There were 76,000-84,000 allied casualties and 105,000-110,000 Japanese. The civilian death toll was 40,000-150,000.
Claiming that lives were saved by bombing cities with nuclear weapons is always going to be a hard one to prove and morally dubious, but it might also be correct. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
After the first dropping, the War Cabinet met on August 9th and concluded in the morning that the US probably did not have the resources to build more than one bomb, and it was decided to keep fighting.
Then in the early afternoon they learned of the second dropping. After further debate the War Cabinet voted 3-3 on whether to continue fighting.
It took two bombing to get to a tied vote (both of the War Cabinet, and the full cabinet): the Emperor had to be called to break the stalemate. I do not understand how anyone could believe zero bombings would result in a cessation of hostilities.
And even after the decision was made, there were still attempts to prevent surrender:
I suppose there were some coups that succeeded because the plotters controlled the news media.
Yes, but it still shows the mindset (of some) in the military.
And military action against government wasn't a new thing in Japan either:
> Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was assassinated by 11 young naval officers. The following trial and popular support of the Japanese population led to extremely light sentences for the assassins, strengthening the rising power of Japanese militarism and weakening democracy and the rule of law in the Empire of Japan.
I'm not a historian but I've always read that the Japanese government famously did not intend to surrender despite being cornered.
They had some operations scheduled for October 1945—they surrendered 1 month before due to the bombs.
As in, Kamikazis because ordered, honour in death, or killing yourself with your own sword. Not really a culture of capitulation. Most of their cities were already firebombed, as you elude to, some more than once, yet there was still no surrender.
Without surrender, a country isn't really done. Leave it be, and they'll arm and rebuild, still at war with you. Invade, and your troops die, for a standing army still existed. Japan also had colonies, islands, resources.
And of course without surrender, even if you occupy, now you have insurgents.
It's hard to view the world through the eyes of even 80 years ago.
War weary, endless soldiers lost already, an unsurrendering Japan, and a way to put an end to it...
> Without surrender, a country isn't really done. Leave it be, and they'll arm and rebuild, still at war with you.
The massive bombing of Japan was a grinding war of attrition that has well-understood limitations and challenges. Military leaders in Japan were perfectly capable of understanding what those campaigns couldn't do, so it came down to a willingness to accept the losses to maintain strategic optionality, which they clearly were.
Most of the limitations of strategic bombing campaigns do not apply to nuclear weapons, which is something the Japanese military leadership also understood, though the scope of capability was uncertain (which also probably helped). If the US switched to nuclear weapons instead of conventional bombing campaigns, which was the risk Japanese military leaders had to consider, it takes most of the strategic optionality off the table at which point there is little to gain by continuing.
So they chose to end it.
There's a fair amount of detail and references in those books if one wishes to dig into it.
(I say they are "history" books as opposed to "activist" books. The latter are not worth reading.)
Some material I've seen claimed that the Japanese leadership didn't know it was a nuclear bomb. The Japanese knew immediately it was nuclear bomb, because they had a nuclear bomb development program themselves.
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation."
Japan had no idea how many bombs we had and part of the strategy of using them in quick succession was to give the perception that we hod more than we did. It seems like Tokyo was going to be the next target:
Truman had ordered a halt to atomic bombings on 10 August, upon receiving news that another bomb would be ready for use against Japan in about a week. He told his cabinet that he could not stand the thought of killing "all those kids". By 14 August, however, Truman remarked "sadly" to the British ambassador that "he now had no alternative but to order an atomic bomb dropped on Tokyo", as some of his military staff had been advocating.
Yeah, it was in an activist's writings someone was using as a cite to me. Tells for an activist book:
1. hyperbolic language
2. no discussion of alternative explanations
3. mind reading - "surely so-and-so must have understood that..." and "so-and-so's reason must have been (something nefarious)"
And this is also something that could strike their leadership. You can build bunkers against conventional bombs but for nuclear that's a different ball game
One can argue about the increased cost in terms of lives if the bombs weren’t used, but my understanding is that by that time, we’re talking about shortening the war by maybe months, but certainly not years.
(*Worth noting that in the final terms, the Japanese did keep their emperor, but the US was demanding an unconditional surrender as a matter of principle.)
By whom? In actuality, both the US and Japan were planning for a long campaign on the Japanese home islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall. The Japanese intended to prolong fighting as much as possible to force the US to abandon the invasion because of mounting costs and casualties.
Even the night before the surrender, some among the Japanese military attempted a coup to prevent it and continue the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
Before that The Japanese had started to talk about a cease-fire, but that cease-fire was expected to include ongoing control of China, Korea, and some of the islands they had taken in the war. In other words it wasn’t a surrender, but rather a let us keep these last little bit bits and maybe we won’t kill you. It was delusional to the extreme.
The debate in Washington at this point not if Japan would be invaded or not or would surrender.
Operations downfall and Olympus were planned. They were projecting anywhere from hundreds of thousands to 1 million casualties on the US side. No one bothered to do the calculation on the Japanese side, but the Japanese leadership believed that their path of victory was to make it prohibitively expensive in American lives to take the islands and they didn’t care how many Japanese died. You can take a look at the ratios of Japanese dead to American dead on Iwo Jima, the Philippines to get an idea of the bloodbath that that would’ve been.
Of course, some Americans were seeing that the Japanese were far stronger on the islands and they anticipated. And we’re pushing for a total naval blockade instead. Japan’s economy and agricultural harvest had already collapsed. A total net naval blockade would’ve killed millions.
I’m fairly certain that happened after the bombs.
Then they suggested they’d surrender if the poition of the emperor was untouched.
From the Japanese PoV, imagining that they could hold off the US/UK suddenly ceased to matter. Obviously Japanese armies could not stand against Soviet armies. So - "OMG, who could have imagined the Americans inventing a super-super-duper bomb! I guess we'll have to surrender to them" was a face-saving way to avoid a quick & brutal Soviet conquest & occupation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Soviet_invasion_of_Ho...
In comparison, the proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Even that wasn't considered enough:
>...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops."
Nobody is saying anything different.
>...And several previous Japanese conclusions of "the USSR will not be able to do X" had proven catastrophically wrong. For example …
The Japanese had already moved all of their experienced troops from Manchuria before the invasion. They were surprised that the USSR would break the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, but the defense of the home islands was their main concern at that point.
As your source says:
>...The Soviet entry into this theater of the war and the defeat of the Kwantung Army were significant factors in the Japanese government's decision to surrender unconditionally on 15 August, as it became apparent that the Soviet Union had no intention of acting as a third party in negotiating an end of the war on conditional terms.
The Japanese knew the USSR was not a threat to the main islands and the USSR knew they would likely fail if they tried to invade Hokkaido. The Japanese had hopes that the USSR would be willing to negotiate with the Allies on their behalf, but once the Soviets declared war was, they knew that would not happen.
Japanese strategists wanted to be in Manchuria and Korea because of their proximity to imperial Japan, but that was also why they had invaded the Philippines (to defend seaborne lines of communication to their oil supplies in Borneo).
By the time the Soviets invaded, the Japanese had been ejected from much of their outlying empire, yet they had not surrendered, because Japan itself had the capability to fight.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria did not change that, an invasion of Japan proper could only have come with involvement from the rest of the allies, including the sealift used for the invasions of Normandy and southern France.
The Japanese were already expecting a Soviet attack: the only 'unexpected' thing about what the Soviets did was make a move in Summer 1945 instead of Spring 1946.
But the Japanese knew what was going to happen eventually.
I strongly suggest the recent book on operation downfall, as well as the recent popular works on the last months of the war from the Japanese point of view.
Furthermore, we have evidence, from the diaries and correspondence of Truman, Stimson and others, that they were concerned about Stalin's territorial intentions, and expressed the hope that the US's demonstration of the atom bomb would curb them. Whether that led to at least a tacit secondary goal, of checking the USSR by leaving no doubt about the US's willingness to use atomic weapons in circumstances it deemed necessary, is an open question debated by historians to this day.
The US manufactured millions of purple hearts in anticipation of an amphibious invasion.
To this day those are the purple hearts used.
Nuclear weapons saved millions of lives.
And the early bombs were merely efficient ways to level a city. 1 B-29 rather than a few hundred. 16 sq miles of Tokyo got burned down in one night, for example.
It's the civilization enders we developed in the 30 years after that woke us up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb
Mk-17: produced Jul 1954-Nov 1955
No. built: 200
Blast yield: 15 megatonnes of TNT
This is 1000 times the power of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
From 1935 to 1955 you could plot "firepower deliverable by a single aircraft" and see a trend that looks a lot like Moore's Law for mass destruction of life and structures.
Edward Teller thought that it was possible to make bombs a thousand times more powerful than the first generation thermonuclear bombs, but fortunately nobody was willing to commit resources to exploring the concept. Merely testing such a bomb on Earth would have been an act of mass destruction.
"We have considered deeply the general trends of the world and the current situation of the Empire, and We have decided to take extraordinary measures to bring the current state of affairs to an end. We hereby inform Our loyal and devoted subjects."
...
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization."
However there were was a major faction that did not want to surrender and had conspired and committed a coup d'état to prevent it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
[citation needed]
This claimed gets brought out every time atomic usage comes up, but are there official US policy documents that date to 1945 that explicitly bring this up as a motivation?
Government decisions and policies, especially in more modern times, runs on memos. If such options were discussed between departments there would be paperwork.