Hacker News Reader

Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

This is a bunch of nonsense. The real reason Americans wanted to finish the war with Japan quickly (at any cost) is that they were afraid that Russia would invade Japan.

View on HN

Nonsense? How about you read up on Operation Ten-Go and the senseless suicidal demise of the battleship Yamato, wasting the lives of two and a half thousand Japanese men to accomplish absolutely nothing except a show of defiance. In total more than 4,000 Japanese men lost their lives that day, while less than 100 Americans were killed. They knew it was suicide and they did it anyway.

> The ships' crews were briefed on the nature of the mission and given the opportunity to stay behind if desired; none did.

Your parent post is right, the Japanese military were absolute fanatics.

Edit:

And another point. After the second atomic bombing, military officers attempted to overthrow the Japanese emperor to prevent the surrender. After the second atomic bombing. Let that sink in. If not for the heroic actions of a few Japanese men, they might have succeeded in suppressing the broadcast of the surrender: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident

This is a good example, although I would be careful about characterizing the entire Japanese military as fanatics. (To his great credit, Carlin is also careful in this regard, and discusses the issue at some length.)

The average Japanese soldier was certainly perceived as a fanatic—due a combination of the evidence at hand at the time, deliberate Japanese policy and propaganda, and also a lot of rather nasty racial narratives—which had a lot to do with why total war was seen as unavoidable.

I think the word fanatic is justified, but I see that it has derogatory connotations. Let's put it this way, the Japanese military, soldiers, sailors and officers, all provided their extreme courage and devotion numerous times over in that war. Courage and devotion to a horrible cause, but nonetheless they certainly weren't quitters.

Another example: 21,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, but only 216 taken as prisoners. They fought for five weeks until the bitter end. The stubborn defiance demonstrated at the Battle of Iwo Jima and Operation Ten-Go both played a role in the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan.

You're right that these are the sorts of figures that influenced the decision. It's also worth remembering that there were high-ranking members of the Japanese military who questioned the logic of the war or ordered retreats from indefensible positions, but were often arrested, assassinated, or ordered to commit suicide. Any stance other than loud, defiant resistance proved dangerous within a military hierarchy dominated by extremists.

There is also some evidence that Japanese Army officers created a deliberate culture of extreme violence, ordering ordinary soldiers to commit atrocities, for example, as a way of ruling out surrender as an option. The soldiers would then assume that their treatment by the other side would be identical.

I don't object to the word "fanatic" out of some semantic pedantry or because it's derogatory per se, but I think it robs us of some consideration of the individuals in question, and the various strands of policy, training, propaganda, fear, group pressure, and nostalgic death-worshipping cultural narratives to which they were subjected. The result was certainly the perception of fanaticism, which was intended to demoralize the Allies but backfired terribly, like the decision to prosecute the war itself. (And, as you point out, produced an enormous wastage of lives for no real gain.)

The research I've read recently puts this concern on the Japanese side. They delayed their surrender, despite atomic attacks, until after it was clear that the Russians were starting to pivot to the Pacific theater, and decided it was better to surrender to the US today than to endure a Russian invasion and occupation.

The Emperor states himself in his surrender that his decision was influenced by the display of the atomic bombs, and ultimately it was the Emperor who put the final end to the Japanese war effort.

It’s probably foolish to say the Soviets didn’t play a part in the decisions of some of the men involved but I also strongly doubt there’s a compelling argument that it was more influential than what the Americans had just shown themselves capable of doing. The Soviets were a distant threat compared to the Americans continually bombing Japan for 3 months up to that point.

> The Emperor states himself in his surrender that his decision was influenced by the display of the atomic bombs, and ultimately it was the Emperor who put the final end to the Japanese war effort.

The argument goes that the Emperor's public statements were an effort to save face in front of the country. "No, it wasn't our incompetence that created defeat, they had a Super Weapon!" The Russians could have had ground troops on Japanese territory in days, compared to weeks or months for the Americans.

There was a faction of right wing Republicans who wanted to end the war quickly in order to forestall Russia, but they wanted to end the war quickly by forgoing an invasion and allowing Japan to surrender conditionally, without an occupation or a forced change of government or constitution, because they thought an armed and relatively intact militarist-run Japan would be a good buffer against the Soviet Union. This was unacceptable to the liberal new deal faction running the US government, who believed that a disarmed and democratic Japan was the only way to prevent another war.

“They only wanted to keep the commies out” is a nicely glib line, but one that glosses over the many, many political considerations that shaped the end of the pacific war and reveals an almost total ignorance of the scholarship on the subject

There is no convincing evidence for this argument. The Soviet Union was deeply engaged in its war against Nazi Germany until the very bitter end, and fully mobilized in that direction. Beyond that, America provided immense quantities of aid to the Soviet Union in the form of Lend-Lease, including military hardware. Some would argue that this was profoundly short-sighted given the realpolitik of Stalin's approach to the war, with an eye on what the Soviet Union would do in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe after the war (as a realization of tsarist fantasies going back a hundred years or more). But the fact is that--while every decision has various complicating factors related to political and institutional concerns--America's primary focus was on ending the war as quickly as possible with an unconditional surrender.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com