Culiacan Mexico
Posts: 8348
Joined: 11/10/2000 From: Bad Windsheim Germany Status: offline
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quote:
Originally posted by 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.
Good post.
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