When I read these revisionist pieces, I often see the same phrase you quoted: "ready to surrender." If someone is "ready to surrender," what does that mean? Well I'll tell you what it certainly doesn't mean: It doesn't mean that they've _actually_ surrendered.
What a lot of revisionist writings gloss over is that yes, certain parts of the Japanese leadership were "ready to surrender." But it is well documented that some were only ready to surrender if conditions X and Y were met. Others were only ready to surrender with conditions Z and A. And of course others weren't ready to surrender at all.
Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual.
And so if this phrase, "ready to surrender," is taken alone (notwithstanding its distinguished source), then it is facile in that it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership, and the complex process which was necessary for the leadership to converge and make a firm, unified political decision.
Here's the opinion of the leader of the US military at the time
Yes, later Leahy apparently said, "It is my opinion," not, "At the time we all believed" ["that the Japanese were defeated and ready to surrender...."]
I'm willing to believe that some, maybe including Leahy, thought the US had only to stand back and wait for the inevitable surrender, with no ratcheting up of force necessary. But, at the same time, somebody [not including the Fleet Admiral?] was also preparing for a full boots-on-the-ground invasion of the Japanese mainland, which (going by the US death tolls of previous island invasions) would have sent thousands of Americans to their deaths.
Unless that invasion plan was entirely fake--something nobody is suggesting--there were obviously plenty of people at the top who thought that the Japanese might not be ready to surrender.
Suddenly a middle option appeared between just waiting and hoping and sending thousands of Americans to their deaths: drop atomic bombs. Even though an atom bomb would actually kill fewer people than the firebombings, it would represent an even greater threat of what could happen if they didn't surrender immediately.
Maybe the Japanese were about to surrender. Maybe they would keep fighting and Americans would keep dying. Maybe the atom bombs would convince them to surrender. Or maybe not. Maybe nothing short of a full invasion would be required. Maybe even that wouldn't be enough to end it quickly, and the dying would continue for a very long time. The Japanese in many places had gone on fighting until they were dead without ever surrendering.
In that context, with no benefit of hindsight, to say that the bomb was not dropped to win the war but just to intimidate the USSR is nonsense.
In that context, with no benefit of hindsight,
to say that the bomb was not dropped to win the war
but just to intimidate the USSR is nonsense.
Not just nonsense, but also part of a propaganda war. I cannot read it otherwise (unless the comment had offered a more profound historical analysis, which it has not).
I'm willing to give the HN commenter above the benefit of the doubt that he/she might just be parroting something picked up on campus, but I agree with you that this claim has been part of leftist propaganda for decades.
And that's because only leftist engange in propaganda? Sorry, couldn't help it.... but for the theory that the ONLY reason the bomb was dropped to intimidate the Sowjets is as wrong as the oppossite view point that it soley anded the war and saved millions of lifes. it's both propagande, just from different camps.
Estimated casualties were thought to be up to a million people. The US ordered 500,000 Purple Hearts in anticipation of that, so many that those ones are still being given out today.
Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual.
But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians.
(To the argument that it wasn’t possible to target the military apart from civilians: that’s exactly why nuclear weapons are so problematic.)
it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership
An alternate interpretation is to not take it alone, and to see it as deliberately summarizing the wide diversity of opinion which was already going through the complex process that you rightly point out. News of Nagasaki’s destruction interrupted a meeting by the Japanese Supreme War Council, not so much about whether to surrender as about how. I don’t think it’s facile at all to call this, in context, “ready to surrender”.
The US did not know the details of the meeting, of course, but they chose to spend 70,000 human lives on an assumption with no particular justification, while under no special immediate military threat – at that point, Japan was relatively contained, and the fear was that if left alone it would reach out again in a matter of months or decades, not weeks. The threat was diplomatic: that Japan might surrender to the USSR. That seems worth presenting as something other than the rueful conduct of justified, proportional warfare as an absolute last resort.
As an American, sometimes I look at other countries that haven’t come to terms with major war crimes – the Armenian Genocide, for example, or indeed Imperial Japan’s crimes in China – and I shake my head.
Then I remember that the US has the A-bombs on our record, and we’ve made it almost 70 years now without admitting as a nation (meaning in standard textbooks, in mainstream entertainment, etc.) that these were, by any sensible definition, crimes against humanity of the highest gravity.
There’s this objection people sometimes raise: that it’s easy to say these things if you weren’t there, if you weren’t under the pressures of command, knowing your nation’s people were dying by the day. That’s true. I don’t know what that was like. It’s easy for me to moralize from a distance. But that argument isn’t actually justifying the act of the A-bombings, merely moderating judgment on the people who did it. Saying they didn’t really know what they were doing is very different from it was a good idea.
You have the privilege of tarring the commanders of US forces as war criminals "of the highest gravity" because of the sacrifices US soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines made during WW2.
If you haven't already, do some research on how the Japanese fought at Okinawa. At the defensive plans they had in place for defending the Home Islands. The toll of an invasion would have been horrendous for both sides. This is without dispute by serious historians.
Your idea that the Japanese were "relatively contained," implying that there was no need to do any further action is almost laughable as a military or political strategy.
When you go to war, you should go to war til the other side cries "Uncle."
Furthermore, the idea that war should be "proportional" is also a sophomoric argument without merit. War is hell for a reason. If someone engages you in war, you fight them to the death. You don't go back and forth in a tit for tat manner that negates all of your advantages and magnifies theirs.
And to lump the A bombs with what Japan did to China? Read up on the Rape of Nanking. Or find out how many Chinese civilians the Japanese Army killed on the mainland. Or how they treated POWs during the Bataan Death March.
> Furthermore, the idea that war should be "proportional" is also a sophomoric argument without merit. War is hell for a reason. If someone engages you in war, you fight them to the death. You don't go back and forth in a tit for tat manner that negates all of your advantages and magnifies theirs.
Did you just agree that people, army and paramilitary forces of Afghanistan are right to go to total war "to death" with the USA, USA army and USA civilians. Because even one innocent dead man in Afghanistan can justify action of, for example, poisoning NYC water supplies?
Or this "unproporional" punishment of enemy is justified only if it's the USA that is doing it, not when it suffers it?
I think it's entirely justifiable for any afghani to be joining the Taliban and fighting to kick out a foreign invader from their soil. Everyone has a right to defend their country's sovereignty.
I personally wouldn't advocate targeting civilians; but if there was no alternative, and my culture, country and way of life was being destroyed, I could see a rational actor choosing to do so.
The US would have been far better served by simply conducting a punitive raid in AFG to knock over the original Taliban and let the assorted tribes learn not to stir the hornets nest. Instead we've decimated the country without creating any real change. And we've also grown accustomed to a sanitized style of warfare where drone operators in Creech, Nevada plink small targets without working up a sweat.
War should be hell, lest we grow to like it too much.
The United States dropped two very big bombs on cities. Cities, not military installations. That's very close to being a war criminal in my opinion, realities of war be damned.
Edit:
> You have the privilege of tarring the commanders of US forces as war criminals "of the highest gravity" because of the sacrifices US soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines made during WW2.
In reality, we Europeans have the privilege because of United Kingdom, Soviet, United States, Canada, Finland, and countless volunteers and freedom fighters from the occupied areas. I appreciate the sacrifices, suffering and determination from a nation I so admire; in fact we celebrate it once a year, but please remember that United States were never alone in the fight.
I didn't mean to imply that the US was the sole combatant; I was responding to the parent who was an American.
War is still hell. The Romans razed Carthage, a war crime? The Germans in WW1 bombed London, war crime? The British torched Dresden, war crime? The Nazis bombed Rotterdam, war crime?
It's far too easy to conflate "war" with war crime. Some feel that the two are synonymous. I think each generation has a tendency to feel superior and more advanced than the previous generation; I think this is naive and ill informed. We're all savages of a sort.
"Now we are all sons of bitches."
— Kenneth Bainbridge
Yes, yes, yes and yes.
I'm not even saying that I would act differently if I were a military commander. War is hell, granted. But that doesn't make it right, and we should be honest with ourselves. It's not right. Killing innocents is not okay; using civilians as leverage in an act of terror is never okay.
Striving is fine, but as some sage once said, "your enemy always has a vote." We're limited in how we act by how our opponents behave. And despite what Fukuyama said, I think that we'll see more conflict in this century than anyone expects.
Their actions can be necessary, and still war crimes and/or abhorrent. These are not mutually exclusive.
We can be grateful for the outcome and many sacrifices and still speculate about whether or not specific actions were necessary and justifiable.
And we can actually recognise the atrocities committed by the Japanese military and question actions by the allies at the same time.
It is understandable that a lot of decisions were taken that had horrible outcomes, and that many of them were taken in good faith and probably the only viable decisions despite how atrocious they might seem in retrospect. That does not mean we should just gloss over everything.
"The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians."
Extraordinarily efficient, one plane, one bomb, one city, but we'd already methodically bombed pretty much every other city (along with Kyoto for political reasons, the A-bomb targets and their alternates were reserved), with e.g. the firebombing of Tokyo killing a conservative 100,000.
To view anyone in Japan, or more accurately, anyone in any of the great powers as a "civilian" during the wartime of WW2 - is pretty naive. All of Europe, Japan, and America were in a state of Total War - Every available resource was being put towards the production of munitions, every able-bodied man was being drafted, every spare cent was being spent on the war.
If you want to bomb a target smaller than a city then you have to design smaller bombs.
If you want to target cities then you keep making city-sized bombs.
If you want to target larger areas, you're probably going to be most efficient by targeting the cities in that area; go back to the previous step of city-sized bombs.
What's the incentive to increase lethality? If you make huge nukes or equivalently powerful weapons, they overkill your target and have negative side effects back on the homeland.
Even sub-city-sized weapons like the ones dropped on Japan are too large to actually launch in the modern world; the political repercussions are much too great. The only use for a nuclear arsenal is to promise Mutually Assured Destruction, and it really doesn't take much for that.
The dangerous super-weapons of the future are small, simple ones that can kill just the right person, anywhere, anytime. That arms race is happening right now, and progress is rapid.
Since at least the Napoleonic Wars, which followed shortly after our Revolutionary war, artillery has generally been the biggest killer on the battlefield.
> But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians.
They were extraordinary weapons, but as the article points out: The bombing campaigns were not, other than in doing the damage with much fewer bombs. Japan had seen similar levels of destruction in dozens of cities that summer, and was running out of larger undamaged cities.
With that context, they should require extraordinary justification to use, but no more so than the previous months of firebombing, and the focusing on the use of a nuclear bomb vs. "just" the fire bombing is detracting from the issue of how much of that overall bombing should have been acceptable and how much of it was necessary or served much purpose.
I don't want to excuse the A-bombs, but the article does make a compelling argument that they were not qualitatively different in the suffering caused.
The cherry-picking on this topic is extreme. One guy claims Lehey was the leader of the U.S. Military during WWII. He was not. He was the senior-serving military official, who worked as chief of staff to Roosevelt. You could call him an early CJCS, or you could just use his title: chief of staff. Marshall was probably the closest we had to a senior person actually running the war, as anybody with a modicum of WWII history can tell you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall The only reason to pump up Lehey is to add authority to the quote, which was made years later during a completely different political situation. When you see this kind of thing, it never bodes well for the argument.
But you beat down one red herring and three more pop up. It's like talking to those 9-11 guys. They already know the answer. Just a matter of selectively arranging facts in a convincing narrative.
The author gives it away towards the end "...There is real resistance to looking at the facts. But perhaps this should not be surprising...They fill an important psychic need."
Well there you go. From the author's comments, and those on this board, I take it this is supposed to be some kind of argument between "patriotic" Americans and the facts (as told to us by the revisionists), instead of what it is: rewriting history to suit current fashion.
I actually wish the revisionists well. Maybe they can get their way and we can go through 100 years or so of believing that the A-bomb was not the proximate cause of the end of WWII. Then a new fashion will take hold, and we can come back to believing what 95% of the people at the time it happened believed. The neat thing about this is that people get educated about history. Frankly, if history is your passion and you spend time on this and know your stuff, I could care less which theory you pick. These stories need to be remembered.
Whenever this topic comes up I reminded of this quote:
But perhaps George M. Elsey, a young naval intelligence officer assigned to the Truman White House, provided the best reply to revisionist historians and others who question the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Asked by David McCullough for his biography of the President (Truman, Simon & Schuster, 1992) about the decision, Elsey replied: "Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made. He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track. It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing."
This is seriously misleading. The OP doesn't even mention William Lehey, let alone include a howler about him. And you accuse other people of red herrings!
Surely if you had found even the tiniest flaw in the OP, you'd have shared it with us by now. Instead your comments are positively incontinent with innuendos and slurs: "UFO stories", "pseudo-science", "revisionists", "9-11 guys", "cherry picking", "selectively arranging facts", "pump up", "add authority", "rewriting history to suit current fashion", "emotional reasoning" (since deleted, unless my memory is playing tricks), and my favorite: "From the author's comments, and those on this board"—as if the two were colluding instead of obviously having nothing whatever to do with each other.
I don't have an opinion about why Japan surrendered in WWII, but when an apparently well-reasoned case provokes this kind of thing, it seems likely that there is something to it.
Knowing a bit about the Asian way to handle conflict, I think it is possible that the bombs gave a good pretext (not the best word) to end the war. It would mean that many in Japan headquarter knew it was foolish to continue the war but it was not possible to change boat without a special new circumstance that can be used to explain the change.
Yes, I know. And then he switched back to the OP as if the two were the same thing, when in fact they're entirely unrelated. That's the dictionary definition of a red herring.
When they are actively trying to surrender, then they're probably "Ready to surrender". The US wouldn't negotiate because the bombs were on the way.
What were the conditions? Because if they were "you help us rebuild" or "and we get a grill-cheese sandwich" then really they're not much. Plenty of peace treaties have taken place with conditions.
"Negotiate?" The US had no appetite for negotiation at that point -- only unconditional surrender was acceptable.
I won't do your research for you, but various factions within the Japanese leadership wanted to put lots of significant things on the table, like maintaining the seat of the emperor, the existing political structure, etc. All were showstoppers to the US.
But that isn't true. The seat of the emperor was maintained, at least nominally, so it clearly wasn't a showstopper. The US may have demanded unconditional surrender before the atomic bombings, but it accepted a conditional surrender after.
1945: Japan signs unconditional surrender
> Japanese officials have signed the act of unconditional surrender, finally bringing to an end six years of world war.
> Under the terms of the ceasefire, Japan has agreed to end all hostilities, release all prisoners of war, and comply with the terms of the Potsdam declaration, which confines its sovereignty to the four main islands which make up Japan.
> Under the terms of the ceasefire, Japan has agreed to end all hostilities, release all prisoners of war, and comply with the terms of the Potsdam declaration, which confines its sovereignty to the four main islands which make up Japan.
> It has also agreed to acknowledge the authority of the US supreme commander. Although Emperor Hirohito will be allowed to remain as a symbolic head of state.
---
I'm pretty sure the surrender was unconditional and later the Allies announced that the Emperor would keep his position(probably mostly to help ease the occupation)
---
At the behest of two Cabinet members, the emperor summoned and presided over a special meeting of the Council and implored them to consider accepting the terms of the Potsdam Conference, which meant unconditional surrender. "It seems obvious that the nation is no longer able to wage war, and its ability to defend its own shores is doubtful." The Council had been split over the surrender terms; half the members wanted assurances that the emperor would maintain his hereditary and traditional role in a postwar Japan before surrender could be considered. But in light of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, Nagasaki on August 9, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, as well as the emperor's own request that the Council "bear the unbearable," it was agreed: Japan would surrender.
Yes, I'm familiar with how the end of the war was reported by the popular press. That does not, however, change the facts of history.
From Wikipedia[1]: 'Japan's ambassador to Switzerland, observed that "unconditional surrender" applied only to the military and not to the government or the people, and he pleaded that it should be understood that the careful language of Potsdam appeared "to have occasioned a great deal of thought" on the part of the signatory governments—"they seem to have taken pains to save face for us on various points."'
So it seems that both Japan and the Allies understood that unconditional surrender only applied to Japan's military.
Further: 'That day, Hirohito informed the imperial family of his decision to surrender. One of his uncles, Prince Asaka, then asked whether the war would be continued if the kokutai (national polity) could not be preserved. The emperor simply replied "of course."'
In other words, Japan was willing to continue fighting, even after the atomic bombings, if it didn't get to insist on a few conditions. That doesn't sound like unconditional surrender to me.
I should also point out that the parent of my original post asserted that any and all Japanese conditions were "showstoppers." I pointed out that, whether or not the emperor's seat was a condition explicitly writing into the surrender documents, at least one of Japan's surrender conditions, namely keeping the emperor in place, was clearly not a showstopper.
Yes, that's what I wrote. They wouldn't negotiate because the bombs were on the way.
It wasn't unconditional anyway, there were plenty of conditions in the potsdam declaration.
You're badly misunderstanding the history. The Japanese didn't participate in Potsdam. The Allies wrote the declaration by themselves as an ultimatum and issued it to Japan, warning the Japanese of complete destruction if they didn't fully accept it.
"Unconditional" doesn't mean "there are no terms." It means that the loser dictates no terms, while the victor dictates all the terms.
What a lot of revisionist writings gloss over is that yes, certain parts of the Japanese leadership were "ready to surrender." But it is well documented that some were only ready to surrender if conditions X and Y were met. Others were only ready to surrender with conditions Z and A. And of course others weren't ready to surrender at all.
Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual.
And so if this phrase, "ready to surrender," is taken alone (notwithstanding its distinguished source), then it is facile in that it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership, and the complex process which was necessary for the leadership to converge and make a firm, unified political decision.