Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japan

August 2020 will mark the 75th 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 generations which endured the cruel tragedies required for carrying out those decisions are rapidly leaving us. Therefore, I find it hard to imagine that the left will allow this anniversary of VJ-Day to pass without attacking the decision of this country made to use the atomic bombs.

I believe we will be regaled with the moral exhibitionism of revisionists who adhere to the principle of premeditated ignorance when reviewing the mass of information available from familiar or obscure archives. Safely remote in time they will present asymmetrical, contra-factual analyses limited to a few sound bites about what a needless and criminal decision the United States had made.

In this essay, when I talk about people living into and through history, I am considering those, both American and Japanese, who faced one emerging tragic reality after another, that instead of clarifying the situation the information brought up ever more gruesome possibilities to consider.

I present this essay as a starting point for those interested in countering arguments presented. In that regard, the bibliography is probably more valuable because the points mentioned are at least truthful if they might occasionally lack in wordsmithing. I hope there are a few good letters or phone calls in here somewhere.

As this personal knowledge becomes ever rarer, we must increasingly listen without their response to the moral exhibitionism of revisionists who adhere to the principle of premeditated ignorance when reviewing the mass of information available from familiar or obscure archives. Safely remote in time 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, 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 point to early estimates that extrapolated from 20,000 American and over 240,000 Japanese deaths on Saipan and Okinawa to estimates of 500,000 American and millions of Japanese casualties for mainland invasions.

This widely known estimate arises from studies preceding the full recognition by planning staffs of the American experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. It does not consider the experience of the allies in defeating German resistance within its borders or later realization of doubling of Japanese divisions in the Home Islands. Also, it does not include the possibility that the Imperial Japan War Faction would spirit the Emperor to a remote location and continue the war long after the Tokyo/Yokohama region had been conquered.

Yet even these early estimates are over three times the casualties suffered by Americans during D-Day, 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 and combat related casualties since June 1944 compared to a quarter million in the previous two and a half years.

For Harry Truman, Henry Stimpson, and George Marshall their own combat memories penetrated current realities. They were determined to pursue any alternatives rather than procure countless American deaths in protracted ground campaigns following amphibious assaults matching the D-Day landings. The experiences of Pacific campaigns proved the Japanese would not crack morally or psychologically. The suicides and killing of Japanese civilians by their own combat forces on the islands of Saipan and Okinawa proved the Japanese saying that “we will fight until we eat stones”. Truman contemplating 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”.

Secretary of War Henry Stimpson in July 1945 prepared a study for invading Japan to answer the inevitable Congressional questions of why there still needed to be huge selective service call ups when the US now fought on a single front. In his summary William B. Shockley the director of the study said, “If the study shows that the behavior of nations in all historical cases comparable to Japan’s has in fact been invariably consistent with the behavior of the troops in battle, then it means that the Japanese dead and ineffectives at the time of the defeat will exceed the corresponding number for the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least 5 to 10 million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and 4 million casualties including 400,000 and 800,000 killed.” This summary aligns those evolving studies by Pentagon and Western Pacific intelligence staffs , as well as Herbert Hoover’s informal analytical group.

This last estimate could have easily involved the upper range of numbers had the invasion occurred. 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. Stimpson had been an artillery officer in WW I, had seen the terrain of Japan firsthand, and told Truman it promised a more bitter struggle than the allies had experienced in Germany. This rapid increase in killing efficiency extended to stubborn defense of major cities just as the Germans carried out in Berlin, where 81,116 Russians died and 280,251 were wounded.

The Japanese would be waiting for the Americans, because the uncertainty caused by the “island hopping” strategy had ended. Experience had taught the Japanese to identify the few regions within their mountainous country that could accommodate the huge armies and air forces needed to subdue their homeland. American intelligence already noted repositioning of divisions into southern Kyushu to counter the first phase of the invasion and could find no alternative sites. There would be few opportunities for maneuver, but instead would demand battles of attrition reminiscent of Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and WW I trench warfare.

The Japanese War Faction resolved to wage Total War of upmost savagery rather than contemplate the shameful reality of surrender. Imperial Japan had even incorporated their urban civilian population into a distributed manufacturing infrastructure making individual homes into cottage industries. Reconnaissance photos taken to assess bomb damage revealed factory equipment in most burnt out homes. With such a spiritual and material national unity committed to waging war, the incendiary raids and atomic bombs were no longer indiscriminate or disproportional.

Leaders maintained the honorable sacrifice of 20 million Japanese lives was essential for planning final mainland battles. Those 20 million deaths or casualties would have occurred in a population of only 72 million. They contended this limitless slaughter would inflict millions of American casualties and grind them into a stalemate that would convince them to abandon the Potsdam Declaration. In preparation, they had redeployed veteran Kwantung divisions and other selected troops 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 to stay behind invaders for suicide missions using light weapons, explosives, and biological agents. Any food shortages caused by the blockade would first call for killing of allied prisoners, and then starvation of as many of their own people as necessary to sustain their armies and civilian militias.

Much was unknown throughout the war about capabilities because America found The Home Islands generally impenetrable except for cryptographic intelligence and reconnaissance photos. The allies had no agents in the Home Islands and most communication was by land line. Americans had to rely upon their primary principle of intelligence analysis to minimize uncertainties by deciding the enemy will focus their command economy on realization of the most devastating weapon capabilities. The true extent of those unknown capabilities would only be discovered by suffering their consequences during invasion.

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 invasion fleet. The kamikazes would concentrate on killing soldiers on the amphibious ships and seldom attempt to attack the carriers protected by nearly impenetrable screens of combat air patrols and anti-aircraft artillery. At the Battle of Okinawa they had proved a devastating weapon destroying or damaging nearly 400 ships and killing or wounding nearly 10,000 sailors. The plans flew long distances on a few know routes. In the Home Islands, they would fly from camouflaged airfields, take unpredictable flight paths using mountainous terrain to evade radar, and attack the static amphibious fleet while it discharged troops and supplies onto the invasion beaches. They had also discovered their hundreds of wooden aircraft were nearly invisible to radar and immune to the proximity fuse of anti-aircraft artillery. Only after occupation did the U.S. also become aware of the extent of suicide boats and mini-submarines stockpiled for the invasion.

Americans had information from China they could face biological warfare. These biological pathogens had already been tested on several hundred thousand in Chinese villages and on prisoners of war. In confirmation occupation searchers uncovered large stockpiles of viruses, spirochetes, and fungus spores throughout rural Japan. They discovered military leaders planned to direct civilian militias to stay behind the 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.

The decision to invade also had to include assessment of Japan’s nuclear program. As WW II began, the U.S. knew Japanese intellectuals included accomplished physicists such as Yoshio Nishina. Analysts knew he was a staunch Imperial nationalist and a capable leader; so capable that two of his students later won Nobel prizes. Analysts knew he built Japan’s first cyclotron in 1940.

A definite 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 our Navy discovered its cargo contained 560 kilos of uranium oxide intended for the Japanese to refine into fissionable material. Even a cumbersome devices might have resided beneath a peasant’s hut to devastate the buildup of forces.

After the war, interrogators discovered Nishina was given a substantial budget to build an atomic bomb. When the Americans reached Tinian and B-29’s could reach Japan further efforts were concentrated at the huge industrial facilities in Hungnam North Korea. One day after the Nagasaki bomb, Japan exploded an experimental nuclear device off the coast of Hungnam. Stalin’s forces advanced beyond Hungnam to the 38th parallel and Japanese equipment and scientists vanished inside the Soviet Union. No further information emerged.

Hirohito appointed a Peace Faction in January 1944, based of navy and army staff studies determining Japan could wage war successfully only until June-July 1943. The faction was to ensure an Imperial decision to authorize negotiations was timed to the emergence of common citizen war-weariness, while allowing sufficient catastrophic slaughters to satisfy military honor styled as romantic self-sacrifice. There would be no genuine peace efforts, because the dominate military caste had often used assassination to still opposition.

Hirohito’s government then conducted an excruciating brand of political kabuki through twenty months of continuous defeats, fire bombings of over 60 cities, looming starvation, and 1.3 million additional Japanese deaths. Too few leaders could discover the courage to contemplate that national suicide would not be required to bring about a condition preserving personal and national honor. Nearly a million of those lives might have been saved if the Japanese public and military had been forced to accept the truth about their crumbling empire and the inevitability of surrender. Even if Hirohito had used the fall of Germany on May 7 as a reason, a half million lives would have been saved.

Revisionists claim Japan was seeking surrender before the last meetings of Hirohito and his advisors, 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 Japanese 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 the Hiroshima bomb, he received a war declaration instead of answers to his latest proposals. U.S. cryptologists reading the diplomatic code confirmed Togo’s Russian contacts were ineffectual. American intelligence also knew those involving Allen Dulles in Switzerland lacked any interest by Japanese leaders.

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. Instead, they ignored their manifest obligation to bring forward substantive questions and proposals and chose to greet the Potsdam Declaration with silence.

The Japanese Cabinet and High Command debated the Final Battles arguments into utter physical and mental exhaustion for eleven hours following the second atomic bomb at Nagasaki on August 9. During those days, they contemplated the reports of Yoshio Nishina and Bunsaku Arakatsu confirming the Americans had released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the devastating atomic weapon Japan had been developing. During those conferences at the Imperial Palace, they also saw much of Tokyo about them had been blasted and burned into a wasteland. The facts of these deliberations confirm the assessment in June 1945 by Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, and Robert Oppenheimer that no creditable demonstration of the atomic bomb could be devised to end the war.

For the final meeting, Hirohito reluctantly invited Baron Hiranuma, who had fiercely disapproved the Pearl Harbor attack. He maintained the United States could not be provoked into war by Japanese conquest of British, French, and Dutch colonies. But the baron was also a renowned prosecutor who could ask the hard questions now essential. 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 was truly necessary to preserve that spiritual essence. There was no rebuttal to his questions, but the War Faction remained unyielding.

Here was illuminated the decisive role Kokutai played in determining the surrender. Any influential 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 this collective soul defining Japan. All able citizens served as soldiers or as civilian militia and awaited the decision of the Empire’s ruling oligarchy.

Though the two factions remained 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 would 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 negotiations leading to surrender.

The atomic bombs accomplished the requirements of unconditional surrender. As detailed in the Potsdam Declaration. Japan eliminating its Emperor was never a condition. By accepting the 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 citizens’ free expression for determining a post war government that eradicated multi-millennial martial and Imperial characteristics.

The American citizens and their leaders who had suffered through two bloody deluges in the twentieth century approached the summer of 1945 with several imperatives. After witnessing the feeble responses to a resurgent Germany following WW I, they would not tolerate a peace requiring anything less than total submission. They found intolerable the idea of 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 lives standard. They would not accept months of diplomatic dithering accompanied by additional hundreds of thousands of civilian and military deaths throughout Asia. They would not suffer the uncertainty of allowing an opportunity for Japan’s nuclear program to produce atomic weapons to repel an invasion.

As far as the country was concerned, the only innocent civilian lives at stake were the common men and women become citizen soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who would have had to invade Japan. The Greatest Generation, their parents, and grandparents would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war simply to indulge in some incestuous moral orthodoxy such as that found so attractive 75 years later.

Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the WW II Era, Sheldon H. Harris, PhD

Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, (1971) David Bergamni His book gets a bad rap in some places, because he was the first to publish the type of contrary information my other two references on Hirohito’s life presented 18 and 29 years later.

Hirohito, (1989) 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 Sacrifice of Twenty 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.”

Point of No Return 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

Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the WW II Era, Sheldon H. Harris, PhD

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

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 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

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

There were also plans already underway to move something like 12,000 B-17s and B-24s of the 8th air force to Okinawa to conduct a bombing campaign of every inch of Japan.

It’s childish not to see that it shortened the war. Also the USSR got into the war in a big way in Manchuria. Had it dragged on 6 more months, they would have been in on a settlement and today we would probably have a North and South Japan.

But most of all Truman said he would not like to explain to the families of any US Soldier who died in the invasion why he had a devastating weapon and refused to use it.

Besides, the brutal Japanese became the nicest people on earth after that.

If anything Hiroshima and Nagasaki are fine arguments for dropping the bomb on Mecca, Medina some Monday. If the Iranians and Pakistanis say a single word about it, Islamabad and Tehran can be Tuesday.

Islam has been a pain in the western ass for 1000 years. They are asking for it bad.

What were the alternatives? A negotiated settlement with Japan? I guess a few (one?) of the more naive Japanese strategists entertained that fantasy, but that was never considered by the American side for a nanosecond. An invasion on the Japanese mainland would have killed hundreds of thousands of American military and, almost certainly, many more Japanese than were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman was right.

Ok, time for my every 5 year post from experience. While stationed in South Korea in 1972 and talking with an elderly Korean man that had been held as a laborer in Japan, I asked about the war and the discussion led to the two atomic bombs. He asked me “why did you stop at two?” Not my position but an interesting perspective.

Excellent!

This topic is of personal interest to me as my dad worked on the Manhattan Project.

Thank you for posting.

While stationed on Okinawa in the 1970’s, I visited a local shop and there purchased a most interesting relic of the war.

In the waning days of the war, steel was in short supply. The ever inventive Japanese turned to an ancient technology and began making hand grenade bodies from a very, very hard porcelain. These would be filled with explosive and a detonator and primer/fuse inserted. My grenade was, of course, empty.

Any invasion of the Home Islands would have been a long, protracted blood-bath. All the worst elements of WWI trench warfare and the caves of Mount Suribachi combined..., but fought by not only Japanese soldiers but also against women, children and old men. Nightmares for all concerned for a lifetime.

Let all the peace-niks go and lay commemorative wreaths at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Dropping the Bombs was the compassionate thing to do.

I just learned a couple years ago, that my uncle was a medic with the first wave of SeaBees to go into Hiroshima

After that he spent his life doing x-rays, owning his own lab

He lived well into his 70’s, but had 5 different cancers going when he died, but none of them likely came from his military service

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