You ignore the fact that what prevented Japan's surrender before the atomic bombs were used was the insistence on Japan's unconditional surrender, which threatened the status of its emperor and largely motivated its continued desire to fight. Yet, unconditional surrender was not necessary to end the war, nor was it required to punish Japan for its aggression in East Asia. And it certainly didn't justify the use of atomic bombs against civilian populations.
The goal was not to end the war, but to win it and prevent Japan from being able to start another one. Explaining why unconditional surrender was a requirement could probably be a one semester history class in university, but I'll try to hit the high points as to why unconditional surrender was a requirement:
1. The European theatre of WWII was largely a result of the "stab-in-the-back" myth in Germany which resulted from Germany surrendering in WWI rather than being defeated militarily.
2. To ensure the military regime in Japan was removed and to demilitarize the country.
3. After Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, etc. Allied leaders did not believe the public would accept a negotiated peace. Especially given that Germany surrendered unconditionally.
Note: Japan was allowed to retain the Emperor but only as a symbolic leader.
Re: your "atomic bombs against civilian populations comment. You differentiate between atomic bombs and "regular" bombs because you have 80 years of experience living under the threat of nuclear war. They did not. Civilian populations became legitimate targets for allied bombing campaigns in 1942 after years of being on the receiving end. The moral justification of this could once again be a stand alone course. However, I will point out, that the most people killed in a one day bombing was a non-nuclear attack:
3. They wanted the war to end before the Soviets could advance too far.
4. Multiple targets had already been set.
We tend to judge past events though the lens of today. "The war was clearly over so why drop the second bomb." The problem is that people in 1945 were making decision based on the knowledge of 1945 not the knowledge of 2025.
The framing here is a bit off. The term 'revisionist history' is only used by critics to discredit an argument. Historians that want to make a positive argument offer reinterpretations, not revisions. And reinterpretation is not always a claim that earlier scholars were wrong, though it often is. A great many reinterpretations happen because new evidence, like archaeological remains, is discovered that change our overall understanding of the facts. Then it's not necessary to say earlier scholars were wrong, they just weren't reasoning based on the same set of facts.
You're mostly correct. "Revisionist history" in popular usage is a pejorative but we still use it in history as well. For example, Cold War historiography includes a number of different "schools" including "Revisionist" and "Post-Revisionist." The historiography of the American Revolution, Slavery and the Antebellum South, and the Great Depression and New Deal are examples of three other areas which have revisionist schools.
Writing an historiography paper was a requirement of my Masters in US History and I chose the Cold War.
Y'all are weirdos then ;-) The fields of history I'm expert in or conversant with, ancient and medieval, don't have self identified revisionist schools, but if that's what you modernists want to get up to I can't gainsay it. I did not know about the specific revisionist schools you've pointed out and I'm grateful for the correction.
I suspect revisionist history is probably more pertinent to the modern fields as the initial takes are usually by people who participated in it and thus are biased one way or another. For example the Orthodox School of Cold War history contains writings by people who lived and fought during WWII and/or participated in Foreign Policy just following the war.
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.
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.
You ignore the fact that what prevented Japan's surrender before the atomic bombs were used was the insistence on Japan's unconditional surrender, which threatened the status of its emperor and largely motivated its continued desire to fight. Yet, unconditional surrender was not necessary to end the war, nor was it required to punish Japan for its aggression in East Asia. And it certainly didn't justify the use of atomic bombs against civilian populations.
The goal was not to end the war, but to win it and prevent Japan from being able to start another one. Explaining why unconditional surrender was a requirement could probably be a one semester history class in university, but I'll try to hit the high points as to why unconditional surrender was a requirement:
1. The European theatre of WWII was largely a result of the "stab-in-the-back" myth in Germany which resulted from Germany surrendering in WWI rather than being defeated militarily.
2. To ensure the military regime in Japan was removed and to demilitarize the country.
3. After Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, etc. Allied leaders did not believe the public would accept a negotiated peace. Especially given that Germany surrendered unconditionally.
Note: Japan was allowed to retain the Emperor but only as a symbolic leader.
Re: your "atomic bombs against civilian populations comment. You differentiate between atomic bombs and "regular" bombs because you have 80 years of experience living under the threat of nuclear war. They did not. Civilian populations became legitimate targets for allied bombing campaigns in 1942 after years of being on the receiving end. The moral justification of this could once again be a stand alone course. However, I will point out, that the most people killed in a one day bombing was a non-nuclear attack:
Tokyo Firebombing (~100,000)
Hiroshima (~70,000–80,000)
Nagasaki (~35,000–40,000)
Hamburg (~30,000–40,000 on the worst night)
Dresden (~25,000+)
So, why the second bomb? The Japs saw what happened after the first bomb. Why the second?
The second bomb was dropped because:
1. They didn't surrender after the first one.
2. The U.S. wanted to show it had multiple bombs.
3. They wanted the war to end before the Soviets could advance too far.
4. Multiple targets had already been set.
We tend to judge past events though the lens of today. "The war was clearly over so why drop the second bomb." The problem is that people in 1945 were making decision based on the knowledge of 1945 not the knowledge of 2025.
The framing here is a bit off. The term 'revisionist history' is only used by critics to discredit an argument. Historians that want to make a positive argument offer reinterpretations, not revisions. And reinterpretation is not always a claim that earlier scholars were wrong, though it often is. A great many reinterpretations happen because new evidence, like archaeological remains, is discovered that change our overall understanding of the facts. Then it's not necessary to say earlier scholars were wrong, they just weren't reasoning based on the same set of facts.
You're mostly correct. "Revisionist history" in popular usage is a pejorative but we still use it in history as well. For example, Cold War historiography includes a number of different "schools" including "Revisionist" and "Post-Revisionist." The historiography of the American Revolution, Slavery and the Antebellum South, and the Great Depression and New Deal are examples of three other areas which have revisionist schools.
Writing an historiography paper was a requirement of my Masters in US History and I chose the Cold War.
Thanks for the comment!
Y'all are weirdos then ;-) The fields of history I'm expert in or conversant with, ancient and medieval, don't have self identified revisionist schools, but if that's what you modernists want to get up to I can't gainsay it. I did not know about the specific revisionist schools you've pointed out and I'm grateful for the correction.
RE: Y'all are weirdos then.
You have no idea. ;)
I suspect revisionist history is probably more pertinent to the modern fields as the initial takes are usually by people who participated in it and thus are biased one way or another. For example the Orthodox School of Cold War history contains writings by people who lived and fought during WWII and/or participated in Foreign Policy just following the war.
Thanks for reading!
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
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?