Necessity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

[Dan Keleher]

Mr. Ed: there is quite a lot of speculation on your part, considering the seriousness of the decision. If you believe that the bombings were necessary and/or justified, the contemporary US military leaders seem to have disagreed with you, then and later.

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one could say the same about yours. You conveniently ignore the very good points Ed raised in his first paragraph, particularly the testimony of Japanese cabinet member who I imagine were better placed that Adm. Leahy to judge whether surrender was only a 'matter of time.'

If you are interested in 'factaul debate', take a look at Frank's book. It may not change your mind but it will provide an alternate view-point abd counter-balance to the strident revisionism of Alperovitz' book.

'Thank God for the Atom Bomb' is also a highly instructive read. Mr. Fussell is certainly no mindless patriot (see 'Doing Battle') but he does have some pointed words to those who decry the use of the A-bombs.

[Gump]

Factual debates are of course meaningless in this case..... The decision to use it was made by one man.

Certainly the issue has been revised and cleaned up after the fact, but in reality it was the machinations in Truman's own conscious that determined the outcome.

I ask again.... Sitting in the comfort of our intellectual easy chairs, Is it possible to "feel" what he felt, what the American people felt ???

Look at the reaction to 9/11 .... 3000 people...
Now imagine 200,000 ........ I dare say that "killing Japs" was a very acceptable reaction, and needs absolutely no apology by anyone. Not the mention the political side benefits of the act.

[ February 15, 2002: Message edited by: Gump ]</p>

[asgrrr]

Originally posted by Dan Keleher:

You conveniently ignore the very good points Ed raised in his first paragraph, particularly the testimony of Japanese cabinet member

If you are interested in 'factaul debate', take a look at Frank's book. It may not change your mind but it will provide an alternate view-point abd counter-balance to the strident revisionism of Alperovitz' book.

'Thank God for the Atom Bomb' is also a highly instructive read. Mr. Fussell is certainly no mindless patriot (see 'Doing Battle') but he does have some pointed words to those who decry the use of the A-bombs.

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The point about japanese cabinet members tells me absolutely nothing except to explain why they surrendered at this particular time. It says nothing whether they would have surrendered shortly afterwards without it. This is why I brushed it aside.

The title of Fussell's book does not indicate an impartial treatment of the subject. If I were to choose from several titles, this one would indicate "a waste of read".
Does Frank's book deal with anything besides casualty estimates?

[asgrrr]

Originally posted by Gump:
Certainly the issue has been revised and cleaned up after the fact, but in reality it was the machinations in Truman's own conscious that determined the outcome.

I ask again.... Sitting in the comfort of our intellectual easy chairs, Is it possible to "feel" what he felt, what the American people felt ???

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I can absolutely understand those sentiments. However, we must bear in mind what the object of historical research is.

It is to know the past in order to
a) understand the present;
b) be able to avoid repeating our predecessors' mistakes in the future.

This cannot be achieved if we allow sentimentality to cloud our vision. I have no doubt that to Truman (and others) the results of the bombings were much more horrible than had been imagined. It was only in the aftermath, when the horrendousness and futility began to sink in, that the theory of "saving lives" began to be formed, because there is no indication that those considerations were the basis of the decision.

"Forgiveness" based on circumstance, so the responsible parties can "rest in peace" or whatever, must be excluded from serios historical research and debate. We have to make an ice cold determination whether this decision was the right one or the wrong one, if we want to draw any useful lesson from it.

[Gump]

The most important point being that It was not horrible or futile given the mindset of people at the time (all people not just the US).

I believe Truman's sentiments might probably have been something along the lines of:

"If it will save 1 American boys life I would gladly drop 10 A-bombs."

Which I would guess would mirror most peoples opinion at the time.

And for us to learn anything from the past I think that is the most interesting revelation.

You would like to study war and history removed from the emotions of the people involved and that is pointless. Emotion and vengence and bloodlust are the real drivers of history, not dispassionate debate 50 years later....

That is the real lesson to be learned.... Humans are much more unpredictable and dangerous under those conditions than we can appreciate in a time of peace..... Learn that lesson if you would somehow like to avoid something in the future.

[Blackhorse]

Was it necessary to drop the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima in order to win the war? No. There were four other ways that the war could have been won.

1. Continued conventional bombing and blockade: This was the approach favored by the Sky Kings (Air Force Generals). According to the Strategic Bombing Survey, from April through August conventional bombing had destroyed 40% of 16 cities in Japan. Beginning in September, the USBS estimated that strategic bombers could deliver a daily payload ten-times greater than the April-September daily average. What does that mean? By the end of 1945 over 100 Japanese cities would have been burnt-out shells, and the death toll from air raids and starvation would have topped 1,000,000 lives.

2. Blockade only: (With continued bombing of transportation facilities). I don't know that anyone "in the loop" advocated this during the war. Afterwards, this became the favorite option of those who felt we shouldn't have dropped the bomb. I suppose it has the moral advantage of shifting the burden of deciding how many people have to die before the war ends from the U.S. to Japan. However, the Allied leaders had every reason to believe that Japan would hold out for months, or years, based on the willingness of Japan's leaders to sacrifice soldiers and civilians (on Okinawa, only 7,000 out of 115,000 soldiers survived, and between one-quarter and one-half of the civilian population perished as well). Herbert Bix' Pulitizer Prize winning biography Hirohito concludes that the Japanese ruling clique would have accepted months of mass starvation in the civilian population while hoping to lure the U.S. into a "decisive battle" on the Japanese mainland.

3. Invasion: Obviously, the least attractive alternative for American political leaders. Japanese casualties would be measured in the millions. Most importantly for American leaders, American casualties, even in the best case scenarios, would be counted in the hundreds of thousands.

4. A Negotiated Peace: The policy of the Allies was "unconditional surrender." This made sense for two reasons: 1. It reassured an awkward coalition of suspicious partners that no country would 'bail out' and sign a separate peace with Germany or Japan. 2. It erased the fear that WWII could end the way WWI did -- with a negotiated armistice, and with the defeated country's military cliques and infrastructure still in place so they could plot a war of revenge. If the U.S. was willing to abandon those two principles, we probably could have negotiated a peace with Japan. On the other hand, we would have pissed off our allies, absolutely infuriated the Russians, and left a dangerous militarist regime in charge of Japan. As WWI and the Gulf War demonstrated, if you have to go to war with another country, its best to finish the job.

What I find interesting is that each of the three "military" alternatives to dropping the Atomic Bomb would have almost certainly resulted in far more Japanese deaths.

I disagree with arguments advanced that the A-bomb was dropped "for revenge" or to keep the Russians out of the war. The American approach to WWII was fairly straightforward -- we wanted to win the war as quickly as we could. In Truman's words, "we found [the bomb] so we used it." As for the Russians -- the Americans had been pressing the Russians to declare war against Japan. We wanted to bring as much power to bear against Japan as fast as possible. Many American leaders were suspicious of the Russians, but our national policy was still to cooperate with them -- the mutual hostility of the Cold War would not form until several years later.

One factual correction of a previous post: The United States did not drop the Atomic Bomb in response to Russia's Declaration of War against Japan. Quite the reverse. The Hiroshima bomb was dropped on August 6th. The Russians declared war on August 8th -- and by many accounts, the Russians hastily declared war after the bomb was dropped in order to get into the war before Japan surrendered.

[asgrrr]

Originally posted by Blackhorse:
[QB]
What I find interesting is that each of the three "military" alternatives to dropping the Atomic Bomb would have almost certainly resulted in far more Japanese deaths.

[QB]

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This is a dubious claim. In the case of blockade it depends entirely on duration. Those top military leaders that Alperowitz details, generally believed the surrender to happen around november, without invasion or A-bombing.

Originally posted by Blackhorse:
[QB]

-- the mutual hostility of the Cold War would not form until several years later.

[QB]

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This is not entirely true. After the fall of Berlin, and indeed sooner, mutual suspicion between US and USSR accellerated tremendously, fuelled by soviet occupation policy in eastern europe. The lend-lease agreement was cancelled in summer of '45.

[asgrrr]

Originally posted by Gump:

You would like to study war and history removed from the emotions of the people involved and that is pointless. Emotion and vengence and bloodlust are the real drivers of history, not dispassionate debate 50 years later....

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You can go that way if you like. But, in my opinion, then you are a student of history for curiosity only. You will not be able to learn lessons from it that will help you (or others) avoid repeating history. It is precisely the most important lesson of history methinks, to learn how to avoid being driven by "Emotion and vengence and bloodlust". These are the real evil characters of the history books, and they never die. If we cannot learn how to avoid them, I fear we have no hope of survival in a world saturated with nuclear weapons. Remember, the future is a very long time. We cannot hope to get through it if we perform a dance at the brink of annihilation every 50 years or so.

[Charles2222]

Have a book I'll make a quote from called "Excerpts of The History of the Second World War" regarding Olympic.

The regular Japanese troops facing the 'Olympic' invasion vastly outnumbered the assault force; and in addition to their regular forces the Japanese hoped to mobilise a huge volunteer army, armed mostly with bamboo spears. The US and British task forces had no direct opposite numbers at all, for the once-powerful Japanese fleet had been whittles down to vanishing point in the Battles of the Phillipine Sea, of Leyte Gulf, and of Okinawa. But the Japanese fleet of kamikaze vessels-each of them intended to eliminate an enemy ship-could theoretically wipe out the entire invasion fleet; and this was only the naval element of Japan's suicide defense force-exactly half the remaining Japanese aircraft were kamikaze machines. And this was only the battle for Kyushu....

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On a diagram they showed what Olympic would've tallied. The Japanese had only 19 destroyers compared to 131 Allied surface ships. The Japanese did have the aforementioned kamikaze craft which were 3,300 strong. The Allies wold have had 20 carriers carrying some 9,000 planes, while the Japanese would sport 10,700 planes, hald as mentioned being set aside for kamikaze. The Allies expected to field 650,000 troops. The Japanese on the other hand would field 2,300,000 with another 28,000,000 possible addition of local volunteers.

The plans relied primarily on the kamikaze (suicide) air units for the defense of Kyushu. The Japanese expected to throw upwards of 10,500 planes (50% of them kamikazes) into attacks in the American transports. Although Japanese experts disagreed among themselves as to the ratio of planes expended to vessels sunk, many confidently expected to destroy at least half of the American troop ships in the first ten days. This, combined with a tenacious beach defense, they hoped would beat back the initial assault and convince America that the cost of subduing Japan was so high that a negotiated peace would be preferable. Actually, the Japanese encountered such difficulty in providing the Kyushu defenders with adequate weapons that it imperilled their ability to resist a landing.

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My little guess is that since Japan was always trying to play the losses game with the people she attacked intitially (USA/Britian), that when the USSR attacked they could no longer play such a game. Given time, and probably not much time at that, the USSR would have conquered them. The USSR wasn't afraid of the losses and the USSR also didn't sign the Geneva Convention.

To make matters worse, with the A-bombs dropping, they were then faced with the issue that the US might not be willing to invade, but might be fascinated with their new toy and not invade at all, with little if any cost to the US.

I'm not sure if the entry of a country that wasn't too concerned about losses scared them more, or the usual loss-conscience US/Britain with a weapon that would enable them to fight from afar, but to have a strategy bent on trying to at least stalemate, by how many losses you could inflict, suddenly backfire by virtue of A-bombs and the entry of the USSR (and their success in China) must've been a massive blow. The fact that the Japanese army in China was surrendering in droves to the USSR might've also told them that the nation wasn't as willing to fight to the death as they expected.

[Tomanbeg]

Throwing hia hat in the ring, T. offers "The Rising Sun" by John Toland. Toland has a Japanese wife and in his own words the book is written largly from the Japanese point of view.
Two things that I have not seen pop up yet. First ol' Clauz's notion that War is part of Politics, and as such is subordinate to politics. So it is invalid to examine the Bomb Decision(Which actually wasn't) without looking at the politics that framed it. The second thing is the cultural attitude of the Japanes toward what we would call human rights. Japs of that period had trouble with saying "I'm sorry". They did not send notes of apology. They would disembowl themselves, and a buddy would the decapitiate them. On Okinawa, school children would sit in a circle, a soilder would puul the pin on a grenade and the children would play catch with it until it went off. There are films of women with children in their arms leaping off a cliff that is over 100 meters high into the ocean. This idiot who thinks the Japs were going to give up without the bomb sounds like one of those who think the holocaust was made up for propaganda reasons. Read Toland, with his slight bias toward Japan, he probably has the closest to an impartial viewpoint that will come out of the 20th century. And Like Gibbon on Rome, Toland will be the most quoted reference on the Pacific War of 1941 thru 1945. I'm thinking of the 23rd century, of course. In a few hundred years, Historians will be using Toland, Liddel-Hart, Keegan and Ambrose. Not the yapping curs who are attacking them today.
T.

[asgrrr]

Originally posted by Tomanbeg:
This idiot who thinks the Japs were going to give up without the bomb sounds like one of those who think the holocaust was made up for propaganda reasons.
T.

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This is were I stopped reading your post. The high command of the US armed forces in 1945 were idiots, were they?

[Charles2222]

In order to press my little theory and adapt it to what has been said following it, this theory would seemingly conclude that the Japanese wouldn't have surrendered without the bomb (although I would debate whether the more destructive general air raids would qualify in a sense as A-bomb attacks, since the damage would be damaging material-wise, but less psychological), because any land invasion, a thing perhaps hoped for in comparison to the bombs, may had been the very thing that gave them any chance, given the idea of her opponents growing weary of losses.

When talking about the bombs, I think it's important not to isolate the nation that had those bombs from the other Allies. It wasn't just the bombs that Japan would realistically have to fight should she not surrender.

OTOH, as the situation wasn't just a debate of whether the US would invade or continue to bomb, by whatever means, from afar, it was also a situation where the USSR would not bend to their strategy of inflicting losses. As I view it, when examining a "cause losses" strategy, even if you disagree that such was their main strategy, late, you cannot exclude the USSR from the quotient and just say whether or not the bomb made a difference in and of itself. Though the bomb was terrible, I conclude that such a rapid acceleration in giving the US the ability to carry on a war with few losses spelt a death knell to the only way Japan could stalemate, should they conclude that such a trend would indicate the US wouldn't be interested in substaining the losses they so badly wanted to inflict. As far as I see it, the USSR was every bit the blow that the bomb was, for both things spelt the practical end of "cause losses", and both factors occuring at one time was devastasting to the only strategy open to them anymore. The US might still attempt an invasion despite the bomb, but nothing was going to stop the USSR. If the bomb didn't convince them that "cause losses" wouldn't work (even though in the US sense it was still strictly a matter of invasion or not), the USSR entry sealed the fact that it wouldn't.


On a sidenote. I believe most consider the Cold War really started with the Poltava Incident. I've read a book on it, and up until that time I'd never heard about it ever being discussed in the US. For those interested in the Poltava Incident here's a link. Go to the Operation Frantic portion for a brief description of what happened: http://members.aol.com/unclevanja/July.html#HIST

[ February 15, 2002: Message edited by: Charles_22 ]</p>

[Mojo]

This is an interesting thread and the question is a difficult one to formulate a satisfactory answer for.

Adm. Leahy may have stated that he believed that Japan was ready to surrender but under what terms and conditions? I sincerely doubt the Japanese were ready to agree to unconditional surrender.

They had proven resistant to the entire idea of surrender. Somebody already mentioned US experiences on Okinawa. The footage of the Japanese woman leaping to her death from the cliff while holding a child in her arms while American GIs watched is still etched in my memory.

“Hap” Arnold may really have believed that air power alone could force Japanese capitulation. Remember that this is early in the history of air power. The Germans thought the "horror" of the Zeppelin raids would bring England to it’s knees. They were wrong. Goering thought that the Luftwaffe could destroy England. He was wrong. We still have people who believe that air power alone can replace a man on the ground with a rifle. They are still wrong.

Could we have starved them into submission through continued use of conventional bombing and naval blockade? Maybe but their military wasn’t too concerned about the plight of the common citizen so the last people who would have starved would have been the military and they would have still gone to any extreme to continue to inflict additional casualties on our soldiers, sailors and airmen.

Churchill has been quoted as saying that he never doubted the bomb would be used and never questioned that it had been the correct decision. Let’s remember that unlike most of the recent US Presidents, Truman had actually served, with some distinction, as an artillery officer in WW I. He knew what combat was.

I’m going to have to take issue with something Penetrator stated earlier where he contends that the dropping of the second bomb was a political decision, out of the hands of the military commanders. The text of the order from the July 25, 1945 order from Gen Handy to Gen Spaatz head of the Strategic Air Forces authorizing the bombing is available on the web but it states in part that “…Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets (Hiroshima, Niigata, Nagasaki and Kokura) as soon as made ready by staff.” That answers in part why there was so little time between bombs. BTW Gen. Marshall and Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan project, drafted the orders. Truman did make reference to the fact that dropping the bombs would “shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans” in a public address August 9, 1945. You should read his diary and see what his reaction was to the devastation the bomb caused.

Sorry to ramble. Been a long week.

Mojo, out

[Dan Keleher]

This is a dubious claim. In the case of blockade it depends entirely on duration. Those top military leaders that Alperowitz details, generally believed the surrender to happen around november, without invasion or A-bombing.

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Gibberish. You do your best to avoid any arguments that contradict your views. I have yet to see you take the time to refute in a clear manner any of Ed's, Blackhorse's arguments or anyone else's.

As for your reliance on the opinions of top American military figures, here's a quote from someone who was in a better position than Leahy or any other person to determine when/if the Japanese would surrender.

"The Supreme War Council... was making every possible preperation to meet a landing. They proceeded with that plan until the Atomic Bomb was dropped, after which they believed the United States would no longer attempt to land when it had such a superior weapon - that the United States need not land when it had such a weapon; so at that point they decided that it would be best to sue for peace."

-Kantaro Suzuki, Prime Minister of Japan, 4/45 -8/45.

[Supervisor]

Having read the last few posts, I think I see where this is going. In the end, this is a much larger debate than about the facts directly surrounding one particular military political decision in 1945. Penetrator is, I believe from other posts, a trained physicist and he lives in his field where memories remain fresh of some of the more perceptive observations of the men with blood on their hands:

"Now we're all sons of bitches."

"I have become death destroyer of worlds."

"If I had known what would become of my theories, I would have become a watchmaker."

I apologize if I've misplaced any of the words above since I went from memory rather than looking them up again. It was one of the rare moments in history when men realized what they had actually done.

Penetrator wishes that nuclear fission and its rather uglier stepchild nuclear fusion had never been put to such practical use. If they must already exist then he wishes we could uninvent them. We can't.

England, the United States, the Soviet Union and later others perused nuclear weapons because after the Special Theory and the practical experiments with uranium fission in the 1930s it was clearly possible to build the "gadget." Now, China, India, Pakistan, France and Israel are all members of the nuclear "club." Other nations are as well or soon will be.

The same globalized economy and technological innovation that brings electricity, chemical processing and CNN to the remotest village in the world also brings the ability to assemble the ultimate arbitrator of grievance. Penetrator is afraid. We all should be. To quote Tom Leher in the late sixties:

I'll try to remain serene and calm,
When Alabama gets the bomb.

One of my beliefs is that the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki induced some reason into all of us. But having read and heard some really silly Panglosian statements by military, political and scientific leaders about nuclear war "fighting" over the years, I wonder. You would have thought from reading Herman Kahn and others that a nuclear exchange would be no more serious than having your wisdom teeth pulled. Both of which would be performed by qualified professionals.

We know that Curtis LeMay not only pursued a pre-emptive war strategy throughout the 1950s and through the Cuban Missile Crisis as a deterrent posture to scare the hell out of the Soviets, he believed in it. As one student of the Cuban Missile Crisis has noted, after all the experts on both sides congratulated themselves on their wisdom, tough mindedness and skill, they and we forgot that primarily we were just lucky. By we, I mean everyone: Americans, Europeans, Russians, Chinese, Cuban ... Inuits.


Several other close calls have taken place. One wonders how many more times we will be lucky.

And so hold onto your butts, nanotechnology, biotech and new break thorough in physics will provide new weapons of mass destruction tomorrow we cannot do more than imagine today. The talking chimpanzees have come a long way indeed from their first stick grasped tightly with an opposable thumb.

So welcome to the brave new world with such wondrous people in it my friends. Rest assured that if not tomorrow then the day after the bin Ladens, Timothy McVeighs and Pol Pots of the world will have toys far more potent than airliner's fuel loads, fertilizer truck loads and brainwashed children with which to play. Kiss you children goodnight, call your mother and fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy century.

[ February 16, 2002: Message edited by: Ed Jenkins ]

[ February 16, 2002: Message edited by: Ed Jenkins ]</p>

[Tomanbeg]

Originally posted by Penetrator:


This is were I stopped reading your post. The high command of the US armed forces in 1945 were idiots, were they?

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Yes several of them were. The important ones weren't. The bad thing is that in Ameriac once an officer gets his stars and turns out to be incompetent, they are not gotten rid of, which would be an indictment of the system, but they are promoted upstairs. In WWII Clark, Fletcher, Lehey, Ghormely, are just a few of the examples. In Germany these guys would have been put out to pasture, in Russia they would have been put against a wall. In America they retire and write books to prove they are not idiots. Those books should be read with a joint and a beer available. For a modern example, lets look at the gone but not lamented wesley Clark. That Idiot ordered the Brits to attack and kill the Russian Soliders that snatched the Kosovo Airport. The British commander told him to bugger off, which was the right thing. I don't know if it would have started WWIII, but It could have. It certainly would have led to the russians arming and proping up the Serbs in a big way. Say half a million 'volunteers'. Clinton would have whinned, but It would have taken attention away from the blue dress. By Now Kosovo would have expanded to all the little countries around there. And some not so little. All over a few acres of concrete that needed several million dollars and months of work to become an operatonal cicilian airport. Now that is what I would call an idiot.
T.

[Tomanbeg]

Originally posted by Penetrator:


This is were I stopped reading your post. The high command of the US armed forces in 1945 were idiots, were they?

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I forgot to add that Idiotwitz was writng to prove a biased viewpoint. He would not included any opinion that did not agree with his. Sort of like a rabid enviro faced with the oddites of the global warming theory he holds.
T.

[nyarlathotep]

BOOYA!

Revised sig T.
{WHOOSH}<----The sound made by a revisionist as he runs face first into a wall he believes is there.

[Vincent Prochelo]

Originally posted by Mogami:
Hi, my sources (well at least my recollection) have 100k killed on landing 1 million casulties total. The 2nd Marine Division was to make the first landing (Operation Olympic) and was written out of planning on D-Day+5 (it was presumed to have been wiped out by then) Personally I do not think the bombs by themselves are what made Japan surrender. (they had sent feelers out in 43 and 44 but did so through the Soviets who just sat on the requests) On Aug 8th 1945 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and began overrunning Manchuria, they caused over a million Japanese casulties. This is what I believe actually caused Japan to surrender (the fear of Soviet occupation)

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Oh come on. You can't be serious. I mean about the Soviet part. The Japanese surrendered because of the A-bomb. No doubt about it. They had sent out feelers when they realized that they would lose, but they would never accept the term of unconditional surrender which is what we wanted.

-V

[Vincent Prochelo]

Originally posted by ratster:
The second bomb was more punitive than "neccessary". Why did they firebomb Dresden for that matter, because there were a lot of pissed off people back then, who wanted payback.

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Dresden was not about anger. Dresden was a major rail hub for the Germans to shift forces between the Western and eastern fronts. The problem was, their just happened to thousands upon thousands of German refugees fleeing the Soviets there at the time.

The Japanese high command was at that point(up too and including Hiroshima) more concerned with the firebombings then the A-bomb(of which they were not aware of its full efects yet). There's a good argument that the second bomb "convinced" them of the "error" of their ways.

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I agree.

As others have stated, there is no way to be sure what the casualties would have been in an invasion of Japan. However, at that point, 1 would have been unacceptable. Remember, the Japanese attacked the US first.

Its easy to come up with alternatives in the 20/20 hindsight of the historical record. One could also argue that one of the chief reasons nukes have not been used since that time is because of the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Agree again.

-V

[ February 16, 2002: Message edited by: Vincent Prochelo ]</p>