[Secret Agent Man]

I wish we would have hit Tokyo first. Destroyed their whole image of emperor as god.

Course Tokyo got firebombed very badly and iirc 100,000 or so died. The nuke would have cracked their will to keep going right away with a dead nuked emperor false god destroyed.

[tanknetter]

I wish we would have hit Tokyo first. Destroyed their whole image of emperor as god.

Course Tokyo got firebombed very badly and iirc 100,000 or so died. The nuke would have cracked their will to keep going right away with a dead nuked emperor false god destroyed.

Ultimately, we got it right. Had we taken out Hirohito and a good chunk of the leadership cadre there wouldn't have been a surrender and instead there would have been a reversion to the tribal warlord model. We would have needed to invade and then spend years, possibly decades, suppressing all the warlords in a guerrilla-style counter-insurgency ... which we weren't really prepared to do.

Think along the lines of an alternate ending to the US Civil War where Lee orders the various Confederate armies to disband and take to the hills to continue the rebellion.

The flip side of the Hirohito/"need-someone-with-the authority/stature-to-surrender-to-us" argument is the indispensable need for Douglas MacArthur as well. Dugout Doug deserves his fair share of criticism for a lot of things, but he was absolutely the right guy to head up the Occupation.

[archy]

Course Tokyo got firebombed very badly and iirc 100,000 or so died. The nuke would have cracked their will to keep going right away with a dead nuked emperor false god destroyed.

Turning the top of Mount Fuji [about a hundred km from Tokyo] into an ashheap would have been a bit hard to keep from the Japanese people.