America dropping the A-bomb

[EHK for Darwin]

[quote name='Ser Scot A Ellison' post='1617156' date='Dec 12 2008, 07.20']EHK,

I'm not saying the Japanese were making reasonable demands in their surrender offers. I'm simply saying that being open to a negotiated peace rather than demanding "Unconditional Surrender" [i]may[/i] have shortened the war and made the Axis powers less willing to attempt to fight to the last man. How different would the post-war been if we could have ended the war with Germany before the Russians pushed through Eastern and Central Europe? We wound up putting a fair number of low level Nazi's back into power anyway, would negotiating an end to the war have been terribly different?[/quote]

We tried that route already with WW1. It didn't turn out so well. Any negotiation that left the current German or Japanese government intact quite possibly would've been an invitation for another war a few decades down the line. Both NAZIism and Japanese militarism had to be crushed and that wasn't happening with a negotiated settlement.

Also the Russians weren't exactly the forgiving types, I don't think they'd stop until they got their pint of blood on German soil whether we reached a peace or not.

[Horza]

The Russians managed to get their elite tank and infantry formations retrained and packed out to Manchuria from Germany in three months, they wouldn't wait to assemble all the assets the US would, or worry so much about casualties either - though that said they were probably lacking in sealift capacity.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

EHK,

That's fair enough (I will not get into the Treaty of Versallis debate now). I simply think it's debatable, given the post-war history we saw, whether negotiated settlements wouldn't have been better in the long term. That said, I can see why "Unconditional Surrender" was a big deal. Additionally, without the push into Germany itself the Nazi's may have been able to cover up the Shoah.

[Rhom]

I've never understood the arguments over the atomic bombs. Honestly, isn't the only thing we are debating here [i]scale[/i]?

Look at the picture of Tokyo linked earlier in the thread. We don't think that the conventional bombing we had already been engaged in killed countless civilians then? If you take the viewpoint that any loss of human life is unacceptable, then aren't both types of bombs equally reprehensible? Why is an atomic bomb in this situation any worse than the conventional bombing of London? Pearl Harbor? Tokyo? Innocent civilians died in all those places.

The fact of the matter is that it was war. It was a war that we did not ask to be in, but it was a war that had to be won.

I read with interest the earlier wiki link to Operation Olympia and Operation Coronet. One of the most telling facts from the article was in the closing paragraph I thought:

[quote]Nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the casualties resulting from the invasion of Japan. To the present date, all the American military casualties of the sixty years following the end of World War II — including the Korean and Vietnam Wars — have not exceeded that number. In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock. There are so many in surplus that combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan are able to keep Purple Hearts on-hand for immediate award to wounded soldiers on the field.[/quote]

It is incredibly insulting to even mention that the only argument in this thread were for American lives. Estimates of the invasion of Japan estimated [i]10,000,000[/i] deaths for the Japanese. Hell, as twisted as it may sound we saved Japanese lives by dropping the bomb.

[sologdin]

[i]Why'd they pick a pissant little city like H-town then? [/i]

weren't hiroshima and nagasaki targeted because the US needed to generate before & after photos, as posted upthread, to demonstrate the effectiveness of each type of bomb? it would've been pointless to develop such photos of tokyo and so on because they'd already been destroyed conventionally. hiroshima & nagasaki, on the other hand, weren't military targets, even by a very liberal definition of the phrase, and therefore hadn't been attacked yet.



[i]not the unconditional surrender [/i]

scot--

wasn't the demand for unconditional surrender kinda perverse, both historically and strategically, insofar as it was engineered to guarantee a rejection, granting an illusory halo over the heads of the atomic bombers, who likely uttered some of the same self-serving dishonesties currently on display in this discussion? very similar to the engineered rejections by the taliban in 2001 and serbia in 1999 - US makes ridiculous demands, other side predictably rejects, US bombs with self-righteous indignation. it's very roman, i suppose, and therefore stylish.

how often had unconditional surrender been demanded in the past? what conditions did the japanese want to impose, besides retention of the imperial symbolism?

[Rhom]

[quote name='sologdin' post='1617237' date='Dec 12 2008, 09.57']how often had unconditional surrender been demanded in the past? what conditions did the japanese want to impose, besides retention of the imperial symbolism?[/quote]

Hell... it was Ulyssess S. Grant's nickname! Don't act like no one in history ever demanded an unconditional surrender.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Sologdin,

Ask FDR. He's the one who pushed Unconditional Surrender as an Allied goal. I recognize it may have prolonged the war, however, I also recognize that without it the war may have been negotiated to an end before we entered Germany and the Shoah may have continued as a result.

Look at U.S. history and you will see the origin of "Unconditional Surrender."

[Horza]

solo:

Hiroshima was a major port terminal and shipyard and Army Marine Forces, Second Army and Chuguko Reserve Army headquarters - Second Army was tasked with the defense of the Southern Home Islands. In all over 10,000 troops were quartered there and it was a candidate city should the govt be forced to evacuate Tokyo.

Nagasaki was again a major shipyard and port terminal as well as an industrial and ordnance manufacturing centre.

By this stage in the war all sides had adopted very liberal definitions of what constituted a military target, and area bombing was well established under the rubric of total war. After six decades of international human rights and war crimes legislation, instutional and social awareness of war crimes has developed to the point where the US conventional and nuclear bombing campaign over Japan from 1944-45 now appears a war crime, but this is anachronistic. The Pacific War was one of the bloodiest and brutal conflicts of WW2, and it drove both sides to greater and greater cruelties, sometimes out of neccessity, sometimes out of bitterness and hatred. The evidence at this point suggests that the atomic bombings did have an impact in breaking the War Cabinet deadlock and bringing the conflict to a close, and that for me is what counts.

[Altherion]

[quote name='sologdin' post='1617237' date='Dec 12 2008, 15.57']how often had unconditional surrender been demanded in the past? what conditions did the japanese want to impose, besides retention of the imperial symbolism?[/quote]
Didn't Germany surrender unconditionally?

In any case, these discussions are almost always from the wrong perspective. Think about it from the point of view of those making the decision back then. They don't know what an atomic bomb is beyond the fact that it is massively powerful and you've devoted a huge amount of money and the time of your best scientists to building it over the past couple of years. The long term effects of the radiation were not well understood at the time -- if you read up on the people who worked with this stuff, you'll see that a fair fraction of them died of cancer at a relatively young age.

So what are your options? You can go back on your word, acknowledge that the Potsdam Declaration was a bluff and accept the negotiated surrender, but who knows what they'll actually ask for once at the table? Even in retrospect, the Japanese leadership was not united on this, though the US couldn't have known that at the time. You can undertake the costly invasion of Japan. If you do that, it is quite likely that Russia will share in the victory. Or, you can actually use the weapons you have in an attempt to frighten the Japanese into submission. If you ignore the mythic qualities that the atomic bombs have acquired since then, it is not that difficult a choice.

[sologdin]

if the eisenhower and nimitz quotations are too long after the fact, there's always more contemporary items, as reported in the [i]christian science monitor[/i]:

[quote name='regarding the 1946 war department study "use of atomic bombs and japan"']Another previously top secret War Department intelligence study - written in 1946 but withheld from the public for roughly four decades - flatly concludes that the Japanese were in such dire straits in the summer of 1945 that even a preliminary November landing on Kyushu island was only a "remote" possibility and that a full assault on the Japanese main home islands in the spring of 1946 "would not have been necessary." This report echoes the official 1946 US Strategic Bombing Survey, which concluded Jap an would likely have surrendered "even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped...."[/quote]

[quote name='same study' date=' as quoted in thompson's *empires on the pacific*']the Japanese leaders had decided to surrender and were merely looking for a sufficient pretext to convince the die-hard Army Group that Japan had lost the war and must capitulate.[/quote]

the study found further that the russian entry into the war "would almost certainly have furnished this pretext."


we know that byrnes pushed truman to use the bombs as a deterrent against stalin, and truman's diary entries seem to credit this motive:

[quote name='truman's philistine reflections']''Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland.''[/quote]


the best thing about this debate is reliance on a "the bombs saved american lives" ideology which mutated over time. truman made a number of public estimates of how many lives would be saved:

15 december 1945 - 250K US lives
late 1946 - 300K to 500K US lives
late 1948 - 250K US lives and 250K japanese lives
6 april 1949 - 200K US lives
late 1949 - 500K US lives (quoting gen. marhsall)
12 january 1953 - 250K to 1M US lives (quoting gen. marshall)
28 april 1959 - "millions of lives"

(churchill later claimed 1.2M allied lives at some point, too.)

of course, we do have some technocratic documents, still, to clarify truman's muddle-headed apologia:

[quote name='from zezima']In June 1945, Truman ordered the U.S. military to calculate the cost in American lives for a planned assault on Japan. Consequently, the Joint War Plans Committee prepared a report for the Chiefs of Staff, dated June 15, 1945, thus providing the closest thing anyone has to "accurate": 40,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500 missing.[/quote]

(these data [url="https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/the-final-months-of-the-war-with-japan-signals-intelligence-u-s-invasion-planning-and-the-a-bomb-decision/csi9810001.html"]explained[/url] by a less hostile source.)

for me, the estimates of the JWPC in 1945 and the war department in 1946 are dispositive; eisenhower, nimitz, and macarthur are just icing on the cake.

[JGP]

i. The Russo-Japanese War of 04-05, Japan's influence in Manchuria begins

ii. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Japan's proposed racial equality clause amendment to the League of Nations covenant threatened the colonialization of non-whites, White Australia, and was rejected by Britain, Australia, and the US

iii. The Great Kanto Earthquake, 1923, Japan

iv. The Immigration Act of 1924, US

v. The Depression, 1929, world wide

vi. [i]The Military establishment's subtle coup of Japan throughout the 30s[/i]

vii. Occupation of Manchuria, 1931

viii. 'Manchukuo' declared an independent state; Shanghai bombed in response to anti-Japanese sentiment, 1932

ix. Japanese withdrawal from the League of Nations, 1933

x. The second Sino-Japanese War, 1937 [Nanking, sad stuff]

xi. Japanese occupation of Vietnam [see: French Vichy gov. as well] 1940; also joined Axis Powers which resulted in the oil boycott, the ABCD line-- so Japan captures the oil rich Dutch East Indies in response

xii. Pearl Harbor, 1941-- and so on and so on, and so forth...


Clearly, Japanese and western relations grew steadily worse since the 'opening' of Japan in the 1800s. Racism vs. perceptions of cultural identity, reaction reaction reaction. The Japanese militarism of the 30s could arguably be construed as responsive in nature, an aggressive self-defense. But be that as it may, none of you will [i]ever[/i] convince me that the Japanese would've fought to the last man. The Japanese military machine might've, perhaps, but I doubt even that.

The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary by that point, and by EHK's reasoning just upthread, that being-- 'Any negotiation that left the current German or Japanese government intact quite possibly would've been an invitation for another war a few decades down the line.' My response would be they were more than slightly off target then. Either that or you’re incorrect.

My vote's for war crimes, obviously.



qualifier: though none of this is or should be construed as a defense of Japan’s war crimes

[DanteGabriel]

Riffing off the "Asian people in politics" thread, I wonder if there are any non-Japanese East Asians out there who don't agree with dropping the bombs on Japan. You'd certainly have to work very hard to find a Filipino who thought dropping the bombs was wrong, and any you did find of that opinion probably feels so more out of reflexive resentment of the US than out of concern for Japanese lives.

[Rhom]

[quote name='Azor Ahai' post='1617285' date='Dec 12 2008, 10.50']The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary by that point, and by EHK's reasoning just upthread, that being-- 'Any negotiation that left the current German or Japanese government intact quite possibly would've been an invitation for another war a few decades down the line.' My response would be they were more than slightly off target then. Either that or you’re incorrect.[/quote]

I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that an intact Germany and Japan would not have led to a war later?

[sologdin]

billy, scot, althy, horza--

i didn't mean to come off as glib re: "unconditional surrender," nor do i consider that policy to be some kind of nefarious novelty, or a crime, or anything necessarily negative--especially given the context of WWII, where the worst crimes in history were committed, unless we count the more mythical portions of the pentateuch.

but my impression seems to be that it had not been the norm in warfare. perhaps it is the norm in civil wars where the insurgent/secessionist group is subject to total defeat on the battlefield, and it certainly was what happened to the third reich.

my point was merely that it was overreaching, given the history of global conflicts between major powers, and that this may have been intentional, considering the investment in the manhattan project (which required a live test for both products) and the inchoate competition with stalin.

[JGP]

[quote name='Billy Clyde' post='1617294' date='Dec 12 2008, 08.58']I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that an intact Germany and Japan would not have led to a war later?[/quote]

Nope. I'm just saying if the penultimate goal of the H-bombings was to eradicate the Japanese government, then they were dropped on the wrong targets. You could flip it, someone most likely will, and say it served to that end anyway with the surrender and occupation-- but it's not that cut and dry. The motives for the bombings or their intended effect either.

I'm with soggy on this.

[Rhom]

[quote name='sologdin' post='1617297' date='Dec 12 2008, 11.01']my point was merely that it was overreaching, given the history of global conflicts between major powers, and that this may have been intentional, considering the investment in the manhattan project (which required a live test for both products) and the inchoate competition with stalin.[/quote]

At the time, WW2 was honestly considered the "War to end all wars." (Of course... WW1 was "The Great War" and was largely considered to be the same thing.) I think it speaks volumes that the world has never since seen a war fought on that scale in the ensuing 6 decades. Who is to say what the world would have been like had Japan been allowed to negotiate a surrender that allowed them to build into a SuperPower? What would have happened if Japan had taken their technological know-how they are widely regarded for now and emerged into a real player in the cold war sometime in the 1970's as the US and USSR faced each other down?

On that note of alternate history... would Kennedy and Kruschev have been more likely to go to war in the early 60's if they didn't have the specter of the realities of nuclear war hanging over their shoulder? Maybe Hiroshima and Nagasaki [i]saved[/i] the world from nuclear holocaust. (Now I'm honestly just talking out my ass... I'm just pondering these things as my fingers work their way across the keyboard.)

[Rhom]

[quote name='Azor Ahai' post='1617307' date='Dec 12 2008, 11.06']Nope. I'm just saying if the penultimate goal of the H-bombings was to eradicate the Japanese government, then they were dropped on the wrong targets. You could flip it, someone most likely will, and say it served to that end anyway with the surrender and occupation-- but it's not that cut and dry. The motives for the bombings or their intended effect.

I'm with soggy on this.[/quote]

If we had dropped the nuclear bomb right during a joint meeting of the War Council with the Emperor... who would have been left to negotiate a surrender? Some general stationed out in the backwaters? Would there have been a revolt amongst the military heirarchy to determine who was in control with the authority to surrender?

Its not as simple as you make it.

[JGP]

Yeah, it is. I understand it would help pacify the civilian populace to have their Emperor surrender, but the unconditional surrender of Japan couldn't have been an expected response, ever, given the reasoning of some in this thread. So which is it?

[sologdin]

[i]Maybe Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved the world from nuclear holocaust[/i]

billy--

that's an entirely reasonable position.

we had this same thread years ago, and i argued more or less the same as i do now.

ser paladin roundly defeated me simply by pointing out that someone had to use an atomic bomb before we all could understand exactly how horrible the things are. in a sense, the US gets a freebie on at least the hiroshima bomb, kinda like an instructor demonstrating a basic scientific principle to a classroom full of n00bs.

my corollary to ser pal's point (and your line above) is that the world needed, NRA-like, mutual ownership of nukes for the deterrence to be meaningful.

so, truman's usage + soviet acquisition = no global thermonuclear warfare later.

if only one side had them, though, i bet there'd be no cold war, but simply undisciplined nuking in the late 1950s.

i.e., rosenbergs FTW!!1

[Bellis]

[quote name='DanteGabriel' post='1617287' date='Dec 12 2008, 10.53']Riffing off the "Asian people in politics" thread, I wonder if there are any non-Japanese East Asians out there who don't agree with dropping the bombs on Japan. You'd certainly have to work very hard to find a Filipino who thought dropping the bombs was wrong, and any you did find of that opinion probably feels so more out of reflexive resentment of the US than out of concern for Japanese lives.[/quote]

SO is Taiwanese; Taiwan was governed by Japan during the war. SO's grandfather was in Nagasaki studying when the bomb hit. he survived, miraculously, and returned to Taiwan to his new wife with a child of mysterious origins (who i jokingly call the Jon Snow uncle). SO doesn't know whether he ever spoke out strongly about the bomb though.

There are Japanese people, of course, who have not forgiven America for this. My colleague is from Hiroshima, and his parents would not visit him in the US because they lived through the atomic strike.