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.
in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped,
1) We used to hear that all the time by the revisionists, starting in 1945. "The submarines had sunk all their merchant fleet, they were starving" ad nauseum. In the meantine, 1,000 allied prisoners of war were dying each day in Jap prison camps. (When a group of us were together in school, and someone brought up that Bad Americans B/S, I'd tell them to pretend that the rest of us had sons and husbands in those prisons, so please tell us why they should die, because we didn't want to look bad. Deer in headlights.)
2)How many Allied soldiers and civilians would have been killed while we waited? Japan had over 2 million men under arms in China and Burma and they weren't using blanks.
3) When people in those nations who suffered under Jap rule were asked if we should have dropped the bomb, many replied in the sense of "Why did you drop only two?"
4) Some American diplomat was talking with a Jap counterpart after the war and the Jap said they surrendered because they didn't want to be hit with a third bomb. When told we used the only two we had, he replied "If we had known you had only two . . ." and then stopped, but the meaning was clear.
5) Can't remember which book, but it reprinted a pep talk by a Jap general to his troops. It went along the lines of "Yes, things look really bad, but if we redouble our effort and prove out willingness to die for the emperor, we can still win." He gave that speech AFTER the second bomb was dropped.
even if Russia had not entered the war
What kind of crap is that? Russia's intervention did not cause them to surrender earlier, it was the A-Bombs. Russia told us they would attack in August of '45 and they would have taken most of Northern Japan before we could have gotten there - and they would have been divided like Korea was.
I went to Mira Costa college in Oceanside, CA, near Camp Pendleton. The night classes I went to had a majority of retired Marines. Our Paki physics teacher told us America dropped the bomb was racism. Many in the class hung their heads. WTF??? I told the Paki that half the Marines in this class wouldn't be here today if we hadn't have dropped the bomb. A few of the head hangers had an epiphany then. I also told him that Col. Tibbets had mentioned his job was a administrative nightmare in the early days as he had to plan for a bomb drop on Germany as well as Japan. Gremany had the good sense to cave in after Hitler committed suicide and that was the only reason they were spared. The interesting "IF" would be, what if Hirohito committed seppuku? Would the Japs have fought on?
All these "IFs" fall into the category my dad classified them: "If the queen had balls, she'd be king."
“Manhattan Project”, by RUSH
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5g8lArr2Js
Imagine a time when it all began
In the dying days of a war
A weapon - that would settle the score
Whoever found it first
Would be sure to do their worst -
They always had before...
The big bang - took and shook the world
Shot down the rising sun
the end was begun - it would hit everyone
When the chain reaction was done
The big shots - try to hold it back
Fools try to wish it away
The hopeful depend on a world without end
Whatever the hopeless may say....
America did not expect Okinawa to be so difficult. You can read the contemporary opinions. It’s right there. Okinawa was a shock, and changed how the US saw the war. Again - it’s not difficult to understand.
Okinawa was difficult, US realizes that an invasion of Japan would be even more difficult. US steps up atomic bomb research.. Trinity comes a month later. Bombs developed for us on Japan and used.
What troops in Burma? Burma was finished in early May of 1945. Zipper was proposed for the recapture of Malaya. The Dutch East Indies were already liberated by then as well.
“Gremany had the good sense to cave in after Hitler committed suicide and that was the only reason they were spared.”
Defense of Germany was untenable once the Rhine was crossed. The Germans themselves knew it. Hitler did not commit suicide until the Battle of Berlin, and the Allies had occupied most of what became West Germany.
As for dropping the Atomic bomb to keep Russia out - that’s contrary to the opinion that dropping it was necessary to win the war, is it not?
The Philippines Sea back in June of 1944 was decisive. The Japanese could not keep their hold on all the territory without airpower combined with sea power. The Philippines sea sank their remaining carrier planes and Leyte Gulf sank their remaining surface fleet.
The only thing the Japanese could do is dig in as they did at Okinawa. That was it. You’re telling me that the entire home island is going to resist a blockade for years? I don’t see it.
My father was a motor pool sergeant on Leyte in the summer of 1945 after being having his draft number finally come up in late 1943 (he had been a worker at Newport News Shipbuilding before then for a few years). He told me once that he’d already been informed that he was going to be part of the invasion of Japan, he never said whether it was going to be Olympic (the invasion of Kyushu) or Coronet (the invasion of Honshu). He wasn’t going to be going ashore in the first wave, but he wasn’t going to be sitting back and working in a motor pool either.
God bless the Manhattan Project, Enola Gay, and Bockscar, because if it wasn’t for them, he might well not have come home in 1946 and I wouldn’t be here.
}:-)4
Yes you are correct about McNamara. He was our own worst enemy.
OTH. The changes in bombing strategy mostly had to do with the fact that almost all of Japan lived in matchstick houses. There were very few masonry/brick structures. LeMay rightly guessed that it wouldn’t take much to torch the place.
He was right.
Short answer; they thought we were screwing with their ability to import oil, which was not available domestically.
Regards,
GtG
later
It stopped an invasion that could have killed over a million people.
Name for me a place where the Japanese didn't offer fanatical resistance. Guadalcanal? Tarawa? Saipan? Peleliu? Iwo Jima? If American war planners were "surprised" by Okinawa after those previous battles then they should have been freakin' fired - the Japanese had been using that island for artillery training for years and had just about every inch zeroed. Why would they have imagined Japan itself would be anything but a bloodbath?
Again, it's not difficult to understand - they started work in 1942 - they didn't use the bomb on Germany for the simple reason that they didn't have it ready before Germany folded.
I’ve read about the heroic fight the men on Wake put up - the real shame is that relief forces were on the way and then got recalled. I’m very sorry that your experience with this is so personal.
Guadalcanal - 7k casulties.
Tarawa - 1.7k casulties
Saipan - 13.7k casulties
Peleliu - 9.7k casulties
Iwo Jima - 28k casulties
Okinawa - 84k casulties.
One of these things is not like the others.
One of these things just doesn’t belong.
Can you tell me which thing is not like the others.
Before I get to the end of my song?
Something to keep in mind, If you look at the total world war II casulties including civilians:
only 4 percent of the total military deaths were Axis civilians. 58 percent of the total were allied civilians.
Soviets lost close to 24 million and China lost close to 20 million. Japan lost about 2.5 million.
Most of the Axis civilian casulties (about 3:1) were between Germany and the Soviet Union. Japan had barely more civilian casulties than Romania.
I think that pretty much says it all. For all the handwringing over the Americans and their conduct in the war - I think the numbers are sobering. They did not target civilians whereas their enemies were all too happy to do so.
No, from what I understand, after reviewing the casualty rates on Saipan, Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the main reason was the predicted horrendous casualties we would suffer if we had to invade. The Russian thingy was just another nail in the Japanese coffin. As it was, the Russians demanded co-equal footing at the conference table. They took over the Kurile Islands and still own them today, so you can imagine what the story would be if they have taken more terrirtory.
A sidebar was that we found a letter that was sent out to the Jap prison commanders. To wit: when they heard that Americans had invaded the homeland, words to the effect of "do what is necessary" with all prisoners. Some commanders didn't wait for the invasion. Read about Palawan for just one instance.
There was also another political angle in that the Democrats feared a major backlash (with good reason), if we suffered anywhere near those predicted casualties when the president had the means to end the war sooner by dropping the bombs.
“They took over the Kurile Islands and still own them today, so you can imagine what the story would be if they have taken more terrirtory.”
Keeping the Russians out of a defeated Japan is a different motive from ‘necessary for the defeat of Japan.’
“There was also another political angle in that the Democrats feared a major backlash (with good reason), if we suffered anywhere near those predicted casualties when the president had the means to end the war sooner by dropping the bombs.”
More American lives were lost at Okinawa than in all the other major battles in the pacific up to then - combined. The other bad thing is the casulty ratio. There were 80k American casulties to 120k Japanese troops. That is what shocked the American command at the time that despite outright superiority in troop counts, that the Japanese defenders were able to hang with the Americans.
These guys:
After two months of arduous combat in a coastal zone of reservoirs and river deltas, Meiktila was taken on 4 March 1945. Two months later, an ambitious amphibious operation allowed Slim’s army to re-enter Rangoon on 6 May 1945. Although this was effectively the end of the campaign, the remaining Japanese forces in Burma did not surrender until 28 August 1945.
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