Posted on 05/29/2016 6:29:04 AM PDT by Arthur McGowan
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."
(Excerpt) Read more at thenewamerican.com ...
Iwo Jima.
An attempt to surrender?
Thr Japanese shure weren’t surrendering on the Pacific iles on the way to the homeland.
Dropping the bomb as self defense. Japan beat us to testing a nuke (Jap nuke test Feb 1945) and it would only be a matter of time before Los Angeles was a smoking molten hole.
We had to drop the bomb.
In his 1967 book Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, Professor Thomas Molnar put his finger on a major reason why the bomb was used:
In our times the portentous event is the atomic bomb which creates general insecurity and is credited with effecting a total change in mankind’s destiny since it can no longer be called a “single event” but a permanent state with which we shall have to live from now on. Accordingly, voices are already heard that, living as we do “in the shadow of the bomb,” our traditional moral assumptions will have to be reconsidered. Religious leaders declare that the existence of “the bomb” has so activated our awareness of science that, as Paul Tillich says, “we must forget everything traditional we have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself.” Political leaders, fearful of the final cataclysm of nuclear annihilation, say that men must huddle together under a world government.... [Emphasis added.]
Were the purposes of using atomic weapons much more sinister than what was reported to the public. Did communist / one world government types within the Truman Administration want a horrible weapon unleashed as a pretext to establish a one word government.
Was it a large-scale version of an operation like Fast and Furious?
“Trying to surrender”
The empire was full of pacifists.
Wow. It took you a minute to post a typical revisionist article about the poor put-upon Japanese who couldn’t find enough white flags to properly surrender to nasty, war-mongering America.
I read it, but not sure I believe it.
Those people were ready for the war to end and they believed what the government told them about the conduct of the war. I remember my Dad saying that nobody was gloating over the dropping of the bomb. They knew it was a terrible thing but it had to be done or the further amount of American casualties would have been too high to bear. Therefore the American people accepted the necessity of dropping those bombs. My Dad maintained that people shouldn't try to rewrite history. My parents both said the Japanese were cruel during the war and my Mom admitted she had trouble interacting with Japanese in America after the war. I'm just reporting her feelings as a slice of history, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with it.
The allies demanded total surrender
the japanese “peace feelers” were not surrender at all
no surrender, no peace
in the last days of the war, even after the bomb at hiroshima, hundreds of planes from the Marianas destroyed city after city. The japs would not surrender even in the face of total destruction.
It took Nagasaki to shock the emperor into capitulation and total surrender
This and several other little gems are in the article. Overall it is a liberal aligned screed with these glaring errors:
In the quote above, it ignores the fact that surrender is the simplest thing in the world. Stop fighting. It isn't complicated. Just stop, lay down your arms and raise your hands. Sure a vindictive enemy (like Russia) may kill a bunch of you anyway, but maybe you should not have attacked them in the first place. Wars are to be avoided for a reason.
The author decries that the US did not "define" unconditional surrender. Color me dense but I think the term "unconditional" means without conditions. The Japanese wanted conditions, so it wasn't unconditional, and the American public would not have accepted it.
By the end of the war, the concept of punishment for their egregious hostility had not nearly dissipated. Heck, here we are more than 70 years later still pissed off about it. If I murder a man, the state doesn't let me go if I apologize. They'll punish me anyway. Why should it be different for groups of people?
And Japanese lives were saved, too. Many more Japanese casualties if an invasion had been fought than would have died by the bombs.
The Japanese surrendered because they didn’t know that we couldn’t nuke them a third time.
that is why the Atomic bombs were the best thing that ever happened to Japan
If your term are just stop killing us and let us keep our emperor, then evidently pretty hard.
The American dual policies of unconditional surrender and no separate peace are what made negotiating with Japan impossible. We were trying to keep the Soviets and the British from making a separate peace with Germany, which both were willing to do at various points during the war. How would it have looked if we had entertained the idea of a separate peace with Japan? Japan did make serious peace offers. In 1945 they offered complete unconditional surrender except for keeping the Emperor. We instead used the atomic bombs on them, then gave them exactly what they had asked for.
I have no sympathy for the Japanese military government, but it wasn't necessary to use nuclear weapons to get them to surrender. I believe that decision had more to do with Truman wanting to spook the Soviets.
Yep. They would have been destroyed from north to south
“The Japanese were NEVER ready to surrender.”
You’re right. In the pre-war years Japanese society had become dominated by an particularly virulent Bushido cult. Combined with a culture that puts immense value on ‘saving face’ and you had a very dangerous mix for both the Japanese and those fighting back against them.
The Japanese had a saying “100 million dead for the Emperor” and the increasingly hard fighting as we got closer to the Home Islands proved the willingness of even civilians to do exactly that.
In the six weeks prior to Hiroshima the battle for Okinawa had just ended. 123,000 dead in one battle, many of them American. In Hiroshima there were 140,000 dead.
The Japanese weren’t going to quit. Nothing short of a force of nature like a typhoon or massive earthquake would permit them to quit and yet save face. Well the atomic bombs did exactly that. They were like something supernatural, and after Nagasaki the ‘peace faction’ within the Japanese leadership was able to overwhelm the Bushido lunatics who were willing to sacrifice the entire Japanese people in their vision of a last glorious fight against a conventional invasion.
Wow. Here’s betting you’ve been a bore for a lifetime!
Why surrender if you are winning? At that point - Japan was winning. Makes no sense at all.
Don’t you realize peace overtures are quite different than surrender?
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