Comment by opo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opo | Hacker News Reader

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>The main reason is there are alternative paths where neither were required. Japan was already fishing around for diplomatic end to the war with the major sticking point being conditional vs unconditional surrender and their main condition iirc was protection for the Emperor ...

This is not true. While there were peace feelers put out by the civilian members of the Big 6, the military hardliners blocked each of them. (Most accounts also state that part of their conditions would be to be given the islands in the South Pacific that the allies had just conquered.)

Even AFTER an atomic bomb had been dropped, the military had unacceptable demands:

>...Three members held out for three additional terms: Army Minister General Korechika Anami and the Chiefs of Staff of the Army, General Yoshijiro Umezu, and Navy, Admiral Soemu Toyoda. These additional terms included: 1) Japan would disarm her own forces; 2) Japan would conduct any “so-called” war crimes trials of her own nationals; and 3) there would be no occupation of Japan. This last term would assure the continuance of the Imperial system and Hirohito’s seat on the throne. These positions would be referred to as the “one condition” and the “four condition” Japanese peace terms. Under the Japanese governing system, however, the Big Six could only act when unanimous. With a three to three split, they were deadlocked.

It was at this point that Hirohito intervened:

>...At the end of the theatrical demonstration of the deadlock, the emperor spoke. He stated he had given serious consideration to the situation at home and aboard. He then announced his support of the “one condition” offer. He and Japan must “bear the unbearable.” The Big Six and later the full cabinet made Hirohito’s decision official government policy. The American and Allied reply accepted the Japanese surrender offer, except that it stated clearly that the emperor would be subordinate to the occupation commander. This produced another dispute as to whether Japan could accept these terms. The emperor intervened again to announce he was satisfied with the American cable.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surren...

Even after all this, hardline military officers attempted a violent military coup to destroy the Emperor's recorded surrender broadcast and keep the war going.

I talk in more (somewhat ramble-y) detail here [0], but I think I can put a more succinct version of the anti argument here, the main argument is that to morally justify the extreme act dropping atomic bombs on those cities requires an extreme set of justifications to the level of "it was the only option short of a bloody millions dead between both sides home island invasion" that history doesn't necessarily support.

The core thrust that undermines the this or that between bombs and traditional invasion justification for dropping the bombs is that a) the Emperor was already exploring possible peace deals and b) ultimately the Emperor was able to override the extreme militarists in the war council and accept the peace after the bombs. A lot of the pro-moral-bomb argument presupposes that the shock and awe of the atomic bombs were a prerequisite for the change in stance and that anything short of a full invasion of the home islands would not achieve shift large enough to get to a peace deal. (and that to achieve that impact required them to be used on a city)

Ultimately I think (and I know this is extremely hard to prove ahistorically) a naval blockade and shelling/arial campaign that devastated what little military might Japan had left would have lead to the same shift as the bombs and that the casualties from that would be lower or at least less morally weighted as the intentional atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When that shift would happen and how to weigh the deaths morally are going to vary a lot from person to person though and I accept that.

> Even after all this, hardline military officers attempted a violent military coup to destroy the Emperor's recorded surrender broadcast and keep the war going.

A coup that ultimately fails though. I don't think anyone really argues that there weren't fanatical elements remaining even after the bombs were dropped. Their existence doesn't mean peace required the bombs however, the big question is what were the conditions that would reduce their power to the point the peace could be accepted. We have one example in the bombing but that doesn't mean that was the only option.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757977

I personally subscribe to the theory that nuking Japan (at least once) probably stopped the need for an invasion. Almost all of the archives that were sifted through pretty much answers the fact that the Japanese were never going to negotiate a peace that removed its militant aspects otherwise. There would likely have been another war and Japan wouldn't have become democratic.

The 2nd bomb? I can be convinced either way. Japan needed to know they had more than one, but it probably didn't have to be a city. That being said, this is a lot of presentism (looking at the past with modern ethics). World War Two was a brutal, total war and the long term effects of nuclear weapons were not fully understood. Remember that there was carpet bombing with incendiary bombs happening against Japan's wooden cities for the year leading up to this. A non-nuclear end the the war would almost certainly have involved a land invasion and many, many more deaths on all sides.

Japan (as a country) was also not innocent in all this. They started the war - both with China and the USA. The Japanese military IN COLD BLOOD slaughtered more civilians than the Allies did in all their strategic bombings, let alone just nuclear. Even the nuclear bombs had military targets in mind...

It's complicated because Japan, then and now:

1) is a place where symbolic and actual authority are two very different things.

2) is a place where outward consensus is prioritized. Heavily.

After the fall of Tojo in the middle of 1944, the cabinet which regained a modest degree of civilian control was split between those who wanted to surrender with one condition (the kokutai gets preserved in some form-this is what Truman eventually agreed to) and those who wanted to surrender, but with several conditions-they handle their own war crimes trials, all kinds of unrealistic stuff.

The thing is: the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the atomic bombings, the potential social unrest, it all happened within the space of a week. It's frankly a bit bizarre to suggest that one and only one of these played a role in the Japanese decision to surrender, especially given the structure of their government. It probably all combined together at once. And even this led to the Kyujo incident.

>The Japanese military IN COLD BLOOD slaughtered more civilians than the Allies did in all their strategic bombings, let alone just nuclear. Even the nuclear bombs had military targets in mind...

Operation Meetinghouse killed more than the atomic bombs did. And the Soviets-quite literally-raped, murdered, and looted their way through Manchuria to the point where anti-Soviet demonstrations in multiple Chinese cities became very difficult for the KMT regime to control. The Americans would pardon Shiro Ishii, the Soviets would put several Unit 731 goons to work on their own human experimentation program at Sverdlovsk. And these were the relative good guys. So, yeah: it was a dark time in human history.

Ultimately, the decision to use the atomic bombs can't be separated from the decision to press for unconditional surrender of some kind. You could genuinely make the argument that Roosevelt was careless in applying something meant for Germany and its history to a completely different country with different pathologies, and it is certainly true that a "placated" Stalin, a strong pro-US nationalist China, a demilitarized irrelevant Japan, and a decolonized Asia were four goals that were never going to be compatible. But it didn't really matter for Truman, one of the few American Presidents who knew what war actually was-WWI as well as being descended from the losers in the Civil War-and someone who barely had the legitimacy needed to agree to keeping the kokutai after the atomic bombings. I think their usage was inevitable by 1945. Those incandescent with rage from 80 years later miss the forest for the trees.

>...Ultimately I think (and I know this is extremely hard to prove ahistorically) a naval blockade and shelling/arial campaign that devastated what little military might Japan had left would have lead to the same shift as the bombs and that the casualties from that would be lower or at least less morally weighted as the intentional atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A full blockade would have led to many more deaths due to famine, etc.

The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.

>...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.

>...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/okinawa-costs...

Japan had every intention of defending the main islands just as strong, or stronger, starting with operation Ketsu-Go. One of the slogans in Japan in 1945 was "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."

https://irp.fas.org/eprint/arens/chap4.htm

The proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Please take a moment to try and picture that armada... Yet even with an armada of that size, 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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall

One thing they would have been facing was a massive kamikaze force:

>...Estimates of how many would have been available vary, but range between 5,000 and 7,000; plans for waves of 1,000 planes were in place. Both sides planned for higher-than-normal success rates since the invasion would greatly reduce problems of finding targets ("fly to the shore, hang a right, find a transport") and the vulnerable transports would be concentrated near shore in order to offload troops. These weren't the only suicide attackers. The navy had midget submarines and frogmen who would attack the landing craft with explosive charges. Civilians were formally "drafted" into defense units, most of which had no military weapons or uniform, and which had been instructed to attack with bamboo spears or hand tools. There's no way to tell whether such units would have had any positive effect - but their inclusion would almost guarantee that US troops would fire on civilians, with the potential for mass slaughter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ka1z1/what_...

A Japanese military officer summed up the thinking by the Japanese military this way:

>...We will prepare 10,000 planes to meet the landing of the enemy. We will mobilize every aircraft possible, both training and "special attack" planes. We will smash one third of the enemy's war potential with this air force at sea. Another third will also be smashed at sea by our warships, human torpedoes and other special weapons. Furthermore, when the enemy actually lands, if we are ready to sacrifice a million men we will be able to inflict an equal number of casualties upon them. If the enemy loses a million men, then the public opinion in America will become inclined towards peace, and Japan will be able to gain peace with comparatively advantageous conditions.

https://irp.fas.org/eprint/arens/chap4.htm

>We have one example in the bombing but that doesn't mean that was the only option.

Yes, besides the atomic bombs there could have been an invasion or a blockade. Both of these options would have resulted in more deaths on both sides.

> Estimates of how many would have been available vary, but range between 5,000 and 7,000; plans for waves of 1,000 planes were in place.

My problem with quotes like that from the Japanese side is I don't believe they could have actually fielded anywhere near that number or at least not for any sustained amount of time. The total number of aircraft counted during the disarmament efforts post war were something like 15k across the entire Japanese army and navy combined across all types of planes and Japan was having massive trouble building any more planes and training new pilots.

Then ultimately the question is how much of that would have been required before the same shift that happened after the atomic bombs were dropped happened in the run up to blockade/invasion? How much of the remaining airforce could have been destroyed before it was really a threat to this alt-history force? etc.

> "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."

Like if we take this quote and others about the defense of the home islands at face value and suppose that they wouldn't have broken soon any ways in the run up to an invasion or in the early days of that effort why are the 100-200k that died by the end of 1945 from the bombings enough when similar amounts wouldn't have been spread among military targets the US could more precisely hit? History already proves that the "One hundred million die proudly" is propaganda bluster.

A big part of the anti-moral-bomb does hinge on the supposition that Japan would not have held much longer and the feared invasion scenario was a case of prudent planning for a worst case that was unlikely to happen. Living as it does in the land of the counterfactual it's tough to really say when they might have broken in this alt-history scenario.

Taking numbers from here which pulls from a post war report: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e5fvss/comme...

>...The total number of aircraft counted during the disarmament efforts post war were something like 15k across the entire Japanese army and navy combined across all types of planes

They were not planning on using those planes for dog-fighting. They planned to use everything they could for kamikaze attacks.

>...why are the 100-200k that died by the end of 1945 from the bombings enough when similar amounts wouldn't have been spread among military targets the US could more precisely hit?

The atomic bomb was the only reason Hirohito gave in his surrender speech to the Japanese people. There also was this:

>...Later in a private letter to the Crown Prince he did not expect to be made public, the emperor stressed Japan’s deficiency in “science”—a euphemism that encompassed atomic weapons—and an underestimation of the United States and Great Britain. He did not mention Soviet entry into the war.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surren...

>...History already proves that the "One hundred million die proudly" is propaganda bluster.

I am not sure why you say that "History already proves" - we really don't know what would have happened. For example, if in 1944 someone was saying that Japan would have over a thousand kamikaze attacks by the end of the war, you might have claimed that was propaganda bluster, but it turns out that is what happened. If someone had said that 90% of the Japanese defenders on Okinawa would fight to the death, you might claim that was propaganda bluster. Or that hundreds of civilians would commit suicide, etc, etc. This was total war.

>...A big part of the anti-moral-bomb does hinge on the supposition that Japan would not have held much longer and the feared invasion scenario was a case of prudent planning for a worst case that was unlikely to happen.

By the time of the fight for Okinawa, Japan was far past any hope of winning that war, yet it was the bloodiest campaign of the entire war. No one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was defeated. Truman and others just hoped that the atomic bomb might be enough to convince Japan to give up.

The reason I say history proves that to be bluster is because they capitulated after 2 atomic bombs and far fewer deaths than the 100 million number, so it's more a question of what other events could have caused that same change in posture inside the war council/the emperor's will to override them.

After the 1944 D-Day landings, Allied planners thought that the war might easily stretch into 1946. The original plan was to drop dozens of atomic bombs on Germany. There was no such thing as "Let's sign a peace treaty where we stop fighting the Germans without invading Germany." You seem to be proposing that when we got to the German border in March 1945 we should have suddenly decided not to enter German territory, but only blockade them instead. The only reason we didn't drop dozens of bombs on both Germany and Japan was that our production lines didn't reach their three bombs per month full capacity until June.

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