

Postscript: Murray Sayle

Posted by Jon Michaud

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2010/09/postscript-murray-sayle.html#ixzz22zhAJiMT

---

Letter from Hiroshima

DID THE BOMB END THE WAR?

by Murray Sayle

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/07/31/1995_07_31_040_TNY_CARDS_000373616#ixzz234whgWbZ

[fishtank]

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Tibbets Jr., left, and his grandson, then-Capt. Paul Tibbets IV, pilot the last flyable B-29 Superfortress. General Tibbets was the pilot in command of the “Enola Gay” when it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. Now a colonel, the younger Tibbets is the Air Force Inspection Agency commander at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. Courtesy photo

http://www.militaryavenue.com/Articles/Face+of+Defense-+Grandson+Carries+on+Grandfathers+Service-38701.aspx

"Colonel Tibbets also shared something his grandfather told him about nuclear weapons: “We hope we never have to use nuclear weapons in anger again,” said the elder Tibbets.

“But if you think about it, we use these weapons everyday as a credible deterrent," stated Colonel Tibbets. "We, as a nation, should never forget that.”"

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: "it wasn’t until the late 90s that Japan finally acknowledged their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Prior to that time, the Japanese people were never told by their government that Japan had attacked first."

I recall someone who was at the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor (1990s) where they met a teenage American visitor who believed that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was in response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[Wildbill22]

My Dad was a Lt, “90 day wonder”, on an APD in the Atlantic working up for the mainland invasion. He was in charge of the 4 LCVPs on that ship and they were told to expect 80% casualties.
-The bomb probably saved his life, and my existence.

[Little Ray]

How?

Where would the Soviets have gotten the sealift capacity to move enough troops into Japan? We had Andrew Jackson Higgens and the Higgens’ boats (the US Army actually had a bigger fleet than the US Navy by the end of the war!). What did the Soviets have to move troops across open water and land them on a hostile shore?

Really, I’m curious.

[US Navy Vet]

What my dad said (after he saw where he was to land after the Japanese Surrender) was they(Janpan) had put BattleShip Guns up in the hills and they would have been able to pick off the Big Ship that that landing craft came out of.

[Psycho_Bunny]

I’ve remarked we didn’t “bomb them back to the stone age” but “bombed them into the 20th century”

[AceMineral]

Yes, the War Department figured everyone “hitting the beach” in Olympic would find up dead, injured, POW, or missing. However, the War Department thought they would be effective enough until that happened for the follow on in February to defeat the Japanese.

[US Navy Vet]

One thing to comsider when talking about Operation Downfall. The US Army after Okinawa and Iwo Jima put in an Order for Purple Heart Medals and we are STILL using up Purple Hearts from THAT order.

[Little Ray]

Right. Tell me again where the soviets would get the sealift capacity to invade Japan, land troops, and keep them supplied?

[Psycho_Bunny]

The thought at the time...as I recall from the book “Day One”, was that if we gave a demo the Japanese military would have likely thought it was a trick of some sort. And there was a risk the bomb wouldn’t go off which would have been counter productive.

Also, we couldn’t afford to give demos: we didn’t have enough material on hand to make more than 3 bombs: and we set all 3 off.

Actually, it may have been enough for 4, but the premise is the same...we couldn’t waste the material - remember, at the time no one was really positive what the Russians were going to do. There were people worried the Red Army wasn’t going to stop in Berlin and that we’d be having to use a nuke on them.

[DustyMoment]

Had we invaded Japan, the fighting would, literally, have been house-to-house as predicted. The Japanese soldiers were smart, clever and willing to die for their emperor.

I don’t doubt that we might have ended up fighting Stalin for the parts of Japan that they might have ended up controlling. In Germany, that’s what the Berlin Airlift was about.

Things were delicate, to say the least, for many years after Japan’s surrender.

[DustyMoment]

I recall someone who was at the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor (1990s) where they met a teenage American visitor who believed that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was in response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And, this is a surprise to whom?

Given the poor state of American education from the union propagandists these days, American kids know plenty about homosexuality, putting condoms on cucumbers and what a great leader zero is, but not much else.

[Little Ray]

Why?
The Japs would learn all they needed to know when we took out a city, and we wouldn’t waste an A-bomb (we only had three...).

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=56&load=1808

This is IMO a very good piece Bill Whittle from PJTV did on Hiroshima anniv. 2009 which discusses the “demo” possibility.

You may have to sign up (free) or you may get a few views for free before you have to do so.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***4. How the Soviet Union single-handedly won WWII***

I’ve already heard that.

The US wasn’t needed at Normandy as the Russians, pushing from the East had the situation well in hand.

The bombs didn’t make the Japs surrender, it was the invasion by the Russians.

Next thing you know we will be just spectators in that war.

[Retain Mike]

Good point. The book Hell to Pay discusses that. I was over 800 words and made some tradeoffs. In his book Giangreco covers analyses closer to August which make one conclude the order should have been about 1,000,000.

[Retain Mike]

I know some people (particularly the Japanese who want to portray themselves as innocent victims) try to make that case, but in all the sources I have seen discussing the reasoning of the contemporary Japanese leadership that point is not mentioned. Beyond destroying the Kwantung in China there wasn’t much the Russians could do. They had no amphibious navy and the Japanese knew that. The Japanese also knew the Soviet army in East Asia was at the far end of the longest logistic train in all history, and that the Americans had all they could do to supply their own forces. The final battles arguments in the sources I have seen mention inflicting losses on the Americans. They do not take into account the Soviets. Japanese preparations for invasion focus on what the Americans may do, not the Soviets. To me the maturing Japanese knowledge of us and this comprehensive silence provides a strong argument against that position.

[G-Bear]

I have always thought that it was a damn shame the we only had two atomic bombs to drop on Japan in 1945.

(A recent thread here on FR says otherwise, I have not yet found any other information to that effect.)

I also think we should never have blown up all those pretty little Pacific islands testing bombs. We should have just declared Japan as the Western Pacific Testing Range, and done it there.

My father was a Marine at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Saipan, and was scheduled for the invasion of Japan. So add me to the list of those who might not even be here except for the atomic bombs.

[Fraxinus]

The displacement of the so-called traditionalist view within important segments of American opinion took several decades to accomplish. It will take a similar span of time to displace the critical orthodoxy that arose in the 1960s and prevailed roughly through the 1980s, and replace it with a richer appreciation for the realities of 1945. But the clock is ticking.

There are several annoyances I have with the traditional narratives. Many seem to want to put the Atomic Bomb in Isolation, without the multiple reverses the Japanese had suffered in the summer before the Bomb, and the planning of the US invasion that they had intelligence of. The Fast carrier fleet was bombing targets up and down the east coast of Japan. The Soviets were crushing Japanese Army Units in Manchuria.

But I also think that it is just as well that we did not make good on Bull Halsey's boast that when this war is over Japanese would only be spoken in hell. I believe that dropping the Bomb had a part to play in that outcome.