My only regret is we didn’t give them more of a chance to surrender…first. There was a 3rd option.
1. Do nothing
2. Nuke civilian population centers
——
3: Use 1 or 2 nukes on strictly military targets close to their seat of government. There was a big Japanese airbase 15 or so miles outside of Tokyo, a strike there would not have only damaged their air forces but would have had a minuscule number of civilian deaths (compared to a big city).
We could always have went back to cities later, except this time with more of a superior moral position.
“We could always have went back to cities later, except this time with more of a superior moral position.”
Really? While his brother was working on the Manhattan Project, my Granddad was the junior engineering officer on USS Gato. His surface action station was directing the deck gun. They sank a Japanese combatant ship within sight of the Japanese homeland. The survivors were swimming to shore. The crew broke out the small arms and shot them in the water. “We had no facilities to take them prisoner, they’d kill us if we tried, they’d be back on another combatant ship within a week. So we killed them all.”
Sic Semper Tyrannis.
We only had the two bombs. Bottom line...it worked. So, no, that was not an option.
Japanese military were insanely stubborn. After the two atomic bombings, there was an attempted coup by the Japanese military, trying to stop the surrender.
An Attempted Coup Tried to Stop Japan’s Surrender in World War II. Here’s How It Failed
he Japanese refer to the attempted coup d’état on Aug. 14, 1945, the last night of the Second World War, as the “Kyujo Incident.” Ringleaders Kenji Hatanaka and Jiro Shiizaki, officers at the army ministry, led a battalion of rebels into the Imperial Palace. Lying brazenly, Hatanaka and Shiizaki told the commander of the Second Imperial Guard Regiment that the top brass had ordered the palace sealed off from the outside. The guards, believing that a broader revolt was afoot, agreed to comply with their instructions pending the arrival of the Eastern Army. But Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori, commander of the guards, smelled a rat. Refusing to join the plot, he was shot dead in cold blood. The confederates then forged an order in General Mori’s name and sealed it with Mori’s official stamp. The document instructed the Imperial Guards to occupy the palace, seal off communications with anyone outside the moats and “protect” the emperor against unspecified threats.
In the palace itself, the imperial stenographer was putting the finishing brushstrokes on the Imperial Rescript on Surrender. The emperor’s seal was fixed to the document, making it official. Shortly before midnight, Hirohito entered a soundproof bunker under the palace, where a team of NHK technicians had set up recording equipment. The emperor read the surrender rescript into a microphone. The recording was four minutes and 45 seconds long; the English translation, broadcast overseas the same day, totaled just 652 words. Only one take was needed. The technicians transferred the recording onto two vinyl records, which were pressed on the spot and deposited in a safe under the palace.
With the Imperial Guards behind them, the coup leaders occupied the palace and cut the phone lines. Persuaded that the Eastern Army was on its way, the guards closed the gates and cut off all automobile and foot traffic into and out of the walled compound. The rebels searched the catacombs under the palace, arresting and interrogating staff members at the points of bayonets. They searched for Marquis Kido, the lord privy seal, but could not find him. They also failed to find the phonograph recordings. With an air raid blackout in progress, the lights were doused and the searchers had to use flashlights. The search parties did not know the layout of the underground labyrinth of passageways and bunkers, and found it difficult to interpret the archaic signs marking the locations of various rooms.
Meanwhile, other co-conspirators spread out through Tokyo and Yokohama. The aged Prime Minister Suzuki, who had survived an assassination attempt nine years earlier, was warned moments before his would-be killers arrived. Other detachments occupied the major radio stations, intending to intercept the emperor’s surrender recording before it could be broadcast to the nation.
https://time.com/5877433/wwii-japanese-surrender-coup/
If memory serves me right, Little Boy and Fat Man were the only 2 A-bombs in the nuclear inventory at the time. Don’t know the timeline when more would be available. Don’t know if weather was a factor with OP-Downfall either. Momentum was at a peak.Hard to delay an invasion of that size
That’s childish. After nuking two cities it still took them several days. And those were our only two bombs for several more weeks. If you blow up an audience and tell them to surrender, they would simply have laughed. Okinawa hurt us badly and they knew it. It took both bombs and the large Soviet invasion of Manchuria for them to surrender. They weren’t even close before that.
You’re touchy feely plan would have ensured the deaths of tens of thousands more Americans. With just POWs alone they were on the verge of murdering them all en masse so they could focus on the war.
But to mention the Javanese at home starving, and getting killed daily by US battleships, conventional bonding and near constant strafing attacks.
The clear merciful thing was a knockout punch.
I’m guessing you were not a sailor, airman or grunt or any sort. How man of them you going to ask to die to save a couple of Jap cities?
The firebombing of Tokyo earlier in the year yielded twice as many casualties, almost all civilian, almost all of whom burned to death. If we wanted to feel guilty about attacking civilians, that would be the bombing to decry, not Hiroshima.
The air base you are talking about must be Tachikawa. If I were Truman in 8/45, my first thought would be that nuking Tachikawa would have two drawbacks: we would need Tachikawa to land our airborne occupying forces, and it would be easier for the Japanese government to cover up the bombing than if we hit a city, and there weren’t any big cities left except for Kyoto.
The same thinking would be the case for nuking Yokosuka, where the Imperial Navy was: we were going to need the base for landing our seaborne occupying forces. In fact, when Japan surrendered ten days later, our first planes landed in Tachikawa and our first ships docked in Yokosuka. (Tachikawa base is now a park, but Yokosuka is still going strong as the home of the Seventh Fleet.)
YOU WEREN’T THERE.
Study your history before commenting. Study the REAL history, not the liberal version.
Read a Truman biography years ago. He was quoted as saying, “I made the best decision I could at the time with the information I had.”
It is good to reflect and critique decisions. We learn from that process. But we have to understand that decisions are made in the heat of the moment, the context of the day and with limited, imperfect information. Chances are that we are not more intelligent or morally superior to those who had to make decisions amidst the chaos of the time. I like reflective evaluation; flat out second guessing I do not like. It is too much akin to revisionist history.
What do you mean by superior moral position? To demonstrate what morality to whom exactly?
Also, the public would have demanded it because of a desire for revenge for Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March (The POW camps had been liberated and previous Intel was verified by then!), defense of Manila atrocities etc. Yes, revenge is not a highly moral position, but it was there and was likely part of the calculation.
It would have been much much worse for everyone if the bombs hadn't been dropped or the coup had succeeded. Atomic bomb production was roughly 3 a month. There would have been more atomic bombings to support the landings and the advance inland. With no doctrine of how to advance through radioactive areas (What was known was either highly classified or plain wrong!) thousands of US\Allied troops would have a developed radiation sickness as well as Japanese civilians. Again, the decision made was the best that could be made out of a whole set of much worse decisions.
Always easy a generation or two after the fact to climb up on a self-proclaimed high moral perch look back and condemn. The people who do that weren't there, aren't subject to same pressures and have the bias of historic knowledge.
We only had 2 nukes. If we had used one or two for demonstration purposes, we wouldn’t have had any left. It was a gargantuan effort to make them and we could only make 2-4 per month at most. Had the demonstration not worked, had the power of the bomb not suitably horrified the Japanese and convinced them to give up, the war would have lasted longer.
Every day an estimated 10,000 people were dying throughout the Asia/Pacific region due to the war. Every 2 weeks = another Hiroshima worth of death. Therefore the decision was made to make the most shocking and brutal example to them possible to make it all stop. It worked.
“My only regret is we didn’t give them more of a chance to surrender…first.”
HUH? They didn’t even surrender when we dropped the first one! We had to destroy a SECOND city before they surrendered.
How can you even THINK that they would have surrendered if we just asked them to?
Yours is a ridiculous statement.
The mood in 1945 was to get the war over as fast as possible, using any means necessary. We had exactly two bombs. Tough decision.
My dad was on a destroyer 1943-1945, on a radio ship. It was not until after he died that I learned that ‘radio’ included radar. Once we had radar, the war became one-sided.
Note that FDR, in 1944, picked Harry S Truman, an obscure Kansas City machine Senator from Missouri, ditching Vice President Henry Wallace (1941-1945).
Wallace was the Progressive Party candidate for President in 1948, causing Truman to lose a close race to Thomas Dewey. Then the Machine, late on Election Night, in Kansas City and Chicago, flipped the election to Truman.
See also 1960, 1968, 2000, 2016, and 2020.
They had the best chance in the world to surrender. Not even unconditional surrender either.
They chose to take that as a sign the Allies were weak.
No regrets.
War is hell son
At the time we only had the two weapons and when another would be available was in doubt.
The thing is it took two nukes to get them to surrender!
And some of them still didn’t want to surrender.🙄
The way it went down…generations will tell of the horrific carnage and will keep them from pulling the same shit as Pearl Harbor again. If we did a lesser punishment they would forget in time and decades later we would have to deal with them again.
Of course…by the time we got to Election Day 2007…we had forgotten 9/11/2001
“My only regret is we didn’t give them more of a chance to surrender…first. There was a 3rd option.
1. Do nothing
2. Nuke civilian population centers
——
3: Use 1 or 2 nukes on strictly military targets close to their seat of government. ... would have had a minuscule number of civilian deaths (compared to a big city).
We could always have went back to cities later, except this time with more of a superior moral position.” [Phoenix8, post 17]
Your statements are nonsensical, in light of the verified historical record.
The Allies did give the Japanese more than one opportunity to surrender, before 6 August 1945. They ignored the offers. Not until after the second strike - on Nagasaki - did the Emperor intervene. And the military largely desired to continue fighting: as tlozo noted in post 27, and BiteYourSelf in post 156, a coup by mid-grade Imperial Army officers against his rule came within inches of succeeding.
The US Strategic Bombing Survey determined that by July 1945 there were no “purely military targets,” nor any industrial-production targets located away from civilian population centers. Dispersion of war-materiel production into civilian neighborhoods was far more advanced than in any other nation in history.
To a greater extent than in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan had integrated its non-combatant populace into the plans of the armed forces. Pretty much no civilians left; 11-year-olds like the girl in the France24 story were being trained en masse to assault Allied invasion troops with sharpened bamboo stakes.
Keep in mind these facts; American bombers had already visited more injury on those non-existent “civilian population centers,” hitting over 60 cities, killing many more people from March 1945 through early August 1945, than did the two atomic strikes together.
There weren’t enough atomic bombs in existence to carry out any extended bombardment campaign in the near term. And the bombs themselves were still mostly untested; a true fissile yield did succeed on 16 Jul 1945 but complete weaponization never did succeed until the strike on Hiroshima itself. Crews from 509CG dropped something like nine inert shapes, and not a single proximity fuze functioned.
It’s cute that moralizers wring their hands so many years on, but in the midst of a war such as that still raging in summer 1945, moral navel-gazing would have been a road to failure. In such instances, effectiveness must take priority over morality - especially the overly precious sort indulged in after the fact.
How many nuclear weapons do you think were simply sitting a shelf in August 1945, simply waiting to be used?