The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan Stalin Did (2013)

I've lived in Japan for over 30-years, read quite a bit about the events and internal debates that lead up to the decision to surrender, and been a part of more conversations on the subject than I can remember.

The facts in the article are not wrong (the rarely are), but the problem is the reductionist approach to answering the question of "what really ended the war?"

You can make a strong, evidence-backed case that the atomic bombs did, and you can make an equally strong case that they did not.

There is no one thing that ended the war. It's certainly interesting to consider how things might have played out under various counterfactuals, but as much as we would all find a simple, tidy answer far more satisfying, the reasons the war ended are just as complex and nuanced as the reasons the war started.

Historians' opinions about this have changed over time -- the generation of people who experienced it felt that a land invasion of Japan would be ruinous, and would kill a million US men. To that effect, the US tried firebombing cities, paraded battleships along the coast, sent subs to the Inland Sea, and telegraphed that they would destroy a city completely. Then they did.

Meanwhile, the USSR invaded and militarily routed the Japanese.

For the Japanese, the situation was militarily hopeless and had been for a while, but the events of August made this very clear to a wider audience.

Perhaps there was no single event that triggered the surrender, but opinion, even of ministers, can cascade rapidly. Once one person publicly lost faith, it became easier for others to join him, but that might not have been initiated by a specific event or on a specific timeline.

This feels like very motivated reasoning. Yes, the Soviets took Manchuria, but they had no capacity to invade Japan in 1945. They had a very small navy to begin with, and essentially no pacific fleet at all. This is important because you need a huge fleet to launch a full scale invasion of an island country.

For instance, the invasion of Okinawa Island alone, which is extremely small in comparison to Japan, involved 1,300 U.S. ships and dozens more from the Royal Navy.

The author is reaching here. I don't buy their narrative of how the timeline doesn't support the idea that the bombings did it. There are easy arguments against that position. Additionally, how can the author be certain of what they knew at what time? Don't you think they also had a capable spy network?? At the very least the threat of bombardment would definitely be weighing heavily on their minds.

Stalin jumped on the chance to "liberate" Manchuria and North Korea, after the Americans fought and won the war in the Pacific. When the soviets entered the war against Japan everything was already decided, there had been two nuclear bombings, Okinawa was under American occupation and it was clear there would be an imminent surrender. To make things 100% clear it was not Stalin nor the Bomb it was almost 4 years of fighting in the pacific.

The recent revisionist trend towards "the communists won the war" is a rather silly and bald faced effort to glamorize that broken system. This is nonsense.

People really underestimate how well the ussr did in ww2. Both in terms of the fighting and the result. Even with the Axis working to try and give the west as much aid as possible, Stalin controlled everything from the Rhine to the sea of Japan. The west's only real advantage was the US strategic airforce and nuclear weapons. The Soviets trumped those with their own bombs and sputnik within a decade.