Posted on 08/05/2012 1:27:24 PM PDT by Retain Mike
Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japan Unavoidable
We now mark the 67th anniversary of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II. Once again we must listen to the contra-factual analysis of revisionists as they expound on what a needless, tragic and profoundly immoral decision the United States had made. In support of dropping the atomic bombs historians often cite the inevitability of horrifying casualties, if troops had landed on the home islands. They extrapolate from 48,000 American and 230,000 Japanese losses on Okinawa to estimates of 500,000 American and millions of Japanese casualties for mainland invasions. However, even these optimistic figures arise from studies preceding the unfolding recognition of American experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Such estimates could have vastly understated causalities, because Japan at 374,000 mountainous square miles mathematically enables over 500 defensive redoubts; fortifications comparable to that General Ushijima constructed to inflict most losses for the Okinawa invasion. This rapid increase in killing efficiency extended to planned stubborn defenses of their major cities just as the Germans had maintained in Berlin. The American “island hopping” strategy had ended, because the Japanese had determined the few regions within their mountainous country that could accommodate the huge armies and air forces needed. Harry Truman contemplated increasingly dire estimates causing him to reflect on the possibility of “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other”.
The Japanese War Faction maintained the lavish standard of 20 million Japanese deaths for planning final mainland battles; battles intended to inflict millions of casualties, and to convince America to abandon the Potsdam Declaration. The Japanese had concealed vastly underestimated quantities of kamikazes and aviation fuel, redeployed veteran Kwantung divisions, mobilized home defense armies, and distributed suicide bombs and bamboo spears to civilians become soldiers.
Americans also faced biological warfare. Occupation searchers uncovered large stockpiles of viruses, spirochetes, and fungus spores throughout rural Japan. These biological pathogens had already been tested on Chinese civilians. For Japan one delivery system directed citizen soldiers to infect themselves and stay behind the advancing troops.
The Greatest Generation and their parents would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war just to indulge some personal moral orthodoxy. If there was any alternative, Harry Truman, Henry Stimson, and George Marshall were not about to procure the deaths of countless Americans in protracted ground campaigns following amphibious assaults exceeding D-Day.
The Japanese Privy Council debated the Final Battles arguments into utter physical and mental exhaustion for eleven hours following the Nagasaki bomb on August 9. For the final meeting of Hirohito and his Cabinet, eighty year old Barron Hiranuma was invited to attend, though he always fiercely disapproved of the war strategy. Among his several censures, he reproved Foreign Minister Togo for never making concrete proposals to the Russians and Minister Anami for accepting limitless nuclear warfare deaths without any opportunity to retaliate. The ministers had no answer.
At impasse Hirohito, the god-king, spoke the “Voice of the Crane” in the 30’ by 18’ sweltering, underground bunker. He would bear the unbearable, conclude the war, and transform the nation. Only then did Japan contact Swiss and Swedish foreign offices to commence negotiations with allied belligerents.
Here was demonstrated the critical role Kokutai played in surrender. Any prominent Japanese lived within an intimate spiritual three dimensional fabric of Emperor, citizen, land, ancestral spirits, government, and Shinto religion. Emperor Hirohito foresaw the probability of defeat and had appointed a Peace Faction in January 1944. However, he and his advisors conducted political kabuki through twenty months of continuous defeats, fire bombings of over 60 cities, and 1.3 million additional Japanese deaths. The atomic bombs removed the Final Battles argument, allowing the War Faction to relent, Hirohito to assume his unprecedented roll, and no one to lose face. Their cabal remained within the fabric of Japanese from all eras who had sacrificed for Emperor and Empire.
Another point says the bombs accomplished little. Supposedly Roosevelt’s decree of unconditional surrender was compromised away by allowing Japan to keep their Emperor. However by accepting the Potsdam 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 people’s free expression for determining post war government that eradicated multi-millennial Imperial characteristics.
The moral failure to leave an Imperial Japan undefeated to prosecute a nuclear war generations hence was intolerable. The expectation of continuing 400,000 civilian and military deaths throughout Asia while diplomats dithered was intolerable. 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 standard was intolerable. Allowing the premeditated ignorance of revisionists center stage as the institutional knowledge of the Greatest Generation dies away is intolerable.
It may be cruel no to defeat your enemy, but the military industrial establishment gets rich from it. They have a strong vested interest in prolonging wars.
When news of the atomic bombings came and then the Japanese surrender, he said that he and all the other sailors, soldiers, and Marines felt their death sentences had been commuted. President Truman's decision save millions of American and Japanese lives. There can be NO argument on this fact.
We used to know how to fight war.
I’m not certain how a society should handle the phenomenon of the sadistic personality type. It all depends on the time and resources available. In war, such time and resources devoted to rehabilitation is severely limited. That the engineers of cultural sadism need to be got rid of ASAP cannot be argued against.
In traditional Japan, brutality and sadism were common and endorsed in the service of the Emperor and they remain an undercurrent in contemporary Japanese culture. Yet Japan is otherwise a remarkably orderly and polite society.
When I was in the Navy around the Vietnam time I went to Boat Group Officer school at the amphib base in San Diego. The chief running the class said my chances of surviving one opposed landing in WW II were 3 out of 10. If you know statistics it drops to less than one out of ten for two assaults.
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