Posted on 08/10/2013 6:09:00 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
That was a conclusion of the 1946 U.S. Bombing Survey ordered by President Harry Truman in the wake of World War II.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said in 1963, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
That wasn’t merely hindsight. Eisenhower made the same argument in 1945. In his memoirs, Ike recalled a visit from War Secretary Henry Stimson:
I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.”
Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief military advisor, wrote:
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
I put a lot of weight on the assessments of the military leaders at the time and the contemporaneous commission that studied it. My colleague Michael Barone, who defends the bombing, has other sources — a historian and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan — that lead him to conclude Japan would not have surrendered.
This confusion is not surprising. For one thing, there’s what we call the “fog of war” — it’s really hard to know what’s happening currently in war, and it’s even harder to predict which way the war will break.
Second, more generally, there’s the imperfection of human knowledge. Humans are very limited in their ability to predict the future and to determine the consequences of their actions in complex situations like war.
So, if Barone wants to stick with Moynihan’s and the New Republic’s assessments of the war while I stick with the assessments of Gen. Eisenhower, Adm. Leahy, and Truman’s own commission, that’s fine. The question — would Japan have surrendered without our bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki? — can’t be answered with certainty today, nor could it have been answered in August 1945.
But this fog, this imperfect knowledge, ought to diminish the weight given to the consequentialist type of reasoning Barone employs — “Many, many more deaths, of Japanese as well as Americans, would have occurred if the atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
We don’t know that. That’s a guess. We didn’t know that at the time. If Pres. Truman believed that, it was a prediction of the future — and a prediction that clashed with the predictions of the military leaders.
Given all this uncertainty, I would lend more weight to principle. One principle nearly everyone shares is this: it’s wrong to deliberately kill babies and innocent children. The same goes for Japanese women, elderly, disabled, and any other non-combatants. Even if you don’t hold this as an absolute principle, most people hold it as a pretty firm rule.
To justify the bombing, you need to scuttle this principle in exchange for consequentialist thinking. With a principle as strong as “don’t murder kids” I think you’d need a lot more certainty than Truman could have had.
I don’t think Truman’s decision was motivated by evil. I’ll even add that it was an understandable decision. But I think it was the wrong one.
I don't see how he's more of an authority than Truman. They had the same info, except as president, Truman got it from more non-military sources, and as a professional pol, probably had a better handle on the cultural aspects of why surrender was not an option for the Japanese. In fact the personal experiences of over a million American troops (as well as Allied troops and guerrilla formations) fighting their never-say-die Japanese counterparts tended to contradict Eisenhower's castles-in-the-air speculation. Ultimately, Eisenhower was talking out of his butt, the same orifice that generated the silly military-industrial complex speech with which liberals (who are otherwise disdainful of him) have been beating us over the head for 60+ years.
You’re looking too far into the future of the development of the bomb. I wrote that it was >intended< for Germany at the beginning of the research to build a bomb. I suggest you read the book. They knew the fission bomb would work, it was the fusion bomb (plutonium) that was questionable since plutonium doesn’t exist in the atomic scale. Again, read the book.
If it was intended for use on Germany, it would have been dismantled after Victory in Europe. It was not. By the time research had progressed to the point where it was a viable weapon - Germany had been defeated.
The Manhattan Project began in 1942. They had no idea how long it would take them to develop the bomb, or how long the war would last. Their fear was the the Nazis would develop it first, and since the Pacific Theater was second in priority to the ETO in everything, I don't see how you've reached that certainty. Particularly in light of Germany's development of the V2 and ME-262 - had Germany still been fighting, their nazi-a$$es would have been lit up.
“Deliberately targeting civilians is murder, and is never morally licit, even in pursuit of a good thing such as ending a war.”
World War II was all about deliberately targeting civilians, and the US did not start it. For that matter the targeting of civilians started with the Spanish Civil War - see Guernica. And that wasn’t the US, either.
The morality expressed in “don’t target civilians” went out the window years before August 1945.
So the notion that other than the “bang for the buck”, what the US did by dropping the atomic bombs was something new, unprecedented, or in departure from all of the things that had gone on before, all of which were started by the Germans and the Japanese, is not based on law or logic.
"...as well as Japan."
The initial claim did not state this. Merely that it was ‘intended for use on Germany’.
I would go so far as to argue that it was never intended for use on Germany. FDR argued that the Germans may develop one, so it was important that the Americans get there first. Why? So that America had a nuclear deterrent against the threat of a German nuclear weapon. It’s all right there...
“Particularly in light of Germany’s development of the V2 and ME-262 - had Germany still been fighting, their nazi-a$$es would have been lit up.”
I just don’t see it, sorry. America had a solid idea as to how long the war would last after the success of Overlord. Bradley and the American R+D and supply chain was set up to use what they got at Overlord and stay with it to the end of the war.
Again, the cutoff for the effectiveness of a nuclear weapon in Europe was Overlord. If it wasn’t ready by then - the war would be over before it had a chance to come to bear.
Sure - the R+D would continue at that point of the war as a hedge, but at least in a logistics and operation sense, America believed that Overlord would be decisive at ending the war in their favor.
Development of the bomb in ‘45 makes perfect sense to me given Truman’s understanding of the war. He believed and invasion would be necessary after the 3 month battle of Okinawa and the difficulty the American forces had in taking the Island. If Okinawa was difficult, than Japan would be even harder. It all fits together. Okinawa didn’t end until June - Trinity was in July and the atomic bombing of Japan a month later.
I think I have a perspective that many people don’t have as to reality. I was in line at a replacement depot, about seventh of a long one, on Leyte, to get our field gear and assignment to one of the divisions being prepared for the invasion of Japan. We had heard about the atomic bombs but no one I knew believed the war would end without the invasion of Japan. There were still minor cleanup skirmishes on some of the islands. When a Lt. came out and told us to go back to our tent there was a big feeling of relief. As much as I can remember no one doubted that it was the bombs that ended the fighting. People aren’t told that practically every major city in Japan was geared to provide war materials. I believe that the Japs in control of their wars and materials might have been planning on a very costly invasion of USA lives in order to extract a very favorable cease fire. To say wait a bit longer and be patient when USA troops were still being in mop ups just doesn’t get to the reality of men dying. I lost my only brother in the fighting on Okinawa. I wish we would have had the bombs ready then, what a difference a few months can make in a war.
Bill Whittle on the necessity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
My father came home alive because of Harry Truman's brave and terrible decision.
My dad was stationed in Japan in the 1950s and I grew up in Sagamihara and Yokohama, returning stateside at age 13 in 1961.
Our maid, Masako, at age eight or nine, was compelled to work in an armaments factory in 1945. When most of the plant was destroyed in a fire bomb raid, the machinery was moved into caves dug into the soft sandstone bluffs near the seashore.
As a little kid, I played with Japanese kids in those caves. We saw no irony in this, a little over a decade after the war.
Thank you.
"CLEAR"??
What's "clear" was that the Japs were NOT prepared to surrender without getting the A-Bomb "memo"....The alternative was 100-200k American dying by taking the island.
War's a b*tch. America didn't start it.
OTOH, America helped rebuild Japan from the ground up and protected them from being a Communist slave-state.
It is called the bubonic plague. They had weaponized it and planned to release it in the fall of 1948.
How do I know this?
Because the Japanese records say so.
Any one remember what happened the last time there was a pandemic following a war? Anywhere from 30-50 million dead.
Just marinate your brain in that for a while.
But Germany was going to be a cake-walk? Your reasoning seems to be based very much after-the-fact.
More americans feel guilty and bbbad about the atomic bombing of japan than japanese feeling bad about being bombed....
The bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki has been used as a tool of “white guilt” for a long time, but in japan they moved on over 50 years ago....
Not to mention the murder of POWs, the rape of Nanking, and numerous other atrocities committed by the Japanese forces wherever they prevailed. Not a tear will I shed for them.
Everyone gets their panties in a wad whenever “nuclear weapons” are mentioned.
1) Dead = dead, no matter the weapon.
2) Most deaths & injuries in from a nuclear weapon are from blast & heat, not radiation
We killed MORE “innocent civilians” in one night of firebombing Tokyo than died in the immediate aftermath of BOTH atom bombs.
“The next month, 334 B-29s took off to raid on the night of 9–10 March (”Operation Meetinghouse”),[7] with 279 of them dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs. Fourteen B-29s were lost.[8] Approximately 16 square miles (41 km2) of the city were destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting firestorm, more immediate deaths than either of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[9][10] The US Strategic Bombing Survey later estimated that nearly 88,000 people died in this one raid, 41,000 were injured, and over a million residents lost their homes. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated a higher toll: 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department established a figure of 124,711 casualties including both killed and wounded and 286,358 buildings and homes destroyed. Richard Rhodes, historian, put deaths at over 100,000, injuries at a million and homeless residents at a million.[11] These casualty and damage figures could be low; Mark Selden wrote in Japan Focus:”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
They started the war, we finished it....end of story.
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