The atomic bombings did not produce Japan's surrender

[thomas]

It's the beginning of August, and Japan's officialdom commemorates the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The National Interest, a neoconservative magazine, argues that it was not the bombings that triggered Japan's surrender.

One of the greatest popular myths of World War II is that Truman had no choice but to drop the atomic bombs on Japan since the Japanese were willing to fight to the last man, and that dropping the atomic bombs saved the lives of one million U.S. soldiers who would have died in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. In fact, the U.S. Army estimated at the time that only 44,000 troops would have died in a full-scale invasion of Japan. However, the stark truth is that the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan did not save the lives of any U.S. military service members as Japan had been attempting to surrender for several months prior to the atomic bombings. Following the U.S. capture of Marianas Island and the commencement of the B-29 firebombing campaign against Japan's largest cities in July 1944, Emperor Hirohito ordered the Japanese government to negotiate Japan's surrender in the belief that his refusal to do so would result in the United States exterminating the Japanese.

Probably this piece doesn't offer a lot of new insights to those familiar with the MacArthur Memorandum, but I find these thoughts quite intriguing (if you are fascinated by juggling historical what-ifs):

Needless to say, had FDR accepted Japan's surrender at that time, not only would he have saved the lives of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, airmen, and sailors who died unnecessarily, but Communist China and North Korea would not exist today due to the fact that Mao Zedong's Red Army would not have had the sanctuary of Soviet-occupied Manchuria to fall back to rest, refit, and rearm with captured Japanese weapons. Instead, Chiang Kai Shek's National Revolutionary Army would likely have defeated them in 1946, bringing all of China under its control. This would have saved up to 100 million lives lost to Communist mass murder and wars, not including over half a billion forced Chinese abortions and infanticides. It also would have saved the lives of nearly 100,000 U.S. soldiers who lost their lives in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

The Atomic Bombings of Japan Did Not Produce its Surrender

The Biden administration would do well to heed the lessons of the atomic bombings of Japan.

nationalinterest.org

 

[Uncle Frank]

When I visited Nagasaki , I was amazed how it appeared to be a giant bowl with the surrounding hills/mountains. A perfect place to drop the bomb and contain the damage. I think any person who witnessed the damage and believed the US had an unlimited supply of the bombs would decide to throw in the towel.

 

[johnnyG]

The final surender was full and unconditional. Any of the earlier 'negotiations' were undoubtedly proposing something else.

 

[Majestic]

This is well-travelled ground, but I think it will continue to come up and be debated again and again. Maybe its a good thing.

I wasn't aware of this MacArthur Memorandum from January 1945, which is supposed to contain an offer of a negotiated surrender by some unnamed Japanese diplomats. I will look for more information on it. I'm particularly interested in who these diplomats were. But it is academic at this point. Their proposal seems to have been "we can agree to surrender, but the Emperor must remain", and the US just wasn't interested in hearing Japanese preconditions to surrender.

 

[Uncle Frank]

As a side note , there has been a long term discussion forever among Navy spooks about the breaking of the Japanese secret communication codes in WWII. The argument is always over the attack on Pearl Harbor and could it have been prevented. Some say the Japanese Navy used total radio silence before the attack and others claim the notification of the attack was setting on some officer's desk over the weekend and it was that screw up that cost so many lives. I've been watching and hearing about it since I was in the Navy in the early 70's and I still have not seen a solid believable answer from either side. I do feel the defeat of the Japanese was really helped by our breaking the code and knowing what the Japanese military was going to do before they did it.

 

[HanSolo]

I heard the main reason was the Soviets turning their attention east after Germany fell, leaving the Japanese with two ugly options, but one much much less ugly, a US occupation vs a Soviet one. A perfectly reasonable train of though, and one proven quite right afterwards.

Is there much credibility to that vs the other possible reasons?

 

[Majestic]

The morning the 2nd atomic bomb was dropped, the war council was having a meeting. They discussed all of these events, and still they couldn't reach consensus on what to do. Specifically, they couldn't agree whether they should accede to the Potsdam Declaration, or if they should accede with several conditions, or if they should continue fighting (knowing that the next phase would be a battle on the mainland). There was still a vocal faction in the war council (namely the Minister of the Military, Korechika Anami, and the Navy Chief of Staff, Soemu Toyoda, and others) who wanted to keep fighting. So even as atomic bombs were dropping and Russia was rolling back all of Japan's territory in Manchuria and Korea, the war council couldn't decide what to do, so they asked the Emperor to make the decision. And even after the Emperor made the decision to surrender, the army still wanted to overturn that decision so much that they plotted (and nearly carried out) a coup on the morning of the 14th before the surrender broadcast was made.

This is why I think all of the articles that claim Japan wanted to surrender are a bit ignorant. There may have been some people in power who wanted to surrender, but they weren't the ones who held the right power. This was one of the problems from the very beginning of the war; nobody could control the army. It was impossible to control them in August, so it would have been even more impossible to control them in January.

Anyway, it was the whole untenable position of Japan in August 1945: the relentless American advance, the firebombing, the nuclear bombing, and yes the Russian advance, that led the Emperor to agree (more or less) to the Potsdam declaration. The bombs weren't the only reason, and maybe even not the most important reason...the Emperor didn't provide a ranking as to reasons he decided to surrender. But the Japanese army was all ready to sacrifice the nation in a land war on the main islands so a land war (Americans in Kyushu or Russians in Hokkaido) was a dice roll that the army was ready to make. It was baked into the army's thinking.

 

[mdchachi]

This has been posted here a few times and so far I have not seen anything to dispute this view.

The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan … Stalin Did

Have decades of nuclear policy been based on a lie?

getpocket.com

 

[thomas]

This has been posted here a few times and so far I have not seen anything to dispute this view.

Highly interesting. I didn't know that the conventional air raids on Japanese cities in the summer of 1945 caused significantly more damage in terms of fatalities and square kilometres levelled than the two nuclear bombs combined.

 

[Majestic]

I agree with the general premise of that article, which is "It is a mistake to think the Japanese were shocked into surrender by the dropping of the atomic bombs". It does a good job in deflating the myth that the two bombs ended the war. Unfortunately this myth is becoming a stubborn fixture in the American mind.

But I think he author, Ward Wilson, overplays his hand when he starts to speculate that the bombs were inconsequential, that the Japanese leadership barely noticed them. This is mythmaking of another kind - the myth of US irrelevance.

He expends some text arguing that it took 3 days after the Hiroshima bombing to convene a strategy meeting, therefore this time lag indicates a lack of urgency with regard to Hiroshima. (It only took Kennedy a few hours to respond to the Cuban missile placement, etc.). It is a dishonest manipulation of the facts. The Cuban Missile Crisis, and the North Korean invasion into the South both took days to unfold as well. In Japan, as soon as the morning of the 7th in Tokyo, Foreign Minister Togo was already discussing the bombing of Hiroshima, and said the bomb was reason to consider accepting the Potsdam Declaration, but the Army pressed for more time to analyze results of investigations. So there was immediate action, it just not the kind of action that Wilson anticipates. The problem wasn't that the Japanese didn't care about the bombs. The problem was the Army wanted to press on to the bitter end, and the Foreign Minister and Prime Minister were unable to stand up to the army.

The War Council met on the morning of the 9th, and Army Minister Anami said "I am confident that we are ready for battles. I am sure we are well prepared for a decisive battle on our mainland even against the United States." Army General Staff Umezu said, "I absolutely agree with the opinion of the Army Minister. We are prepared for a decisive battle on our mainland. Although the Soviet entry into the war is disadvantageous to us, we are still not in a situation where we should be forced to agree to an unconditional surrender".

So Wilson's argument that the Soviet entry into the war eliminated all of Japan's options and motivated them to surrender, is invalidated. Or, if Japan's leadership saw the Soviet invasion as a total game-changer, they didn't mention it as such during the most important meeting of the war. Instead, the Army's conviction in its ability to continue fighting was unaltered, and they continued to believe their decisive battle would be a land battle with the US, even after the Soviets entered the war.

So the entry of the Soviets didn't even completely persuade the War Council to consider surrendering with some conditions. It just caused the entrenched positions to become more entrenched. It was an impasse that lasted until the night of the 9th (and the early morning of the 10th) when the Emperor made the call to "kind of" accept the Potsdam Declaration at the "Gozen Kaigi".

Which brings up another question; if Japan is determined to fight on despite destruction of all of its cities, what should the US response be? It brings up an awful calculation of human life when one nation decides its own citizens aren't worth saving, and turns Wilson's secondary argument on its head. If the firebombs and atomic bombs were to have no effect on Japan, then surely a land invasion was similarly going to have no effect either (and Anami said as much). "We should live up to our cause even if our hundred million people have to die side by side in battle". Nowhere does the Japanese leadership indicate that a land war with the Soviets is too awful to contemplate. The military establishment in Japan is ready for a suicide mission, and it puts the onus of saving Japan from itself onto the US, which is the way these historical revisions tend to drift.

Americans would do well to understand that the end of WW2 was more complicated than is generally believed, but to negate the impact of the American effort is miseducation as well.

 

[Majestic]

This piece is particularly illuminating

"The next morning (Aug 8th), Togo, well aware of the continuous publicity blitz of the Anglo-American broadcast about the atomic bomb, was admitted to the Emperor's presence at the Court after consulting with Prime Minister Suzuki. Informing the Emperor of the broadcast, the foreign minister reported that there was no option but to accept the Potsdam Declaration. Hearing this, His Majesty stated that the advent of the new weapon like the atomic bomb made it impossible to continue the persecution of war and steps should be taken to end the war without delay. His Majesty ordered the foreign minister to relay his remark to the prime minister."

And still there was a complete impasse until the following night, due military intransigence. So claiming that the atomic bombing didn't have "much significance at all" is very wrong.

 

[mdchachi]

This piece is particularly illuminating

"The next morning (Aug 8th), Togo, well aware of the continuous publicity blitz of the Anglo-American broadcast about the atomic bomb, was admitted to the Emperor's presence at the Court after consulting with Prime Minister Suzuki. Informing the Emperor of the broadcast, the foreign minister reported that there was no option but to accept the Potsdam Declaration. Hearing this, His Majesty stated that the advent of the new weapon like the atomic bomb made it impossible to continue the persecution of war and steps should be taken to end the war without delay. His Majesty ordered the foreign minister to relay his remark to the prime minister."

And still there was a complete impasse until the following night, due military intransigence. So claiming that the atomic bombing didn't have "much significance at all" is very wrong.

The author explains such contemporaneous accounts away this way. But of course he's quoting just one historian that supports his view.

Japanese historian Asada Sadao has said that in many of the postwar interviews "Japanese officials … were obviously anxious to please their American questioners." If the Americans wanted to believe that the Bomb won the war, why disappoint them?

Attributing the end of the war to the atomic bomb served Japan's interests in multiple ways. But it also served U.S. interests. If the Bomb won the war, then the perception of U.S. military power would be enhanced, U.S. diplomatic influence in Asia and around the world would increase, and U.S. security would be strengthened. The $2 billion spent to build it would not have been wasted. If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced. And once the Cold War was underway, asserting that the Soviet entry had been the decisive factor would have been tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

 

[johnnyG]

Bombing of Tokyo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Bombing of Shizuoka in World War II - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

War crimes?

 

[Majestic]

Yes, I agree that the postwar remembrances and recollections of the Japanese leadership may be conveniently skewed in favor of the American occupation. Be that as it may, we have to deal with the evidence at hand, and either dismiss it all as fabrication, or accept it knowing its possible deficiencies. What we know for certain is that by the late evening of the 9th of August, Japan was ready to surrender subject to the Emperor being given preferential treatment, and that even this conditional surrender was enough to infuriate the army, who tried desperately to overturn this decision before it was announced to the public.

 

[Majestic]

To @johnnyG 's point about war crimes, yes, we have to reckon with the reality that the US firebombing and atomic bombing would certainly be considered war crimes today, and despite various legalistic loopholes that some American partisans would employ, the bombings would almost certainly be considered war crimes in the 1940s had the US been on the defending side of a war crimes trial.

The only thing I can say in defense of the US, is this; despite showing extreme indifference towards Japan's civilian population up until August 9th, the US went out of its way to feed Japan, and to establish a democracy of sorts once the US occupying forces hit the ground at the end of August. Small comfort to the 100,000s killed by American bombs, but unfortunately there is no time machine for us to use to change these things.

 

[johnnyG]

Since it came to that later, I've wondered what different effect the Dolittle raid might have had if, instead of 'normal' bombs directed at targets with military value, they had instead carried incendiaries, and tried to burn tokyo then.

 

[mdchachi]

Since it came to that later, I've wondered what different effect the Dolittle raid might have had if, instead of 'normal' bombs directed at targets with military value, they had instead carried incendiaries, and tried to burn tokyo then.

50 people dead vs 1000 or 10,000 people dead. I don't think it would have changed anything.