Slitherine

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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Originally posted by Penetrator:
One can speculate back and forth on the casualties in the case of invasion, but all that is irrelevant. No such invasion would ever have taken place. There was no option left to the japanese but surrender. The japanese leadership knew this. The US leadership knew this. And the US leadership knew the japanese leadership knew this. They only had to come to terms with this (to them) monstrous fact, which they would have in due course.

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Anyway, since they were willing to surrender when faced with atomic destruction, why would they not have surrendered when faced with certain destruction by other means?

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Originally posted by Raverdave:
I think that this is the true reason for the A-bombs being used....more so as a signal to the soviets than to further pressure the Japanese. The US had seen the half of Europe swallowed up by the Soviets who were busy installing pupet governments and now with the USSR declaring war on Japan, they had the nightmare of the soviets gaining control of large areas of Asia. I just don't see how the A-bombs alone could have convinced the Japanese....lets face it....by mid June most of Japan's industry and cities were a fire-bombed wasteland....Kobe, Kawasaki,Yokohama,Osaka,Nagoya and of course Tokyo. There was no military need to drop the bombs. In fact "Hap" Arnold was so convinced that the USAAF could wipe out the rest of Japan that he sent LeMay to Washington to try to convince the JCS that there would be no need for an invasion of the home land. And as for the timing? Well the first bomb was droped on the 6th of August....the same day that the Soviets declared war.

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Originally posted by Raverdave:
I think that this is the true reason for the A-bombs being used....more so as a signal to the soviets than to further pressure the Japanese. The US had seen the half of Europe swallowed up by the Soviets who were busy installing pupet governments and now with the USSR declaring war on Japan, they had the nightmare of the soviets gaining control of large areas of Asia. I just don't see how the A-bombs alone could have convinced the Japanese....lets face it....by mid June most of Japan's industry and cities were a fire-bombed wasteland....Kobe, Kawasaki,Yokohama,Osaka,Nagoya and of course Tokyo. There was no military need to drop the bombs. In fact "Hap" Arnold was so convinced that the USAAF could wipe out the rest of Japan that he sent LeMay to Washington to try to convince the JCS that there would be no need for an invasion of the home land. And as for the timing? Well the first bomb was droped on the 6th of August....the same day that the Soviets declared war.

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Originally posted by Penetrator:
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. It seems at least clear that there was no conscious decision on behalf of militarily informed persons, that the use of the bomb would save lives.

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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.

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Originally posted by Culiacan Mexico:
Harry S. Truman, Diary, July 25, 1945 This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children...

He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance...

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