Just in case you care, today is the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It happened at 8:15 am on August 6 in Hiroshima, which is 7:15 pm on August 5 in Washington DC.
It is nearly conventional wisdom these days, certainly on the left, to say that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary and constituted a war crime. I still disagree. It's true there were multiple reasons Japan surrendered when it did, but there's not much question that the bombs were a big part of it. Without that, the war almost certainly would have ground along for another year and produced hundreds of thousands more deaths. Things are different now, but if I had been president in 1945 I would have done the same thing Truman did. This was not a war of choice. We were the ones attacked, and ending things with minimum loss of life was the right thing to do.
Actually, the declaration of war by the Soviet Union was an even bigger shock to the Japanese than the atomic bombs, as they had been hoping the Soviets would mediate a peace deal. The real, unwitting value of Hiroshima was demonstrating in the starkest terms what a nuclear war would mean. Had the bomb not been used, the chances of a catastrophic nuclear exchange would have been much higher.
It wasn't really. The Japanese military command already knew that the Russians were building up forces, and expected them to breach the peace and invade by early 1946.
It probably took both the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the atomic bombs to get Japan to surrender when they did. That's largely because you had to get the Imperial Japanese Army, the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the civilian leadership all to agree that it was time to give up.
The Japanese had a really fucked up system of government before and during the war. There was no one who could give orders to the army, no one who could give orders to the navy, and no one in control of both. They fought fundamentally different wars, with only a minimum of coordination. For the army, the war was always primarily about China, and they were convinced that, if they could just get Chiang to capitulate, everything else would fall into place. The navy recognized that, after Pearl Harbor, China was mostly a sideshow and the main enemy was the US.
The Soviet invasion was more important, simply because the army was the center of the complete dead-enders. Their power base was in Manchuria rather than Tokyo, and they had plans to continue the war even if the Home Islands were lost. They were shocked not only by the declaration of war, but by just how easily the Red Army steamrolled their defenses. That caused them to be willing to throw in the towel.
But, without the atomic bombs, it's questionable whether everyone in Tokyo would have been ready to give up. As it was, the coup intended to prevent the surrender almost succeeded.
It's also unfair to judge the decision to drop the bombs by what we found out later. At the time Truman made the call, there was no way to know how close to surrender the Japanese were. It's important to keep in mind just how shocking it was when at least a thousand Japanese civilians on Saipan chose to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff rather than surrender. After that, the Americans started to believe that the Japanese would never give up. That colored the decision making over the last year of the war.
If anyone thinks Japan was about to surrender w/o an invasion, check out:
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Die-Defeated-Forgotten-American/dp/0306823381
"when at least a thousand Japanese civilians on Saipan chose to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff rather than surrender."
Most, if not all or those civilians, were driven there by the Japanese Army and compelled through force or hysteria. Despite broadcast pleas by US Army Nisei not to.
The point stands though. Lord knows what would have happened once a land invasion of Japan began.
The experience in Okinawa showed what a land invasion of Japan would have looked like.
Data Point: The Japanese armed forces burgeoned in 1945 under urgent mobilization from about 4.5 million men under arms to over 6 million by August.
The change in Japanese strategy in Iwo Jima and Okinawa deeply affected the morale of the US military. Previously the Japanese had opposed the landings on the beaches, then after a few days burned their picture of the emperor and staged a final suicidal banzai charge. On Iwo Jima and Okinawa the Japanese withdrew into series of interlocking strong points that provided defense in depth. Each strong point had to be taken out individually while the attackers were exposed to fire from the supporting strongpoints. The goal was not victory, but to demonstrate that the Japanese would fight to the last man. It worked to the extent that the US military from the lowest private to the generals dreaded the idea of invading Japan.
My father (born in Hawaii, Scots/Norman stock) had recently graduated from college and got a temporary civilian job in the security office at Pearl Harbor maintaining the camera used for taking ID pictures. (Old time leather bellows style - not really designed for use in the tropics. He arrived for work at the main gate just as the first Japanese torpedo bombers came through KoleKole pass, dove into a culvert the instant he saw the planes, and kept his head down until the bombs stopped dropping before running to the security office since he knew things were going to get hot for him.
Later he joined the 27th Army Infantry Division (New York based) as it came through Hawaii on the way to the Pacific. Technically he deserted his job because he decided he had a better chance of surviving fighting the Imperial Japanese Army than his security job.
The Division fought in a couple of early battles taking some small islands, Makin, Majuro, Eniwetok, the bigger targets, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. He didn't talk about Okinawa - I didn't know why until I came across an old documentary about the battle and what you described was exactly what the 27th ran into.
One interesting point. Those strong points/pillboxes on Iwo Jima and Okinawa were built of a form of coral concrete that had very interesting characteristics - they flexed - armor piercing battleship and heavy cruiser shells bounced off them and would detonate in mid-air - not fun. They were also arranged so that as one was about to be overwhelmed, the crews would zip out the back and race to the next pillbox to reinforce that.
The 27th was going to be in the first waves for the planned attack on Japan. My father knew about the planning because he was was also a good typist and in demand for that when he wasn't on the front lines with a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) or a carbine and a lot of hand grenades. He was kept busy typing up orders for the deployment, and was very happy about the surrender.
In theory the emperor had absolute power as a divine monarch. In practice he was isolated with a minimal staff, dependent on the military to propose policy. The Japanese army had a particularly nasty habit of assassinating anyone who stood in their way. At state dinners the emperor ate all by himself on a raised dais. Hirohito found making policy decisions difficult and preferred to spend time in his biology lab studying hydrozoa (very small animals related to jellyfish).
Maybe not the thread to ask but about the WWII Soviets, I've always wondered why we ever allied with them. Yes Ike wanted a 2 front war, but given the Hitler's invasion of Russia, AFTER the non-aggression pact, we'd have had that for free.
The USSR had not at ALL the shipping needed to invade Japan however. And at that point the US was not going to help them.
So it was more about losing their armies on the mainland than any threat of Japan. I tend to think it was the combination because nukes meant the Japanese plan to contest every square inch of the home islands suddenly looked a lot more shaky in terms of producing enough dead Americans to get the US to settle
Hmm, demonstrating to the Soviets that we had a big ol' weapon that they didn't have played a bigger part than Kevin seems to think, and no one believes Truman would have dropped it on the Germans to prevent U.S. casualties on DDay.
It wasn't ready by D-Day, and the scientists and military command absolutely wanted to use it on Germany (and the military brass actually made the decision, not Truman - although he tried to take credit afterwards).
He absolutely would have done that if the bomb had been ready. Literally everyone who knows anything about the war knows that to be the case.
The same scientists who protested its dropping on Japan had no such qualms when they thought it was destined for Nazi Germany.
They absolutely would have used it had the European war gone to August of 1945.
This is also a flaw that many "How the Nazis could have won!" scenarios fail to address.
How could the Nazis win in such a way to keep the Americans from making Germany glow in the latter half of 1945.
D-day fails?
Berlin glows.
Stalingrad holds?
Berlin glows.
The Suez falls?
Berlin glows.
dropping the bomb certainly didn't intimidate the soviets. however, i think the point is that after dropping the bombs, everyone, soviets and the u.s., knew what the consequences of a nuclear war would be. in essence the idea of MAD was the result.
The "Soviet invasion" claims are over-exaggerated. The Japanese government essentially pulled all their troops from Hokkaido to sacrifice it to a possible Soviet amphibious landing (not that they could have done one). They also already believed that the Soviets would breach the peace and invade by 1946.
The double nukes mattered because it meant they couldn't force the US into a settled peace that would let them keep their government leadership and gains elsewhere. Even then, it was a close fight in the Japanese government. It was the Emperor who broke the stalemate and pushed it into surrender, and he explicitly cited the atomic bombs as the reason for it.
I tend to think the biggest argument for the use of them is humanitarian. Prolonging the war into 1946 would have meant a vast number of Japanese civilians starving to death. Obviously Truman and his ilk didn't care about that (he didn't actually make the death to drop the bomb - it was made by military command), but in retrospect it's one rationale.
Ilk????? Truman was not ilk. He made the best decision at the time based on what knew as opposed to the luxury of hindsight. The thinking was to save the lives of all the soldiers who would die invading Japan. Maybe we didn't need the second bombing but then again that's hindsight.
Folks thinking otherwise are very foolish.
At the time the primary concern was not that two bombs might be overkill, but rather that two bombs would not be enough. The two bombs were dropped days apart to create the illusion we had lots of bombs. We didn’t.
That's exactly the version we got.
That's what I've read as well.
+1
"They also already believed that the Soviets would breach the peace and invade by 1946"
Except the Soviets invaded in August 1945. It was a shock. The invasion so soon after conquering Eastern Europe is one of the greatest military feats in history and caught Japan totally off guard.
Also, it may be the council that decided to surrender may not have heard of the Nagasaki bombing.
"This was not a war of choice. We were the ones attacked ..."
About the "we" part. The United STATES of America was not attacked because Hawaii wasn't a state back then. It was a territory, which, fairly or not, is a little less "us" and more "an extra piece of furniture out in the back yard" kind of sensibility.
Hawaii may not have been a state, but it was definitely considered part of the country.
And it was the US Navy which was the target of the Pearl Harbor attack.
About the "we" part. The United STATES of America was not attacked because Hawaii wasn't a state back then.
This is one of your worst ever takes. And that's saying something. I mean, those weren't Hungarian sailors who were slaughtered en masse.
You do understand that US troops were killed in Hawaii and the Philippines, right?
As an incorporated territory, it was legally considered a part of the US just as Guam and Puerto Rico are right now.
But a major attack on US military facilities, regardless of its location, resulting in ~3400 casualties would surely be interpreted as an attack on the US.
AMERICANS were attacked you dufus. Never forget that.
Sinking our ships was an act of war committed on the US, whether they were on the high seas or anchored in a US territory.
Well, it had a sizable chunk of the US Navy docked there, so whether it was part of the US or not doesn't really matter. The US Navy was attacked.
Reading the autobiography of Akira Kurosawa I first learned of something called “The Honorable Death of One Hundred Million”. He mentions it rather casually, that the Japanese population would have committed suicide had the Emperor called for it. I’ve since read a bit more about it. Apparently the Japanese military expected the population to fight to the death. Both the Japanese and American militaries thought the invasion would cost millions of lives. If there were no atom bomb I suppose the war would have ended with millions dead and Japan partitioned by the Soviets and the U.S.
Why 'if'? Most people in Japan didn't know about Hiroshima until after the war.
More people were being killed in firebombing raids every other day.
The nuclear bombs were just more of the same, when it came down to headlines.
This. The Americans had shown in both Germany and Japan that they were willing to burn cities to the ground. Nukes were just a far far cheaper way of accomplishing that goal. The fire-bombing of Tokyo killed around as many people as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and fewer were killed in Nagasaki.
The Japanese went to war on the mistaken premise that Americans were soft and would quickly seek peace. Instead we spent $2 billion dollars to build the bomb, another $2 billion to build the B-29 to drop it, as well as the navy to capture the bases to fly them from.
That's right. In July 1945, a bombing raid on Tokyo killed close to 200,000. If you read the news from that summer, city after city in Japan was being destroyed and hundreds of thousands killed by conventional weapons. If you read the book Unconditional, you'd see that there were no quiet negotiations or entreaties. Japan was prepared to fight.
The atomic bomb was a different enough weapon to provide an excuse for surrender.
If they were that convinced of ending in a Massada event why would the atom bombs matter? They could have gone out in a blaze of suicidal glory by nuke too.
"I would have done the same thing Truman did."
If FDR had lived, he'd have done the same thing. Ike would have too. There is not a president in our history who wouldn't have dropped the bomb as well. The first job of the president is to protect the country and to save American lives when possible. Not one of them, knowing there was an alternative, would have ordered US forces to invade Japan. The costs likely would have been monumental. The judgment of history would not have been kind.
Totally agree. It wasn’t a real choice. It had to be done.
just like january 6th, eh?
Are you saying the insurrection had to be done and was comparable to dropping the bombs on Japan? WTF is wrong with you? I assume you think Trump actually won the election and therefore the insurrection was necessary?
"WTF is wrong with you?"
It's a troll. It leaves its droppings to get attention. Please don't feed the troll.
It's worth noting that, at least half of the time, Atticus himself is a troll. But even he is disgusted by Algore.
the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary and constituted a war crime. I still disagree
My take has generally been saturation bombing by the allies in WW2 was generally justified.* The enemy's war plants were every bit as legitimate a target as his armies. Precision bombing would have been nice, but in the main it just didn't work. We tried it over Germany in 42 and 43. The British told us it wasn't going to work. And they were right. The technology wasn't sufficiently ripe, and so we switched to area bombing.
We killed more people in the infamous Tokyo raid (11 March 1945) than in any other bombing, including the two nuclear attacks. It's no more barbaric to kill the enemy with the strong force than with electromagnetism.
*I do think there's a pretty strong case that the Nagasaki bombing was overkill. Japan was clearly teetering at that point, especially with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. But Hiroshima? It was a legitimate target. General Sherman put it best: "War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."
The bombings were targeting the supporting population at least as much as the factories.
So is there an atrocity you couldn't justify by that line of thought? The rape of Nanjing? The Holocaust? some future world-riving nuclear war?
So is there an atrocity you couldn't justify by that line of thought?
The bombing of Hiroshima wasn't an atrocity, so your premise is flawed, and thus your question is nonsensical.As I wrote above, the bombing of Nagasaki may well have been unjustified.
But since you seem to be an expert, I'll ask you: did the allies not possess the moral authority to target the war economies of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? It seems untenable to posit we didn't have that right, for obvious reasons: these fascist, genocidal powers were bent on worldwide conquest; they would have enslaved humankind if left unchecked; economic power was obviously a critical enabling factor in their quest for dominance; and furthermore the weapons they were producing were being used to kill large numbers of Americans.
And again, there was no satisfactory means of reducing the enemy's economic capacity in precision fashion: the technology simply wasn't sufficiently refined.
Unnecessary and not specifically a crime.
We were already destroying cities and killing more per raid several times a week than the nuclear bombs did. They were hardly a bump in the death figures.
And Russia joining the battle meant there were no other avenues to pursue diplomatically, even though nothing came of it.
But was the nuclear boming a crime? If it was, the firebombing of Tokyo was a larger one.
By today's standards they are both clearly crimes. But today's standards were not in force at the time. The horror the world felt afterwards for what went on in WWII, and WWI as well, was the motivator for codifying international laws of war.
The creation of those laws was bought at a huge price of death and suffering, the world now tosses them into the dustbin of history at its great peril.
Under today's rules, yes, it would have been considered a war crime. But that's part of the modern interpretation of the boundaries of war.
The counterfactual -- what could the US have done to avoid using two atomic bombs on Japan while achieving the same results -- is the question you should ask.
Could the US have dropped one bomb in Tokyo Bay as a demonstration of the awesome power the US held?
I came to this thread to post this same idea. Use one bomb as a demo. If that didn’t work, then bomb one city. That would likely have produced the same result with half the number of casualties.
If I remember correctly, ideas like this were batted around at the time. They were rejected because the US had so few bombs, and insufficient confidence that they'd actually work.
This wasn't like a pharmaceuticals thing where the first pill costs $4Bn to make and each one after that costs half a penny. I gather they had those three bombs (Trinity, and the two dropped later on Japan), and then no ability to quickly make more.
We had three bombs at the time. Enough so a demo could have been done with two in reserve.
The counterfactual is simple, because the Americans had already done it. They had repeatedly shown they were willing to firebomb urban areas. The fact that they could achieve the same results more cheaply with atomics was nice for them, but didn't really change the reasons for Japan surrendering.
About 4000 people per day were dying in the Pacific theater that summer. If the war had lasted a few more months without the bombs, more people would have likely died than did with them. While we cannot replay history, given Japan’s post/war success one would be crazy to call for a do-over.
It’s highly probable the bombs saved lives given the conventional war casualty rate. I do think, however, that Hiroshima was probably enough to give Japan the face-saving exit path that it took, and that it is reasonable to argue that Nagasaki was overkill given the Soviet invasion.
They definitely saved American lives. That was the number one priority.
The bombs saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. And millions of Japanese lives.
Which I was I said, though it may be that Hiroshima saved lives and Nagasaki cost them, to a lesser degree.
When you calculate the daily losses in Japanese-occupied Asia--China, the Philippines, South East Asia and Indonesia--the death toll is much higher.
But they were Asian civilians, and life there is cheap, if you're not Asian.
This annual commemoration evokes certain other reactions among the former citizens of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
It’s been years since I tucked that figure into the memory hole, but it was inclusive (indeed mainly) civilian deaths, of all nationalities.
Targeting civilians is a war crime. Fire-bombing and nuking cities, whether in Germany or Japan, is a war crime.
Targeting civilians is a war crime.
Targeting economic centers (war plants, marshaling yards, rail depots, port facilities, training facilities, airfields, etc) vital to the enemy's war effort definitely wasn't a war crime in WW2 (not for the Allies, at least, whose war wasn't illegal).
Unfortunately there was no way to do the above without killing a large number of civilians.
The Tokyo fire-bombing was specifically designed to burn down the entire city. It was specifically designed to inflict massive civilian casualties.
Don't be a fucking idiot.
The Tokyo fire-bombing was specifically designed to burn down the entire city.
Tokyo was the seat of the enemy's government and military command structure as well as its most important economic center. As such it was an eminently legitimate target.
Don't be such an fucking idiot.
In the case of Germany and Japan, it was also a case of reaping the whirlwind.
The main historical lesson I learned has been from the lack of nuclear attacks of this scale since the end of WWII: Apparently, there may be a limit to humanity's propensity for violence and mass casualties by state actors. Maybe.
"Apparently, there may be a limit to humanity's propensity for violence and mass casualties by state actors. Maybe."
You're dreaming.
Since when is it conventional wisdom (namely on the left) that the atomic bombings were unnecessary? I'm reading the comments here and I don't see that at all. I suppose it depends on how we define "left" but in the US, I don't see a lot of controversy about this at all.
I don't doubt that there's still some controversy, but I don't think I've ever spoken to an American who believes that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were avoidable - not that it comes up much. I can think of a couple of non-Americans I've heard denounce the bombings.
I would say that the crux of the matter is if unconditional surrender was the correct objective.
The arguments that it was unnecessary almost always stem from early 80's scholarship and research. Forty plus years later and more analysis of Japanese documents has shown the absolute depth of Japanese militarist fanaticism.
The Army wanted to resist even after Nagasaki, and fanatics tried a late minute coup to seize the Emperor.
The last kamikaze attack was actually launched against the US fleet hours after the Japanese surrender was announced.
Absolutely true, yet it also shows that civilian deaths had no effect on Japanese military leaders. By that logic, destroying cities could well have been unnecessary. There was only one person to convince and that was Hirohito. Could that have been achieved otherwise? How about this: rather than insist on unconditional surrender, demonstrate the power of the bomb in another way and tell the emperor he could stay and that Japan would remain a sovereign nation, which is what happened anyway. I don't know if it would have worked but it could have been tried. Unconditional surrender sure sounded horrible to the Japanese.
The Americans had already demonstrated their power by showing their willingness to firebomb two towns a week. (They had already burned down the largest cities.) Being able to burn down cities with 6 b-29s instead of 500 is nice for the Americans, but doesn't really change the calculus to surrender.
There was only one person to convince and that was Hirohito. Could that have been achieved otherwise?
Yes, perhaps via an invasion. But that would have killed millions, including vast numbers of Americans. And this was a war, after all, we didn't start.
After one particularly horrific raid, the one on Tokyo perhaps, Hirohito expressed particular concern . . . about his ceremonial raiment.
After the war he was kept on as a bulwark against communism --as were many numbers of the Kempeitai, the Japanese Gestapo. And just as guilty of war crimes, and kept on for the same reason.
"the crux of the matter is if unconditional surrender was the correct objective.". THIS. +100. Particularly considering how well the US treated Japan in the end, which they certainly didn't expect at the time.
They expected a Japanese style occupation. When the Americans started shipping food in, instead of out, they became America lovers.
In the end absolute unconditional surrender was waived as the Japanese were promised eventual sovereigty and the right to choose their own government, including keeping their emperor. The emperor was required to renounce his status as a divinity. After the defeat of Germany the American public was sick and tired of war and wanted it wrapped up quickly. There was not great pushback on fudging "unconditional surrender" just a bit.
You have to go back to the mentality of those days. There was no taboo on nuclear weapons, that only came when the Soviet Union developed them too and the home turf could be destroyed. There had been a rush, led by Germany (which went off into crazy V2 stuff, but anyway), to the superweapon that would end the war through decisive victory. There was also a gradual shift to accepting civilian casualties. If I'm not mistaken, it was the British who actually were keen on bombing cities including residential areas in Germany; the Americans were hesitant at first. But they bit by bit converted to the idea and the firebombing of Tokyo showed it. Without this shift, the US might have chosen more military targets to demonstrate its new power to the Japanese. Particularly when it comes to Nagasaki there were other ways to tell them: "We have more of these bombs than just one".
So I'm not blaming Truman as much as the "logic" of war. There were other options besides fullscale invasion (a very bad one considering the Japanese home defense strategy of training even schoolkids to be cannon fodder) and the destruction of two big cities.
Now we see the mad logic of war at work in Israel. It could step back from the brink of regional war, including nuclear under its Samson doctrine if it loses, but the zero-sum mindset has hardened and won't allow it. The US is being pulled into it by a similar logic: defend Israel even if it brings havoc upon itself. I'd also call the Mutual Assured Destruction logic of the cold war days absolute insanity, from which we escaped mostly thanks to Gorbachev - but it's crazy to have to be saved by the enemy. Hitler's Nero Befehl: burn everything. Akira Kurosawa's magnificent movie Kagemusha pictured the madness of the "logic" perfectly.
The final step in that logic (not attained in 1945, since the US would win in any case and knew it): "THIS is the decisive moment in history and no future is possible if we lose". How many times haven't generals and heads of state thought that? But they didn't have nukes, so in the end there was a future after all. For having seen that danger, the greatest US president IMO was Jimmy Carter.
I agree, it seems impossible to put ourselves in the mindset of 1945. A country tired of war (thinking of the Ukrainians), an inevitable bloody end, no taboo, and some of the other bombing options were equally as bad if not worse from a civilian death toll point of view (see the Tokyo fire raids). However, to say “we were attacked” to justify the atomic bomb is just cheap sophistry. Like saying someone punch me at the bar so I had to kill their entire family- this is not just weak sauce it’s bad sauce.
The US daylight bombing campaign in German remained focused on industrial and transportation centers, with exception of single raid done on Berlin done under pressure by the British. One can still question the degree of precision bombing, given the average error in dropping the bombs could be measured in miles. In contrast the British dropped firebombs by night, trying to burn entire cities. By their own standards, they only really had two successful raids where entire cities were burned. These were Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945.
When the US found precision bombing of Japan to be of limited effectiveness. This was due to B-29 engine reliability issues exacerbated by the need to operate at high altitude, the existence of the jet stream over Japan often making accuracy impossible, and the diversified nature of Japanese industry. This drove Curtis Lemay to the heresy of rejecting high altitude daylight precision bombing in place of low altitude night firebombing. Lemay proceeded to show the British how large scale firebombing of civilian cities should be done.
If I'm not mistaken, it was the British who actually were keen on bombing cities including residential areas in Germany; the Americans were hesitant at first.
Yes, this is broadly correct. The USAAF to its credit tried precision bombing, but, due to a number of factors, it largely proved untenable: in the main, the technology (including the famed Norden bombsight) wasn't ripe, and losses during these daylight raids were horrendous. Indeed, for a while in 1943, the US air offensive over Germany was called off—the losses were simply unsustainable.
In practice, by the late stages of the war in Europe, the USAAF was engaged in area bombing just like the RAF, and over Japan not even a pretense was made that the bombing campaign was being done in precision fashion.
On this point, my wife gave me a copy of "Bomber Mafia" by Malcom Gladwell and it has a take on this I had not seen before.
To summarize, within the air force there was an emerging thought, starting in around 1930, that with bombing that was precision enough (i.e., enough to really hit only the factories) a world war could conceivably be stopped without WWI type millions of trench casualties.
It was a plausible theory, and the Norden bombsite made it testable. But in reality as some have pointed out above, it didn't work. The firebombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities would have continued as Curtis LeMay had taken over and he knew that precision bombing would not work, so he was just into full on "keep destroying cities until there are no cities left."
After having read the book, I don't really think there was anything, at the time, unique about the two atomic bombs, the same result would have happened with conventional bombing, Le May was already doing it.
What is really sad is we only ever seem to get better at killing each other in ever more novel ways. At the end of the book Gladwell is discussing the current state of precision bombing, now exactly where the precision bombers always wanted it to be, but war is no less costly.
They estimated close to a million US casualties invading Japan. They made enough Purple Heart medals to give to all the wounded. They are STILL handing them out today.
So, my daughter took a Japanese language course here in the Bay Area through a community college. Her instructor was from Japan, though a long-time transplant. She had been a litle girl in Japan when the bombs were dropped.
Her take was that we absolutely needed to do that. According to her the people in charge were going to arm everyone, women and chlldren etc, and fight until they were all dead.
She held no anger or animosity for the US for doing that.
That's one person's story, and their are other stories, of course. If we look for fault from the US for that war, a better place to look would be in the racism and poor understanding of the Japanese manner of expressing themselves before the war started. Lots to see there.
If “the left” thinks the dropping the atomic bombs was unnecessary, I wonder where they got that idea?:
“The use of this barbarous weapon…was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.” —Adm. William Leahy, Truman's Chief of Staff
“It was a mistake.... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.” —Adm. William “Bull” Halsey
Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that “the atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.” Adm. William “Bull” Halsey Jr., the commander of the US Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946 that “the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment…. It was a mistake to ever drop it…. [The scientists] had this toy, and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it…”
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” He later publicly declared, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Even the famous hawk Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command, went public the month after the bombing, telling the press that “the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-the-us-really-bombed-hiroshima/
This argument would seem decisive except that most of the people quoted have a stake in the matter. Their protestations, in general, amount to "we were doing just fine and we didn't need any help from those eggheads".
Which in some sense, was correct. The US had defeated Japan by then in the sense of military vs military. But the Japanese people, who had been kept mostly in the dark about the progress of the war, were lined up to fight to the last child.
Not disagreeing with that, but none of these guys could be considered “the left” and if someone thinks it was a mistake to use the atom bombs it’s not as if they don’t have some pretty impressive people agreeing with them. My opinion, (or yours or Kevin’s) has far less weight, I think.
Gar Alperowitz, rehashing his 40+ year-old thesis and ignoring everything that's been written and researched since.
The Army and the Navy claimed the bombs were unnecessary because after the war the Air Force claimed that the atom bomb made the Army and Navy obsolete.
Leahy insisted that the Navy could have blockaded Japan and starved it into submission--at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives, not to mention the ongoing war throughout Asia.
Eisenhower claimed that an ground invasion would have succeeded. Subsequent studies indicate it would, again at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives, approaching a million, and so many Allied casualties at that in the end the bombs would have been used to end the killing.
As for Halsey--only admiral to lead a fleet into a typhoon and do it again a few months later. Quietly retired rather than court-martialed.
See Rchard Frank's Downfall and Dennis's Hell to Pay for the facts of the case.
Ike makes the classic mistake of thinking that because the Japanese were defeated, it meant they were ready to surrender. They weren't. Ike seems to forget that the Germans never surrendered until they were occupied, even though it was clear after Stalingrad and D-day that they were “defeated”.
Of course Curtis Lemay didn't like his competition in the Air Force dropping the atom bomb and getting credit for ending the war. He wanted the credit to go to him and the firebombing of Japanese cities.
Likewise the Navy was pissed the bomb was dropped. They wanted to win the war either through a naval blockade or a naval landing on the Japanese homeland. The dropping of the atom bomb not only accelerated the end of the war, it brought into question the whole strategy of basing your defense on a vulnerable battle fleet.
Don't assume there was not considerable politicking going on as various military organizations jockeyed to take credit for winning the war and securing adequate funding for the future.
There is a good book that argues that point that Japan wasn't at the point of surrender.
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, by Richard B. Frank
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0141001461?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
It's worth remembering that the attack on Pearl Harbor did not come out of nowhere. The US had been conducting economic warfare against Japan for years before that, mainly in an effort to get Japan to stop attacking China, and Japan was losing. The immediate objective of the attack on Pearl Harbor was to cripple the American Navy so they couldn't interfere while Japan secured supplies of oil and rubber in the region of Borneo.
I'm not saying the US was wrong, but it is a fact that the attack by Japan was provoked.
Maybe Japan thought it was provoked to attack Pearl Harbor but I do find it risible that they thought we were obliged to trade with them while they were raping Nanking. It sounds a little like Russia attacking Ukraine because the U.S. made them do it.
And after the Doolittle Raid, the wreckage of his planes was found in Japanese occupied China, but not the air crews. Reasoning that they'd been smuggled out by the Chinese, they responded to THAT provocation by killing nearly a quarter of a million Chinese in that area.
Fair's fair, huh?
I'm not saying the US was wrong, but it is a fact that the attack by Japan was provoked.
It's also a fact that Japan could gotten America to lift its sanctions by ending its invasion of China.
You can always end a war, economic or shooting, by surrendering. Do you really think that was a possible option for Japan in 1941?
Among Japanese civilian leaders it was definitely an option. Even the Japanese Navy might have gone along. But for the Japanese Army zealots who held the real power, it was a nonstarter.
You can always end a war, economic or shooting, by surrendering. Do you really think that was a possible option for Japan in 1941?
Do I think Japan could have withdrawn from China? Yes. Human beings have agency—especially powerful humans who run governments.
We were the ones attacked, and ending things with minimum loss of life was the right thing to do.
True. But then this argument will also apply to most other countries using nuclear weapons too. Like if Israel dropped one on Gaza, well, they "were the ones attacked, and ending things with minimum loss of life is the right thing to do" could easily slip out of Bibi's mouth. And be absolutely true from his/Israelis' POV! Extend this further though, and suddenly we have every country ever attacked at any point in history justifying dropping nukes on their adversaries. "Well, sure, they invaded us years ago, but you never know when they'll do it again, so better to nuke them and let God sort it out."
Well, no, he'd be wrong. The Zionists were attacking first, last, and always.
From our dear allies in Israel (link)
This shows clearly the high value of those laws of war the world bought with WWII atrocities even if thus far they have not stopped criminals like this man.
I have read that we could have caused mass starvation in Japan by closing off all the sea routes necessary to bring food to Japan. Our submarines became very effective in the last years.
I visited Tokyo back in 1967 and saw small plots of land within the city being used to grow food. Even small rice fields. This may have been because of tax purposes or in remembrance of the time of hunger.
Not so much our submarines as our torpedoes, IIRC. Up until fairly late in the war torpedoes often failed to detonate even when they scored a direct hit.
The Navy's Mk. 14 torpedo had numerous issues that initially made it ineffective. By 1944, after two years of war, these had finally been resolved. By August 1945, 1,178 Japanese merchant vessels were sunk, totaling 5,053,491 tons. Of those, 55 percent were sent to the bottom by U.S. submarines.
That was, after all, Japanese strategy. They had long since ceased playing to win and had been playing to make the war as bloody as possible as a way of getting the allies to abandon the idea of unconditional surrender. Look at Okinawa as a microcosm of what an invasion of the home islands would have been like. They didn't bother to contest the landings but instead set up an intricate trap in the middle of the island to maximize the number of casualties.
My father fought in the Pacific theater for several years during WWII and participated in the taking of island after island.
He never said much about the war, but he did once say that, based what he had been through, when he was finally on a troop ship headed towards Japan, he didn't expect to survive.
He was part of the US occupation force in Japan after Japan surrendered, and he said that a lot of US soldiers were killed during that time, but that fact was suppressed in the interest of forming public opinion of the Japanese as a newly peace-loving nation.
Worth reading Gar Alperovitz’s book “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” for a richly-detailed and sourced account of why Truman dropped the atomic bombs. An account at variance with Kenin’s confident assertion that the war would have continued for another year absent the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.