Dropping the Bomb: Why Did the U.S. Unleash Its Terrible Weapon?

Much of the historical perspective on the era holds that the Japanese were prepared to fight to their very last man, and that until the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been visited upon their homeland Japanese leaders had no intention of surrendering. But in fact the Japanese had sent peace feelers to the West as early as 1942, only six months after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. More would come in a flood long before the fateful use of the atomic bombs.

In her 1956 book, The Enemy at His Back, journalist Elizabeth Churchill Brown supplied overwhelming evidence to counter the inaccurate views about the close of the war. Beginning in 1949, she plunged into dozens of wartime memoirs and congressional hearings dealing with the conflict. The wife of noted Washington Star columnist Constantine Brown, Mrs. Brown had access to many of "the men who were no longer 'under wraps,'" as she noted. She wrote, "With this knowledge at hand, I quickly began to see why the war with Japan was unprecedented in all history. Here was an enemy who had been trying to surrender for almost a year before the conflict ended."

Ditto for me. My father was at the Presidio in San Francisco waiting to ship out to the Western Pacific. He had completed over three years as a bomber crewmen in the Eighth Air Force. But because he was prewar regular army, he was not subject to the 25 Mission rule or to being discharged upon return to the United States.

The article mentions early on that there was a “War Party” and a “Peace Party” within the Japanese government. The article then turns all of its attention to detailing efforts of the Peace Party. However, one thing that the article fails to mention is that the Peace Party was not running the country. The War Party was firmly in charge even after the fall of of General Tojo following the the Japanese military losses in 1944. Further, the Japanese army was largely intact, most of it being in mainland Japan. The Japanese army was on the offensive in China in 1944 and 45. The Japanese military was also very actively preparing to defend the home islands.

These were not the actions of a government that was strenously attempting to surrender. Consequently, the Japanese were sending mixed signals with a weak Peace Party making indirect and secret diplomatic contacts while the War Party was actively preparing to resist to the end. Had the Peace Party actually been as powerful as the article suggests, it could have simply broadcast its desire for peace and terms in the clear for the whole world to know the sincerity of their desires. One can imagine the effect that such an announcement would have had on the Japanese people and armed forces after all the suffering they had been asked to endure. One need only reflect on the desperate attempts made by a faction in the Imperial Japanese Army Headquarters to prevent the broadcast of the “surrender” message by Emperor Hirohito in August 1945 to appreciate how violently the public announcement of such a surrender initiative in 1944 (or earlier) would’ve been greeted.

No, wIth the War Party in charge, it was going to take something rather extraordinary to shake them out of their determination to carry the war to its final conclusion. This can be partially attributed to the conditioning all Japanese military had received with respect to the requirements of Bushido and the disgrace of surrender.

Atomic bomb made it abundantly clear that simply enduring and inflicting casualties upon the enemy who was attacking them on the ground in a conventional manner was no longer the only pathway the coming fighting could take. As remarked upon by the emperor in his speech to the nation, the enemy had begun to employ a terrible weapon with the potential to destroy the whole world. With very little exposure of its forces, the Allies could now devastate entire cities.

It should be noted that the two atomic bombs dropped were not the only bombs available. There were at least four more in final stages of preparation and there were specific allocations of atomic bombs to each of the Allied armies expected to operate in mainland Japan.

As for the opinions (and that’s really all they were) that Japan could be compelled to surrender through aerial bombardment or starvation by naval blockade, one need only look to the Luftwaffe bombardment of Great Britain, the submarine Battle of the Atlantic, the Allied bombing of Germany, and the Siege of Leningrad to put paid to the notion that boots on the ground could somehow be foregone if the enemy can be just caused enough suffering. People will endure unbelievable suffering if their government insists that there is no alternative to victory. And, in the cases of Japan and Germany, they will continue to endure even when it is clear they are not going to win simply because their governments are too frightened of the future to quit.

The capacity of politicians to make their citizens suffer is unlimited.

The moral principle that it is a crime intentionally to kill non-combatants is not any sort of revisionism, lefty or otherwise. It’s not a historical assertion or an opinion. It’s a universal moral principle.

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Maybe voodoo or other pagan magic could be used to kill only those with bad intents. Or maybe those nano-drones we had in the 1940s. You know, the ones we reverse-engineered from aliens who turned Eleanor Roosevelt into a lesbian and told FDR to fake being a cripple even after giving him the cure for his polio.

Fire and brimstone called down from heaven to destroy two cities was good enough for the Lord to save three lives. I think we did pretty good in saving around 1.5 million, with His help of course.

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Who, in Japan, at that time, was a non-combatant? That’s a question worth discussing.

Picture worth a thousand words.

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