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.
Hitler admired Britain and wanted their assistance. When he found that wasn't going to be the case, things changed.
Had he had the opportunity...he would have most definitely attacked the US. It may not have been in his initial plan, but as his madness increased and he saw that his “master plan” may not be accomplished, his insanity and fear of loss saw no bounds.
We would have had to fight two wars in Japan, the first against Tojo, the second against the Communists.
At the end of the war, the Japs had 2,000,000 men under arms on the home isands, and 3000 operational aircraft. In addition they 'militarized' uncounted civilians and were planning on using them as fodder or suicide soldiers. How many would have died via the blockade? The bomb(s) were the only good option in terms of sparing lives on both sides, and saving out POWs, in effect, they were the only righteous option. We can thank God they worked so well.
Yep, as it was, we just postponed the war with the commies 5 years. But because of the decisive nature of the bomb, we had a base in Japan to fight the war in Korea, one not devastated by a blockade of an undetermined length, a period of time when if possible, the hatred between former enemies might have become more intractable. The success of a blockade would have been inevitable, but at what cost in lives, misery and expenditure of national treasure on both sides. Any speculation on its length is revisionism of the worst kind. The free world deserved a speedy end to the conflict, the bomb paved the way, no pun intended.
“they were the only righteous option”
Frankly I trust Eisenhower’s opinion on this matter more than you.
That's fine, now reason out how a blockade would work, even absent our continued air and naval attacks. Answer how our POWs survive, estimate the number of Jap dead before they are forced to the peace table, how much longer would the world have to wait before the stranglehold had its effect. You have a scenario across Sea of Japan similar to a blockaded Imperial Japan, where the military and the political leadership eats, the rest of the population not so much.
Look at the history of the war, learn to think rather than emote about the use of the bomb. I like Ike, I doubt he raised this issue in his run for the Presidency as he would have been crushed. I noted earlier that a blockade working was inevitable, but a war planner figures out the costs before planning or approving a Course of Action (COA). A blockade didn't meet the objectives unless the only objective was victory without a timetable.
“Frankly I trust Eisenhower’s opinion on this matter more than you.”
That could be a mistake. Eisenhower understood nothing of the Japanese. His opinion was based on the assumption that the Japanese were rational according to his standards of rationality. That assumption was false.
Really disappointed in Carney. The anti-bomb point of view is almost invariably an emotional rather than a logical calculation, as it is here.
“Eisenhower understood nothing of the Japanese”
Sounds like pure hubris to me.
“That’s fine, now reason out how a blockade would work, even absent our continued air and naval attacks.”
I find it an odd tendency that whenever someone argues something that they don’t like, to insert conditions that make no sense whatsoever. Why must a blockade not include air and naval attacks in order to contain the Japanese?
“where the military and the political leadership eats, the rest of the population not so much”
The IJN would be foolish to do so. The military at that point could not save Japan. By starving the people, it would lead to their own destruction.
“If I am not mistaken, I believe Szilard’s view was colored by the prospect of using the bomb against Japan. He had not voiced an objection to using it against Germany. Only after Germany surrendered did he become anti-nuclear.”
Haven’t learned enough about Leo Szilard to be sure, but I will gladly defer to okie01 on this. A passionate man and a standout among the leading scientists of his day, it would be very much in character for Dr Sz to have taken just such a stance.
Albert Einstein became a darling of anti-nuke movements and world-government activists thanks to a number of pithy remarks about the purported hopelessness of military measures, and what was perceived by the average citizen as ever-escalating levels of violence. But after more details were made public postwar, he ventured the opinion that the German nation should be dissolved. Or so I read in Walter Isaacson’s 2007 biography of Dr E.
My recollection is from The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes -- a thoroughly informative and entertaining work. Leo Szilard was certainly a leading character among the scientific cadre and seemed to be the source of constant insights about how to make the damn thing work.
An altogether fascinating man.
“...In what way is ‘historian’ not a profession? ...”
I guess we’re going to have to proceed via baby steps here.
A profession is defined by exclusivity: the in-group is delineated from the out-group. There are criteria for qualification and entry; for maintaining standards; gatekeepers exist, and sanctions can be taken members who violate standards (both of competence and ethical probity).
The traditional “big three” are theology, the law, and medicine. Academics languished long as provisionally-respectable stepchildren, both helped and held back by the mundane fact that the first two were bound up with voluminous book-learning.
Others were added as the scientific revolution gathered momentum: engineering (civil initially, then mechanical, then electrical), administration, management, academia; military professionalism got its start in the United States via civil engineering (West Point, officially founded in 1802, was the nation’s very first engineering school), but paucity of content remained a factor until the proliferation of technological weaponry began to accelerate later in the 19th century.
Forum members will note that “historian” and “scientist” appear nowhere on any of these lists (fans of Star Trek and Dr Who notwithstanding). Historians are at most academics, and science was the province of wealthy eccentrics or underbusy clergy until the rise of government bureaucracies and university-led research institutions in the late 19th century.
Historians are usually writers, and there are no entry criteria for that activity. Of a certainty, authors never face discipline. Essentially, writers are people who can’t shut up ... the fact that they can multiply words means more to them than the validity of anything they might chance to write.
“A profession is defined by exclusivity: the in-group is delineated from the out-group. There are criteria for qualification and entry; for maintaining standards; gatekeepers exist, and sanctions can be taken members who violate standards (both of competence and ethical probity).”
All of which exist for historians.
“The traditional “big three” are theology, the law, and medicine. Academics languished long as provisionally-respectable stepchildren, both helped and held back by the mundane fact that the first two were bound up with voluminous book-learning.”
Nonsense. You should start by reading up on the seven liberal arts.
They were: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithematic, geometry, astronomy and Music.
This goes all the way back to the Greeks.
They are matched by what Aquinas called the seven sciences.
Civil law, Canon law, History, Natural Philosophy, Normative Philosophy, Theology and Metaethics.
This is very different from the programme today, but it demonstrates that history as a discipline is one of the oldest disciplines in existence.
“Forum members will note that “historian” and “scientist” “
You can fold up all of engineering and science into Natural Philosophy, respectively, if one studies the discipline even in the time of Galileo. It wasn’t until later that the disciplines began to divide where one might study Biology, and not Physics or Chemistry. This divide is actually quite late - late 19th century.
“Historians are usually writers, and there are no entry criteria for that activity.”
Quite the contrary. The study of rhetoric, logic and oratory are all part of the trivium and go back all the way to Ancient Greece. Whereas you may not value the ability to write and write well, it is very much a discipline.
“Historians are at most academics, and science was the province of wealthy eccentrics or underbusy clergy until the rise of government bureaucracies and university-led research institutions in the late 19th century.”
I suggest you look up the word empiricism and get back to me. Empirical history is possible, and it has many proponents, probably the greatest of them Ludwig von Ranke, who argued for the systematization of History and historical studies.
Again, please look it up yourself before commenting on historiography and the development of history through the ages. History as a discipline goes back to Herodotus, prior to Aristotle and natural philosophy.
Contain them? That is the definition of a blockade, they aren't going anywhere. Air and naval attacks would continue to kill civilians, wasn't that the purpose of the bombs? But it is okay to kill them in another, less efficient way. The attacks risk our men when the blockade is supposed to be sufficient.
By starving the people, it would lead to their own destruction.
The IJN was done, it was the army running the show in the home islands, as for the destruction of the military leadership, it was assured in any case. I doubt the army plan for the use of civilians cared that they would be slaughtered by us. The army would have been fed, the Japanese civvies showed nothing but obedience to their masters.
“Japanese civvies showed nothing but obedience to their masters.”
Right, that’s because the Japanese have no souls of their own, eh? /sarc
I don’t believe this for a second.
There doesn't seem to be an aversion to killing civilians in this argument as much as there is an aversion to killing them efficiently, dramatically, in a way that saved the POWs and hastened the close of hostilities. In short, it is a nonsensical argument that ignores the truth on the ground at the time, a re-write of history.
Unlike yourself I’ve actually studied Japanese history under both the Shogunate and under Meiji. But, why would that matter? We all know Japanese don’t have souls and they always obey their masters.
Japanese history didn’t begin with Tojo and end with the atomic bomb. Yes, there were many who desired war. Assessing Germany by Hitler makes about as much sense as assessing Japan by Tojo.
But anyways, go ahead. Tell us how the Japanese no longer had a will of their own...
Japan had been a war-like people for a very long time. They often invaded their neighbors, like Korea.
“Sounds like pure hubris to me.”
If you want to hear why it is not, send me a private mail.
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