About the dropping of the atomic bomb, and whether Japan had been about to surrender
The issue was raised in a comment by “Phil D,” here.
The answer is contained in this 2005 article from the Weekly Standard. Pay particular attention to page three.
It is very detailed and cannot really be summarized here. However, the conclusion was as follows:
Finally, thanks to radio intelligence, American leaders, far from knowing that peace was at hand, understood–as one analytical piece in the “Magic” Far East Summary stated in July 1945, after a review of both the military and diplomatic intercepts–that “until the Japanese leaders realize that an invasion can not be repelled, there is little likelihood that they will accept any peace terms satisfactory to the Allies.” This cannot be improved upon as a succinct and accurate summary of the military and diplomatic realities of the summer of 1945.
We dropped the first bomb. We asked for their surrender. They did not surrender.
Does that have any bearing in assessing their intentions?
“And if Truman had refused to disclose fully his thinking, these scholars reasoned, it must be because the real basis for his choices would undermine or even delegitimize his decisions. It scarcely seemed plausible to such critics–or to almost anyone else–that there could be any legitimate reason that the U.S. government would have concealed at the time, and would continue to conceal, powerful evidence that supported and explained the president’s decisions.”
“In explaining their decisions to the public, they deliberately forfeited their best evidence. They did so because under the stringent security restrictions guarding radio intercepts, recipients of this intelligence up to and including the president were barred from retaining copies of briefing documents, from making any public reference to them whatsoever at the time or in their memoirs, and from retaining any record of what they had seen or what they had concluded from it. With a handful of exceptions, they obeyed these rules, both during the war and thereafter.”
These two paragraphs IMMEDIATELY jumped out at me and caused me to wonder how much of that could be applied to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.
I have run into this at my church among some of the parishioners. My position of support for the use of the bomb as a measure to end the war and ultimately save lives is dismissed as error and I’m viewed as a supporter of violence. I’m so thankful that my parents raised me to be comfortable with dissent and a willingness to be misunderstood.
It turns out that it was the most humane choice. Any other would have led to the partition of Japan and the creation of another commie crap society like NK. That’s if Japan survived at. Even so the failed military coup to seize Hirohito’s surrender recording before it could be broadcast showed there were still plenty of fanatics that wanted Gé¶tterdé¤mmerung.
Japan – nuked too much or not enough?
Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit)
I’m so thankful that my parents raised me to be comfortable with dissent and a willingness to be misunderstood.
It all rests on how much you want to be “liked” Sharon and how much disagreement or dislike you can tolerate.
Most humans are weak, they want to be part of the herd, so they will comply, even if it means overriding their own judgment and conscience.
As mentioned before, if FDR extended the war with Japan and refused to consider conditional surrender proposals by the Japanese, it was because FDR wanted to give RUssia “more flexibility” after the end of the Euro front, so that Japan can be split up, the way FDR split up other countries with Russia.
I guess this “debate” will never go away. It was a long, brutal war. Much longer, and much more brutal, than the period of our participation. I really do not understand how anyone who studies the history would second-guess an action that brought it to the swiftest possible conclusion.
I would add one more point relative to the argument that Japan would surrender. The Kamikaze attacks at Okinawa certainly would play on the minds of U.S. decision makers; and would suggest that surrender was very unlikely before Japan had bled nigh unto death; and killed an enormous number of Americans in the process.
Oldflyer:
Plus, that “second-guessing” involves a supposition about the US government and president and military, which is that they wanted to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians for no reason, because they had a good alternative that they unaccountably refused to activate. We have been subjected to so much anti-American history in recent decades that a lot of people don’t even blink at that suggestion.
I guess this “debate” will never go away.
Doesn’t this come from a Southerner that thinks the Civil War was started by Northern abolitionists and that Southern slavery would have ended anyways and that the South was fighting for “State’s Rights” under the Democrat plan to force states to enforce federal fugitive acts and to expand slavery to the territories…
Well, if it did come from that pov, it would be pretty ironic.
The argument about the dropping of the atomic bomb and whether Japan had been about to surrender is irrelevant because it’s not about whether nuking Japan was justified, much less morally defensible.
It’s about condemning America no matter what we might do, in this case by advancing the meme that violence is never morally justified* and, that violence never solves anything**.
That’s why facts, logic and reason have no effect whatsoever upon the other side.
This applies to every argument from the Left.
“For the left, it’s never about the issue, it’s always about the revolution.” David Horowitz
* Eric Holder’s assertion that we have “a duty to retreat”
** Bush’s invasion of Iraq led to ISIS (utter BS)
That there may have been high-ranking Japanese officials who were willing to surrender is not the same thing as Japan being willing to surrender. Even if there were verifiable documents that existed that suggested terms, they would be of extremely uncertain value. They might represent only a minority of “high-ranking” Japanese officials; they might be purely exploratory, even if generally supported; they might even be a ruse as delaying tactic. Treating them as Real True Overtures Which Evil Racist Warlike America Ignored is quite a stretch.
There is a frequent variation on this which maintains that it was all cultural misunderstanding, and that if American leadership had only understood Japanese culture, it would have known that surrender was actually being offered in a context of saving face. My thinking on that would be that the Japanese have a rather large responsibility to make themselves understood in such a situation. If I want to communicate something to my enemy in a life-or-death situation when it’s my life we’re talking about, I’m going to make damn sure I understand his culture and how to say things, not demand he understand mine.
it would have known that surrender was actually being offered in a context of saving face.
Is that how the Left treated Qaddafi and Egypt, Israel too?
There’s an inconsistency there that people might want to look at, if they are taking Leftist tropes seriously.
If one wishes to condemn Truman’s decision; one must likewise condemn the fire bombing of Tokyo, other Japanese cities, and of course the fire bombing of Dresden and other German cities. More died in Tokyo than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The actual war crimes during WW2 were perpetrated by the Japanese and the Germans. As noted by others, the hand wringing over Truman’s decision 70 years after the fact are nothing more than the same old leftist propaganda to discredit America as evil, colonial, etc.
References:
http://crossroads.alexanderpiela.com/ThankGod.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1708051/posts
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2013/08/08/its-not-too-late-to-honor-the-atomic-bomb-drops-on-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2009/08/05/my-mom-is-a-hiroshima-bomb-survivor-too/
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2010/03/18/tom-hanks-shows-stunning-ignorance-when-he-claims-americans-were-racial-genocidists-against-the-japanese-during-wwii/
This is ridiculous. Nobody even sees what the real issue should be. We did not negotiate in good faith the actual terms of surrender we were willing to give and did give. The Japanese got to keep their emperor. With what was at stake we should have simply told them that we had a bomb that would destroy a city; that they could not win. Surrender now and keep your emperor and stop the slaughter of tens of thousands by a single bomb. There is no honor in being slaughtered like bugs. That we did not do this redounds against any morality we claim, particularly considering that those killed were civilians.
Such an offer may not have been accepted but it was required that it be offered. My own judgement is that Truman’s decision was made mostly for domestic political gain.
mf,
Hiroshima was not enough to get Japan to surrender. It took Nagasaki. Do you honestly believe that politics meant more to Truman than the lives he knew would be lost in trying to take the Japanese mainland? Maybe you need to do some more reading about the Pacific war.
neo-neocon, 2:52 pm — “they wanted to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians for no reason, because they had a good alternative that they unaccountably refused to activate.”
Calls to mind my late grandfather, who was a Menshevik in the Russian Revolution. [The Mensheviks were socialists / communists, as were the Bolsheviks; but my best and shortest summary of the distinction is that the Mensheviks were more given to a democratic process, and the Bolsheviks were (much) more ruthless.]
Anyway . . .
Said late grandfather was convinced that the reason we (USA) dropped the bombs on Japan and not on Germany was that the Japanese were yellow-race, but the Germans were white-race (i.e., more like us).
Sigh; what ya gonna do?
M J R:
I guess your grandfather wasn’t all that familiar with Dresden or Hamburg. Nor did he realize that the atom bomb was not ready for testing until mid-July of 1945, and that Germany had already surrendered the previous May.
neo-neocon, 7:07 pm —
There was a lot with which my grandfather (R.I.P.) was unfamiliar. He was an extremely doctrinaire socialist.
In some ways, he could be a man of contradictions. He was *very* tight with his money, but anything his children or grandchildren might have asked for, he gave generously, without pausing for a second thought.
He became terribly anti-black, although he once was very pro-black and pro- civil rights, as all good leftists were. He came into contact with many blacks as a result of them becoming his customers; they were often not good experiences. He became a classic example of having been mugged by reality, except it was confined to that aspect of things. He was a faithful socialist to the end.
mf:
You’ve got some rather strange reasoning there.
First of all,, firebombings had already destroyed many Japanese cities. See this:
Why on earth would a warning (“mere words”) that we had a bomb that could do it in one fell swoop deter them any more than that? As for negotiations, there’s this:
So you think the US should have somehow gotten word to them they it had a bigger bomb—why?
Not only that, but since Japan didn’t surrender after Hiroshima (an actual bomb that destroyed an actual city, rather than a mere warning of one), it’s virtually certain a warning would have been meaningless. The surrender came after Nagasaki.
There are countless arguments about the decision, and probably always will be. Plus, there’s a school of thought that thinks the surrender actually had more to do with the USSR declaring war on Japan and less with the bombs. But there is virtually no scenario in which a warning about the bomb would have made any difference, so it’s not clear why you would place such emphasis on it.
M J R:
My uncle was a faithful pro-Soviet socialist/Communist to the end, so I get it.
expat,
I am talking about before the bomb was dropped. We did not negotiate in good faith. We did not indicate that we would allow a conditional surrender. The decision Truman made was to drop the bomb without offering a conditional surrender. We have no idea what would have happened if we had negotiated in good faith because we did not. There were plenty of reasons to drop the bomb aside from just winning the war and avoiding a costly invasion of Japan. Like cold war implications involving the Soviets, domestic politics, etc. None of those reasons trump dropping the bomb while not negotiating in good faith. The decision as made was the act of a barbarian. All that was needed to change that judgement was to negotiate in good faith.
mf:
Did you read my comment to you?
Yeah, that’s right neo. The atom bomb was not a game changer. Sure.
And of course you have completely avoided the argument.
One cannot pretend to negotiate in good faith while not offering the actual terms one is willing to accept. To say they will not accept is the ultimate in self fulfilling prophecies.
mf:
I didn’t say the atomic bomb was not a game-changer. I said that warning that we had a big bomb like that would not have been a game-changer. I actually think the two detonations of the atomic bombs were a game-changer, but that a mere warning wouldn’t have mattered at all.
I also said that a few historians think the bomb detonations weren’t a game-changer, and that the actions of the Soviets were the game changers. But I don’t find their arguments compelling.
And it is you who are ignoring the information I put up there, which had to do with the fact that no meaningful negotiations could have possibly happened because only the emperor had the power to negotiate those things, and he wasn’t negotiating, nor did anyone (except one lone person) in the Japanese government think that they should have opened direct negotiations with the US. So your concept of “good faith negotiations” is strangely out of touch with reality, and also unilateral in nature.
(See this post on a somewhat related subject.)
The Japanese surrender terms were the same surrender terms the Germans received, unconditional surrender. This was what the allies had agreed on.
With one caveat, unless you’ve read this book you can not offer an informed opinion:
http://www.usni.org/store/books/audio-books/hell-pay
HELL TO PAY
Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947
by D.M. Giangreco
The one caveat; if you’ve read the declassified documents the author bases his book upon. Then, you can also offer an informed opinion.
After the war the American occupation forces gathered senior Japanese military and naval officers together and had them report in detail exactly how they had prepared to defend the home islands. The Americans were stunned. They had anticipated every American move in horrifying detail and had prepared an absolutely lethal defense in depth. An invasion would have been a bloodbath beyond comprehension.
The Japanese forces in WWII are sometimes stereotyped as rigid, inflexible, and incapable of learning while the American were the opposite. This is by no means entirely true. The Japanese had been learning from American and allied forces. They were learning how we operated, what beaches we required or preferred to conduct amphibious assaults, the whole nine yards. They knew after Okinawa the US would establish a beachhead on Kyushu, then exactly what beaches in Chiba prefecture east of Tokyo where the forces would land. It was like they had read our plans, but they hadn’t they had just learned from us.
Which is why the closer US and allied forces got to the home islands, the higher the price the Japanese would make us pay. They were convinced they could make the price to invade the home islands too high, and after looking at how perfectly they had anticipated US moves (let’s face it, the Pacific war was an American operation; while the ANZAC forces were extraordinarily courageous and professional they were too small to even defend their own countries let alone take on offensive operations and the Brits were barely even bit players in the theater) and how well the Japanese had prepared to counter them it’s impossible to say they were wrong.
The planning for the invasion of Japan had to start well in advance, which should be obvious considering the enormity of the undertaking. Yet each step closer to the home islands blew prior casualty estimates away. The number of troops the US was going to need kept going up. They might have based their planning on the casualty figures of Tarawa. But after Saipan they had to throw those numbers out and start over. Then after Iwo Jima they had to throw the Saipan numbers out and start over. Then there was Okinawa, which was far worse.
It’s been a while since I read the book but if memory serves the Navy had to place an emergency order for hundreds of thousands if not over a million Purple Heart medals as they realized they had no where near enough on hand. This was particularly true after Leyte in October 1944 when the Japanese began organized kamikaze operations in earnest. The kamikazes were demoralizing enough, and then sailors in their hospital beds didn’t even get a Purple Heart when the soldier or USAAF airman lying next to him was awarded his. Because the Navy hadn’t ordered enough.
Just the chapter on delivering plasma and whole blood to the wounded makes you appreciate the atom bomb. At least it makes me appreciate the atom bomb as my dad was a Coastie in the Pacific and I probably wouldn’t be here if they had to invade.
Which, I’m sure, has many of you opposed to dropping the bomb if you were on the fence before. Ah well.
Dugout Doug was tapped to lead the invasion. His Chief Surgeon on staff was responsible for planning medical support to the operation. Just the one aspect, delivering plasma and whole blood to the wounded, was almost incomprehensibly mammoth. Plasma keeps but can only do so much, while whole blood had a limited shelf life which in the 1940s could be measured in hours. Basically this medical officer on MacArthur’s staff would have had an Air Force larger than the Army Air Corps the US started the war with just to get the blood and plasma from the US (massive blood drives were planned) to staging areas in the Philippines where in turn they’d be flown to as close to combat as possible. Then this medical officer would have had an entire navy at his command; specially equipped LSTs (Tank Landing Ships) converted to transport these two commodities.
And this is just one aspect of the medical support planning. Then there had to be field hospitals and a million other things to think of.
Anybody who doesn’t understand how many lives the atom bomb saved on both sides doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together.
“Ambassador Sato’s report to Tokyo that the Soviet Union had declared war was never transmitted, Molotov’s promise notwithstanding. The Russians themselves, hours later, broadcast the news. It was monitored by the radio room of the Foreign Ministry before dawn that morning, while Bock’s Car was still hundreds of miles from Nagasaki. Smashed was Togo’s last tenuous hope for negotiations through the U.S.S.R. …
Japan had been stabbed in the back without warning – he was indignant as Cordell Hull had been on Pearl Harbor day.
…
Suzuki called to order an emergency meeting of the Big Six. It was 11 AM, one minute before “Fat Man” fell on Nagasaki. “Under the present circumstances, ” Suzuki began, “I have concluded that our only alternative is to accept the Potsdam Proclamation and terminate the war””.
“The Rising Sun” John Toland
neo,
You are still ignoring the point I am trying to make. You are too smart to not realize it. If the purpose of your posting is just vanity there is no need to continue.
However, if you want to learn something read this page paying particular attention to the comments by Jasonc:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2309523/posts?q=1&;page=51
There is a history in there of wnat was actually happening in the Amrican an war councils about the Japan negotiations. There was disagreement. HST over-ruled the likes of Sec. of War Stimson and Ambassador Grew who both pushed for an offer of conditional surrender which mean they get to keep their emperor.
There is also clear headed explanations of what is required in war. Hint. It’s not about spiking the football in the end zone.
In case my prior post screwed up the url here it is as a tinyurl:
http://tinyurl.com/p8vlbzn
Lurker: John Toland was a Leftist, an admirer of Stalin and really disliked Churchill (see his “The Last 100 Days”). His wife, BTW, was Japanese.
But I’m sure he was entirely objective.
Here’s a link to some of Japan’s wartime atrocities. As the article Neo linked noted, they slaughtered 17 million people, so don’t cry crocodile tears for them.
http://www.pacificwar.org.au/JapWarCrimes/Cross-section_JapWarCrimes.html
Just a sampling, but enough to turn a strong man’s stomach.
Also worth noting: the Japanese began their invasion of China in 1937 — years before the attack on Pearl Harbor and before America imposed any embargoes.
And there’s the Rape of Manila:
Early in 1945, General Yamashita planned for his men to evacuate Manila and fight in the countryside. However, two Japanese admirals ignored his order and committed their men to a final stand inside the city. When the Americans arrived, the Japanese forces realized that they faced certain death and vented their rage on the hapless civilians trapped inside their lines.
For weeks, the Japanese raped, pillaged, and murdered. Aside from the bayonets and beheadings, they machine-gunned captives and set fire to buildings with people trapped inside. The Americans ceased artillery strikes so the Japanese could surrender, but the Japanese instead continued their rampage.
After the dust settled, all Japanese defenders of the city had died, taking with them 100,000 civilian casualties. The incident left Manila as one of the Allies’ most damaged capital cities, second only to Warsaw.
There are many, many more Japanese atrocities, but this one sticks in my mind.
Unit 731 conducted medical experiments as horrifying as anything conducted by Mengele at Auschwitz. But who has heard of them? (Yes, we’re so racist: if so, why is this?)
During the occupation of China, the Japanese army set up the secretive Unit 731. Behind closed doors doctors infected civilians with plague, subjected them to extreme temperature changes, and had them dissected alive.
http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/07/23/forgotten-horrors-the-human-experiments-of-unit-731/
MF evidently believes we should have negotiated the conditions of the unconditional surrender ultimatum we had given the Japanese. The unconditional surrender had been agreed to by our allies and Truman couldn’t start negotiating with the Japanese and ignore the allies.
mf is a one trick pony. Thank you Harry (RIP) for incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki and bringing about the unconditioanal surrender. That decision saved millions of American lives/casualties and many more millions of Japanese.
Unit 731
The US pardoned them in return for the medical information on anti chemical warfare and other agents.
The thing about digging into history is that people don’t come out clean, because reality is not the “idealistic equality” Americans are fed with all the time.
As for the nukes, Hirohito was told by his advisers that the first American nuke was uranium and thus could not be mass reproduced very easily. The second bomb was plutonium, which could be.
The Japanese pov about WWII and the aftermath is interesting to read through. It’s the pov of the defeated, while America and UK is the pov of a (now decadent) victor. Very different.
As I wrote before, the only reason Emperor Hirohito was left alive and pardoned more or less for war crimes, is due to MacArthur’s personal relationship with Hirohito and MacArthur’s own position and authority.
It had little to do with the US wanting to save Hirohito or refusing to accept the conditions that the Japanese had wanted.
In a slightly different world, Hirohito would have been tried as a war criminal and executed, as they did to the German officers. And Japan would have revolted and Russia would be occupying half of it even now.
To the Japanese, fire in their cities was a common hazard they had to fight. And their natural history had massive fires that destroyed large swathes of a city, as well.
So firebombing was psychologically familiar, although still damaging.
The nukes meant that even hardened defenses or tanks, would melt like ice under the fury of the new sun. Which meant all those beachheads the military kept telling Hirohito about? They would evaporate.
Of course in reality the ability to make that many bombs wasn’t very quick at the time. They had no breeder reactors or enrichment reactors. But it was only a matter of time.
mf:
What would vanity have to do with it?
I’ve addressed many of the points that you made, and you haven’t addressed mine. What’s more, several other commenters have addressed your points, as well.
mf insists we are all missing/obscuring his salient point. But it is he/she/it that is blowing smoke. Spiking the football is an idiotic analogy in the context of the lives that would be lost on both sides in the invasion of the main islands. Unconditional surrender does not allow for negogiations.
Unconditional: not subject to conditions. How difficult is that to understand? mf suggests that negogiations should be less than unconditional; perhaps allowing the Japanese to retain control of Manchuria or continue to hold POWs and starve them to death while brutalizing them? I use the word moron sparingly, but duped by the left moron appears to apply.
Neo, you’ve stated the actual history and reasoning quite cogently. There always will be people safely protected by time and geography from grasping the reality as it was, and see it only through the lens of their own myopic present day political view. The best that can be said is they are at least reading (but not comprehending) your writing.
To all,
I have made one point and it has yet to be addressed. That is we should have offered the conditionalsurrender we eventually gave. We should have told the Japanese we would allow them to keep their emperor. We should have done this before we dropped the bomb. If the Japanese refused the offer, then go ahead and bomb.
Paul Fussell, author of “Thank God for The Atomic Bomb” was something like my late father. He’d been an Infantry platoon leader in Europe, too beat up to go to the Pacific until the casualty reports from Iwo and Okinawa came in. Then it was fog-a-mirror physical standards.
Fussell remarked that, for the veterans of the war who objected to the use of nukes, it was a social signal. They were of such high status–not like the lowly grunts–that they would not have been going up the beaches.
IMO, a good amount of the current objections are also social signaling: The US is always wrong and I’m so evolved I know it. I’m the Right Sort of Person.
That is we should have offered the conditionalsurrender we eventually gave.
You’re not very quick on the uptake, are you.
it has yet to be addressed
If you can’t even figure out that it was addressed and in what fashion, what business do you have to claim the authority to argue about much of anything?
A rational enemy would have surrendered after the fall of the Marianas.
To believe that Japan was about to surrender, the US would have to assume that they were about to do what no sizeable Japanese military unit had Ever done.
I put up a link to this discussion above but now I have distilled it down to the points I consider important for understanding the point I am having difficulty making. Please forgive the length but please read. So here it is:
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2309523/posts?page=51#51
The US after the war agreed to leave the emperor in order to secure the willing cooperation of the defeated, during the occupation.
The Japanese had been insisting on that as a condition of surrender for a year. The US continually said no, the surrender must be unconditional.
It is not transparently obvious that there was anything in the slightest bit necessary about this sequence. One might argue that it was, that some total break of will was necessary for the surrender to be “real”. But it is sheer speculation. On its face, the Japanese said “we’ll surrender if you leave our king”, the US said “surrender without that assurance or we’ll kill you all”, and then said “and oh by the way you can keep your king” after they surrendered.
Yes a conventional invasion would have been worse. But it is not remotely clear that was the only alternative. The road not taken was to negotiate a peace in slightly better faith, instead of in implacable self righteousness.
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2309523/posts?page=54#54
At the time, plenty of people saw that the unconditional surrender demand was unreasonable and prolonging the war. It has been issued in order to keep the wartime allies united, especially to prevent any last minute splits in dealing with Germany. Its application to Japan was required mostly by stubbornness and a desire of the pols involved to appear powerful and consistent to their own populace. Not exactly mortal considerations when in the balance with millions of lives.
It is ludicruous to pretend Japan was still any threat to the allied powers. It was necessary to finish the war, certainly. That is all.
The key issue was the political opposition to surrender within Japan. In case everyone forgot, the military staged a coup against the surrender even after the bombings – it didn’t make *them* willing to surrender. It did make the emperor willing.
The Japanese had the delusional hope at the time that the Russians might remain neutral and help them negotiate a peace on terms better than unconditional surrender. That prop was knocked away when the Russians invaded Manchuria, in the same week as the bombings. Loss of that hope, from Russia’s entry, plus an offer to keep the emperor but otherwise surrender unconditionally, might have been accepted.
Or it might not have been. But not to even offer it, even by back channels?
It is much harder to justify that. In fact it is impossible, in my opinion. Justice during war includes the requirement of a good faith willingness to parley in order to end it, if all the political aims of the war can be achieved without further killing.
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2309523/posts?page=63#63
Truman et al knew what they were doing and are morally responsible for their actions. They did not pursue every diplomatic avenue to avoid continued killing because their prestige was more important to them, and probably because it didn’t occur to them that it mattered that much to the Japanese, and probably because they hated them as enemies and had not yet adopted the magnamity shown by MacArthur after the war, when he decided the emperor should stay. They wanted to break wills and thought that was the only way to peace. That is an easy thought but it is also easy to see that it is false.
Plenty of third parties saw the unconditional surrender demand as prolonging the war to little purpose. Few probably knew its important at the close of the war in Europe for keeping all the allies on the same page instead of bickering with one another or negotiating anything with the Germans, and it was useful in that context. It was superfluous with Japan.
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2309523/posts?page=67#67
The principle of unconditional surrender was useful in maintaining the unity of the allies in the endgame *with Germany*, but from May 1945 onward it was *pointless* and the only reason it was being maintained was prestige and a desire to look consistent. Once Russia agreed to attack Manchuria and actually did so, there was nothing whatever left to gain from it. Russia didn’t give a damn about removing the emperor and neither did we – so why insist on it? Because there had been a reason to reject all talks *with Germany* (purely prudential ones, to avoid them playing off levels of effort of the various allies etc). And because the pols wanted to sound high and mighty and consistent. Well, the last is the prince’s vanity and not a legitimate claim, to quote Montesquieu. It was not worth human blood.
As for who advocated a public statement about keeping the emperor at the time, ambassador Grew formally proposed it to Truman while the fighting was still going on on Okinawa. Stimson and Marshall both approved of such a statement “in principle” at that time, but asked for it to be delayed until after the conclusion of the Okinawa campaign. Any decision on it was then punted down the road, first until after Okinawa was won and then until after Potsdam. Grew renewed the proposal right before Potsdam as something to be decided at it. Stimson drafted a proposal for non-unconditionalsurrender as part of the bomb ultimatum. He personally added that specifically including the possibility of keeping the emperor would increase the chances of the ultimatum being accepted. The state department, which did not want to commit yet to the form a postwar Japanese government would take, then watered down his language. Truman personally rejected even that watered down version.
These are not minor players and they are not anonymous. They are the amdassador to Japan, who knew their culture best among those involved in the decision; the secretary of war, the senior professional civilian official directly involved, who was complying fully and scrupulously with the moral code of just war doctrine and striving to minimize unnecessary loss of human life, while securing all the political objectives of his country; and less involved at the end but having agreed previously in principle, the army chief of staff, who was the military professional charged with judging what was militarily required.
Truman made the call himself, and his was the ultimate authority and responsibility to make that call. But in the whole affair, Grew and Stimson come off as entirely moral men doing what the moral law required of the situation, and Truman does not.
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2309523/posts?page=78#78
The emperor accepted unconditional surrender; ergo, he would have accepted conditional surrender that left him nominally in power too. Many of his officers did not accept the first and were willing to use force trying to stop it. Many of them would have accepted the second. Actual control for any of them was out of the question and they knew it, they were going to be slaughtered if they continued to resist and they knew that too. There were just several things they were perfectly willing to die for, and one of them was what they thought of as the honor of their emperor, which the shinto cult raised to a god figure. Which did not have any connotation of actual command, given Japan’s past, but did have one as a figurehead that warriors gave lives for.
Regardless of whether the emperor would have accepted such an offer without the bombings, it was the clear duty of the US leadership to offer it before using them, since it did not in fact require the removal of the emperor as a political aim of the war.
By “the US” I do not mean two men you name, I mean General MacArthur and our actual policy during the occupation. You know, what we actually did. We left the emperor to make it easier to rule Japan. If that farsighted policy had been adopted very slightly earlier, it could have been offered before the bombing – as Grew (the ambassador to Japan) and Stimson (secretary of war) both urged at the time. Stimson in particular did not know if it would work, but thought is blatantly obvious that it was worth trying. It might save hundreds of thousands of lives and it would cost nothing whatever.
Truman overruled him. It was an unwarranted and wanton decision. Stimson was right, and Truman was wrong. Morally. And this was clear at the time, it is not hindsight.
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2309523/posts?page=80#80
On the contrary, the Americans were anxious to secure Stalin’s agreement to join the war against Japan, clear back to the previous great power conference.
And Russia declared war after the first bomb because that is when they were ready to attack and in fact attacked, so it was when the Japanese learned of it. But the allies knew of it long before that, they had already secured Russian agreement to enter the war against Japan before the first bomb was dropped. There was no issue of unity left to safeguard, and the point at issue – keep the emperor or not – was not one that divided the allies to begin with.
And no, the role of the unconditional surrender policy was not remotely symmetrical for Japan and for Germany. Germany was fighting a two front war and the allies entered it late, from the Russian’s point of view. The unconditional declaration had helped avoid interallied fighting over the efforts each would make to defeat Germany. Germany (and its generals, including those seeking to overthrow Hitler) was continually dreaming of a split between the western allies and Russia to save Germany from final defeat. This was delusional, but there were serious post war tensions brewing between the Russians and the west in Europe. There was nothing comparable in the eastern theater, where everyone saw and knew that the US could finish off Japan without help if necessary and would occupy the place. Stalin wanted to get in at the end to grab territory on the mainland, while the US wanted to minimize its own casualties and welcomed the help.
Nothing to be gained by the unconditionality demand could go farther than active Russian participation in the war. The US had that in its pocket before it dropped the first bomb, and could use it along with its ultimatum, and could make that ultimatum less than unconditional easily. This was clear to all concerned and it is why it was directly advocated by high officials.
Ambassador Grew was acting sec state at the time but had been ambassador to Japan before the war. (Ambassadors retain that title regardless of later job, by the way, it is a rank like general in that respect). He knew their culture and what the emperor meant to their resistence. His advice was perfectly sensible.
Pointing out that others wanted the emperor removed is irrelevant because they lost that debate afterward, in the actual event. MacArthur kept the emperor. There was no US goal being secured by insisting on the ability to remove the emperor, because we didn’t in fact remove him.
A peace reached without that unconditionality and also without the atomic bombings would have been less draconian, sure. There were no doubt any number of bloody minded men who would prefer the way it actually happened, regardless of whether the other course would have worked, out of hatred of the Japanese or out of a desire for prestige, or in the belief that really grinding their noses in it was the best way to wring any future resistence out of them. But if the ultimatum before the bomb had offered them a chance to keep the emperor and they had accepted, who the hell cares? It would have saved nearly half a million lives and still ended the war.
It is possible they would have rejected the ultimatum anyway. It is possible they would have rejected it, but caved after the first bomb and before the second. Nobody knows and it is beside the point. What isn’t beside the point is the *moral requirement* to *seek peace* without *unnecessary loss of life*, if it can be had without sacrifice of the just political goals of the war. Grinding their noses in it isn’t such a just goal, and removing the emperor wasn’t one we actually sought. Killing more people just to avoid any need to offer it, was not morally justified.
Stimson and Grew saw this, Truman either did not or more likely didn’t give a damn and wanted to look as tough as possible, for the sake of the Russians and for the sake of the electorate. But those are the vanity of the prince and not a legitimate right.
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2309523/posts?page=87#87
Good faith in negotiations is a term of art that means making demands that are one’s actual demands, making them openly and plainly, being as good as one’s word, and expecting the same. It means agreement is the actual goal of the negotiations, not playing to a gallery or other extraneous goals. It is usually contrasted with negotiating in bad faith, marked by taking positions that are not one’s own policy demands, purely for bargaining purposes; holding out things one doesn’t want as bargaining chips, negotiation purely for show and consumption by third parties rather than seeking agreement with the counterparty, deliberate “crossing” behavior of asking not for what one wants, but what one expects the counterparty to be reluctant to give, and the like.
It was in bad faith to demand terms that implied removal of the emperor when there was no need or intention to remove the emperor. It was done for the sake of third party consumption (the electorate, the Russians), and for glory or the appearance of power or of consistency – to appear not to need to negotiate.
What I called “implacable self righteous” is exact and means somehting, it is not a free floating denuncifier. The desire to appear implacable means “cannot be placated”, means “will not negotiate”. Men may feel a subjective sense of power in it and third parties may even so perceive it, but it is not a source of power itself. It consumes it, spends it. Power gets what it wants and minimizes and neutralizes opposition effectively.
An accepted ultimatum would not have ended the war any less effectively. A rejected one that had been more reasonable and in better faith, would not have precluded the course of action actually taken to win the war.
What you call “situational pursuit of peace” is simply the moral and reasonable demand that the aims of war be kept constantly in view throughout its course, and the continuation of war be subordinated to achieving them. This is in contrast to war for its own sake, war as punishment, war to annihilate the adversary rather than achieve his compliance and one’s own political aims. It is the subordination of war to political direction and rational control of that direction for civilized ends – in contrast to, say, a deliberate war of annihilation as Germany proclaimed in Russia, to pick an example.
The US wanted Japan to cease hostilities and to submit to occupation and demilitarization. If it could achieve those ends with less loss of life and no cost to their actual achievement, it had a clear duty to do so. If that depended on the Japanese as well (it did), then the US’s duty in the matter was limited to offering that outcome in good faith. It would then by Japan’s duty to accept it, on recognizing that keeping the emperor was the only political aim for which they were fighting that the allies would conceed in practice, and that their military situation was hopeless.
Ambassador Grew and Stimson saw this, and Stimson in particular also clearly saw the gravity of the ultimatum. He knew what the atomic bomb meant, not just for the end of that war. As for what knowledge of Japan was behind their proposal, Grew knew Japan better than anyone else involved in the US decision making process. He knew what the emperor meant to the warrior code of the Japanese military. He knew how futile it was to threaten them with a destruction they gloried in accepting, compared to appealing to a point of honor. Stimson heard him out, and gave his mature judgment – among the best ever to serve the United States or any great power, on every sort of subject, I might add – that a clause saying the emperor could remain if Japan laid down arms, would materially increase the chances of the ultimatum being accepted.
There is every reason to believe that judgment is correct. It would have materially increased the chances of the ultimatum being accepted – without raising them to certainty, admittedly. It cost nothing, and it had a significant chance of saving the lives of half a million human beings.
It was wanton to reject that advice. Stimson was right, and Truman was wrong about it.
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2309523/posts?page=97#97
On the role of honor in the use of arms, there was a time it was tolerably clear to every schoolboy. Men kill in war to disarm the adversary, to render him unable to harm innocents. When the end can be reached without killing unarmed civilians it should be. To kill the defenseless and unarmed, or to kill for spite or to “break wills” or see men grovel, is shameful, not honorable.
It was honorable to offer the terms actually required politically to end the war, and it was wanton to reject that proposal and insist instead on things not wanted for consistency or prestige, when hundreds of thousands of civilian lives were at stake.
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mf, had the U.S. followed the path of accepting terms less than unconditional, Japan would not have been ready to remake their society as happened. Such half measures in war such as the Korean cease fire, the cease fire in Operation Desert Storm, what is presently happening in Afghanistan, etc. lead to more problems down the road. Dropping the bombs was actually a humanitarian gesture in that it saved lives on both sides and resulted in a Japan ready and able to join the .free nations of the world. All the moral hand wringing and rationalization of the past is, IMO, a waste of time.
mf:
I’ll let the length of that comment stand, since it’s the only long one you’ve posted. But just for future reference, I ordinarily cut the length of posts that are too long, like that one.
What’s done is done and cannot be undone. Perhaps we can learn a lesson ex post facto.
If anything, the carte blanche that FDR gave to Stalin to trample the Slavs was worse.
A point has been raised, so against my better judgement I’ll attempt to address it.
1. Yes, the US did call for unconditional surrender.
2. Yes, the US did allow the Emperor to retain his position, which is a condition.
3. Therefore, yes; the US did accept a condition, and they did not inform the Japanese that they were prepared to do that,
Therefore :
4. The US was morally liable for the fact that they didn’t tell the Japanese that they were prepared to be more reasonable than they had said they wouild be.
This argument ignores several things :
Japan had, over a period of two generations, committed acts of aggression against Korea, China, Tsarist Russia, Manchuria, China (again), the Soviet Union, Vichy France (Indochina), The Dutch (the East Indies), the British (Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, and India) and the United States (the Phillippines, Guam, and other places, especially Pearl Harbor).
Japanese forces routinely violated every rule of civilised warfare, in their treatment of enemy prisoners, conquered civilians, and occasionally their own troops.
Japan routinely lied about its actions and intentions.
Japanese soldiers routinely fought to the death even when doing so served no valid strategic purpose. In the Phillippines, they did it even after having been ordered not to do so.
No major Japanese force ever surrendered, under any circumstances, and no enemy who was aware of their history and doctrine would have expected them to do so.
In their defense, it might be argued that the Japanese had intended to deliver their declaration of war against the United States prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor – About three whole hours before, after they had already moved their forces into position.
In short, the entire Asian War was a criminal act by the military government of Japan, who frequently conducted it using criminal means.
Under the circumstances, the US was under no moral or legal obligation to show the government of Japan any consideration whatsoever.
Yet in the end they did, by allowing the Emperor to remain.
Of course there were alternatives. We could have invaded, and killed millions of Japanese civilians. We could have waited for the Russians to participate, and killed millions of Japanese civilian. We could have used a “Bomb and Blockade” strategy… and killed millions of Japanese civilians.
ALL of the likely alternatives to the Atomic bombs would have killed more Japanese than the bombs did.
A negotiated peace was not a likely alternative, because a rational enemy would have surrendered at least a year earlier. Their strategic position was arguably untenable after the loss of the Marianas, and certainly after the loss of the Phillippines.
We would have been perfectly justified in continuing to insist on a completely unconditional surrender.
In fact, by traditional standards of behavior, we would have been completely justified in demanding massive reparations.
We didn’t do either of those things; we were in fact more merciful than we needed to be, and more merciful than the Japanese had ever been when they were winning.
To suggest that US actions constitute a moral lapse, let alone indicates any kind of moral equivalence, appears somewhat dubious at best.
Rich:
Very well stated.
The Japanese prime ministers never believed that democracy would ever take root in Japan. There was quite a lot of resistance from the old generations. They knew they had lost and they expected to pay reparations until 1990, and they expected that their nation would crash and burn for a couple of decades as the vengeance of the victors reigned supreme.
The idea that Japan would resurrect itself in only 20 years, is a miracle that most Japanese pre or post WWII, would never have believed in.
And it wasn’t technically democracy that did it, it was MacArthur reforming the system in several ways using “Christian morality”. Christian morality and reforms, not “democracy”. Although it ended up looking like a Western democracy at the end.
1980 Japanese culture and 1945 Japanese culture was fundamentally different. 1945 was a military regime dominated culture that utilized the glory of expansion and liberation of European colonies as a justification for glory and expansion. 1980 Japanese culture focused on self defense and non military, non expansionist policies and philosophies.
I cannot say for certain that a negotiated surrender, even if the Emperor Hirohito, Truman, and others would have been capable of accepting it, would have increased or decreased the chance for MacArthur to reform the system.
For the most part, Americans think American philosophy reformed Japan. But that’s not really true. Half of it was domestic, half of it was foreign, but the way the Japanese used democracy was not the way FDr would have used democracy or the way Democrat KKKers would have used democracy or the way Planned Profit would have used democracy. And that’s why Iraq looked like it had issues. The Stat Department was in charge of reforming Iraq, not the US military, and look what happened.
Is military rule “democracy”? If not, then MacArthur’s GHQ wasn’t spreading democracy, it was a kind of autocracy that stabilized the system using Security and Authority, along with cultural affinity and cooperation.
If America had realized why Japan changed, Vietnam and Iraq might have been done. But the lessons of the past, were forgotten. They fired MacArthur in the end, after all, he was just a “warmonger” that the peaceful, prosperous American people found obsolete.
The book HELL TO PAY Operation Downfall is available on via neo’s Amazon wicket. I couldn’t donate due to a not-so-sudden bout of poverty (seriously, I operated at a loss in 2015) so I offer this up.
If you want to know what you are talking about I can’t recommend Giangreco’s book more highly.
On the other hand I realize some people think the fun lies in not knowing what they are talking about. Which limits their opponents to playing half-court b-ball, the half of the court where truth rules.
IMO, WW I was the shadow hanging over the issues of the end of the war. It was the most horrible war in living memory. Additionally, the success in handling sepsis saved a lot of lives, but the non-existence of cosmetic and reconstructive surgery left living horrors groping up and down the streets. The French built resorts for guys so hideously mutilated they wouldn’t come out in public. IOW, it wasn’t over ,as in…over. Rudyard Kipling’s poem,Witches of En-Dor implored women to stop using seances and what not to talk to their men, apparently a growth industry in Britain.
And then, scarcely twenty years later the bastards did it AGAIN, only worse. Whatever we think of the Versailles Treaty, the Germans were let up easy after WW I. That wasn’t going to happen again. And that view was applied to Japan which had been doing unspeakable things in China since the early Thirties–see the Mukden incident, and Manchukuo, and the rape of Nanking.
No letting them up easy, either. That required unconditional surrender, occupation, and the remaking of their societies by force.
The link is to an orientation film for troops getting ready for occupation duty in Germany. You’ll get the flavor of what people were thinking. People were pissed. They were really, really pissed. Every WW II decision maker was a veteran of or had been an adult during WW I.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=821R0lGUL6A
It was in bad faith to demand terms that implied removal of the emperor when there was no need or intention to remove the emperor.
That was always a false claim. FDR and Stalin had ever intention of replacing the Emperor of Japan with a stooge or puppet. Show trials were their thing, after all. Well the Japanese Americans and the Admiral at Pearl Harbor, didn’t even get a trial or advance warning via intel.
They had every intention of going broke on the matter. Only two people stopped that later on. Truman and MacArthur, mostly MacArthur.
Don’t forget that Fat Man and Little Boy were two different types of fission bombs. We had to know they were both going to work, and we needed to know what kind of damage they would produce in a real world scenario.
It has been some time since I visited here, so sorry for my late answer.
The “Atomic Bomb” as “Deus ex machina”, “Might makes Right”, Vae Victis and things like that.
So let me put it as a hypothetical;
Germany has the atomic bomb and manage to explode one in the harbour of New York, but too late to change the course of the war.
So, would the USA have considered those responsible for the atomic bomb and for the attack to be war criminals?
If yes, then the question of Hirosjima and Nagasaki is answered, if not, then I think you delude yourself.
To repeat myself, in war sh*t happens. It doesn’t stop me appreciating the USA, especially since the US armies were truly liberating armies, they even liberated Japan and Germany (part of anyway) itself. And for that you have my full, 100%, adminiration.
What does take my regard for the US down a few notches (temporarily at least) is the hubris involved. We are the USA, we are good. Since it is us who dropped the bombs it was only right and proper. We really liked it. …
To repeat myself, again, I really shouldn’t have mentioned it, but then the thread was about, to quote the quote in your article;
And my last “repeat” (wiki: Nuremberg Trial);
Ps. Also from the wiki article of the Nuremberg Trials;
I quote this because; a) I like it; b) I agree fully with the opinion expressed; c) It shows what I so admire in the US, Harlan Fiske Stone being a Republican who simply refused to preside over a mockery and who wasn’t shy to express his opinion on that. We could use people like him today. Btw, I don’t call the Trials a sick mockery because some nazis got hanged but because their Russian accusers and judges weren’t hanged beside them.
I hope I did some good by recommending the book.
Japan was by no means on its knees. The choice was bombing or invasion. And the US didn’t have enough bombs. That was a secret, and we at the time wanted Japan to think we had the bombs, but those are the facts.
The US had just enough bombs to head fake Japan into surrender. We are all lucky they didn’t call that bluff.
But please continue with your discussion of the injustice of the Nurmburg trials or whatevs.
My white privilege knows no bounds.