The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan
foreignpolicy.com
foreignpolicy.com
But these things are the province of speculation, not knowledge.
Think for a minute about what this essay is asking "What if action X did not end the war in the Pacific?"
Well dang, Action X could be just about anything. The fact of the matter is that all of the actions, taken together, were the reason for the war to end. Yes, Stalin played a big role. But it's not an either-or situation; it's an amalgam. The logical structure of trying to support a statement such as "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan" is flawed. It's like saying the landing on Tarawa didn't beat Japan. Well no, and yes. The assertion itself is flawed.
While I love all sorts of semi-non-fictional essays, I have a little warning bell that goes off when I'm mostly through an essay and the essayist starts telling me a story about how I've been misled. Smells of a political agenda and manipulation.
Japan was threatened on many fronts and made the best choice it could. That much is clear. Atom bombs did not cause as much building and population damage as the fire-bombing did. That's also clear. But atom bombs represented one thing that Stalin and fire-bombing did not: the end of Japanese culture. A few dozen atom bombs would not only have made huge holes in the landscape, it would have erased the culture of Japan.
Nobody is finding comfort in simplistic stories. In fact, the more details people know, the happier I am. But dropping the bombs on Japan saved millions of both Japanese and allied lives. It served as a quick end to a long war, and it saved thousands of allied prisoners whom the Japanese were ready to execute. It also allowed the great Japanese culture to continue.
Most serious historians don't get into counter-factuals, except maybe as fiction. It just doesn't work.
It's unfair to put the article in the same bucket as "UFO stories". No one who has read it (and is being fair) would describe it as "speculation". It isn't anything like counterfactual fan fiction. Almost the entire piece does nothing but cite facts, such as: the dropping of the nuclear bombs does not figure significantly in historical records of the Japanese leadership's discussion about surrender; the Japanese war council decided on August 8 not even to discuss the Hiroshima bombing; damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not out of scale with the earlier fire-bombings of other cities; Japanese leaders had expressed a willingness to sacrifice their cities if necessary; Japan's war strategy was predicated on the Soviets staying neutral; and so on. Are these wrong? If so, how? Are there other, more important facts omitted? If so, what are they?
The negative responses to this article so far are so insubstantial that they form a defense of it by omission. I'm very curious now to hear a credible counterargument. Surely there is one?
For those who disagree with the article, why don't you ask Japanese what they think, instead of speculating about these two bombs ending the war? It was clearly obvious that these two bombs were, just like the article said, just another two drops in a long history of bombing on Japan that has destroyed most of the largest cities. Come to Japan and see from yourself how little is left of Old Japan. All cities are built of concrete here, because there was nothing left of what they were before. And check Japanese litterature of the time - there was ample suffering and hardship without even talking about the atomic bombs.
There's nothing "revisionist" about these claims.
> Attributing the end of the war to the atomic bomb served Japan's interests in multiple ways. But it also served U.S. interests. If the Bomb won the war, then the perception of U.S. military power would be enhanced, U.S. diplomatic influence in Asia and around the world would increase, and U.S. security would be strengthened. The $2 billion spent to build it would not have been wasted. If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced. And once the Cold War was underway, asserting that the Soviet entry had been the decisive factor would have been tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Logically, this section asserts that the atomic bomb, though not successful in doing physical damage, actually created a political situation that allowed graceful surrender, and it aligned with the Japanese government's desire to preserve Japan's culture and forms of government. It's very difficult to speculate what the Japanese response would have been at this point had Hiroshima and Nagasaki been destroyed with conventional weapons. However, their way of life would have been more at risk without a clear way to appease the enemy, which we have evidence to suggest was on their minds.
It's important to note that the entire last section is speculation and offers no facts at all to support the claim that Japan consciously blamed the atomic bomb with these goals in mind. Yet, this is the crux of the article -- the idea that the atomic bomb won the war singlehandedly is a myth supported in part by the Japanese government's desire for self-preservation.
I think that's what the original reply author means when he says "all taken together." The atomic bomb clearly did not put a dent in the Japanese leadership's attitude, but, according to the article's speculation, it did allow them to make a life-saving decision more easily.
> 'During the early days of the occupation, many Japanese officials worried that the Americans intended to abolish the institution of the emperor. And they had another worry. Many of Japan's top government officials knew that they might face war crimes trials (the war crimes trials against Germany's leaders were already underway in Europe when Japan surrendered). Japanese historian Asada Sadao has said that in many of the postwar interviews "Japanese officials... were obviously anxious to please their American questioners." If the Americans wanted to believe that the Bomb won the war, why disappoint them?'
I think it was addressing the overall idea of speculation in historical events.
1. To meditate on a subject; reflect. 2. To engage in a course of reasoning often based on inconclusive evidence.
If you mean 2., the article doesn't do anything of the sort. It lays out specific pieces of evidence based on observed historical fact and draws specific conclusions from them. On the other hand, the top-level comment above is pretty vague in its rebuttal.
> Attributing the end of the war to the atomic bomb served Japan's interests in multiple ways. But it also served U.S. interests. If the Bomb won the war, then the perception of U.S. military power would be enhanced, U.S. diplomatic influence in Asia and around the world would increase, and U.S. security would be strengthened. The $2 billion spent to build it would not have been wasted. If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced. And once the Cold War was underway, asserting that the Soviet entry had been the decisive factor would have been tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
It basically argues, yeah, both Stalin AND the bomb likely contributed to a surrender. This part is not cited as well, however. It relies on implication based on the dissonance between records before the surrender and statements by the Japanese government after the surrender.
dspeyer's point is a good one if (but only if) the article actually does make the two claims he mentioned. Does it? I don't remember.
Well, Hirohito himself mentioned the bomb and its 'incalculable' destructive potential in his formal announcement of surrender.
So at the very least the bomb played a very substantial role in ending the war in the Pacific.
On the other hand, according to [1], Hirohito also cited the Soviet invasion when convening the council to discuss surrender.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u6qqo/there_h...
Contrary to your assertion, the essay is not asking "What if action X did not end the war in the Pacific?". It is stating - categorically - that the commonly accepted narrative is based on an insufficient accounting of the facts, and that this narrative is unsustainable in the face of a more complete record of what actually happened.
Here's the key passage:
"It didn't take a military genius to see that, while it might be possible to fight a decisive battle against one great power invading from one direction, it would not be possible to fight off two great powers attacking from two different directions. The Soviet invasion invalidated the military's decisive battle strategy, just as it invalidated the diplomatic strategy. At a single stroke, all of Japan's options evaporated. The Soviet invasion [of Manchuria] was strategically decisive -- it foreclosed both of Japan's options -- while the bombing of Hiroshima (which foreclosed neither) was not."
Again, that's not "speculative" or "pseudo-historical" writing. And there's no way an attentive reader of good will could characterize it as such. Now, you may dispute the veracity of the facts. Or you could bring additional facts to bear. And you may reasonably disagree with the writer's conclusions. But for a guy who is ostensibly adverse to arguments that "smell of a political agenda and manipulation", you do yourself no favors by (a) seriously misrepresenting the basic nature of what's being said, and (b) responding to your straw man in the most inappropriately condescending manner possible. (Seriously, lumping this in with UFO conspiracies, as though the Soviet military were what? A figment of unreliable imagination?)
If you want to see some real slimeball rhetoric, sir, look no further than your own remarks. The only good thing about dishonesty of this sort of is the amusingly ironic dearth of self-awareness that it also represents.
>"Most of Japan's best troops had been shifted to the southern part of the home islands. Japan's military had correctly guessed that the likely first target of an American invasion would be the southernmost island of Kyushu. The once proud Kwangtung army in Manchuria, for example, was a shell of its former self because its best units had been shifted away to defend Japan itself."
It wasn't that the best troops were defeated; just that Japan couldn't fight a war on two fronts. Once the Soviet Union invaded, they had no other viable options other than surrender or fight a losing battle.
However, even if the author's analysis is correct, I still think it best to believe that the nuclear weapons were the main cause but the other variables also influenced the outcome.
Here's the opinion of the leader of the US military at the time.
"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." -Fleet Admiral William Daniel Leahy (May 6, 1875 – July 20, 1959), the senior-most United States military officer during th Second World War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_D._Leahy#Atomic_bomb
The bomb was dropped not to win the war, but to intimidate the USSR.
What a lot of revisionist writings gloss over is that yes, certain parts of the Japanese leadership were "ready to surrender." But it is well documented that some were only ready to surrender if conditions X and Y were met. Others were only ready to surrender with conditions Z and A. And of course others weren't ready to surrender at all.
Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual.
And so if this phrase, "ready to surrender," is taken alone (notwithstanding its distinguished source), then it is facile in that it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership, and the complex process which was necessary for the leadership to converge and make a firm, unified political decision.
Yes, later Leahy apparently said, "It is my opinion," not, "At the time we all believed" ["that the Japanese were defeated and ready to surrender...."]
I'm willing to believe that some, maybe including Leahy, thought the US had only to stand back and wait for the inevitable surrender, with no ratcheting up of force necessary. But, at the same time, somebody [not including the Fleet Admiral?] was also preparing for a full boots-on-the-ground invasion of the Japanese mainland, which (going by the US death tolls of previous island invasions) would have sent thousands of Americans to their deaths.
Unless that invasion plan was entirely fake--something nobody is suggesting--there were obviously plenty of people at the top who thought that the Japanese might not be ready to surrender.
Suddenly a middle option appeared between just waiting and hoping and sending thousands of Americans to their deaths: drop atomic bombs. Even though an atom bomb would actually kill fewer people than the firebombings, it would represent an even greater threat of what could happen if they didn't surrender immediately.
Maybe the Japanese were about to surrender. Maybe they would keep fighting and Americans would keep dying. Maybe the atom bombs would convince them to surrender. Or maybe not. Maybe nothing short of a full invasion would be required. Maybe even that wouldn't be enough to end it quickly, and the dying would continue for a very long time. The Japanese in many places had gone on fighting until they were dead without ever surrendering.
In that context, with no benefit of hindsight, to say that the bomb was not dropped to win the war but just to intimidate the USSR is nonsense.
In that context, with no benefit of hindsight,
to say that the bomb was not dropped to win the war
but just to intimidate the USSR is nonsense.
But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians.
(To the argument that it wasn’t possible to target the military apart from civilians: that’s exactly why nuclear weapons are so problematic.)
it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership
An alternate interpretation is to not take it alone, and to see it as deliberately summarizing the wide diversity of opinion which was already going through the complex process that you rightly point out. News of Nagasaki’s destruction interrupted a meeting by the Japanese Supreme War Council, not so much about whether to surrender as about how. I don’t think it’s facile at all to call this, in context, “ready to surrender”.
The US did not know the details of the meeting, of course, but they chose to spend 70,000 human lives on an assumption with no particular justification, while under no special immediate military threat – at that point, Japan was relatively contained, and the fear was that if left alone it would reach out again in a matter of months or decades, not weeks. The threat was diplomatic: that Japan might surrender to the USSR. That seems worth presenting as something other than the rueful conduct of justified, proportional warfare as an absolute last resort.
As an American, sometimes I look at other countries that haven’t come to terms with major war crimes – the Armenian Genocide, for example, or indeed Imperial Japan’s crimes in China – and I shake my head.
Then I remember that the US has the A-bombs on our record, and we’ve made it almost 70 years now without admitting as a nation (meaning in standard textbooks, in mainstream entertainment, etc.) that these were, by any sensible definition, crimes against humanity of the highest gravity.
There’s this objection people sometimes raise: that it’s easy to say these things if you weren’t there, if you weren’t under the pressures of command, knowing your nation’s people were dying by the day. That’s true. I don’t know what that was like. It’s easy for me to moralize from a distance. But that argument isn’t actually justifying the act of the A-bombings, merely moderating judgment on the people who did it. Saying they didn’t really know what they were doing is very different from it was a good idea.
If you haven't already, do some research on how the Japanese fought at Okinawa. At the defensive plans they had in place for defending the Home Islands. The toll of an invasion would have been horrendous for both sides. This is without dispute by serious historians.
Your idea that the Japanese were "relatively contained," implying that there was no need to do any further action is almost laughable as a military or political strategy.
When you go to war, you should go to war til the other side cries "Uncle."
Furthermore, the idea that war should be "proportional" is also a sophomoric argument without merit. War is hell for a reason. If someone engages you in war, you fight them to the death. You don't go back and forth in a tit for tat manner that negates all of your advantages and magnifies theirs.
And to lump the A bombs with what Japan did to China? Read up on the Rape of Nanking. Or find out how many Chinese civilians the Japanese Army killed on the mainland. Or how they treated POWs during the Bataan Death March.
War is hell.
Did you just agree that people, army and paramilitary forces of Afghanistan are right to go to total war "to death" with the USA, USA army and USA civilians. Because even one innocent dead man in Afghanistan can justify action of, for example, poisoning NYC water supplies?
Or this "unproporional" punishment of enemy is justified only if it's the USA that is doing it, not when it suffers it?
I personally wouldn't advocate targeting civilians; but if there was no alternative, and my culture, country and way of life was being destroyed, I could see a rational actor choosing to do so.
The US would have been far better served by simply conducting a punitive raid in AFG to knock over the original Taliban and let the assorted tribes learn not to stir the hornets nest. Instead we've decimated the country without creating any real change. And we've also grown accustomed to a sanitized style of warfare where drone operators in Creech, Nevada plink small targets without working up a sweat.
War should be hell, lest we grow to like it too much.
Edit:
> You have the privilege of tarring the commanders of US forces as war criminals "of the highest gravity" because of the sacrifices US soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines made during WW2.
In reality, we Europeans have the privilege because of United Kingdom, Soviet, United States, Canada, Finland, and countless volunteers and freedom fighters from the occupied areas. I appreciate the sacrifices, suffering and determination from a nation I so admire; in fact we celebrate it once a year, but please remember that United States were never alone in the fight.
War is still hell. The Romans razed Carthage, a war crime? The Germans in WW1 bombed London, war crime? The British torched Dresden, war crime? The Nazis bombed Rotterdam, war crime?
It's far too easy to conflate "war" with war crime. Some feel that the two are synonymous. I think each generation has a tendency to feel superior and more advanced than the previous generation; I think this is naive and ill informed. We're all savages of a sort.
Yes, yes, yes and yes.
I'm not even saying that I would act differently if I were a military commander. War is hell, granted. But that doesn't make it right, and we should be honest with ourselves. It's not right. Killing innocents is not okay; using civilians as leverage in an act of terror is never okay.
We should strive to be better than that.
We can be grateful for the outcome and many sacrifices and still speculate about whether or not specific actions were necessary and justifiable.
And we can actually recognise the atrocities committed by the Japanese military and question actions by the allies at the same time.
It is understandable that a lot of decisions were taken that had horrible outcomes, and that many of them were taken in good faith and probably the only viable decisions despite how atrocious they might seem in retrospect. That does not mean we should just gloss over everything.
Extraordinarily efficient, one plane, one bomb, one city, but we'd already methodically bombed pretty much every other city (along with Kyoto for political reasons, the A-bomb targets and their alternates were reserved), with e.g. the firebombing of Tokyo killing a conservative 100,000.
What would be unusual is if weapon technology _didn't_ increase exponentially in lethality over time.
Given enough time even Little Boy will, to future generations, look to be nearly as puny as a flintlock. Hope we don't do ourselves in.
If you want to target cities then you keep making city-sized bombs.
If you want to target larger areas, you're probably going to be most efficient by targeting the cities in that area; go back to the previous step of city-sized bombs.
What's the incentive to increase lethality? If you make huge nukes or equivalently powerful weapons, they overkill your target and have negative side effects back on the homeland.
The dangerous super-weapons of the future are small, simple ones that can kill just the right person, anywhere, anytime. That arms race is happening right now, and progress is rapid.
Compared to e.g. canister shot from canons I don't think it would have awed them that much (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canister_shot).
Since at least the Napoleonic Wars, which followed shortly after our Revolutionary war, artillery has generally been the biggest killer on the battlefield.
They were extraordinary weapons, but as the article points out: The bombing campaigns were not, other than in doing the damage with much fewer bombs. Japan had seen similar levels of destruction in dozens of cities that summer, and was running out of larger undamaged cities.
With that context, they should require extraordinary justification to use, but no more so than the previous months of firebombing, and the focusing on the use of a nuclear bomb vs. "just" the fire bombing is detracting from the issue of how much of that overall bombing should have been acceptable and how much of it was necessary or served much purpose.
I don't want to excuse the A-bombs, but the article does make a compelling argument that they were not qualitatively different in the suffering caused.
The atom bombs saved millions of Japanese lives because the alternative was a protracted brutal ordinary war.
Reminder: the firebombing that preceded the atomic bombs killed a lot more.
The only thing that matters is that Japan surrendered. That they were "thinking" about it or "close to it" is pretty much irrelevant.
But they convened the council to discuss surrender before the second one. The timeline given by the article is:
Hiroshima bombed
Soviet declaration of war
Surrender council convened
Nagasaki bombed
SurrenderThe cherry-picking on this topic is extreme. One guy claims Lehey was the leader of the U.S. Military during WWII. He was not. He was the senior-serving military official, who worked as chief of staff to Roosevelt. You could call him an early CJCS, or you could just use his title: chief of staff. Marshall was probably the closest we had to a senior person actually running the war, as anybody with a modicum of WWII history can tell you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall The only reason to pump up Lehey is to add authority to the quote, which was made years later during a completely different political situation. When you see this kind of thing, it never bodes well for the argument.
But you beat down one red herring and three more pop up. It's like talking to those 9-11 guys. They already know the answer. Just a matter of selectively arranging facts in a convincing narrative.
The author gives it away towards the end "...There is real resistance to looking at the facts. But perhaps this should not be surprising...They fill an important psychic need."
Well there you go. From the author's comments, and those on this board, I take it this is supposed to be some kind of argument between "patriotic" Americans and the facts (as told to us by the revisionists), instead of what it is: rewriting history to suit current fashion.
I actually wish the revisionists well. Maybe they can get their way and we can go through 100 years or so of believing that the A-bomb was not the proximate cause of the end of WWII. Then a new fashion will take hold, and we can come back to believing what 95% of the people at the time it happened believed. The neat thing about this is that people get educated about history. Frankly, if history is your passion and you spend time on this and know your stuff, I could care less which theory you pick. These stories need to be remembered.
Whenever this topic comes up I reminded of this quote:
But perhaps George M. Elsey, a young naval intelligence officer assigned to the Truman White House, provided the best reply to revisionist historians and others who question the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Asked by David McCullough for his biography of the President (Truman, Simon & Schuster, 1992) about the decision, Elsey replied: "Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made. He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track. It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing."
Surely if you had found even the tiniest flaw in the OP, you'd have shared it with us by now. Instead your comments are positively incontinent with innuendos and slurs: "UFO stories", "pseudo-science", "revisionists", "9-11 guys", "cherry picking", "selectively arranging facts", "pump up", "add authority", "rewriting history to suit current fashion", "emotional reasoning" (since deleted, unless my memory is playing tricks), and my favorite: "From the author's comments, and those on this board"—as if the two were colluding instead of obviously having nothing whatever to do with each other.
I don't have an opinion about why Japan surrendered in WWII, but when an apparently well-reasoned case provokes this kind of thing, it seems likely that there is something to it.
What were the conditions? Because if they were "you help us rebuild" or "and we get a grill-cheese sandwich" then really they're not much. Plenty of peace treaties have taken place with conditions.
I won't do your research for you, but various factions within the Japanese leadership wanted to put lots of significant things on the table, like maintaining the seat of the emperor, the existing political structure, etc. All were showstoppers to the US.
But that isn't true. The seat of the emperor was maintained, at least nominally, so it clearly wasn't a showstopper. The US may have demanded unconditional surrender before the atomic bombings, but it accepted a conditional surrender after.
1945: Japan signs unconditional surrender > Japanese officials have signed the act of unconditional surrender, finally bringing to an end six years of world war.
> Under the terms of the ceasefire, Japan has agreed to end all hostilities, release all prisoners of war, and comply with the terms of the Potsdam declaration, which confines its sovereignty to the four main islands which make up Japan.
> Under the terms of the ceasefire, Japan has agreed to end all hostilities, release all prisoners of war, and comply with the terms of the Potsdam declaration, which confines its sovereignty to the four main islands which make up Japan.
> It has also agreed to acknowledge the authority of the US supreme commander. Although Emperor Hirohito will be allowed to remain as a symbolic head of state.
---
I'm pretty sure the surrender was unconditional and later the Allies announced that the Emperor would keep his position(probably mostly to help ease the occupation) ---
> www.history.com/this-day-in-history/japan-accepts-potsdam-terms-agrees-to-unconditional-surrender
At the behest of two Cabinet members, the emperor summoned and presided over a special meeting of the Council and implored them to consider accepting the terms of the Potsdam Conference, which meant unconditional surrender. "It seems obvious that the nation is no longer able to wage war, and its ability to defend its own shores is doubtful." The Council had been split over the surrender terms; half the members wanted assurances that the emperor would maintain his hereditary and traditional role in a postwar Japan before surrender could be considered. But in light of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, Nagasaki on August 9, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, as well as the emperor's own request that the Council "bear the unbearable," it was agreed: Japan would surrender.
--
> www.history.com/this-day-in-history/japan-accepts-potsdam-terms-agrees-to-unconditional-surrender
From Wikipedia[1]: 'Japan's ambassador to Switzerland, observed that "unconditional surrender" applied only to the military and not to the government or the people, and he pleaded that it should be understood that the careful language of Potsdam appeared "to have occasioned a great deal of thought" on the part of the signatory governments—"they seem to have taken pains to save face for us on various points."'
So it seems that both Japan and the Allies understood that unconditional surrender only applied to Japan's military.
Further: 'That day, Hirohito informed the imperial family of his decision to surrender. One of his uncles, Prince Asaka, then asked whether the war would be continued if the kokutai (national polity) could not be preserved. The emperor simply replied "of course."'
In other words, Japan was willing to continue fighting, even after the atomic bombings, if it didn't get to insist on a few conditions. That doesn't sound like unconditional surrender to me.
I should also point out that the parent of my original post asserted that any and all Japanese conditions were "showstoppers." I pointed out that, whether or not the emperor's seat was a condition explicitly writing into the surrender documents, at least one of Japan's surrender conditions, namely keeping the emperor in place, was clearly not a showstopper.
"Unconditional" doesn't mean "there are no terms." It means that the loser dictates no terms, while the victor dictates all the terms.
Given Japan's current record on how they engage with World War 2 history, I honestly wouldn't trust any of their claims. Wikipedia has an overview of the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#Debate_in_J...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history_textbook_contr...
I'm not saying that they would lie, but at this point I think the propaganda war is going to eclipse any useful qualitative data that could be gained.
What confuses me about this debate is what purpose is serves. Minus patriotism, why does it matter? I've maintained a neutral stance on the matter precisely because I don't understand this. (But I'm also a relatively non-nationalistic person, and I also have seen people who still think we need to get revenge for Pearl Harbor (4srswtf), so maybe it's just me.)
To find out what motivated Japan to surrender? Whatever conclusion you draw from their actual motivation is up to you.
This was actually the essay topic on my US History AP exam.
If the Emperor had not accepted defeat we might well have a guerrilla war still going today.
Or the equivalent of North and South Korea.
Is it even possible to imply any causality without a counterfactual? You can obviously take things too far and start speculating on an alternative time line, but the immediate turn of events is surely a legitimate area of speculation (even for 'serious' historians) and I would say the decision to surrender in japan is one of those.
It's much more like saying 'well, this body was stabbed through the heart and then burned, but they almost certainly would have been dead even without the burning' than 'some complex series of actions occurred and we have no idea which of them was actually relevant in the resulting outcome'.
Yeah the US played ball by nuking japan. But saying it saved japanese people and their culture because it quickly ended the war, it's a little fast. I mean we're talking about nukes, not some poker games, those are war decision, you're still talking like the winner won because it took the best decision. Nuking is not a good decision, but it was a necessary one at the time. You're saying it like japan also thought "yeah, you nuked us, that really saved us, thanks !". When I read "bombs saved japanese", it sounds a little weird.
At least the article offer the reader some opportunity to think about the japanese perspective.
> Smells of a political agenda and manipulation.
UFO and conspiracy theories at it again ! The internet is never holding the truth, it's mandatory to not believe everything, it applies especially for this article. Consider the alternative like an opportunity to explore perspectives, not just like another one of those "deviant zealot".
Speculation may be made in this case if we ascribe significance to the near simultaneous release of The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) and Jared Cohen (Council of Foreign Relations member and head of Google Ideas; somewhat spooky in and of itself), which Julian Assange variously described as a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism and an enticement to Western soft power.
One of the advanced praise writers for the book (aside Kissinger, Blair, Clinton, Albright and Bloomberg - who, it must be noted, recently declined presidential candidacy as billionaire and 7th richest American to run New York) was General Keith Alexander, who is the present Director of the NSA (former Deputy Chief of Staff, Army; formerly Commanding General, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command; Director of Intelligence, US Central Command; Deputy Director for Intelligence, Joint Chiefs of Staff). Jacob Applebaum (of The Tor Project, also Wikileaks affiliate) described General Alexander as the most powerful man in the world and a fucking liar for claiming to congress that the NSA does not routinely intercept the communications of US citizens.
Why has this article been published by Foreign Policy in the current climate? The author has been developing these ideas awhile (http://cns.miis.edu/staff/wilson_ward.htm).
This assumes an invasion of the island of Japan would somehow have been a necessary goal.
"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life – but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."
T.R. Fehrenbach This Kind of War, 1963
1 - Japan was already defeated and it was only a question of time
2 - Atomic bombs didn't drop on Germany because the Third Reich surrendered before
3 - The US needed an actual use case to assert the damage and potential of this as yet unknown weapon
4 - It was as much about threatening the sowjets as it was about ending the war in the Pacific if not more so
What I know about the late days of the second world war is that they were regarded by both the future NATO allies (read the Commonwealth and the US) and the Sowjets as the basically the first days of a future conflict between these parties. Germany and Japan didn't play much of a role in this picture any more.
So what the US got from the use of nuclear weapons was much more than just the japanese surrender. It was a stronger position compared to the Sowjets and the garantee that the war in europe didn't continue on after the German surrender. In order to prevent this, the western allies even slowed their advance to Berlin to allow the Sowjets their successes. Which doesn't mean they didn't have their fair share of it anyway.
But that is just my point of view and I'm no historian.
And finally to the point about saving lives. I've grown tired of nationalistic people stating an unverifiable estimate of probale deaths as the herois reason to kill any number people right know. You don't save people by killing others and it is certainly not heroic. I know that the victors writes the history, but this argument mostly comes up in cases where some really bad things have to reinterpreted.
What does that mean, and how is it supported by the historical evidence in the article or elsewhere?
The way the article ends with the bogeyman, "What if we didn't fear nukes as much?" has a circularity to it. What "nuclear warfare" meant in 1945 was obviously different from what it became just 15 years later - a political football that diverted people's attention, vs. an entire strategic doctrine that acted to encourage low-level proxy wars and interventions, while discouraging the "total war" practice that was conventional through the World Wars.
Claiming "Stalin did it" when there had also just been an atomic attack and an entire summer of horrendously devastating attacks, that the Japanese were almost powerless to defend against, on cities not to mention the ever tightening noose of allied encroachment throughout the region and the anticipation of an imminent final invasion, just seems like someone is trying to come up with a catchy article title... not honestly looking at the situation.
Agree or disagree, these are serious arguments that deserve to be met with more than platitudes and belief-repetition.
I don't think it is easy for us today to understand how slow information was to travel during the time of the war nor is it easy for us to understand how incomprehensible it would be to accept reports about a single bomb creating as much destruction as was reported at the time.
While the slow reaction of Japan might be incomprehensible if the same events happened today I think it is dangerously misleading to apply todays standards regarding communication loops and the destructive force of atom bombs to the events of the late 1940s.
The Japanese were hardly in a position to strike back against the atomic bomb. In the absence of an obvious response, it's not surprising that it took time for their leaders, a group, to come to a decision to surrender, considering their culture and society.
(I do agree that the role of the Soviets is indeed underplayed, but in its desire to make a point the article overreaches.)
There isn't any way to prove that stuff of course, and you can tweak the indefinite to be whatever you want to overcome the definite. So in some ways it is simply mental gymnastics and great fodder for writers of fiction.
The further we get away from the events of those times the easier it is to second guess those decisions and not be challenged by someone with first hand knowledge of the events.
No, the article is not arguing against a factual claim like that, but against a causal one: that Japan surrendered because of the atomic bombs. The latter may be the mainstream view but it's just as "indefinite" by your standard. And causal claims can be weakened by evidence, which is what most of the article tries to do.
Also, one of the article's major claims is that Japan didn't surrender immediately. That argument is more intricate and interesting than I expected.
I find it hard to reconcile this idea with the relatively persuasive reasoning that the second bomb was unjustifiable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings...
I am not entirely convinced that it was so, but I do think it is reasonable that a few days is not sufficient time to understand the full magnitude and novel nature of such an event. The second bomb was probably necessary, but even in an alternative universe where it was not, I think it would be foolish to expect a surrender that immediately.
That doesn't mean the U.S. couldn't have waited more (the Nagasaki bombing occurred while Hirohito's Supreme Council were discussing Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion), but I don't think they would have waited much longer either.
The article addresses this.
The article argues that the surrender could not have been motivated by the bomb because the timing was wrong and they did not yet have a full appreciation of what happened. To this extent, the article meshes neatly with the assertion that the second bomb was dropped before the first was understood.
However, the notion that the bombs would not have made them surrender is not supported by the fact that they did not surrender following the bombs. They did not have time to do so. It is an unknown if they would have, had they been given more time.
It's true that the Wikipedia article paints a completely different picture. I'd like to know what the OP would say about that.
That is why I think it really would take more time for things to settle in after a single bomb. The second bomb drives home the "yes, this really is what it looks like; this isn't like before." factor.
I think it would have taken more time for a complete appreciation of what happened at Hiroshima to sink in. Whether or not a complete appreciation of that single bombing would have lead to surrender is debatable, I'm inclined to think not.
Any formulation that takes a few isolated facts and makes a narrative out of them is an oversimplification, of course. For example, the Japanese leadership was initially deadlocked on accepting unconditional surrender, and by the time the final decision was made, news of Nagasaki had reached them and could have been the deciding factor. They were considering the totality of their situation, so every factor came into play.
They split evenly on the question of whether to surrender or to keep fighting in favor of conditional surrender terms (and this after 2 atomic bombings and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria).
Hirohito had to break the tie and decide for peace; he did mention the atomic bomb as one of his reasons, but we can't know where that ranked vs. the Soviet invasion, American preparations, etc.
Great observation, summarizes one of my main quarrels with people trying to reimagine history.
This is stuff written either immediately before the bombing or shortly afterwards. It's only now that people have had years of believing a narrative that we're exactly in that situation where stating that the atomic bombs were necessary is a view that can go unchallenged.
Indeed. Those throwing around accusations of revisionism need to question whether the history they accept is not actually the revisionist one.
> 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.
>
> United States Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946 : http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS-PTO-Summary.html
The reason I get that impression is because its a natural consequence that if the reason for the surrender was not the dropping of the Atomic bomb, then the decision to drop the bomb was unnecessary at best and erroneous at worst.
Perhaps I've read too many foreign policy debates but that is exactly the way someone says something without actually saying it. Which makes for face saving diplomacy and protracted if ineffective debate. Had they not been second guessing the decision the dropping, they would have included that the war declaration by Stalin was insufficient in its own right to cause the surrender. Similarly they might posit that it was the combination of those things. Reading such debates is a combination of reading what they don't say, what they do say, and how they say it.
Pretty easy to get the popup and the overlay.
Whitelists, AdBlock, Ghostery, NoScript, HTTPS everywhere and so on and so forth should fix any issues you have.
You are perfectly able to choose when / where ad revenues are paid, rather than being tied to someone elses business model.
You can do that by just not visiting the website. I find it to be a lot more worthwhile because you actually find legitimate alternatives instead of [in my personal opinion] cheating the system.
Vonnegut also talks about this on Slaughterhouse-V:
"The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people. So it goes." (Chapter 9)
The nuclear attacks served their purpose, sure, but they were definitely not decisive for the outcome of the war.
He's more right about the Tokyo bombing. Richard Rhodes, in his fantastic "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", cites 100,000 dead and 1 million injured.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War...
[2] http://www.dresden.de/media/pdf/infoblaetter/Historikerkommi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
As for the "uniqueness" of nuclear weapons, there's an interesting parallel to the uniqueness of chemical weapons use in Syria. Even as conventional weapons are ripping the country to pieces, there is a heavy amount of focus on chemical weapons. I think it has to do with the desire to draw lines of acceptability somewhere, but an inability to draw lines on anything but a technological front.
TFA aside, it is generally accepted that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused Japan to surrender. Besides, the bomb was not invented until well into the war.
I closed the page immediately because of the full-page popup ad, but I've encountered the premise elsewhere so it warrants examination.
The first thing to realize is that for Japan, whatever else happened an invasion of any sort would be harshly contested. It's not simply a matter of manpower either, there was a lot that was needed to be able to provide a workable invasion:
* Control of the air.
* Gunfire/artillery support to suppress the defenders prior to the assault wave.
* Logistical support, including landing craft (LOTS of landing craft), means of turning a beachhead into a supply terminal.
* More importantly for logistical support, a working supply chain to feed materiel to the battleground.
In almost all military aspects the U.S. was already in much better shape to host an assault on Japan. Even assuming the U.S.S.R. could pull all their troops from the occupation of Eastern Europe fast enough via the Trans-Siberian railroad they still would have needed to accumulate sufficient landing craft, field Naval support assets, build more airstrips and air bases, etc. etc. etc. As a side note, the whole reason Stalin would have needed to move the masses of troops back to the east was because he knew from his diplomats in Japan that Japan would respect the ceasefire that had been signed after Gen. Zhukov decisively defeated the Kwantung Army at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939, a military result that may have proven invaluable in the later defense of Moscow.
The Soviet troops fighting in Manchuria/Manchukuo in 1945 were in a much better military situation by comparison: The Kwantung Army's best troops had been continually bled to fight on the real front lines, Mao and Kai-Shek's guerrilla armies represented a constant drain on the Kwantung Army, and years of garrison duty had the effect of further reducing the martial ability of the KA compared to battle-hardened Soviet troops arriving from the Eastern Front.
But at this time the Soviet gains were achieved only overland. In fact the Soviets proved unable due to logistical difficulties to completely overrun Korea, a failure which would itself significantly alter the course of later history.
Sometimes proponents of the "Soviet shock" theory mention that it was the threat of attack on the Japanese Home Island from the undefended north which truly drove the spectre of fear amongst the Japanese leadership, but that's missing a very big point: There's a reason the Japanese defenders on the Home Islands were concentrating on the south! The Japanese could certainly have redeployed to the north if they had wished, so it seems that they feared the imminent U.S. invasion more than the potential threat of Soviet invasion.
But the Japanese knew the Soviets were going to attack. They in fact had been re-deploying the Kwantung Army to east Manchuria where they expected the attack to fall. The Soviets surprised the Japanese by attacking from every possible direction instead, but the surprise wasn't that the Soviets attacked at all, it was that it came sooner than expected and from the wrong directions.
None of this is to say that the atom bombs were the reason that the Japanese surrendered either. But it bears repeating that the Japanese were quite willing to fight an invasion of the Home Islands. Whether the invaders were American or Soviet was relatively immaterial, and given the massive American advantage in both air cover and Naval support the Americans could have invaded into a weak spot if that were the only concern.
In the actual event the news of the Nagasaki bombing had come during a Supreme Council being hosted by Emperor Hirohito amongst his closest advisers. The news drove the Council to split evenly on whether to surrender (but maintain the Kokutai) or surrender with further conditions.
An American B-29 pilot was tortured into "confessing" that the U.S. had a 100 more atom bombs, which would be used in the next few days, news which was used by Japan's War Minister to push for surrender. Likewise, when Emperor Hirohito broke his Council's tie (in favor of surrender) he explicitly mentioned the destructiveness of the atom bomb. One of the emperor's advisers even mentioned the 'twin shocks' of Soviet invasion and the atom bombs as being gifts in a sense, as it meant the Emperor could say he was forced to surrender and not that Japan "gave up".
So it seems clear that the Soviet invasion was core to the decision-making, but not that it was the only concern, and certainly not that the atom bomb was not factored in at all.
Unsurprisingly, you haven't addressed most of the article's arguments. Even where your material does overlap, it does so incoherently, because one can't figure out where you actually disagree with the author or are even talking about the same things.
A serious counterargument to the OP would be very interesting. The comments on the FP site itself are terrible. So far, the only real argument I've seen is that the article is old hat, since we already know that it wasn't just the bombs that ended the Pacific war. It may be old hat among specialists, but it isn't to the millions of us who were taught and still believe exactly that.
This kind of "history" starts with the assumption that all the sources, or at least huge majority of them, are manipulated or downright fiction. It then tells you that a) the sources were manipulated by X for Y and with support of Z (with names ofc); b) there were other sources, that were not manipulated. The latter are mostly unprovable, because there is no way to cross-check them and no way of tracking their history, yet they are believed in above all doubt. "Revisionists" then say that they can "learn" everything, "all the truth", from the manipulated, untrusted resources they previously dismissed and then they become silent for a year, during which they try to get access to those documents. Shortly after they have it, the fun starts - every other week there is some revisionist who presents a "proof" that such-and-such lied, murdered, stole and so on. That's only a beginning though, because they soon want to demolish statues and change the street names, fire people from work (from police, army, all the other public services). Then the elections come and suddenly they disappear.
Well, at least that's how revisionists looked like in my country. The article is not that bad for sure :)
(I think mpyne's reply is "serious", though. It's always preferable to read first, but the argument presented in the article is not new. I did read the article, and I'm not surprised mypne managed to address several of its points without even looking at it.)
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u6qqo/there_h...
If you can point me to counterarguments more specifically, I'll look at them.
As the top comment by /u/restricteddata points out, the argument about the Soviet role was made by Hasegawa (who the FP article did not cite). There's no refuting that the Soviet side of the story is important and relatively unrecognized (by the public). But it's hard to say exactly how events would have played out without the bomb. And the FP article's subheading, that US policy has been based on this "myth", is just a puzzling conclusion.
But merely "challenging a #1 belief" isn't inherent justification for the legitimacy of an argument either; that's the same tack the creationists take when trying to blow up evolution.
By all means people can and should learn about the Pacific War. But learn the actual lessons of that conflict, don't just use it to reinforce your own previously-held beliefs.
You may want to actually read the article before criticizing it. It's more nuanced than you seem to assume, and does not really contradict your own comment.
In particular, it does not imply that the threat of Soviet invasion was the determining factor; but that it was only one of several factors, of which the bomb was another, neither of which were dominant.
> Emperor Hirohito ... explicitly mentioned the destructiveness of the atom bomb
As you say, the bomb was a gift, allowing the emperor to (quoting the article) "blame the loss on an amazing scientific breakthrough that no one could have predicted" and put Japan in a sympathetic light. The emperor and the government had every reason to shift the blame on the bomb and away from everything else.
Which is why it was the decisive element; Japan has lost militarily before either the bomb being dropped or the USSR declaring war. But the bomb is the thing that, given the cultural context, allowed the regime to admit defeat, which was what was missing.
The actual title: "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan... Stalin Did"
A more accurate title: "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan... There Were Many Confluent Factors"
The latter is something you'd expect to read on an academic paper, where the former is about par for the course when it comes to journalism.
Note that this practice is much, much older than the internet; hyberbolic headlines sell newspapers as well as driving people to click on links, and headline writers have been taking that into consideration forever.
The atomic bomb was not the deciding factor for two reasons: 1) the decision to surrender happened before the impact of the atomic bombs was fully assessed, and 2) the effect of the bombs was no worse than the massive conventional bombing that Japan had already experienced. The vast majority of Japan's large cities had already been pretty much destroyed by the time the atomic bomb was used: it was a "raindrop in a hurricane."
A true historian is a die hard revisionist, someone who is chasing "conspiracy theories" to reveal the truth using scientific reasoning based on evidences, documents.
The article itself is kind of worthless, since it is based on vague speculations, without critical look on the presented hypothesis (the most important, IMHO, part of honest scientific approch is to try to find weakneses in our own theories).
The fact that something sounds probably is not a proove that it is true. If I see blond haired woman, I may put hipothesis, that she's dying her hair - they are blond, after all, but we all understand, that it does not have to be the case.
The article itself is kind of worthless, since it is based on vague speculations
What "vague speculations"? That doesn't sound like the article I read.
History is a science only in the sense that "political science" is.
Why oh why do they have a sign-up/sign-in? The content is clearly there in the background! So obtrusive!
This is how I was able to read the article:
(function(){var o,w,h,b,n,s,h,i,j;o=document.getElementById("TB_overlay");w=document.getElementById("TB_window");if(!!o){o.parentNode.removeChild(o);}if(!!w){w.parentNode.removeChild(w);}h=document.getElementById("art-mast");b=document.getElementById("art-body").getElementsByClassName("translateBody")[0];n=document.createElement("div");n.style["max-width"]="625px";n.style.padding="150px 0 0 150px";n.innerHTML=h.innerHTML+b.innerHTML;document.body.innerHTML="";document.body.appendChild(n);s=document.getElementById("share-box");s.parentNode.removeChild(s);h=document.head.getElementsByTagName("script");i=h.length;while(i--){j=h[i];if(!j)return;j.parentNode.removeChild(j);}})();Also, "intentionally" can always be fudged. We "intentionally" bombed the house with the suspected terrorist in a dense neighborhood, but "unintentionally" killed a lot of civilians in the surrounding area. We don't seem to be revolted enough by that to stop doing it.
Unless "unintentionally" can be fudged to morally sanction wiping out a city with a nuclear weapon today, I don't see the point. Maybe I slightly exaggerated the moral repugnance of society today towards civilian death. But the difference between moral attitudes toward civilian death today and civilian death in WW2 is so dramatic, a little bit of exaggeration does very little to weaken the point.
Ask yourself if the would-have-ended-soon-anyway defense works well for the Civil War.
Did the Soviet Union make a serious strategic error in declaring war against Japan when it did?
Remember, we're taking it as a given that Japan surrendered to the Allies because of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it surrendered to the USA because it for very good reason preferred USA reconstruction to USSR reconstruction, in a way that mirrors whom German troops very strongly preferred to surrender to.
What if, instead, the USSR had simply decided to bide its time?
Some results:
1) Two rivals would continue to claw at each other for months, draining massive amounts of blood and treasure.
2) In the meantime, the Allies would be forced to have at least some number of fewer troops in Europe than they did in actuality. I don't find it plausible that the Soviet Union would see it in their interests to, say, invade France and Italy. But it would give the Soviet Union a much stronger negotiating position, and a United States devoting its resources to crushing Japan would be a United States not focused on rebuilding Europe. And a vacuum of power in the more developed parts of Europe would have been very tasty for Stalin.
3) On the con side, the USA would likely end up in a more powerful position in East Asia, if it won, decreasing Communist influence from China to Indonesia and Vietnam to India.
3.5) If the USA lost (let's define that as the cessation of hostilities while Japan managed to hold on to many of it's earlier imperial acquisitions), the USSR would have an embittered, genocidal, and highly authoritarian state with the capacity for total war on its border.
4) Also on the con side, Soviet influence would have been quite limited in Manchuria and northern Korea. The main base of operations for Mao in the Chinese Civil War would have been limited.
5) The USSR wouldn't have regained some positions in the Far East that it imagined were legitimately Russian. It also wouldn't have been able to uproot the large amount of industry that the Japanese had invested in Manchukuo.
6) Violating the Potsdam agreement that required the USSR to invade by August 9 would have decreased trust in the Soviet Union on the American side.
7) All those cons acknowledged, all of them except 6) could have been mitigated by the Soviet Union dragging its feet for six months or even a year more, drawing out and sabotaging back channel negotiations with Japan as much as possible, and then invading at the very end.
7.5) If it waited longer, Japan's willingness to surrender might have evaporated, leaving more time to get a full scale invasion of the whole of Korea, northern Japan, and a wider area of China going. That's on top of allowing for more preparation time, which may or may not have been useful.
Thoughts, HN? If anything, I think this indicates that the Soviet entering when it did wasn't the main factor that ended the war, because from the Soviet strategic perspective dragging the war out as much as possible seems very preferable to what ended up happening.
I've always wondered why American troops stopped at the Elbe and left Berlin to be captured by the Soviets.
Was there a deal? Soviets get Berlin in exchange for attacking Japan?
And having seen the damage from the Tokyo firebombing all the Bomb provided was efficiency. The US had already come up with the proper means of erasing cities.
I've not read the whole thing (just starting work, have it marked for later) so I may be jumping the gun with this comment, but that paragraph jumped out. A lot of arguments I see for why dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary seem fairly rooted in hindsight - this doesn't make the arguments wrong, but it does mean we can't judge the decisions made on these metrics because at the time people did not have that hindsight to help them.
Did they know that the effect of soviet actions would be so detrimental to Japan long-term?
Did they absolutely know that Japan, or one of its allies, didn't have something up its sleeve had the potential to turn that situation around? Or that a sudden change of fortunes wouldn't disable a large chunk of the relevant forces against Japan such that they could pull themselves "back into the game"?
No one thing beat Japan. War isn't about doing the one thing that will probably stop an enemy: it is about trying to make sure they stop and stay stopped long enough for you to solidify your position and deal with your other problems (particularly, in a large war, battles on other fronts). This often means hitting an enemy while they are down just in case. Rule 4: The double-tap.
Of course as taps go dropping a nuke over a civilian target is at best morally dubious, this is undeniable IMO, but I find a lot of the arguments against to be ill considered from the point of view of what people making the decisions at the time definitely knew, definitely knew that they knew, and the long list of things that they could not confirm so strongly.
This is merely one piece to that larger argument, which I find convincing, that atomic bombs are not useful in a modern world as a militaristic or diplomatic tool. Maybe some of the commenters that are demonstrably far more expert historians than I would explain whether they think this recollection supports that idea, or that atomic bombs are merely less influential than a large scale invasion from Stalin, a scary dude.
So either way, the bomb caused Japan to surrender or Stalin caused Japan to surrender. Both precursors were directly or indirectly caused by the bomb. In summation, the bomb caused Japan to surrender.
I want my 20 minutes back for reading this garbage.
His argument seems to come down to this 3 day delay between Hiroshima and the Supreme Council meeting. He is not looking at this through the lens of the Supreme Council, or even any Japanese citizen.
Remember: this is the first use of the atomic weapon in front of the entire world in human history. As far as the Japanese were concerned, on August 6, 1945 the sky suddenly lit on fire and destroyed an entire city in seconds. To the mind of 1945, this event was indistinguishable from magic. He cites many examples of military emergencies inciting a quick response but none on the level of total, wholesale destruction like the atomic bomb. Indeed, the atomic bomb was completely unprecedented in all of human history.
It is therefore not completely mysterious why the Supreme Council would initially not know what to do. They would be a) in a state of complete confusion b) in a state of complete defeat and c) trying to shore up the nation after what must have appeared like a supernatural force leveling an entire city and killing many, many thousands of people.
" Japan had a nuclear weapons program. Several of the military men mention the fact that it was a nuclear weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in their diaries. General Anami Korechika, minster of war, even went to consult with the head of the Japanese nuclear weapons program on the night of August 7. The idea that Japan's leaders didn't know about nuclear weapons doesn't hold up."
As for your " none on the level of total, wholesale destruction like the atomic bomb":
" if you graph the number of people killed in all 68 cities bombed in the summer of 1945, you find that Hiroshima was second in terms of civilian deaths. If you chart the number of square miles destroyed, you find that Hiroshima was fourth. If you chart the percentage of the city destroyed, Hiroshima was 17th. Hiroshima was clearly within the parameters of the conventional attacks carried out that summer."
In other words, there is nothing to suggest any of the state of shock that you suggest would prevent them from meeting earlier.
About the bomb, it's not a question of necessity, but of economics. That was a time of war. American forces beat the enemy every step of the way in the Pacific. The Allies may have enough power to bring Japan down to its knees during the war in the long run, but how tempting is a weapon that wreaks destruction unseen yet on the planet, but gives zero casualties, instead of sending your fellow soldiers to their deaths on a foreign land? Who wouldn't get sick of a long war and not seek to end it as soon as possible?
Of course, someone may argue that since it's a question of economics, then it is unnecessary, and therefore, the bombings were wrong. But surely, if there is something you wouldn't want to give to your enemy, one of those is time. The author mentioned a Japanese nuclear research program, and that really deserved a red flag.
It took 6 more days after the Soviet invasion and Nagasaki bombing, before Emperor Hirohito publicly announced their unconditional surrender. If the emperor made the public announcement before the Nagasaki bombing, then the second bombing may be wrong.
If there is something I would admire of the Japanese people, it would be their sense of patriotism. Stalin did not beat Japan. What kept the country from surrendering and hold that long was Japanese Pride.
Little Boy and Fat Man are very weak compared to today's nuclear weaponry. Historians and article writers should be discreet when discussing sensitive issues like this, as they can fuel hatred. Focus should be on preventing nuclear war, or there would be no more history left to discuss.
Responding to this, I would point out that it was a known historical facts for a long time that Stalin had spies (plural) in the Manhattan Project, and generally had a good idea of how far the United States was progressing toward developing an atomic bomb. So one could just as well say that it is the advanced development of the bomb by the United States that prompted Stalin to declare war against a new enemy, right after a brutal and prolonged war against the European Axis powers.
Over the years, I have read many proposed ways to defeat Japan without dropping the atomic bomb in a variety of American sources. Submarine captains thought that submarine warfare alone could defeat Japan. (Near the end of the war, American submarines were operating freely very near the coast of Japan, and even in the Inland Sea between Shikoku and the other main islands of Japan.) American aviators were glad to have the bomb to continue to justify their existence, of course, but many have expressed the opinion that conventional strategic bombing alone could have defeated Japan.
Japan set up a rather harsh set of expectations by how fiercely it fought against the Allied landing on Okinawa. That made Allied war planners revise upward their estimate of the difficulty and cost in lives (both civilian and military) likely from a forced invasion on the main islands of Japan. That had to be part of the consideration as Allied war planners decided whether or not to drop the bomb. It's still a historical fact that no surrender was offered until after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.
The bomb was tactically economical, and nothing else. It did the work of 500 B-29s. Guess what? We had those 500 B-29s, and the bomb did nothing more than save petrol.
Quit hand-wringing.
+ Open up the JS console
+ $("#TB_window").remove()
+ $("#TB_overlay").remove()
Done!
Change the 5 at the end of the url to a lower or higher number for different pages.
I'm not sure if it's just me but the page navigation seems to come and go.
Edit: I am getting the login box when I go to the "single page" link. Removing the DOM elements works.
And that if we drew the wrong conclusion that somehow this might impact or could have impacted the rationale for developing nuclear arsenals.
It's also popular in the US war college that officers attend, the statement that "Wars cannot be won by air power alone".
But beyond these details, whether the history is exactly right on what caused the Japanese to surrender, there is no doubt that the conclusion of WWII precipitated an arms race and a space race as Nazi scientists and technology were divided among the superpowers.
Nothing would have stopped the advancement of war making technology, no convenient conclusions about the strategic causes or effects.
Technology will advance whether we want it to or not. And whether or not its in out best interests as we perceive them in our posited "future".
That anyone in the 21st century would ever attribute heroism to a man who murdered 20 million people (that's a low estimate btw) is beyond comprehensible.
Was Stalin the "lesser of two evils" in the fight with ole Adolf? Perhaps. But anyone who holds Stalin in anything but contempt is either utterly ignorant of a huge swath of 20th century history or has a profoundly twisted sense of morality.
I suggest you take a brief spin on Uncle Joe's wikipedia page or read Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin to get a feel for just what sort of hero Stalin was.
EDIT: I misread. It's about double, 3 million. Unreliable figure in any case.
But you're right that 1.5 million is too small. I read again and there's about 3 million officially recorded victims. I cannot trust or distrust the higher figures, as these were reported either by western media or political dissidents, both of whom have very good reasons to demonise the USSR.
Just as the USSR spread a lot of lies about the Western world, I don't trust the Western media about these controversial subjects.
The artifical famine of 1932-1933 was not a natural famine. It was a calculated effort by Stalin to undermine the Ukrainian peasant farmers, a class he viewed as a threat, and force them into collectivization. It was perpetrated by the Communist party through the steady increase in grain quotas. It is a matter that of historic fact that Ukrainians starved to death while trains shipped away mountains of grain that they themselves had grown.
Feel free to distrust "Western media", but there are primary sources that support this narrative. For instance, Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko's account, or the narrative of American (and up to that point Soviet sympathizer) William H. Chamberlin (although perhaps you might not trust his account since he's a Westerner).
"... during the period of 1928–53, about 14 million prisoners passed through the system of GULAG labour camps and 4-5 passed through the labour colonies."
Original source: Robert Conquest in 'Victims of Stalinism: A Comment.' Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 49, No. 7 (Nov., 1997), pp. 1317-1319 states: "We are all inclined to accept the Zemskov totals (even if not as complete) with their 14 million intake to Gulag 'camps' alone, to which must be added 4-5 million going to Gulag 'colonies', to say nothing of the 3.5 million already in, or sent to, 'labor settlements'."
Subtracting the ~1.5M foreign prisoners of war, the 12M estimate seemed like a reasonable minimum number of Russians sent to the Gulag.
One evil does not cancel out another. Of course it was still preferable that the US won, and there is no denying that they made a very important contribution to end WWII. But there is no need for hero worship. Just because the Allies fought an opponent that was worse, does not absolve them from criticism for their behavior.
I think there is a lot of post rationalization about the attrocities commited by the Allies. If one admitted that a lot of the killing of civilians was unessesary and barbaric, then the story would not be such a nice good guys vs bad guys story.
Stalin wasn't a hero. The Nazis were defeated by USSR (millions of peoples oppressed by the Stalin's regime, yet the alternative was even worse). USA helped defeat the Nazis.
USA defeated Japan. USSR helped defeat the Japan. USSR had no viable ambitions and wasn't in any shape to have them beyond the 38th parallel.
But I don't normally see "Stalin" and "hero" used on purpose in the same sentence either...
Ask any Jewish person what they think of Stalin.
In another context, ask any Palestinian what he thinks of the foreigners who invaded his home in the 1940s, and massacred his kin and are continuing to increase the bloody settlement of his land...
The fact that the Soviets freed concentration camp victims as they came across the camps afterwards is admirable, but that wasn't why the Soviets were fighting, just as the U.S. wasn't fighting just to save the Jews.
Why should we applaud Stalin for the sacrifices of his men?