Posted on 08/06/2014 8:24:20 AM PDT by Retain Mike
We now mark the 69th anniversary of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II. The generations which made the decisions for World War II have passed away. The generation which faced the tragic violence required for carrying out those decisions is rapidly leaving us.
As this personal knowledge becomes ever rarer, we must increasingly listen without response to revisionist contra-factual analyses expounding about what a needless, tragic and profoundly immoral decision the United States had made. The arguments advanced display a pleasing, deliberate ignorance which burnishes this peculiar new morality. However, these views can be countered by presenting the history that the Greatest Generation, and their parents and grandparents lived into and through.
In support of dropping the atomic bombs, historians often cite the inevitability of horrifying casualties if troops had landed on the home islands. They extrapolate from 48,000 American and 230,000 Japanese losses on Okinawa to estimates of 500,000 American and millions of Japanese casualties for mainland invasions. However, these figures arise from studies preceding the unfolding recognition by planning staffs of the American experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Even these estimates are over seven times the dead and wounded suffered by Americans during The Battle of the Bulge; casualties that shocked the American public.
However, such estimates could have greatly understated casualties. Kyushu and Honshu at over 100,000 rugged square miles mathematically enable at least 500 vast redoubts; complex fortifications comparable to that General Ushijima constructed to inflict most losses on Okinawa. This rapid increase in killing efficiency extended to planning stubborn defense of major cities just as the Germans carried out in Berlin. The feeble response to B-29 bombing missions caused U.S. planners to vastly underestimate the thousands of kamikaze airplanes with aviation fuel concealed for invasion. The American “island hopping” strategy had ended, because the Japanese had determined the few regions within their mountainous country that could accommodate the huge armies and air forces needed to subdue the main islands. Harry Truman contemplated increasingly dire estimates causing him to reflect on the possibility of “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other”.
The Japanese War Faction maintained the standard of 20 million Japanese deaths for planning final mainland battles; battles intended to inflict millions of casualties, and to convince America to abandon the Potsdam Declaration. They had redeployed veteran Kwantung divisions from China, mobilized home defense armies, and distributed suicide bombs and bamboo spears to civilians transformed into soldiers.
Americans also faced biological warfare. Occupation searchers uncovered large stockpiles of viruses, spirochetes, and fungus spores throughout rural Japan. These biological pathogens had already been tested on Chinese civilians. For the Japanese one delivery system directed citizen soldiers to infect themselves and stay behind the advancing troops.
The Greatest Generation and their parents would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war simply to indulge some incestuous moral orthodoxy. If there was any alternative, Harry Truman, Henry Stimson, and George Marshall were not about to procure the deaths of countless Americans in protracted ground campaigns following amphibious assaults matching the D-Day landings.
Revisionists claim Japan was seeking surrender, but history reveals Japanese negotiation initiatives proved too vacuous to make dropping the bombs unnecessary. These supposed negotiations cite proposals Foreign Minister Togo directed Ambassador Sato to offer to Molotov. In those proposals, Japan intended bribing the Russians into neutrality with conquered Chinese territory. The Soviets would then mediate settlement terms preserving Imperial visions of peace with honor. The first June 29 contacts ignored attributes of surrender with proposals the Russians considered too vague to answer. The August 2 proposals accepted the Potsdam Declaration as only one basis for further study.
When Ambassador Sato finally saw Molotov on August 8, two days after Hiroshima, he received a war declaration instead of answers to his latest proposals. U.S. cryptologists reading “Magic” confirmed Togo’s Russian contacts were ineffectual. American intelligence also knew those involving Allen Dulles in Switzerland lacked any Japanese Cabinet knowledge or interest.
The pattern of Japanese contacts demonstrated an unwillingness to accept any responsibility for understanding Western expectations for negotiation strategies. The fact America had destroyed its navy, massacred its island garrisons, and bombed its cities into cinders should have prompted Japanese proposals embracing a Western style of clarity.
Instead the Japanese Privy Council debated the Final Battles arguments into utter physical and mental exhaustion for eleven hours following the Nagasaki bomb on August 9. For the final meeting, Hirohito reluctantly invited Baron Hiranuma, who had always fiercely disapproved of the war strategy. He reproved Foreign Minister Togo for never making concrete proposals to the Russians and Minister Anami for accepting limitless nuclear warfare deaths without any opportunity to retaliate. Hiranuma also maintained the Emperor’s spiritual essence, as the foundation of Japan’s future, endured independent of any government imposed by surrender. The ministers made no answer to his arguments, but remained unyielding.
At impasse Hirohito, the god-king, spoke the “Voice of the Crane” in the sweltering, underground bunker. He would bear the unbearable, conclude the war, and transform the nation. Only then did Japan contact Swiss and Swedish foreign offices to commence negotiations with allied belligerents.
Here was illuminated the critical role Kokutai played in surrender. Any prominent Japanese lived within an intimate spiritual three dimensional fabric of Emperor, citizen, land, ancestral spirits, government, and Shinto religion. Emperor Hirohito foresaw the probability of defeat by January 1944 and appointed a Peace Faction. However, he and his advisors conducted political kabuki through twenty months of continuous defeats, fire bombings of over 60 cities, and 1.3 million additional Japanese deaths. The atomic bombs removed the Final Battles argument allowing the War Faction to relent, allowing Hirohito to assume his unprecedented roll, and requiring no one to lose face. Their cabal remained within the fabric of Japanese from all eras who had sacrificed for Emperor and Empire. In their first meeting, when MacArthur praised Hirohito for ending the war, the Emperor replied others also deserved praise. Yet the Peace Faction could not prevail until the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki so dramatized Japan’s situation that Hirohito could intervene and elevate it into dominance at that final meeting.
Another point says the bombs accomplished little. Supposedly Roosevelt’s decree of unconditional surrender was compromised away by allowing Japan to keep their Emperor. However by accepting the Potsdam Declaration, Japan abandoned the militarism that had committed the country to Asian conquest. The Emperor’s and the government’s authority became subject to the Supreme Allied Commander. Their authority was later subject to the Japanese people’s free expression for determining a post war government that eradicated multi-millennial martial and imperial characteristics.
The moral failure of a negotiated peace requiring anything less than total submission was unacceptable. Allowing a blockade to operate interminably, while deferring to the War Faction any decision about whether Japanese and allied prisoner deaths met their 20 million standards was intolerable. Allowing months of diplomatic dithering to accompany additional hundreds of thousands of civilian and military deaths throughout Asia was intolerable. An imperial, militarist Japan could not be allowed to intimidate future generations when they were on the cusp of producing nuclear weapons.
Allowing the premeditated ignorance of revisionists center stage as the institutional knowledge of the Greatest Generation and their parents and grandparents dies away must remain intolerable.
Partial bibliography:
Hell to Pay, D. M. Giangreco
The Atomic Bomb and the End of WW II, The National Security Archive
Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the WW II Era, Sheldon H. Harris, PhD
Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, David Bergamni
Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring, Gordon Prange
The Secret Surrender, Allen Dulles
Japan’s Secret War, Robert K. Wilcox
Battle of Okinawa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
Normandy landings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_Landings
The Battle of the Bulge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge
Japan geography: http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/geography/Indonesia-to-Mongolia/Japan.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html Okinawa redoubt was about 100 sq mi
Allied POWS Under the Japanese http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/rg331-box%201321-jap%20pow%20camps.htm Military prisoners were 34,000 in Japan, 70,000 outside Japan, and 112,000 civilians. There were already 142,000 Anglos and Pilipino victims of criminal killings.
Statistics of Japanese Democide Estimates, Calculations, And Sources* http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM As a tactic of administering conquered lands, the Japanese had murdered 6 million Asians from 1937 to 1945.
My father was a motor machinist 3rd class on a yard minesweeper (YMS-389) that was heading from Okinawa to participate in the invasion of mainland Japan. He figured that he would have been killed if the atomic bomb was not dropped. For me and my generation, I’m glad it was.
There.
Fixed it for somebody.
It’s true, they didn’t want to surrender after Hiroshima. Truman demanded an unconditional surrender and Hirihito came up with “conditions” so we said “FU” and dropped Little Boy on Nagasaki and told them the next one (we didn’t have a third one yet though) would be on Tokyo.
Hiromshima and Nagasaki were military cities in that the ‘civilians’ there were mostly working in munitions plants, etc. They were military targets for that reason.
We only had the two A-bombs; Fat Man and Little Boy. Both were totally different designs. They weren’t sure if one, both or neither of them would work.
The prototype for Fat Man (plutonium bomb) was detonated at Almogordo, NM on July 16, 1945.
It worked, so it was a pretty sure thing that Fat Man would work also.
Little Boy (uranium bomb) made it’s debut over Hiroshima; that design was never tested previously. Obviously, it worked just fine.
Japanese women training to defend Japan with bamboo spears.
At Saipan hundreds (maybe even a few thousand - no one knows the real number) of Japanese civilians committed suicide by throwing themselves from cliffs, rather than surrender to the Marines, because of the propaganda they had been fed. Had the U.S. invaded Japan the civilian deaths would have been astronomical.
Which one did they stick with before the hydrogen bomb? Or did they still make both plutonium and uranium bombs?
According to wikipedia, they made 32 Little Boys and 120 Fat Men before they were superceded by newer designs.
But why "imperative"? That implies that there was absolutely no other choice.
A starvation blockade and conventional bombing would have been options --followed by a demonstration of our wonder weapon and then perhaps a negotiated peace, or perhaps unconditional surrender.
I'm not saying that we should have done that -- politically it may have been an untenable position, and we could be blockading and bombing them still today -- but it was alternative, at least in theory.
The poor Japanese... it’s meant to be a finger-point from a leftist about supposed racism, even when those bombs were being made to drop on Germans (but Germany surrendered before they were ready). And it’s surprising how many people don’t consider how those two bombs, while taking so many Japanese lives, saved so many American (and more Japanese) lives.
Thanks for clarification on the military aspect of the targeting. I was focusing on the civilian casualties obviously. Let’s face it, if you decide to use an atomic bomb but don’t kill a lot of people with it, the effect might not be realized. Heck, we still had to do it twice before they came to their senses. It’s pretty hard to break the will of your enemy...
No doubt they were options, but they came after invasion. The invasion was the selected course of action, the bombs were an alternative to the selected course of action because if they worked it was thought they would achieve the desired result. Blockade and conventional bombing never met the strategic objectives, which is why they weren't selected.
To what? The war of aggression started by the Japanese? The millions of deaths for which the Japanese were responsible? The slavery, the use of humans as guinea pigs for biological experiments? The facts show it was not a proportionate response because it was too small a response to be proportionate.
That they would kill the POWs is indisputable, but there was no way for them to have a chance to get back to assist the defense of the home islands, unless they swam.
Remember, up to the time of WWII the Japanese were pure warriors and trained and indoctrinated as such. They were brutal before then to the Chinese and others.
I realize I was deliberate in choosing imperative, because I advocate for those who are long dead and/or are passing away. They were past the point of considering options for dealing with this crisis.
You do make me think I should work on the narrative to emphasize the increased fragility of support for the war based on the huge increase in casualties for the 12-15 months leading up to August 1945. The country really didn’t feel the human cost the first two and a half years of involvement. But then Europe beginning June of 1944 and Okinawa in spring of 1945 hit this country hard. I remember the story told by one man who was too young to serve, but as an adolescent delivered telegrams part-time for the local Western Union office. He eventually quit, because every day he had to deliver the death notices and people began looking at him with some combination of anxiety and hatred.
Indeed. I had an employee who is Indonesian and she told me a story of her grandfather. He fought against the Japanese and was captured near the end of the war. He was still captive when the war ended. The Japanese executed all of their prisoners at this POW camp, including her grandfather even though the war was officially over. She said her family never recovered from that loss.
So awesome..and I’m sure it WAS near spiritual. Thank you!!
I was thinking of the same things. I understand how hard it is in this day and age to wrap one’s mind around it but that was the mindset in Japan then. Very little of the population knew anything of the outside world and the militant leaders were dead set on keeping it that way and pushing the entire country to fight to the death. For a number of reasons they would have proudly done so.
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