You know, I have always been amused by this argument. It shows a fundamental lack of study of the subject.
We know exactly what would have happened if the bombs hadn’t been dropped, the Allies military leaders who didn’t know about the drew up plans.
For the Army and Marines, your article covered the basics quite well, so I won’t go into that.
The USAAF figured that they could keep burning Japanese cities every few days for the rest of 1945, slowly moving down in city size until they had forced so many people from their homes that starvation and disease would kill millions that winter and an invasion in the spring of 1946 would be much less costly.
My favorite, however, is the Navy’s “Operation Starvation.” Yes, that is the real name. You see, Japan is basically a mountain range with the highest peaks sticking out into the air. Over 80% of it is mountainous and grows very little food. The people also share most of their population with the most arable land. Furthermore, Japan in 1945 did not have the road or rail network to transport food from where it was grown to where it was eaten, instead, they depended on shipping. Operation Starvation consisted of the systematic destruction of that shipping capability through air, surface, subsurface, and mine warfare and had, by the time of the surrender, sunk or damaged something like 75% of Japan’s merchant tonnage.
Please think about what any of those three plans would have meant for the Japanese people. We might be living on a world in which Japanese is indeed, spoken only in hell.
“Civilians shouldn’t be targeted.” While noble many forget that in those days they need not be targeted to be killed collaterally. Many don’t realize that during D day more french civilians were accidentally killed by the allies than there were allies killed by Germans in the invasion. Thusly the unintentional civilian casualties in an invasion of Japan would have been extremely high. I also believe highest death toll of any raid on Japan, to include Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was the Tokyo fire bombing.
Right. The fact that war is terrible is the reason so many Western and Christian philosophers have spent so much time discussing the concept of Just War.
Also, the Japanese habit of workers living around the factory in which they worked instead of in another part of the city made avoidance of civilian casualties effectively impossible.
“In this absence of this type of concrete proof historians present the revisionist argument by reinterpreting (disagreeing) with previous historians.”
I often find that historians, and people in general, tend to reinterpret the past based on the morals and cultural norms of the present without understanding the history in general. For example when the left of today confuse corporatism that Mussolini referred to with corporations of today.
It’s always worth bearing in mind that leaders look to their past for guidance, and not our past which includes their future.
Truman and his lieutenants knew nothing about the Cold War or the post war arms race. They also knew nothing about what model global citizens Japan would become.
Instead, they looked to the recently concluded war in Europe - in which the Germans continued to fight as long as Hitler was alive - and to the American Civil War (still nominally in living memory) in which the Confederates had fought on long after all hope was lost.
Not to mention the recently concluded Battle of Okinawa in which junior high school age kids were thrown into the front line, and civilians threw themselves off cliffs while Americans begged them to surrender.
They had every reason to believe that the Japanese would fight to the end.
Non, Japanese knew they couldn't win after the firebombing of Tokyo, and were denied surrender. Then the nukes came and butchered not just the Japanese but those immigrant populations in Nagasaki & Hiroshima, with Japan going out of its way after the war to care for the foreign survivors after foreign governments rejected them. Look it up.
Never seen such a succinct picture of the events and decisions from the headquarters documents, as concisely presented here.
A rational approach based on an understanding of the enemy rationale is difficult to find, and historically significant. It puts a much different spin on FDR and MacArthur than is often found. Especially as it seems reasonable in the decision making process.
This also implicates both Red China and Japan identified together as a threat which would preclude Patton’s interest in ousting Stalin from global politics. Unfortunately the outcome is serfdom to China by a bloated and spoiled generation of baby boom children. This was clearly not the goal.
FDR died almost 4 months before the bombs were dropped and I don't know enough of the details to know how involved he was in the final decision. In a meeting with Churchill in Sept 1944 they did agree on Japan as the target for the in-development atomic bombs. I'm sure MacArthur and other top commanders had input. The final decision rested on Truman though.
I think the best analysis of potential casualties would start with the invasion and battle for Okinawa. The US military suffered over 10,000 dead with tens of thousands of additional wounded. (BTW, watch The Pacific if you want to understand the brutality of the fighting.) But the Japanese suffered at least 90,000 military and 140,000 civilian deaths. Now consider just how many millions of Japanese likely would have died in a full scale invasion of Japan and you quickly realize that ending the war with 2 nuclear bombs almost certainly saved millions of Japanese lives.
The "message to the Soviets" part also forgets that - if we're talking about likely outcomes - if instead of atomic bombs the Allies had chosen invasion, then all of Korea would have come under Communist control (as the US/UK would have been too busy fighting in Japan to occupy any of Korea), and the Soviets certainly would have taken Hokkaido, and probably northern Honshu, as well
So there would have been a whole-peninsula DPRK, and a northern DPRJ, too. And so more millions would have been condemned to living under tyranny, and a Japanese civil war along the lines of a Korean one would have been more of a naval war, and thus more likely to draw in the SU directly and openly, and escalate.
One the night of March 9th 1945 the US Air force dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo. The Tokyo Bombing.
The aftermath of the bombing raid, estimated casualties were 100k dead and one million homeless.
If the Japanese military and its emperor did not request a cease of hostilities, after such a great loss, such a horrendous strike, what makes anyone think that the Japanese forces would have not fought to the death?
2. By May 1942, Tojo approved a set of "non-negotiable" demands to be presented once the Allies sued for peace that allowed Japan to keep everything it already conquered while assuming possession of considerably more. Under such demands, Japan would assume control of the following territories:
the British Crown colonies of India and Honduras as well as the British dominions of Australia, Australian New Guinea, Ceylon, New Zealand, British Columbia and the Yukon Territory
the American state of Washington and the American territories of Alaska and Hawaii
most of Latin America including Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and the rest of the West Indies.[66]
If true then why did Japan attack Midway, the Aleutians and Dutch Harbor?
I would suggest their aggressive actions against the U.S. and Britain made it our business. It’s not as though they were just fucking around in Asia and we attacked them. They attacked is and they allied with the Nazis who were also attacking our shipping to Europe to include the sinking of the USS Reuben James in Oct of ‘41.
You are over simplifying actual events to support your point of view.
Reading this made me rethink Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
"...Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths.
Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000 - 80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls.
Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of bestial machinery."
For a piece that portrays itself as being against revisionism it sure does a lot of cock-gobbling of American mythology when it comes to why the U.S. was fighting Japan in the first place.
>> Ignore military intelligence received months in advance of an attack on your remote Polynesian colony
>> Leave expensive military assets mostly undefended there
>> "We have nothing to fear but fear itself"
>> Throw American citizens in concentration camps
>> Liberate Europe from different evil empire funded by American and British capital, and friendly with a large portion of American elites
>> Integrate leadership of said evil empire into your own military intelligence apparatus, assist others in their flight to South America
>> Put on highly publicized trials for the mid-to-low-tier bad guys, however.
>> Meanwhile, continue to push original bad guys out of their imperial holdings, at huge loss of life, because they attacked your imperial holdings
>> Of course we dropped the bombs; what else were we supposed to do lol
>> Almost immediately invade many of the same countries you just liberated from the bad guys, using chemical and biological weapons. For democracy, of course.
The differential treatment of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan by academics and leftists has always confused me. Anyone vaguely familiar with the war knows the Japanese we're every bit as evil, if not more so, than the Nazis. Yet, they are treated with a mixture of sympathy and pity that would never be afforded the latter. I've never heard anyone suggest that we should have stopped at the German border to avoid civilian deaths. I suspect it's mostly driven by the weird paternalist attitude leftists have towards non-western cultures.
I suspect you're right. The belief that any Western action against a non-white country has to be racism probably plays a role in the progressive analysis.
The Allies invaded Germany because they were fighting an enemy who fought in the same manner. The Japanese military was a death cult who fought to the last man, flew kamikaze missions and committed suicide rather than be captured. There is zero reason to believe such tactics would cease if the Allies invaded mainland Japan.
Don't forget, invading the European mainland (D-Day) was not guaranteed to succeed even though Germany had a much larger coastline to defend and were busy losing a war to the Soviets in the East. The Japanese Islands would have been much easier to defend than Europe.
Thanks for this piece. I've been making these arguments on all sorts of forums for years but you do it very well here. Aside from the clear fact that millions of lives were saved by the use of the bomb I tire of the constant second guessing made over half a century after the war by people who have no concept of the fog of war and the difficulty of making decisions with incomplete information while under the gun, as they say. These armchair warriors feel like cheap moralizers whose greatest enjoyment is criticizing their own culture and people, as if proving their own virtue is more important than getting to the truth.
Thanks for the comment and taking the time to read my post.
I believe much of this revisionism is driven by the progressive dogma that any military action by the West, especially if the "victims" aren't white, is driven by racism. It's just wrongheaded.
In his book “Downfall” Richard B Frank argues that the invasion of Japan probably would not have taken place, because Admiral King believed that the Japanese buildup on Kyushu was so substantial that the attack would fail. Alternative landing sites would have been beyond the range of Allied land based planes, and thus impractical.
The alternative plan was to literally starve Japan into submission. Japanese costal shipping had already been destroyed, and the bombing campaign was beginning to target Japan’s remaining rail network, the only way left to move food to the population centers.
In fact there was danger of famine in Japan in 1946, and the Americans sent 800,000 tons of food to Japan, after MacArthur insisted on it.
Also note that even after the bombing of Nagasaki and after the Soviet Union entered the war the Japanese Supreme Council was split 3-3 on surrender. With three favoring accepting the Potsdam Declaration and three demanding terms that would have left the militarist ruling class intact. Only at the eleventh hour was the Emperor asked to break the deadlock, an unprecedented act
The bombings were awful, but Japan ultimately benefited. Today the are a functioning industrialized Democracy, that has been at peace for the last 79 years.
Sorry for the rant. When it comes to this issue, the revisionists make me want to puke.
Great comment. This year we did a week on the Atomic Bombs in class and I got into some of my old sources. There's a couple articles with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Cold War Studies that talks about the Soviet angle.
Apparently Japan expected the Soviets to enter the war in 1946. Instead the Soviets managed to sneak a massive army across Siberia and catch the Japanese completely unawares. Incredibly impressive!
Also I hate the whining about “Unconditional Surrender” - sure to show up here before long.
Anyone with access to the Internet can read the Potsdam Declaration - which although it did call for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Armed Forces, is full of specific promises as to how Japan would be treated.
Promises which were all kept, by the way.
Also see my remarks above re 79 years of peace (and counting)
So after the Germans surrendered in May 1945 a bunch of Japanese diplomats (Frank calls the “Peace Entrepreneurs”) independently put out feelers.
The only effort that was remotely connected to the Japanese Supreme Council was handled through the Japanese Embassy in Moscow.
At the time the U.S. had cracked the Japanese diplomatic codes (also the military codes, although we didn’t learn that until the 1990’s). The Americans were reading these messages, sometimes before the intended recipients.
What they heard was the Prime Minister, who was one of the “Doves”, telling the Ambassador to make proposals, and the Ambassador telling him he was out of his mind; that this proposals were fever dreams and Japan should accept the Potsdam Declaration. Then the PM telling the Ambassador to basically shut up and do his job.
The Allies knew these “peace feelers” coming from random places meant nothing.
I can't find the link at the moment, but he had a very interesting article discussing this very issue. Regarding "Unconditional Surrender" he made the excellent point that certain things are not possible when two countries are at war and then things become possible when the loser has finally surrendered. Basically making a very nuanced take on how this sort of stuff really works.
He also goes on to discuss how it might've gone different in the interest of better understanding what DID actually happen. Was very useful in class.
You know, I have always been amused by this argument. It shows a fundamental lack of study of the subject.
We know exactly what would have happened if the bombs hadn’t been dropped, the Allies military leaders who didn’t know about the drew up plans.
For the Army and Marines, your article covered the basics quite well, so I won’t go into that.
The USAAF figured that they could keep burning Japanese cities every few days for the rest of 1945, slowly moving down in city size until they had forced so many people from their homes that starvation and disease would kill millions that winter and an invasion in the spring of 1946 would be much less costly.
My favorite, however, is the Navy’s “Operation Starvation.” Yes, that is the real name. You see, Japan is basically a mountain range with the highest peaks sticking out into the air. Over 80% of it is mountainous and grows very little food. The people also share most of their population with the most arable land. Furthermore, Japan in 1945 did not have the road or rail network to transport food from where it was grown to where it was eaten, instead, they depended on shipping. Operation Starvation consisted of the systematic destruction of that shipping capability through air, surface, subsurface, and mine warfare and had, by the time of the surrender, sunk or damaged something like 75% of Japan’s merchant tonnage.
Please think about what any of those three plans would have meant for the Japanese people. We might be living on a world in which Japanese is indeed, spoken only in hell.
“Civilians shouldn’t be targeted.” While noble many forget that in those days they need not be targeted to be killed collaterally. Many don’t realize that during D day more french civilians were accidentally killed by the allies than there were allies killed by Germans in the invasion. Thusly the unintentional civilian casualties in an invasion of Japan would have been extremely high. I also believe highest death toll of any raid on Japan, to include Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was the Tokyo fire bombing.
Right. The fact that war is terrible is the reason so many Western and Christian philosophers have spent so much time discussing the concept of Just War.
Also, the Japanese habit of workers living around the factory in which they worked instead of in another part of the city made avoidance of civilian casualties effectively impossible.
“In this absence of this type of concrete proof historians present the revisionist argument by reinterpreting (disagreeing) with previous historians.”
I often find that historians, and people in general, tend to reinterpret the past based on the morals and cultural norms of the present without understanding the history in general. For example when the left of today confuse corporatism that Mussolini referred to with corporations of today.
Correct. It's called presentism,
pres·ent·ism
/ˈpreznˌ(t)iz(ə)m/
noun
uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.
One would expect it of the average person but unfortunately it seems to be common among historians as well.
Did not know it had been defined. Thanks
A solid point.
It’s always worth bearing in mind that leaders look to their past for guidance, and not our past which includes their future.
Truman and his lieutenants knew nothing about the Cold War or the post war arms race. They also knew nothing about what model global citizens Japan would become.
Instead, they looked to the recently concluded war in Europe - in which the Germans continued to fight as long as Hitler was alive - and to the American Civil War (still nominally in living memory) in which the Confederates had fought on long after all hope was lost.
Not to mention the recently concluded Battle of Okinawa in which junior high school age kids were thrown into the front line, and civilians threw themselves off cliffs while Americans begged them to surrender.
They had every reason to believe that the Japanese would fight to the end.
No they weren’t
Yes they were
Non, Japanese knew they couldn't win after the firebombing of Tokyo, and were denied surrender. Then the nukes came and butchered not just the Japanese but those immigrant populations in Nagasaki & Hiroshima, with Japan going out of its way after the war to care for the foreign survivors after foreign governments rejected them. Look it up.
Never seen such a succinct picture of the events and decisions from the headquarters documents, as concisely presented here.
A rational approach based on an understanding of the enemy rationale is difficult to find, and historically significant. It puts a much different spin on FDR and MacArthur than is often found. Especially as it seems reasonable in the decision making process.
This also implicates both Red China and Japan identified together as a threat which would preclude Patton’s interest in ousting Stalin from global politics. Unfortunately the outcome is serfdom to China by a bloated and spoiled generation of baby boom children. This was clearly not the goal.
Thanks for the comment.
FDR died almost 4 months before the bombs were dropped and I don't know enough of the details to know how involved he was in the final decision. In a meeting with Churchill in Sept 1944 they did agree on Japan as the target for the in-development atomic bombs. I'm sure MacArthur and other top commanders had input. The final decision rested on Truman though.
Thanks for this! It's a good read. I'm going to share with the husband, and I'll probably read it a second time myself.
Thanks so much! I'd be interested in hearing his thoughts as well.
I think the best analysis of potential casualties would start with the invasion and battle for Okinawa. The US military suffered over 10,000 dead with tens of thousands of additional wounded. (BTW, watch The Pacific if you want to understand the brutality of the fighting.) But the Japanese suffered at least 90,000 military and 140,000 civilian deaths. Now consider just how many millions of Japanese likely would have died in a full scale invasion of Japan and you quickly realize that ending the war with 2 nuclear bombs almost certainly saved millions of Japanese lives.
Yes, I've seen it. Horrifying scenes.
The kind of horrors the second guessers need to see and acknowledge
The "message to the Soviets" part also forgets that - if we're talking about likely outcomes - if instead of atomic bombs the Allies had chosen invasion, then all of Korea would have come under Communist control (as the US/UK would have been too busy fighting in Japan to occupy any of Korea), and the Soviets certainly would have taken Hokkaido, and probably northern Honshu, as well
So there would have been a whole-peninsula DPRK, and a northern DPRJ, too. And so more millions would have been condemned to living under tyranny, and a Japanese civil war along the lines of a Korean one would have been more of a naval war, and thus more likely to draw in the SU directly and openly, and escalate.
It nearly came to be - https://archive.vn/fFpxu
One the night of March 9th 1945 the US Air force dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo. The Tokyo Bombing.
The aftermath of the bombing raid, estimated casualties were 100k dead and one million homeless.
If the Japanese military and its emperor did not request a cease of hostilities, after such a great loss, such a horrendous strike, what makes anyone think that the Japanese forces would have not fought to the death?
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwix0tWthaOHAxU8D1kFHWmRAxkQFnoECCEQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBombing_of_Tokyo&usg=AOvVaw1c9cuC5kMPVN4grkLM1P2m&opi=89978449
No. The entire war wasn’t justified. What Japan was doing in Asia was none of America’s business.
1. Pearl Harbor
2. By May 1942, Tojo approved a set of "non-negotiable" demands to be presented once the Allies sued for peace that allowed Japan to keep everything it already conquered while assuming possession of considerably more. Under such demands, Japan would assume control of the following territories:
the British Crown colonies of India and Honduras as well as the British dominions of Australia, Australian New Guinea, Ceylon, New Zealand, British Columbia and the Yukon Territory
the American state of Washington and the American territories of Alaska and Hawaii
most of Latin America including Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and the rest of the West Indies.[66]
So what? What happens in Asia is none of America's business. Who cares if Japan took over all of Asia. The America parts are fantasy land.
If true then why did Japan attack Midway, the Aleutians and Dutch Harbor?
I would suggest their aggressive actions against the U.S. and Britain made it our business. It’s not as though they were just fucking around in Asia and we attacked them. They attacked is and they allied with the Nazis who were also attacking our shipping to Europe to include the sinking of the USS Reuben James in Oct of ‘41.
You are over simplifying actual events to support your point of view.
I also failed to mention the unprovoked attack on U.S. bases in the Philippines on Dec 8.
War is best avoided. Those who refuse to avoid war should expect the worst. Not all who die are guilty, not all who live are innocent.
Reading this made me rethink Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
"...Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths.
Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000 - 80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls.
Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of bestial machinery."
For a piece that portrays itself as being against revisionism it sure does a lot of cock-gobbling of American mythology when it comes to why the U.S. was fighting Japan in the first place.
>> Ignore military intelligence received months in advance of an attack on your remote Polynesian colony
>> Leave expensive military assets mostly undefended there
>> "We have nothing to fear but fear itself"
>> Throw American citizens in concentration camps
>> Liberate Europe from different evil empire funded by American and British capital, and friendly with a large portion of American elites
>> Integrate leadership of said evil empire into your own military intelligence apparatus, assist others in their flight to South America
>> Put on highly publicized trials for the mid-to-low-tier bad guys, however.
>> Meanwhile, continue to push original bad guys out of their imperial holdings, at huge loss of life, because they attacked your imperial holdings
>> Of course we dropped the bombs; what else were we supposed to do lol
>> Almost immediately invade many of the same countries you just liberated from the bad guys, using chemical and biological weapons. For democracy, of course.
Like what?
And how is it relevant to the decision to drop the bombs?
The differential treatment of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan by academics and leftists has always confused me. Anyone vaguely familiar with the war knows the Japanese we're every bit as evil, if not more so, than the Nazis. Yet, they are treated with a mixture of sympathy and pity that would never be afforded the latter. I've never heard anyone suggest that we should have stopped at the German border to avoid civilian deaths. I suspect it's mostly driven by the weird paternalist attitude leftists have towards non-western cultures.
Thanks for taking the time to read it.
I suspect you're right. The belief that any Western action against a non-white country has to be racism probably plays a role in the progressive analysis.
The Allies invaded Germany because they were fighting an enemy who fought in the same manner. The Japanese military was a death cult who fought to the last man, flew kamikaze missions and committed suicide rather than be captured. There is zero reason to believe such tactics would cease if the Allies invaded mainland Japan.
Thanks for the comment.
Don't forget, invading the European mainland (D-Day) was not guaranteed to succeed even though Germany had a much larger coastline to defend and were busy losing a war to the Soviets in the East. The Japanese Islands would have been much easier to defend than Europe.
Thanks for this piece. I've been making these arguments on all sorts of forums for years but you do it very well here. Aside from the clear fact that millions of lives were saved by the use of the bomb I tire of the constant second guessing made over half a century after the war by people who have no concept of the fog of war and the difficulty of making decisions with incomplete information while under the gun, as they say. These armchair warriors feel like cheap moralizers whose greatest enjoyment is criticizing their own culture and people, as if proving their own virtue is more important than getting to the truth.
Thanks for the comment and taking the time to read my post.
I believe much of this revisionism is driven by the progressive dogma that any military action by the West, especially if the "victims" aren't white, is driven by racism. It's just wrongheaded.
In his book “Downfall” Richard B Frank argues that the invasion of Japan probably would not have taken place, because Admiral King believed that the Japanese buildup on Kyushu was so substantial that the attack would fail. Alternative landing sites would have been beyond the range of Allied land based planes, and thus impractical.
The alternative plan was to literally starve Japan into submission. Japanese costal shipping had already been destroyed, and the bombing campaign was beginning to target Japan’s remaining rail network, the only way left to move food to the population centers.
In fact there was danger of famine in Japan in 1946, and the Americans sent 800,000 tons of food to Japan, after MacArthur insisted on it.
Also note that even after the bombing of Nagasaki and after the Soviet Union entered the war the Japanese Supreme Council was split 3-3 on surrender. With three favoring accepting the Potsdam Declaration and three demanding terms that would have left the militarist ruling class intact. Only at the eleventh hour was the Emperor asked to break the deadlock, an unprecedented act
The bombings were awful, but Japan ultimately benefited. Today the are a functioning industrialized Democracy, that has been at peace for the last 79 years.
Sorry for the rant. When it comes to this issue, the revisionists make me want to puke.
Great comment. This year we did a week on the Atomic Bombs in class and I got into some of my old sources. There's a couple articles with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Cold War Studies that talks about the Soviet angle.
Apparently Japan expected the Soviets to enter the war in 1946. Instead the Soviets managed to sneak a massive army across Siberia and catch the Japanese completely unawares. Incredibly impressive!
In my mind, the bombs plus the Soviets did it.
Barely. It was damn close even then.
Totally agree. I wouldn't push my view all that hard for exactly that reason. More color commentary than anything else!
Also I hate the whining about “Unconditional Surrender” - sure to show up here before long.
Anyone with access to the Internet can read the Potsdam Declaration - which although it did call for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Armed Forces, is full of specific promises as to how Japan would be treated.
Promises which were all kept, by the way.
Also see my remarks above re 79 years of peace (and counting)
I think this was the article. My memory of reading it was fuzzy.
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2022/05/02/did-the-japanese-offer-to-surrender-before-hiroshima-part-1/
Here's the line I was remembering. Does a good job making the distinctions.
"The distance between these “peace feelers” and an “offer” or even “readiness” to surrender is quite large."
So after the Germans surrendered in May 1945 a bunch of Japanese diplomats (Frank calls the “Peace Entrepreneurs”) independently put out feelers.
The only effort that was remotely connected to the Japanese Supreme Council was handled through the Japanese Embassy in Moscow.
At the time the U.S. had cracked the Japanese diplomatic codes (also the military codes, although we didn’t learn that until the 1990’s). The Americans were reading these messages, sometimes before the intended recipients.
What they heard was the Prime Minister, who was one of the “Doves”, telling the Ambassador to make proposals, and the Ambassador telling him he was out of his mind; that this proposals were fever dreams and Japan should accept the Potsdam Declaration. Then the PM telling the Ambassador to basically shut up and do his job.
The Allies knew these “peace feelers” coming from random places meant nothing.
Have you read this gentleman? https://alexwellerstein.com/
He's the historian behind the NUKEMAP https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
I can't find the link at the moment, but he had a very interesting article discussing this very issue. Regarding "Unconditional Surrender" he made the excellent point that certain things are not possible when two countries are at war and then things become possible when the loser has finally surrendered. Basically making a very nuanced take on how this sort of stuff really works.
He also goes on to discuss how it might've gone different in the interest of better understanding what DID actually happen. Was very useful in class.