Hiroshima: 69 years ago
[NOTE: The following is a slightly changed version of a post of mine. If you follow the links in the second paragraph, you’ll find three other pieces I’ve written about the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.]
Once again it’s the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Nagasaki followed three days later, and Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945.
To date these two bombs remain—astoundingly enough, considering the nature of our oft-troubled and troubling species—the only nuclear warheads ever detonated over populated areas. (I’ve written at length on the subject of those bombs: see this, this, and this.)
Oliver Kamm wrote a while back:
Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire – and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties.
This context always needs to be kept in mind when evaluating any “terrible thing”—and there is no question that the dropping of these bombs was a terrible thing.
But critics who are bound and determined to portray the West as evil, marauding, bloodthirsty— whatever the dreadful adjective du jour might be—are bound and determined to either avoid all context, or to change the true context and replace it with fanciful myth. As Kamm writes, those who want to portray Hiroshima and Nagasaki as American crimes cite evidence of an imminent Japanese surrender that would have happened anyway.
Trouble is, there’s no such evidence; available information points strongly to the contrary. It’s difficult to know whether those who argue that the bombs were unnecessary and the deaths that ensued gratuitous are guilty of poor scholarship, wishful thinking, or willful lying—or perhaps some combination of these elements.
Truth in history is not easy to determine (see this), although it helps greatly if conventions of scholarship (sources, citations) are properly followed. Oh, the main events themselves are often not disputed—except for fringe groups such as those who think we didn’t go to the moon—although the details are often the subject of disagreement. But it’s the motivations behind the acts, the hearts and minds of the movers and shakers, the “what-might-have-been’s” and the “but-fors” that are so open to both partisan interpretation and willful distortion, and so deeply meaningful.
It’s hard enough to determine what happened. How many died in Dresden, for example? Do we believe Goebbels’s propaganda as promulgated by David Irving, or do we believe this work of recent exhaustive scholarship? The former “facts” have reigned now in popular opinion for quite a while, and although the latter mounts a far more convincing case, how many have read it or are familiar with the facts in it, compared to those who have been heavily exposed to the former?
There’s what happened, and then there’s why it happened—the meaning and intent behind the policy. A combination of the two is what propaganda is all about. It takes a lot of time and effort to wade through facts, make judgments about the veracity of sources, and be willing to keep an open mind.
Much easier to stand in a public square (as a bunch of nodding, smiling, waving, middle-aged peace-love Boomers regularly do in the town where I live) holding huge banners declaring “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB.” Repeat it often enough, and the hope is it will become Truth in people’s eyes.
Especially in the eyes of the young, and of future generations, who don’t have their own memories to go on. It’s much harder to convince a WWII vet that Hiroshima was an unnecessary war crime than it is to convince a young person of same; the former not only has the context, he has own personal memories of the context. But propagandists are not just interested in changing opinions in the present, they’re interested in history and the future.
[NOTE: The definitive essay on the dropping of the atomic bomb by a contemporary and a fine historian is Paul Fussell’s “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.” And for a good discussion of all the controversy about whether Japan was thinking of surrendering prior to Hiroshima, see this. For a discussion of the idea that Russia’s entry into the war against Japan rather than the atomic bomb was the cause of Japan’s surrender, see this.]
My late wife’s parents were generally left-oriented [you-all know the routine, no need for illustrative examples].
But late wife’s mother’s brother was a prisoner of war in WWII, held prisoner by the Japanese. In fact, he wrote a memoir, just for family, describing what he and his fellow prisoners endured at the hands of the Japanese.
My point: as left-oriented as late wife’s mother was, when it came to the issue of dropping the two big bombs on the Japanese cities, guess what? — she sided *firmly* with those who believe it was the best and right thing to do.
Truly, “the former [those who lived through WWII] not only has the context, he has own personal *memories* of the context.”
There were actually half a dozen targets selected in Japan. You needed to be able to see the target to bomb it, so weather reconnaissance flights would take off each morning to see which targets had clear weather. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unfortunate enough to have good weather which made the bombing possible.
Strictly speaking, “warheads” reside atop missiles, and bombs are dropped from bombers.
Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be remembered in America and Japan as events that saved perhaps as many as 2+ million Japanese and American lives. My late father inlaw and one of my uncles survived Okinawa and both expected to die in the invasion of the mainland. I thank Truman for the lives of my father inlaw and my uncle and for giving my wife a chance to be born.
My mom had 5 brothers deployed in WWII, all alive at VE day. None were mustered out and the general belief was all were headed for Japan. As far as she is concerned The Bomb saved some or all of her brothers. And those who were at least somewhat aware of the fight with Japanese (one of her brothers was in combat in the Pacific theater) knew how truly awful those battles were. Reading about Okinawa is all I needed to be convinced that it was necessary.
That and I cannot see why firebombing, or explosive bombing, or flamethrowing or hand-grenading or shooting or stabbing or starving millions of Japanese to death and surrender is somehow morally superior to incinerating 1/10th or fewer of them.
In doing some research I once stumbled across a story in an obscure newspaper—an article you will practically never see referred to—quoting one of Japan’s key WWII atomic bomb researchers, who readily admitted that, had the Japanese been able to create such a bomb, they would have unhesitatingly dropped it on us.
There is also at least one heavily researched book by a U.S. academic (looking around briefly now I can’t find the title again, but they probably read him out of the club for writing it and making the arguments he did) who was proficient in reading the very hard to read Japanese scripts used in official and other documents (not a qualification that many western authors have).
He argued that, from the documents he was able to dig up right after the war and from the interviews he conducted, Japanese research into creating an atomic bomb, which was centered not the Japan but in remote, heavily restricted sites in what is now North Korea that had the abundant rivers needed to generate the enormous amounts of hydroelectric power necessary for such research, was much further along than the U.S. public was told and that, in fact, toward the very end of the war the Japanese had already achieved some sort of a sub critical explosion (see, for instance, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/12/120_56715.html); the half-assed, elementary state of Japanese A-bomb research we have been led to believe then existed usually illustrated in reference sources by a picture of a Japanese “scientist”– based in and doing all his basically “theoretical” research at a university in Tokyo or Kyoto–in a white lab coat looking at a few apparently broken bits and pieces of equipment right out af a cheesy Frankenstein lab scene.
parker,
Some estimates were considerably higher.
“A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s staff by William Shockley estimated that conquering Japan would cost 1.7—4 million American casualties, including 400,000—800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities. The key assumption was large-scale participation by civilians in the defense of Japan.”
Truman was given all of these estimates and though they varied in numbers they all agreed that the Japanese would fight fiercely and that civilian participation was almost certain.
President Truman in a August 9, 1945 radio address to the American people, outlined the reasons why we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (and later Nagasaki)
“I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb. Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster, which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first. That is why we felt compelled to undertake the long and uncertain and costly labor of discovery and production.
We won the race of discovery against the Germans. Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.”
Given the very high estimates given Truman, I can only guess that he decided that stating the actual estimates of the cost to American lives would be needlessly confusing.
Truman also said he never lost a moments sleep over his decision to use the bomb. He understood that, in fighting a cruel enemy, it is cruelty to the innocent, to extend mercy prematurely, to the guilty.
From Louise Steinman’s book The Souvenir: A Daughter Discusses her Father’s War. [, Algonquin Books, of Chapel Hill]
Unlike the Germans, the Japanese have not come to terms with what their country did during WW2. Those Japanese who lived through the war years are becoming fewer and fewer, which suggests that future Japanese will be less likely to have heard viewpoints such as the above- that the bomb was necessary to stop the war, and many fewer Japanese died as a result of the bomb than if the US had invaded Japan.
Parker: amen…Amen…AMEN…A*M*E*N..!!
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My Dad was on Tinian at West Field with the 462nd Bomb Group of the 20th Air Force, The Hellbirds, when the A-Bombs were delivered from North Field by Enola Gay and Bocks Car. Thousands of young Marines were on the island re-equipping and awaiting Home Island invasion orders. Pop said that when word came through of The End which Hiroshima & Nagasaki had brought,”Those Marine boys swamped our airplanes hugging the tires and anything else they could grab. They were the happiest bunch I ever saw!” Yep, they were going to live to be old men. “THANK GOD For The Atom Bomb”!!
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“The Supreme War Council…was making every possible preparation to meet {an American} landing. They proceeded with that plan until the Atomic Bomb was dropped, after which they believed the United States would no longer attempt to land when it had such a superior weapon—that the United States need not land when it had such a weapon; so at that point they decided that it would be best to sue for peace.” …Kantaro Suzuki, Prime Minister of Japan, April–August 1945….
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Around 250,000 civilians in Japanese occupied Asia were dying per month at the time the bombs ended the war.
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The great American novelist, William Styron, who’d been a young Marine awaiting invasion orders on Saipan said at a gathering of Allied and Japanese veterans in Florida about 20-years ago: “When word reached us of the 2-Bombs which ended the war, I felt Ecstasy. I felt it then and I feel it now.”
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Works for me.
GB,
Well, I did type 2+ million. 😉 There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that Truman gave the correct order. Had either/both Germany and/or Japan developed the atomic bomb first they would have used them without hesitation or remorse. Another important issue for Truman was that should the invasion of the main islands occur we may have needed Russian cannon fodder to avoid politically unacceptable US casualties. That would have given Stalin a foot in the door in the occupation.
Others have already pointed it out, but it is obvious that the atomic bombs saved far more Japanese than American lives.
A full-scale invasion of the home islands would have made D-Day look like a cakewalk. Our troops would have been in no mood to “win hearts and minds” after enduring that hell.
Japanese civilians would have been encouraged to undertake suicide attacks. Imagine the psychological damage to American servicemen forced to shoot approaching children who may or may not have been booby-trapped with hand grenades.
This is not exactly on-topic, but about a month ago I bought a new 2014 Mazda 5. It was built in Hiroshima.
That reminds me of the photo essay that was going around a while ago comparing Hiroshima and Detroit in 1945 vs. today. Here is one version.
I happened to do quite a bit of research on the issue of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the estimates of the very high number of U.S. solders likely to be killed/wounded in an invasion of the Japanese home islands were far lower than the perhaps millions of expected Japanese civilian casualties.
As the time of a likely Allied invasion grew closer, Japanese authorities were telling Japanese civilians–men, women, and children alike–that their duty to Japan and the Emperor was to oppose the invasion of sacred Japan with every means at their disposal, and that they were to go down to the beaches with whatever implement they had that could kill–a rake, a hoe, a kitchen knife, a cudgel, etc., and to try to kill at least one U.S. soldier before they themselves were killed.
At the same time, some of the Japanese generals who would be in charge of opposing our landings and directing the defense of the home islands were positively salivating over the prospect of a showdown, of a final “glorious battle.”
Moreover, the very high U.S. anticipated casualty figures were based in part on intelligence estimates of just how much in the way of remaining troops, ships, aircraft, cannons, small arms, ammunition, and fuel the Japanese had left to defend the home islands.
It was only after the surrender and U.S. army investigators got access to Japanese territory that they discovered that the Japanese had managed to squirrel away far more in the way of ships, planes, munitions, and fuel than our intelligence estimates had calculated. So, had we actually tried to invade, the invasion would have been more effectively opposed, would have likely taken longer, and the astronomical number of estimated casualties would have been much higher than already anticipated.
I think we all forget something here and that is there was a road not taken. We could have offered a conditional surrender which we eventually gave them: we allowed them to keep their emperor. It was our moral obligation to make a serious effort to make them understand they could not win and that there is no honor in being obliterated like an insect you stamp your foot on. This may not have worked and time was of the essence as more died every day but I do not believe a serious effort was ever undertaken. The political and military objectives may have been obtainable with less loss of life which would have been a better outcome.
IIRC Truman said after he would never use the bomb again, having seen the destruction it wrought.
Two thoughts:
1. On the island of Saipan, there were approx 30,000 military and 30,000 Japanese civilians at the time of the US invasion. 29,000 of the military died before the island was secured. 20,000 of the civilians died, mostly through suicide. There is newsreel footage of civilians throwing themselves off cliffs rather than live as civilian prisoners.
2. After the first atomic bomb, Japan still did not surrender. We dropped the second, then they surrendered. We only had two.
mf,
Pay attention…. the alternatives were a.) starve 10s of millions of Japanese via a blockade until surrender, or b.) the lose of unknown millions of Japanese civilian lives and unknown number of American lives. A few hundred thousand lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where a bargain compared to what blockade or invasion would have cost.
BTW, allowing the emperor to remain as the titular head of Japan was in the works from the get go. We wisely decided that compliance during the occupation would be much more tranquil by allowing the emperor to remain as the national symbol of Nippon.
Sheesh, go out and buy a clue.
mf,
Unconditional surrender is the only surrender acceptable in war. The enemy has to learn a serious, unforgettable lesson. We have lost that wisdom to our great suffering…. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan. Half-assed war is a guarantee to having to fight the same war all over again. Think Stuck Inside Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.
MF – “conditional” surrender would not have ended the war. It would have left the Japanese military warlords thinking they had “won” somehow or other. If only to fight another day.
It is exactly your line of thinking that has continued to give us the likes of Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, etc.
No, war is war – to the finish. To do otherwise is morally bankrupt and passing the problems to future generations.
parker, I think mf has a point. There is a school of thought that says that our insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged the war unnecessarily.
A conditional surrender is not the same thing as a cease-fire or a negotiated settlement. It still involves surrender, and the admission by the vanquished that they were indeed defeated. It is not the same as fighting a half-assed war.
Demanding unconditional surrender tells the enemy that no quarter will be given, so they have no choice but to dig in their heels and keep resisting.
With Japan, I’m not sure what we could have done differently. They were an alien culture, and there wasn’t much opportunity for reaching a mutual understanding. Yet even after dropping two atomic bombs on them, we did end up accepting a conditional surrender, since we allowed them to keep their emperor.
The case with Germany is much more interesting. They were a part of Western civilization, so they weren’t completely alien. Many Americans were of German descent and had a fondness for German culture. Many Germans didn’t especially hate England or America. The German and British ruling families were related at the start of World War I.
There were German military officers who loved Germany but hated Hitler and the Nazis. There was an underground German resistance movement which begged the Allies for assistance.
There were definitely opportunities to clandestinely work with them to undermine the Nazi war effort and shorten the war, but the insistence on unconditional surrender told them that they had no choice but to fight to the bitter end.
I strongly recommend Diana West’s American Betrayal.
Imperial Japan was ruled mostly by the military officers, the Emperor was kept on a tight leash and fed certain information only.
The original motivation for Japan’s conquest of the Asian Co Prosperity sphere was freedom. To free European colonies from the lash and to raise up Asian civilization to the level of the West. Japan led the revolution of change in changing to Western ways.
This inevitably led to the Japanese military gaining great influence. As Western technology mostly boosted the military sphere.
mf… Please read: “Downfall” by Richard B. Frank. (Random House, 1999)
It is breathtaking.
The North Vietnamese never insisted that America unconditionally surrender, but they skillfully employed propaganda to shape Western public opinion, which undermined America’s war effort and they ended up winning the war.
Hamas is trying to do the same thing today with Israel.
You want to spike the football in the face of a defeated enemy rather than save lives by allowing for a possible conditional surrender. You wish to do this to a tiny island nation who had tried to maintain their national integrity decades prior when we forced them with guns ablazing to open up their land to trade [and if that had never happened there would have been no Pearl Harbor]. You wish to incinerate human beings without giving them a chance to give up, without informing them of the true nature of the threat they faced. You wish to neglect the hatred felt by Truman for the “Japanese barbarians” and the personal political dimension to the decision he made. That way lies barbarity. Truman recognized it too late for the Japanese and American people.
It may not have worked but to not try is wrong.
The post war resurgence of Japan’s economy and its transformation into a nation allied with the west would not have happened that they been allowed to negotiate terms of surrender. mf, is wrong rickl, and so are you. I know many Japanese martial artists, granted they are my age or older, who have told me that breaking the rice bowl of the militarists was the best thing to happen to Japan in their history.
mf, I largely agreed with your 8:02 comment, but I disagree with your 9:46 comment.
Talking about Commodore Perry in the 1850s is part of the “coulda, woulda, shoulda” school of history. None of that mattered by 1945. Japanese barbarism and sadism towards Allied POWs was an established fact. It wasn’t only Truman. Pretty much everybody in America wanted to teach the Japs a lesson they would never forget.
Dropping the atomic bombs was entirely justified. They ended the war, and saved literally millions of lives. Period. Even after Nagasaki, some fanatical officers wanted to continue. They were only stopped by the Emperor himself, who decided to end it.
FWIW:
The Third Atomic Bomb Was Going To Be Dropped On August 19
National Security Archive
13 August 1945
General Hull and Colonel Seaman
This is a telephone conversation transcript between Colonel Seaman of the Manhattan Project and General Hull of Marshall’s staff that took place on 13 August 1945. The subject is atomic bomb deployment and production timeline.
H[ull]: What General Marshall wants to know is the status of the development of these bombs so we can best determine how to use them. There’s one of them due up the 23rd as I recall it.
S[eaman]: There’s one ready to be shipped – waiting on order right now.
H: If the order is given now, when can it be ready?
S: Thursday would be its readiness; the 19th it would be dropped.
S: … Then there will be another one the first part of September. Then there are three definite. There is a possibility of a fourth one in September, either the middle or the latter part.
H: Now, how many in October?
S: Probably three in October.
H: That’s three definite, possibly four by the end of September; possibly three more by the end of October; making a total possibility of seven. That is the information I want.
S: So you can figure on three a month with a possibility of a fourth one. If you get the fourth one, you won’t get it next month. That is up to November.
H: The last one, which is a possibility for the end of October, could you count on that for use before the end of October?
S: You have a possibility of seven, with a good chance of using them prior to the 31st of October.
H: They come out approximately at the rate of three a month.
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/72.pdf
Rickl:
Thou shalt not kill. That is thou shalt not kill wantonly. That is just war doctrine. It is the obligation of the CIC of the greatest military of the greatest nation in the greatest war in history to be honorable in his negotiations with a defeated enemy. To withhold what was offered later is not honorable. To not even make a serious attempt at offering is not honorable. To not recognize this basic and simple truth is to allow ourselves to become what we profess to hate.
mf: The Japanese had not accepted defeat in the first week of August 1945. Far from it. They were rarin’ to go.
rickl: “Hamas is trying to do the same thing today with Israel.”
Bingo!
Rickl:
But that has nothing to do with my point.
mf,
No, no, no, and NO. You are emoting, not thinking. The quickest way to stop the bloodshed and save lives is to convince the enemy that unconditional surrender is the only option. I repeat, absent the ability to demonstrate overwhelming power to destroy; the only options were blockade (which would have been accompanied by fire bombing which incidentally had already consumed far more lives than were lost at H&N) that would have subjected 10s of millions to starvation or invasion which would have resulted in millions of Japanese lives in addition to our own loses.
You blather weepy BS in ignorance of verifiable historical reality.
Unconditional surrender is what we got. That unconditional surrender came in the wake of a half a million dead. Truman received advice from Secretary of War Henry Stimson to announce that we would allow the emperor to stay. His reason was he hoped the war could be ended quickly without additional loss of life, all life, including the Japanese. Truman, having been in office 4 months, overruled him. Much of the post war world was shaped by the mature judgement of Stimson. Go read about him on wikipedia to get an idea. I’ll take the judgement of the Republican Secretary of War over Truman. An unconditional surrender we received. An unconditional surrender was not needed. A face-saving gesture may have saved the lives of half a million. I would hope that people could see the merit of my position. The offer should have been made.
The late George MacDonald Fraser (best known for his “Flashman” novels) has an interesting discussion on the decision to use atomic weapons on Japan in his memoir of his service as an infantryman in Burma in WWII “Quartered Safe Out Here”.
The bozos (beauxeaus?) who claimed that Japan “woulda surrendered anyway” are the same bozos who claimed “if we pull out of Vietnam, there won’t be any bloodbath” (John Gigolo Traitor Kerry, I’m lookin’ at you) — and hundreds of thousands were slaughtered by the Communists.
Yeah, right. As far as the Japs are concerned, they can go to hell. I’ve read enough about their war crimes: the Rape of Nanking alone — in 1937, folks — butchered far more people, in arguably much more hideous ways, than the two A-bombs.
And that was only one city. http://www.nanking-massacre.com/RAPE_OF_NANKING_OR_NANJING_MASSACRE_1937.html
Also, they had what, three days? between bombs to surrender, and the Jap militarists refused, even then. It was a stroke of tremendous luck that the second one did the job — as you all no doubt know, that was all we had at the time.
The internment camps, though they were upsetting for the Japanese citizens, at least had plenty of food, cots to sleep on, families sharing quarters, and school for the kids. No one was beaten, no one was tortured, no one died. They would have felt like heaven on earth to the prisoners of the Imperial Japanese war machine: used for bayonet practice, starved, shot for the slightest infraction, or nothing; used in hideous medical experiments the equal of anything Dr. Mengele came up with.
One of the Japs’ favorite games with prisoners, for example, was to shove a garden hose in their rectum and turn on the water until they vomited their own feces.
They crucified some of the Aussie soldiers they captured, just for the hell of it. Nailed them, alive, to trees in the Burmese jungles. If they captured you alive and dragged you into their trench or foxhole, they would carve the meat off your legs and arms and roast it for a meal while you screamed in agony. Oh, they had all sorts of tricks: ask a veteran, while you still can.
They paid especially vicious attention to our boys who were blonds or redheads: they were singled out for repeated, savage beatings and unspeakable tortures, for the Japs were, Yep! very RACIST. (And the Koreans and the other Asians under their jackboots can attest to that, too.)
Estimated total Chinese casualties alone, from 1937 to 1945, over 30 million.
mf…Revisionist history is a happy, comfy place, no doubt. It also populates a ‘world turned upside down’. David Irving was a first rate scholar before morphing into a blathering holocaust denier. In addition to the Richard Frank volume recommended by me at 9:34pm above (and quoted at 6:24 via Japan’s last wartime P.M.) you might avail yourself of reading what the fights with the Japanese was really like for our men from..ooohh, say…Peleliu thru Okinawa. And, toss in “Prisoners of the Japanese” by Gavan Daws. Come to think of it, add a horrific little tome by Iris Chang,”The Rape of Nanking”.
If you still don’t get why Bill Styron felt “Ecstasy”, read the best memoir of the Pacific War by E.B. Sledge: “With the Old Breed on Peleliu and Okinawa”.
Parker: yep, Yep, YEP, Y*E*P..!
Beverly
Also, they had what, three days? between bombs to surrender, and the Jap militarists refused, even then.
Exactly. Which puts paid to the assertion that before using the bomb on Japan, we should have invited the Japanese to view a demonstration – out in the ocean somewhere?- to show the power of the bomb. If one city destroyed by the bomb didn’t convince the Japanese to surrender, then a demonstration certainly wouldn’t have done the job.
Max Hastings made the point in one of his books that the negotiation proposals that the Japanese sent out through third parties during 1945 showed that the Japanese thought they had more time than they actually did. They dithered and dithered in their third party negotiations during 1945, such as trying to use the USSR to negotiate a better deal. The main reason they thought they had more time than they actually did: they didn’t realize the US had an ace up its sleeve, the A-bomb. [Max Hastings is against the bomb having been dropped.]
Had the Japanese been less dithering in their negotiations with third parties- many negotiations of which the Japanese didn’t realize the US knew about via its ability to read Japanese encrypted transmissions- perhaps the US would have earlier softened its point about the Emperor’s remaining.
Nonetheless, I suspect that had the US, before it dropped the bomb, had softened on the issue of the Emperor remaining, the Japanese would have interpreted this as a concession on our part and would have responded with more dithering. After all, it one side makes a concession, why wouldn’t you try to extract further concessions? Negotiating 101.
In addition to the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan, there are other points by which we can compare the killings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the firebombings of Tokyo in the spring of 1945, about 100,000 Japanese lost their lives in the firestorms that destroyed about 100 square miles of Tokyo. I have not read of many protests about our firebombings- firebombings which used napalm, BTW. Second, the estimates of civilians that the Japanese killed during WW2 range from 10 to 20 million. By comparison, the 100-200 thousand killed by the bomb do not loom large.
General Sherman: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” VDH has a good article on General Sherman: “Sherman at 150.”
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=7734
Disclaimer: I had family on both sides, officers and foot soldiers.
Gringo…Speaking of VDH, a War scholar I hold in high standing, his namesake and cousin of VDH’s Dad, was killed at Sugar Loaf on Okinawa along with many friends.
mf — your statements are simply fantasies. Japanese officers attempted to stage a coup against the Emperor AFTER Hiroshima when they found out that surrender was in the offing. It took determined effort by a few brave individuals to secure the Emperor’s surrender statement in the face of the militarists.
And we didn’t grant a conditional surrender: WE decided to alow the Emperor to continue because it was in our own best interests, not as a concession to the Japanese. We could just as well have decided to depose him.
In all of this historical revisionism, there’s a strong tendency to omit the Japanese propaganda of the day: “100,000,000 strong, we die as one with the Emperor.”
There is NOT ONE indication that the Japanese civilians would not have taken genocidal levels of self destruction.
The crazy idea that the Japanese were going to ‘get reasonable’ after 10,000,000 fatalities is utterly bizarre.
Olympic and Coronet would’ve liquidated Japanese culture. Period.
Ask the Aztecs and the Inca how that worked out for them.
Further, during Coronet, you can take it to the bank that the IJA would’ve liquidated every Chinese and Korean soul to hand. Think hundreds of millions of souls.
THAT’S where the war was heading.
For those curious, Google “Operation Go” [ The IJA in China circa 1944 retaliating for the B-29 raids. ]
That slaughter was vastly more horrific than Dresden.
%%%
I’m not one to protect the rep of Goebbels….
But it was Kurt Vonnegut who put Dresden on the Leftist radar.
It then became a Soviet promoted meme.
In fact, Dresden made it to the hot list for two reasons:
1)The Red Army demanded it. The 6th SS Panzer Army was staging east right through Dresden — to engage in the last Nazi counter-attack of the war. (in Hungary) Likewise, the last drops of synthetic gasoline were shifting east through Dresden to support the 6SS Panzer Army.
[This Nazi army was the very last to surrender — not doing so until the ammo ran out — in mid May — a full week after the official end of the war!]
2) Dresden was discovered to be the (final) location producing Zyklon B. [The first location was Hamburg, and look what happened to it. Think Sodom and Gohorrah.]
While never put in writing, on the facts it’s evident that any community that produced Zyklon B went to the top of the hit list. The time between the intelligence discovery and the ‘hit’ was remarkably brief for both cities. Both were cleared by Winston, himself.
In very much the manner of Hiroshima, Dresden was widely known to be a massively Catholic city. In Dresden’s case, it was also known to be a hot bed of anti-Nazi sentiment. Goebbels was always on the look out for Dresden sentiments.
Also like Hiroshima, Dresden had scarcely any direct war production. Both were critical (late war) transit nodes. Hiroshima was the main jumping off point for all reinforcements for Kyushu.
As you might guess, both cities had been spared any bombing at all — until the very last. Both cities attributed their good fortune to their Catholic faith.
I see in most of the posts that everyone looks past the urgent reality that the IJA had 400,000,000 trapped Chinese civilians who would’ve been genocided right along with the Japanese in the home islands.
That’s a lot of hostages.
During any end-game in Japan the Japanese army would’ve gone ‘Manilla’ on the trapped Chinese civilians. Don’t you doubt it.
The issue was an actual issue at the time. The CIC made his choice. The road not taken cannot be known but it would have cost nothing to take it.
I’m sure the world would have been just as thrilled to hear Truman say:
“Today the surrender of the Empire of Japan has been effected. We will begin occupation and demilitarization shortly. The war is over.”
Suppose we had said:
“You know very well the war is over. What you are doing is fighting on for honor blah blah blah. We have a bomb that will destroy a city whch means we have the ability to stop you cold without our taking any losses. What’s the honor in being indiscriminately slaughtered? Tell you what, you can keep your emperor blah blah blah. These are the conditions of your surrender blah blah blah. Do you accept?”
Or something like this offering a surrender. It might not have worked, but it also might have. We will never know because that road was not taken. And yes, this was an actual issue at the time.
mf,
Grow up! Stop your what ifs. There actually is something called reality. It confronts you each and every day. Until you do so, you will always be on the wrong side of history and the history that is being born this moment. Time waits for no one.
We were willing to allow the emperor to remain. We were just not willing to say so. Too bad and inexcusable in my opinion when a half a million lives hung in the balance. But the politicians got to look strong and post war we get to maintain our self-righteousness which would be well justified if only we had made the offer. But I suppose, it makes no difference to some as long as they get to write the history.
mf you dingbat: The Japanese military would not believe a single word America said.
That’s what drove all of Tokyo’s ‘negotiations.’
Even after the collapse of Nazi Germany — under terms of unconditional surrender — Tokyo STILL did not believe that those terms would be imposed upon Japan.
They were so delusional that they thought that Moscow was a neutral party. (!)
That made Tokyo as clueless then as you are today.
English does not move you.
Japan was not hanging on to save the Emperor. She was hanging on to avoid the fate of the Nazis. (Japanese) War crimes — and the resulting trials were already very much in the news.
And since Tokyo had committed more atrocities than the Nazis — there was a L O N G list to select from.
Most of these horrific crimes were perpetrated by the Japanese against Koreans, Chinese and in the Philippines.
Everything from cannibalism to biological and chemical warfare ‘research’ using prisoners of war…
To forced labor on an epic scale — dwarfing the Nazi efforts…
To enforced starvation (Warsaw style) to bizarre brutalities against the Polynesians…
The list of war crimes is too long to list, too painful to recount.
It is FALSE to think the Japanese were even one step behind the Nazis in mass barbarities.
And like the terminal Nazi state, Tokyo turned its guns around onto its own people: forced labor compelled from Japan’s native sons and daughters.
It’s been generations since that war. Japanese citizens are STILL loathed across the larger Pacific, Korea and China.
All of the above are the reasons why the military clique did not want to surrender. The Emperor was — and is — merely a totem to hide behind. Such ‘protection’ runs thin, of course.
%%%
For some crazy reason there is a general memory that the Japanese fought an honest war while the Germans were low down dirty skunks. The record is crystal clear: the Japanese treatment of the Chinese and the Soviet treatment of the Kulaks were inspirations for the SS/ SD.
When FDR refused to call out Uncle Joe for massacring Polish officers — Hitler and company figured the route was clear to liquidate entire races.
While European Jewry gets post-war media prominence, the record is clear: Adolf fully intended to liquidate most of the Slavic races and enslave the rest, the Gypsies (Roma), the retarded, the disabled (WWI vets in particular), and eject/ liquidate Black Africans.
He prioritized Polish professors and authors even before Jewish intellectuals!
The Japanese had their own version. It consisted of running all of Korea like a rural death camp. Koreans were being starved even as they were farming rice with a will to live.
Against the shear carnage of these evil regimes, the atomic decision was a rounding error. We all know how easy it is to be a Monday morning quarterback.
[ Lastly, the Japanese negotiators were as clear as mud with regard to hanging on to the Emperor. Everything was being routed through Stalin’s ‘good offices.’ Ain’t that rich?]
The incineration of a half million is but a rounding error to you. How sad. There really is nothing more to discuss.
mf
The incineration of a half million is but a rounding error to you.
Says who?
There really is nothing more to discuss.
On that we can agree.
Blert:
The incineration of a half million is but a rounding error to you. How sad. There really is nothing more to discuss.
Gringo:
Check blert’s message at August 8th, 2014 at 3:36 am.
mf to blert:
The incineration of a half million is but a rounding error to you. How sad. There really is nothing more to discuss.
It turns out that blert and I have said essentially the same thing.
blert:
Gringo:
We do not agree with each other You haven’t convinced us, and we haven’t convinced you.
Se acabé³ la vaina.
Gringo:
I don’t think any of you know what my point was. None of the reactions I received even address it. I never said that dropping the bomb was wrong, per se. I said that we had a moral obligation to warn them and to offer them terms of surrender that were the actual terms we would grant which meant we would allow them to keep their emperor.
An appeal based on their barbarity as a reason for dropping this weapon without warning is in my opinion just wrong when the possibility is there that they might surrender. We will never know because we did not ask.
Again, this was an actual issue at the time amongst those who were in a position to affect the decision.
mf
I never said that dropping the bomb was wrong, per se. I said that we had a moral obligation to warn them and to offer them terms of surrender that were the actual terms we would grant which meant we would allow them to keep their emperor.
I made comments @ “August 7th, 2014 at 11:21 am” regarding 1) warning the Japanese and 2) surrender terms which would allow them to keep the emperor. I have also read extensively on the Japanese “negotiating” in 1945 before the bomb was dropped.
I repeat:
We do not agree with each other You haven’t convinced us, and we haven’t convinced you.
Se acabé³ la vaina.
Gringo:
Apparently you’re telling me the thread is over, at least that’s my best guess based on google translate. If that’s correct, you certanly have the ability to end it by youtself. All you need do is leave it.
In the mean time, give this a go, just to show you that this was an actual issue at the time. But of course, Ike may have been a dingbat peacenik and his judgement should not be considered at all because the Japanese were so heinous that it justifies our barbarity despite the possibility existing that they would have surrendered.
Just one other thing. You say you read extensively on this subject. Did you ever stop to consider that it is the winners who write the history?
http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2534018
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
That was a conclusion of the 1946 U.S. Bombing Survey ordered by President Harry Truman in the wake of World War II.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said in 1963, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
That wasn’t merely hindsight. Eisenhower made the same argument in 1945. In his memoirs, Ike recalled a visit from War Secretary Henry Stimson:
“I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.””
Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief military advisor, wrote:
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”
I put a lot of weight on the assessments of the military leaders at the time and the contemporaneous commission that studied it. My colleague Michael Barone, who defends the bombing, has other sources – a historian and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan – that lead him to conclude Japan would not have surrendered.
This confusion is not surprising. For one thing, there’s what we call the “fog of war” – it’s really hard to know what’s happening currently in war, and it’s even harder to predict which way the war will break.
Second, more generally, there’s the imperfection of human knowledge. Humans are very limited in their ability to predict the future and to determine the consequences of their actions in complex situations like war.
So, if Barone wants to stick with Moynihan’s and the New Republic’s assessments of the war while I stick with the assessments of Gen. Eisenhower, Adm. Leahy, and Truman’s own commission, that’s fine. The question – would Japan have surrendered without our bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki? – can’t be answered with certainty today, nor could it have been answered in August 1945.
But this fog, this imperfect knowledge, ought to diminish the weight given to the consequentialist type of reasoning Barone employs – “Many, many more deaths, of Japanese as well as Americans, would have occurred if the atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
We don’t know that. That’s a guess. We didn’t know that at the time. If Pres. Truman believed that, it was a prediction of the future – and a prediction that clashed with the predictions of the military leaders.
Given all this uncertainty, I would lend more weight to principle. One principle nearly everyone shares is this: it’s wrong to deliberately kill babies and innocent children. The same goes for Japanese women, elderly, disabled, and any other non-combatants. Even if you don’t hold this as an absolute principle, most people hold it as a pretty firm rule.
To justify the bombing, you need to scuttle this principle in exchange for consequentialist thinking. With a principle as strong as “don’t murder kids” I think you’d need a lot more certainty than Truman could have had.
I don’t think Truman’s decision was motivated by evil. I’ll even add that it was an understandable decision. But I think it was the wrong one.