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.
The Germans fought the Soviets tooth and nail right up to the end. The Red Army lost 100,000 men to take Berlin. In the West, they surrendered in droves, because they realized the Western Allies would treat them much better than if they fell into Soviet hands.
Even though I am sort of Generation X — I can see that Japan sowed to the wind by cruelly invading the countries around it as well as bombing Pearl Harbor. And they reaped the whirlwind at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In other words, live by the sword, die by the sword.
If anyone needed to apologize, it was the Japanese leadership to their own people.
Now we need to send the rest of our stockpile to the middle east and turn it into a glass parking lot, develop our own oil!
And? They were irrelevant to the course of the war - they were cut off from their supply, and were in insufficient numbers to threaten anyone.
The next planned offensive was what is now Malaysia to retake Singapore and re-establish control over the strait of Moluccas. This would have joined up the Southern front to the Western and secured the passage to India.
The problem is that the only way for Japan to actually maintain control over these vast territories is through shipping. They had no overland path from Japan to Korea, to China to Vietnam. Instead, they supplied their troops by sea. Now that they no longer had the forces to supply their troops in Burma and in SE Asia, the forces had to make do on their own. Most hunkered in for attacks that did not come (as they were irrelevant).
Japan had bigger priorities than to maintain troops in Burma when they were under interdict. This the IJN understood back in 1944 with the battle of the Philippine sea. They knew that once their internal defensive corridor was breached that they couldn’t maintain the shipping from Japan south - exactly the problem they faced at the start of the war.
This is why Spruance chose to attack there and not elsewhere. Japan could not afford to lose and would direct the majority of their forces. This was expected.
Japan later on, in the Battle of Leyte attempted to protect their shipping corridor one last time by throwing the remainder of the IJN’s large surface fleet. Checkmate at this point was inevitable but the hope here at Leyte was to delay defeat.
The point wasn't American casualties - the point was Japanese casualties. For example, of the 25,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, how many survived? A couple thousand, maybe? So, based on that shining example (and similar percentages at the other places I mentioned) one could have reasonable assumed, beforehand, that they were willing to fight to the bitter end at Okinawa. And, because there were many more Japanese soldiers on Okinawa than Iwo Jima, one could have also reasonably assumed there would therefore be many more American casualties. You see how this works?
The bitter fighting at Okinawa should NOT have been a surprise to American war planners and it certainly did not alter their plans with regard to the nuke. The nuke had taken YEARS to develop, it had been intended with Germany specifically in mind, but circumstances dictated otherwise. So, your statement that "It was never intended at [sic] Germany" is complete, unadulterated b.s.
Conventional incendiary bombing had already destroyed 45 Japanese cities.
Japan wasn’t ready to surrender, and didn’t surrender.
The first atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima.
Japan wasn’t ready to surrender, and didn’t surrender.
After the second atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki, the wussy emperor finally put his foot down, said he’d have no kingdom to pass to his son if the war were not stopped.
He recorded the surrender message, and the records were to be shipped to all the military radio stations.
Some officers took it upon themselves to interdict the shipping out of the records, as well as to seize the emperor and continue the war.
When the lights had to be shut off during a US bombing run, the officers got lost in the dark palace, and failed to accomplish either mission.
The point isn't that they were relevant - it's that every direct interaction with actual Japanese who were not prevaricating diplomats playing for time indicated that they had no inclination to surrender. Even the Germans "surrendered" only when Berlin was overrun. The Japanese were known for fighting to the last man and, in the post-war era, for holding out for decades past the war's end. The idea that the Japanese would put up less of a fight than the Germans short of some massive shock, might or might not be ludicrous, but it certainly ran against the experience of every encounter Allied forces had with them. Eisenhower's comment about the Japanese inclination to surrender sounded like his way of passing the buck - since as President Truman had taken ownership, why let any of the dirt get splashed on him?
“The Japanese were known for fighting to the last man and, in the post-war era, for holding out for decades past the war’s end.”
Nonsense. They resisted capture through suicide rather than permit allied capture. That’s not exactly ‘fighting to the last man’, is it?
The Allies took advantage of this by directing their attacks at strategic centres and cutting off areas that were well defending but unimportant to the general progress of the war. Japanese armies in northern Burma could do what? Attack china and be annihilated? March down the river to Mandalay and be annhilated? Do a forced retreat to where? Vietnam? Stay where they were without adequate supply? There were simply no good options for them.
That the Burmese armies were rendered insignificant is significant in that they could no longer hinder the progress of the war. What does it matter to the allies if you’ve got 20k Japanese soldiers cut off from civilized society in the jungles of Burma? What exactly are they going to do? What they ended up doing is the only sane outcome - marching to Mandalay and surrendering to the allies (instead of to the Chinese) who would have executed them. So that is what they actually ended up doing once they realized that there was no other option.
Arguing “Japanese had forces elsewhere that would have had to be engaged” Isn’t really a significant argument. By 1945, the allied blockade had forced these armies to hunker down into irrelevance.
“The point wasn’t American casualties”
Yes, the point was the American casualties.
Okinawa was a shock as American losses were an order of magnitude higher than at Iwo Jima. And, as I’ve already demonstrated, allied losses at Iwo Jima were considered high for the war. Do I need to cite contemporary opinion stating exactly this?
Okinawa in May after VE day was followed up by the push (by Truman) for the Trinity experiment, followed by the subsequent dropping of the bomb on Japan. The timeline fits together well. It matches up with contemporary opinion of the shock of the American battle losses at Okinawa being larger than the entire rest of the war in the pacific up to that time.
The historical account simply doesn’t support your position, sorry. Okinawa was a shock.
Some did; Yamamoto, for instance.
That is incorrect. 100K American lives were lost in the Pacific campaign, only 12K of which were lost on Okinawa, and a plurality of the losses in the Okinawa campaign were of Navy personnel, whose dead exceeded that of the Marines and the Army taken individually. American deaths from Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, added together, exceeded the Okinawa death toll. This excludes, of course, the 10K killed during the Battle of Bataan, when American forces were on the defensive.
They committed suicide when they were about to be burned to a crisp by flamethrowers, and had run out of ammo. In fact, many pretended to surrender and then attacked Allied troops who let their guard down. However, the point here is that the only way to get them to stop fighting, whether via committing suicide or last ditch banzai charges, was to overrun their positions. The Germans surrendered when they were surrounded. The Japanese figured that to die fighting was to become part of the Divine Wind that would sweep American troops from the home islands, that every GI killed sapped Uncle Sam's resolve. And I suspect they were right. Past a certain point, we would have declared victory and gone home.
Which is one of the reasons I’m doubtful the bomb would ever have been dropped on Germany even if it was developed prior to German capitulation. Europe is just too small. Berlin is what? 40 miles from pre-war Poland? Do you nuke Vienna, despite the fact that the Austrians did not bring Hitler to power?
Even Fulda is just 170 miles from France.
To put it in perspective, White Sands was 125 miles from Albuquerque. Given what we know today of fallout - does it seem wise to drop an atomic weapon in the heart of Europe?
“That is incorrect. 100K American lives were lost in the Pacific campaign, only 12K of which were lost on Okinawa, and a plurality of the losses in the Okinawa campaign were of Navy personnel, whose dead exceeded that of the Marines and the Army taken individually. American deaths from Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, added together, exceeded the Okinawa death toll. This excludes, of course, the 10K killed during the Battle of Bataan, when American forces were on the defensive.”
Total casulties on Okinawa *alone* were 80k, per the previous chart. Well above those of Iwo Jima.
“They committed suicide when they were about to be burned to a crisp by flamethrowers, and had run out of ammo.”
Ok, you’re a Japanese soldier in the heart of Burma. You’ve lost touch with your command structure. You are no longer being supplied. What do you do? You haven’t had contact with anyone, friend or foe?
“In fact, many pretended to surrender and then attacked Allied troops who let their guard down.”
Vanishingly small portion of the total. This is incorrect. Most who surrendered, surrendered.
“However, the point here is that the only way to get them to stop fighting”
Is this what was done at Truk? Or did the garrison surrender when faced with starvation after the loss of their supply chain? The garrison surrendered in 1945 after they ran out of food and the USN cut off their supply.
Starving pockets out via blockade was done, and was done successfully throughout the pacific war.
Yamamoto probably calculated that for Uncle Sam, losing the PI wasn't really that big a deal, since independence was in the works, anyway, so the US probably wouldn't engage in all-out war against Japan. And this view would have been backed up by historical fact - the Russo-Japanese War had not resulted in all-out war* between Russia and Japan, despite the fact that Japan had attacked the Russian Navy before declaring war. Japan went on to win that war because the Russians decided not to take it any further.
Near the end of WWII, Japan seemed to be hoping that it could negotiate an end to the Pacific War similar to the deal that the Russians got at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, where the Russians lost some territory, but business went on as usual, with the Romanovs 100% in charge and so on. We were looking to place GI's on Japanese soil and systematically demilitarize Japanese society. That wasn't going to happen without either the A-bomb or the invasion and occupation of the Japanese home islands.
* They probably figured the US couldn't possibly be more aggressive than the Russian bear, which had been expanding for centuries against its neighbors. They were wrong.
80K casualties is correct. But the dead accounted for around 12K. Bataan casualties were 30K. The dead came to 10K.
Bataan wasn’t an offensive operation...
We’re examining losses in the other end of the campaign, not losses from defending against the Japanese.
Here’s another account of what your father and father-in-law would likely have seen, without the efforts of Gen. Groves et. al.:
http://www.webwizpro.com/1945InvasionofJapan.html
Would have made Verdun, the Somme and “The Russian Front”, combined, look like a mild dispute in a convent.
Ultimately, the Japanese thought Americans only cared about the bottom line, just like the Russians. The reason the Romanovs did not pursue the Russo-Japanese War to victory was for pure cost-benefit reasons - the costs exceeded the benefits. I don’t think it occurred to Yamamoto in his wildest dreams that American war aims in response to Pearl Harbor would involve the military occupation of the Japanese home islands. After all, WWI had resulted in an armistice, and no Allied troops on German soil.
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