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Hiroshima revisionism — 23 Comments

1. Since the declassification of the Magic intercepts in the early nineties there is no real case for the assertion that the Japanese were ready to surrender and the bombs weren’t necessary to shock them into it (recall that after the second one the Supreme War Council still couldn’t vote to surrender and it was the intervention of the Emperor that finally ended the war).

   I haven’t read “Hell to Pay,” a new book on the subject, but anyone interested is referred to Richard Frank’s “Downfall” and Robert James Maddox’s “Weapons for Victory.” Of a number of bad alternatives, this was the one that shortened the war and saved the most lives, including Japanese.

   Claims otherwise tell you more about academic fashions than assessment of the evidence.

2. You’re right, Alex, but even before taking those into consideration, I’ve always maintained that it was pretty obvious (even if not a 100% slam-dunk) that there wouldn’t be any surrender. For one, the advocates of surrendering were marginalized in the Cabinet. The Emperor was pretty much the only one who even the militants would have to pay attention to, and he never interpreted his role as allowing him to step in until the bombs dropped. Two, the preparations and dedication of resources to fight the Americans was still happening. Three, much of the historical facts being used by the “Japan would’ve surrendered before the bomb” contingent was misused to begin with, given that the peace feelers to the USSR were based on the condition that Japan could keep it’s empire and militant system, as well as most (or was it all? I forget…) the territory it had already conquered. Or in short, not a surrender by Japan as much as an agreement for the US to quit the field and let Japan keep what it had. Obviously, that would never, ever have been acceptible.

   Well, anyway… I’ve learned that historical revisionism is simply a fact of life, and that anyone interested in fact and critical thinking simply has to be on guard against it. The stupidity of 9/11 conspiracy peddling has demonstrated that idiotic revisionism is alive and well. Thank goodness it’s also extremely marginalized. At least WWII/Atomic bomb revisionism has a veneer of scholarship to it (doesn’t save it from being wrong, though).

3. With regard to the polls, it seems the other polls, Gallup, USA Today, CNN and others have all started showing Obama in negative numbers. This is rather new because as of a few weeks ago only Rasmussen showed the negative numbers. One thing that has not been seen is a new low in Rasmussen. He has been -22 before. It is also significant IMHO that more respondents strongly disapprove of Obama than generally approve.

   I suspect that it will take a new disappointment in some untouched area of incompetence or knavery to move Ob’s poll number further south.

4. Bob from Virginia
   One thing that has not been seen is a new low in Rasmussen. He has been -22 before.

   Correct. However, the 90-day average, currently at -15-75, is the lowest it has ever been. The 90-day average has been below -15 for the last 15 days. Previously, there was only one day where the 90-day average had hit -15. [applying Excel to Rasmussen data].

   However, the 30-day averages have been oscillating more than trending down for about 8 weeks, to support your final statement.

5. Correction: -15.75

6. If you dig a bit you will notice that there is a whole Leftist cottage industry (the University of Maryland’s Gar Alperovitz in the lead) devoted to trying to peddle an alternative history of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the course of researching various facets of WWII, Japanese actions during WWII, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki I found a number of interesting things.

   1. JCS casualty estimates (here is one chart with estimates from various sources http://www.operationolympic.com/p1_casualties.php) for our invasion of the Japanese home islands i.e. Operation “Downfall”–which was to be divided into two stages–first, Operation Olympic, amphibious landings on the Island of Kyushu and the conquest of the first third of Japan, and then it would be on to finish the job with Operation Coronet–were that our forces were likely to suffer roughly 1,000,000 wounded and over 250,000 killed or missing, and one estimate from another source was for the Japanese to suffer–military and civilian–somewhere between 5 and 10 million casualties in the course of our invasion and conquest of the home islands.

   2. According to a very well documented analysis that appeared in print just a decade or so ago, after the war, when we could actually look at Japanese records and at the situation on the ground, it was discovered that our intelligence estimates as to the number of Japanese troops, ships and aircraft they had available, and the amounts of fuel and supplies available to the Japanese for what they called “The Final Battle” to defend their home islands were way off, and that, in actuality, the Japanese military had had many more troops, ships and aircraft available to them and much more in the way of fuel and supplies that they had gathered in anticipation of this “Final Battle” than we had known of (an apocalyptic “Final Battle” that fit right in with Japanese history, the Japanese mindset and Bushido, and a battle that, from their statements, some Japanese generals welcomed and relished fighting to the last man, as they had everywhere else) so that our anticipated casualty estimates for our invasion–already horrendous–were, in fact, way too low, although this discovery is, somehow, never mentioned.

   3. In the weeks prior to the anticipated invasion, the Japanese government had initiated a propaganda campaign, telling Japanese civilians–some by that time surviving by eating grass and tree bark–that it was the duty of every Japanese subject of the Emperor–male or female, young or old–to find some lethal implement–a knife, a club, a rake or other farm implement, and to meet the invaders on the beaches, with the aim of each Japanese civilian killing at least one invader each–and still faithful subjects of the Emperor (and no doubt also prodded by the 36,000 plus members of the feared Japanese Military Gendarmerie, the Kempeitai) they would have done it.

   4. While we had captured hundreds of thousands of German POWs, many of them housed in relative comfort in more than a hundred POW camps scattered all over the U.S. (a fact that few Americans today are even aware of) we had no similar POW camps full of Japanese–because they refused to surrender and be taken alive, and virtually every one of the few Japanese soldiers we were able to capture (most often because we came upon them when they were sick or unconscious), eventually found some way to commit suicide.

   5. The death rate for U.S. POWs held by the eeevil Nazis, was slightly over 1%, the death rate for U.S. POWs held by the Japanese was more than 40%. So, this was the mentality we were dealing with.

   6. Don’t get me wrong, dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrendous but necessary actions, but it is often forgotten that many more people were killed in the conventional firebomb raids that preceded them.

   7. The atrocities committed by the Japanese–the “Rape of Nanking,” the “Bataan Death March,” their use of POWs for dangerous, deliberately man-killing Slave Labor and their transportation of POWs in “Hell Ships,” POW camp commanders deliberately starving our POWs while warehousing and not distributing the parcels of food and medicine that they had received from the Red Cross for these POWs, and their generally brutal, deliberately murderous treatment of Allied POWS to mention a few, were far more horrendous, extensive, systematic and numerous than the American public–both during and after WWII–were, as part of deliberate U.S. policy, led to believe.

   8. Among these atrocities was the Japanese Army’s relatively little known, massive, 15 year long program of invariably fatal chemical and biological warfare experimentation on thousands of human subjects by their “Unit 731” and other, even more shadowy units, POWs and other victims unlucky enough to be swept up by Unit 731’s soldiers that the staff of Unit 731 referred to as “marutas” or “logs. ” And, then, there were Unit 731’s “field tests” of the agents they developed and their delivery methods, that reportedly sickened and killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese and perhaps people in S.E. Asia as well, that I doubt even a few of every hundred Americans have even heard of; it is notable that several years ago the Japanese government signed an agreement with China to spend many millions of dollars to build a plant in China that would “demilitarize” the hundreds of thousands of gas and toxin filled shells and bombs the Japanese Army left behind from WWII, another development that was hardly even reported by our MSM. Moreover, in the last few months before the Japanese surrender, it was suggested by General Dr. Ishii, who headed Unit 731 (and who retired, unprosecuted–which is a whole other story in itself–to Japan after the war on a handsome government pension, there to continue his “medical research”) that these crude but effective agents and delivery methods Unit 731 had perfected should be turned on the United States.

   9. There was at least one scholarly book written after WWII by a Western academic, asserting (which assertion apparently no one has wanted to pursue) that there was a massive Japanese program undertaken in Manchuria (which possessed both the isolation and the enormous hydroelectric power generation capacity essential for such research) to develop their own atomic bomb that was much more large-scale and advanced than their small scale, theoretical, academic research and experimentation in Japan, research in Japan which was what our MSM exclusively focused on, assuring us that it was laughably primitive and ineffectual; in the last days of the war the Japanese army made very extensive efforts to erase evidence of both the activities of Unit 731 and of their atomic research in Manchuria and, curiously, U.S. authorities were not interested in digging around and stirring up trouble. And last but not least, there was a quotation I discovered in an obscure newspaper by one of the chief scientists who ran the Japanese program, in which he said that, had the Japanese developed such an atomic bomb, they would have unhesitatingly used it on us at the first opportunity.

   So, spare me the talk about the “saintly,” victimized officials and citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their lecturing us on morality.

7. Wolla, that is very interesting information that you have dug up. I had not heard a lot of it, especially about the POWs and medical experimentation.

   I have heard that the Japanese air force was superior to the US’s at the time of the anticipated invasion – they were already experimenting with jet propulsion on their planes. So as more of history gets dug through and declassified, the better the a-bomb looks in retrospect.

8. anna:
   True, the Japanese were experimenting with jet-powered planes, but they were just that: experiments. The U.S. had overwhelming air superiority by the summer of 1945. The B-29s that dropped the atomic bombs didn’t even have fighter escorts, and they flew at an altitude beyond the capability of Japanese fighters to reach.

   Now the Japanese still had hundreds of fighters held in reserve for the invasion, many of which would have been used as kamikazes and would have taken a fearful tool on American ships. (By the way, the U.S. was already working on developing surface-to-air missiles to counter the kamikaze threat.)

9. Make that “fearful toll”, not “tool’.

10. Anna–Yes, Unit 731’s existence was rather thoroughly covered up/ignored after WWII but, particularly in the last dozen years or so, information about its existence and activities has started to emerge, although the Japanese Army did such a good job of obliterating the evidence, that we will probably never know the full extent of its activities and the deaths and illnesses it caused or, according to some Chinese researchers, the diseases it established in China, that are now endemic in areas where they had never existed before.

    I might note that, as of several years ago, newspaper accounts indicated that personnel who served in Unit 731 were still holding annual “reunions” in Tokyo; no doubt to talk over “the good old days.”

11. This is the sort of question that wouldn’t have been asked 30 years ago, since the percentage calling for an apology wouldn’t have been measurable. I suspect most of those who’ve bought into the argument have graduate degrees, above average incomes, and voted overwhelmingly for Obama.

12. “I suspect most of those who’ve bought into the argument have graduate degrees, above average incomes, and voted overwhelmingly for Obama.”

    Or, as certain religious figure once said, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

13. My dad, long gone now, was one of the first to fly over Nagasaki and Hiroshima after the bombs were dropped. He was involved in the assembly of them.

    Japanese workers walked away from their machines, leaving them running, when told it was over. There were all kinds of war machines on the ground ready for action, including japanese built versions of German equipment, including the jet fighter. They were out of fuel. It saved many lives, on both sides, dropping the two bombs. And as also been said, there would have been a “North Japan” and a South Japan”.

14. I have no doubt that the nuclear bombings could be construed as war crimes, (as were the massive firebombing campaigns that preceded them). I also have no doubt that I might not exist but for them, as my father would have been part of the invasion . I also have no doubt that, on balance, more lives were saved than lost by the bombings. I have no doubt that –as war crimes go– these pale in comparison with Japanese atrocities, and indeed that those atrocities are overshadowed by the nukes have enabled the Japanese to avoid confronting their own terrible history. But, while we can scarcely judge those who made decisions we did not have to make, neither can we afford the luxury of not learning from history. Thus, would I support the nuclear bombing of any civilian targets now? Hell, no. While I may not judge, even so, I shall be judged. And losing your soul is too high a price to pay, even to save your world.

15. Mike Walsh.
    Your point has brings up two considerations.
    One is that, perhaps, the increasing accuracy of munitions means they may be able to accomplish the required with far less collateral damage. That depends, of course, on what the required is. Industrial choke points, beloved of WW II planners desperate to avoid the mass slaughter of WW I, turned out not to be so vulnerable, nor, in a modern, resilient society, so irreplaceable.
    You will, of course, support increasing R&D into more and more accurate and effective munitions. They might even end up being useful in a strategic sense. Stranger things have happened. Not often.
    Parenthetically, it was said that the Sov doctrine did not have a bright line between conventional munitions and nukes. For them, the question was whether our non-nuke stuff was getting the job done. Accurate conventional stuff getting the job well done would be considered, said the doctrine, the equivalent of nukes.
    The other consideration was mooted by, I believe, Wretchard. What if the Iranians–for example–put us in a position where we have to do what we have not the moral courage to do? What if they set off a smuggled nuke in the US every month or so. It’s clear it’s them, but they use a cut-out to confuse the issue and to provide the left with an excuse. What are we going to do to them to get them to stop? Cruise missiles over their refineries? B2 strike on what passes for their parliament? Kill five million of them?
    So let somebody else make the call and your hands are clean, even while you are safe.
    Spit.

16. Richard,

    It has nothing to do with making sure one’s hands are clean: neither you nor I make those calls. These are opinions on policy, nothing more. NB: the “they” involved in a WMD use on civilian targets are mostly non-combatants, who can’t make those calls, either. And spinning theoretical scenarios makes for an endless and pointless discussion: If cut-outs with nukes are in play, what guarantee that an overt strike on a patron-state would stop them?

17. “I had not heard a lot of it, especially about the POWs and medical experimentation. ”

    One of the “good” things that at least did come out of it is that a great deal of our knowledge of what happens to humans under extreme conditions knowledge came from these experiments.

    They did many other “experiments” (we do not really have a word in English for it – torture’s definition includes an element of coercion). Things like killing POWS through heat, cold, alternating them between the extremes, burning POWS, and then seeing what their proposed treatments would do for them.

    At that time they didn’t really consider us to be actual humans, only they counted. So they used us in medical experiments to try and learn how to treat major casualties that were occurring to their soldiers. So pretty much anything you can think of that was happening (for instance planes crash and pilots get burned then jump into near freezing ocean water or bullet wounds) they saw the POWS as a source of animals physically identical to the real humans.

    They kept very detailed records and it was ran as a proper scientific study – a horrid one no doubt but fully documented. Much of our burn and hypothermia treatment/knowledge comes directly out of those actions.

    While horrid some of the more brutal happenings was during the invasion of China. Not only was the idea that they were not human prevalent then but centuries of hate were unleashed. There are well documented cases of taking children and forcing to parents to watch as they “practiced” using their bayonets, smashed the babies against walls, and inflicting pain and seeing how long they could prolong it. This occurring in the *millions* – some of it even on video (history channel ran heavily edited footage of it once, even with most of it blacked out it is something hard to forget).

    The Japanese *certainly* didn’t come close to the moral high ground in WWII that many are trying to paint them as now. I, personally, think that some of their current attitudes are an attempt to forget that this happened. I do not think that large swaths of China has remotely forgiven them either.

18. Mike Walsh.
    One (useless) argumentation technique is to address a hypothetical as if it’s technically impossible or unlikely.
    The point stands: What if an enemy–China with 25 million extra men, or Iran with some millions dragooned into the effort–take us on in a fashion which requires us to kill by the millions….
    Or some other hypothetical.
    If we don’t have any say in the matter, then preening your moral superiority about saving your soul is kind of pointless, isn’t it?
    But you got to be born, you got to be safe, and you wash your hands of the folks who made it happen.
    Sweet.
    You recall the human wave attacks against the Iraqis laid on by the Iranians, with kids leading the way in order to detonate mines?
    If that happened again–same type of guys in charge, see Ahmedinijad (Sp)–and it was our guys killing, say, a million of them, what then? Would we–some of our potential enemies might wonder–have the guts to keep killing their kids?
    “Guarantee” No guarantees in this world, but destroying the enemy’s military and technical facilities whole sale would probably do the job but would require more than pinpoint attacks with fifty-pound warheads. And, given the interest many of the terrs have in hiding behind civilians, many, many hundreds of thousands of them would die.
    Would we, our potential enemies might wonder, actually respond in an effective way?
    Remember, the point isn’t whether they guess right or not. Wrong or right, if they move, huge numbers die. The point is to give them as little reason as possible to doubt our resolve.
    Moral preening by the self-soul-savers doesn’t help.

19. I do not think that large swaths of China has remotely forgiven them either.

    My roommate in grad school a few years ago was Taiwanese. Her grandparents had come over from Mainland China, and they had lived through what she called the “Anti-Japanese War.” Some of the things they saw and experienced were so bad that she refused to tell me about them; there were other things she told me that I simply didn’t understand until I did some reading up on the Pacific Theater. It was clear that, for her at least, the memory of Japanese atrocities during WWII was alive and well. Btw, when I asked her if she thought we had been right to drop the bombs, her response was immediate and unequivocal: “Yes.”

    Alex Bensky, thanks for the book references. I’ve added them to my reading list. And Wolla Dalbo, that’s very interesting information you’ve got. I have to admit, the appalling casualty estimates at the link you posted accord very well with my gut sense of what the military conquest of Japan would have involved.

20. Wolla, you make excellent points; thanks for adding them.

    One side point–you often hear that the Japanese would have surrendered by the beginning of December in any event. A professor named Robert P. Newman actually looked into the provenance of this assertion and wrote it up in “Truman and the Hiroshima Cult.”

    The source of the statement is the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, undertaken after the war and led by Paul Nitze. Its ostensible purpose was to evaluate strategic bombing but the implicit aim was to make the case for an independent air force. The summary volume contains this now famous statement.

    Newman dug into the archives, the records of the actual interviews with Japanese leaders, and found that almost to a man they related that “one hundred million die as one” was not just a slogan, and they had intended to resist invasion fully and as savagely as possible. I think just one or two leaders said otherwise and Nitze cherry picked those statements, by far against consensus, because that’s what he wanted to find.

    There is some reason to think that the invasion might not have come off anyway. The Navy, in light of the intelligence failures not discovered until July, 1945, was reconsidering its support for the operations.

    In that case the blockade, the continued bombing, and the destruction of the Japanese transport system would have resulted in millions, literally millions, dying of starvation over the winter, And this is not to mention heavy and costly fighting on the Asian mainland.

    But how much should this mass of evidence weigh in comparison to the self-righteous wallowing in guilt?

21. Alex Bensky,
    I don’t see it as self-righteous wallowing in guilt. I see it as fake self-righteous wallowing in guilt while insisting others really are guilty and ought to admit it.

22. Probably the most common I hear (and I suppose there is truth to it) is that at that point in the war we had no real reason to invade. We were only preparing to do so because that was How Things Were Done.

    Japan is small and particularly devoid of resources, especially at that point in the war. It would have been trivial to contain and starve them into submission. They didn’t have enough navy, air force, or trained soldiers to do anything to kill many of us if we just backed off from the island a bit and did a limited bombing campaign to halt any mass production of anything. Their allies were all gone – they were it.

    That is, as far as I can tell, pretty much accurate.

    However while accurate I’ve never understood is why that particular horrendous death toll (MUCH higher than the atomic weapons) with the agony of starving them to death is preferable to the two atomic bombs. But then they are the same people who have little to no issue with slaughter houses for cows, pigs, chickens, etc but freak out because someone dove, squirrel, and deer hunts. As if the Japanese people (or those cows) would have felt some form of cosmic fulfillment as they starved but their souls evaporated into nothing because of the bomb.

    Every time I’ve asked that I get a bewildered look and some form of “Atomic bombs are evil” (they got fried, there is radiation, etc) – which doesn’t even remotely answer the question. Why is the higher death toll through a much more painful act preferable? I could imagine when they surrendered what we would think now and went to an island that was a big version of the German concentration camps.

23. strcpy
    Radiation seems to affect people–the idea of radiation, that is–in an irrational manner.
    Years ago, a truck carrying medical waste from a cancer treatment center–some of whcih was used in radiation treatments–crashed in Detroit. The paper noted that it failed to explode.
    There was a breathless report in CA some years ago that half the nuke plants there were below average in safety.
    IMO, the answer to your question is that the horror and unacceptable nature of the atomic bomb has been internalized, grafted on to the personality. Other ideas were not. So when the rational meets the irrational, the defense can only be irrational.
    Which is to say, makes the defender look stupid.
    As to why invade, that is not how things were done.
    Few western wars in the last five hundred years, other than civil wars, have ended with the victors occupying the vanquished after pounding them flat, and remaking their societies, keeping large military forces as occupation troops (NATO, cough). After Napoleon went to Elba, the allies re-installed the Bourbons. After our foundation wars, for independence and 1812, we did not occupy Britain and hang the king and his ministers.
    After WW I (the Germans were everywhere on Allied soil at the time of the Armistice), the Germans were left to run their own show.
    I have said elsewhere that the lessons of the latter act were to never let an enemy up easy again. Thus Unconditional Surrender.
    The decision makers in WW II were veterans of or had been adults during WW I and its aftermath.

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