Posted on 08/10/2013 6:09:00 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
That was a conclusion of the 1946 U.S. Bombing Survey ordered by President Harry Truman in the wake of World War II.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said in 1963, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
That wasn’t merely hindsight. Eisenhower made the same argument in 1945. In his memoirs, Ike recalled a visit from War Secretary Henry Stimson:
I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.”
Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief military advisor, wrote:
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
I put a lot of weight on the assessments of the military leaders at the time and the contemporaneous commission that studied it. My colleague Michael Barone, who defends the bombing, has other sources — a historian and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan — that lead him to conclude Japan would not have surrendered.
This confusion is not surprising. For one thing, there’s what we call the “fog of war” — it’s really hard to know what’s happening currently in war, and it’s even harder to predict which way the war will break.
Second, more generally, there’s the imperfection of human knowledge. Humans are very limited in their ability to predict the future and to determine the consequences of their actions in complex situations like war.
So, if Barone wants to stick with Moynihan’s and the New Republic’s assessments of the war while I stick with the assessments of Gen. Eisenhower, Adm. Leahy, and Truman’s own commission, that’s fine. The question — would Japan have surrendered without our bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki? — can’t be answered with certainty today, nor could it have been answered in August 1945.
But this fog, this imperfect knowledge, ought to diminish the weight given to the consequentialist type of reasoning Barone employs — “Many, many more deaths, of Japanese as well as Americans, would have occurred if the atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
We don’t know that. That’s a guess. We didn’t know that at the time. If Pres. Truman believed that, it was a prediction of the future — and a prediction that clashed with the predictions of the military leaders.
Given all this uncertainty, I would lend more weight to principle. One principle nearly everyone shares is this: it’s wrong to deliberately kill babies and innocent children. The same goes for Japanese women, elderly, disabled, and any other non-combatants. Even if you don’t hold this as an absolute principle, most people hold it as a pretty firm rule.
To justify the bombing, you need to scuttle this principle in exchange for consequentialist thinking. With a principle as strong as “don’t murder kids” I think you’d need a lot more certainty than Truman could have had.
I don’t think Truman’s decision was motivated by evil. I’ll even add that it was an understandable decision. But I think it was the wrong one.
And some were on the other side who supported surrender. There are always hardliners.
Japan wasn’t a monolith.
Who is “they”?
The Japanese leadership couldn’t make it through the winter?
The people were already suffering horrifically and had been for a long time forced to “sacrifice” for the war effort. It wouldn’t matter if they weren’t going to make it, a lot of them already didn’t.
Ever see “Grave of the Fireflies”? I’d recommend the cartoon version, but its still too sad.
European mindset vs Asian mindset.
Two very different animals. The Asian mindset is an ancient one that most of us don’t understand.
It reminds me of the Masada. It matters not if they committed suicide or were slaughtered. Some people do not have surrender in their vocabulary....or know what that means.
After reading the comments by Ike, I can see that you might concur. But Ike dealt with a completely different situation.
Much of the issues we had with the Japanese had as much to do with their unfamiliarity with us than with our unfamiliarity with them.
I firmly believe that had the United States been able to get the word out to the Japanese people that we were not going to rape and enslave them, we would have been successful in getting Japan to surrender. That is what happened at Okinawa. The actual people on Okinawa were willing to expose Japanese collaborators to ensure that they as civilians were not targetted by the Americans. Why? Because they came to realize that they had been lied to. Okinawa managed to save many women and children from suicide when this became apparent.
The real tragedy is how many people on Okinawa died, roughly a third. A third of Japan as a whole would have been a holocaust unmatched by anything else in the war.
I would argue not so different from where I stand. There are some things that I will not put up with. If they were to happen I can see making the same choice as they did and choosing to die rather than live in such a world.
The question was of their motive, not of their accomplishments.
I’ve really enjoyed this discussion with you. I guess we won’t see eye to eye on this particular subject, but I hope we can talk again. Thanks again.
It was the fleet tug Tolowa, ATF-116. My father’s ship was close enough to the shore to watch flame thrower teams at night. The also were able to watch the kamikaze attacks from very close, including when anchored ammunition ships were hit and exploded.
Apparently it doesn’t bother you to contradict yourself in two consecutive paragraphs in the same post.
Yes, there was a third option - blockade.
In fact, Curtis LeMay in “Mission with LeMay” says it “might” have been possible to starve Japan into submission with a blockade.
But it would have killed tens of millions of Japanese, mostly the women/children/elderly civilians the the no-nukes dreamers get their panties most in a twist over.
Ain't irony wonderful?
The only aspect of the battle that could be considered 'unexpected' was the massive use of Kamikazes against the fleet, although the battle of Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines gave the allies a taste.
As for whether one thing isn't like another:
Guadalcanal - 7k casulties. 2060 sq miles 36200 defemders
Tarawa - 1.7k casualties approx 1 sq mile 2619 defenders
Saipan - 13.7k casualties 45.5 sq miles 31000 defenders
Peleliu - 9.7k casualties 5 sq miles 11000 defenders
Iwo Jima - 28k casualties 8 sq miles 22000 defenders
Okinawa - 84k casulties. 463 sq miles 120000 defenders
Oki was fought in the lower third of the island where the bulk of the Japs and their prepared defenses lay. After Iwo, the allies knew what was in store for them ashore.
Pick a stat would you? More casualties at Oki, much bigger battle. The US casualty rate at Iwo exceed the number of enemy that were there in a much shorter timeframe.
The principal target of a blockade is civilians. If they starve to death that's just? If they are killed by another means that's unjust?
” ‘It was intended for Germany’
It was never intended at Germany. Trinity wasn’t until July of that year. Until Trinity they had no clue that the bomb would actually work - they had tested and failed.”
JCBreckenridge is in error. At more than one point.
The bomb development program was initiated specifically to counter the Third Reich: Dr Leo Szilard badgered Dr Albert Einstein into signing the letter (”We might be able to build a big bomb”) to President Roosevelt in 1939, just as the Nazis were attacking Poland.
While it is baldly true that no one was perfectly certain any fission bomb would work, the Manhattan Project physicists, engineers, and techs were so confident in the design of the bomb used on Hiroshima that they deliberately did not bother with a test. The ground test of 16 July 1945 (Trinity device) at Alamogordo was of a design far more ambitious and uncertain. A bomb of the Trinity configuration was used on Nagasaki.
Isn’t that what I said? That the development was originally intended to be a deterrent for the Nazis?
Where did I say that dropping the atomic bomb was unjust? It’s not. Japan killed millions of Chinese civilians. Japan had about as many civilian casulties as Romania, even after the atomic bomb drop. Axis civilian casulties were only 4 percent of the total deaths, and most of those were German.
You don’t consider 80k a significant step up from 20k?
I’d buy that. Estimates before Iwo Jima were very optimistic. Arguing that ‘Americans had learned their lesson before Iwo Jima, don’t jive with the American estimations of casulties before the battle.
I’m not one of those folks who believes that dropping an atomic bomb wasn’t justified by the total war Japan had waged on the Allies. Arguing it was a ‘necessary evil’, implies two things that just aren’t so. One, it wasn’t necessary, and two, it wasn’t an evil. All the alternatives lead to higher casulties on both the American and Japanese side.
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