[tanknetter]

I wish we would have hit Tokyo first. Destroyed their whole image of emperor as god.

Course Tokyo got firebombed very badly and iirc 100,000 or so died. The nuke would have cracked their will to keep going right away with a dead nuked emperor false god destroyed.

Ultimately, we got it right. Had we taken out Hirohito and a good chunk of the leadership cadre there wouldn't have been a surrender and instead there would have been a reversion to the tribal warlord model. We would have needed to invade and then spend years, possibly decades, suppressing all the warlords in a guerrilla-style counter-insurgency ... which we weren't really prepared to do.

Think along the lines of an alternate ending to the US Civil War where Lee orders the various Confederate armies to disband and take to the hills to continue the rebellion.

The flip side of the Hirohito/"need-someone-with-the authority/stature-to-surrender-to-us" argument is the indispensable need for Douglas MacArthur as well. Dugout Doug deserves his fair share of criticism for a lot of things, but he was absolutely the right guy to head up the Occupation.

[moonshot925]

Here is what Downfall by Richard B. Frank says on page 303.

"General Farrell and Captain Parsons had met with General Twining, Admiral Nimitz, and General Spaatz, and by the afternoon of August 9th they urged Washington to review target lists since the 'effects at Trinity and Hiroshima ... [had] far exceeded optimistic expectations.' They 'expressly recommended' that the next bomb be dropped in the 'region of Tokyo' to achieve maximum psychological effect. On August 14, Twining submitted a new list of six targets in order of priority: Sapporo, Hakodate, Oyabu, Yokosuka, Osaka, and Nagoya."

[Secret Agent Man]

We should not have allowed the concept of the emperor being god, to continue to exist.

[Cyber Liberty]

I agree with that analysis. If we want a surrender, we need to leave someone powerful enough to do a credible job of it. Germany required a bit of pacification after Hitler croaked himself (leaving nobody in charge), and that’s the only good think about the Soviets deciding to keep a good share of Germany in their pocket. They were better pacifiers than we were, because they were more savage. Still are.