I knew someone and Aussy POW in Japan when the bomb dropped. He was a
bit of a historian. He said that there were conflicts between
pro-emporer and pro- Tojo diplomats and security officers. The generals
knew they faced the noose with any kind of surrender. Those sending
peace messages on the emporers side where under virtual house arrest
with the phones tapped. When the bombs dropped key people on Tojo's side
quietly switched sides. Phone lines became available to the pro-peace
diplomats, the guard commander at the palace gate went off to see if his
family was OK, the generals orders were acted on but very slowly. A
docudrama move made recently explored the tale. Have you seen anything
to prove this tale to be untrue?
Jed Rothwell wrote:
Harry Veeder wrote:
it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the
Smithsonian
downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many
tens of
thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military
target."
Hiroshima had some of largest army and navy installations in Japan.
Nagasaki was and still is one of the largest shipyards in the world.
The supertankers I saw under construction there dwarfed the whole
downtown area. They built the superbattleship Musashi there, and
recently they have constructed gigantic cruiseships, as well as wind
turbines and solar cells.
Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate
surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the
Japanese
home islands." But it's not that straightforward.
Nothing in history a straightforward.
As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing
the Enemy" — and many other historians have long argued — it was the
Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after
the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to
Japan's capitulation.
That is unquestionably true. Every surviving account of the emperor's
counsel emphasizes that the Russian attack was the straw that broke
the camel's back. However, whether that alone would have been
sufficient, and whether they would have surrendered without the
nuclear attacks is impossible to know. The final cabinet vote was a
tie -- all of the civilians in favor of surrender, all of the military
leaders against it. The emperor broke the tie, voting himself for the
first and last time in Japanese history.
My guess is that there would have been at least one or two more large
battles: one in Kyushu against the US, and one in Hokkaido or Tohoku
against the Russians. The Japanese still had a million trained
soldiers and ungodly amounts of ammunition and fortified bunkers in
Kyushu that would have survived a nuclear attack. (Everyone could see
that is where the attack would come.)
The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on
Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been
destroyed.
That is ridiculous. They dropped leaflets continuously, starting in
the fall of 1944. It was one of the most effective weapons of the
U.S., since the purpose of the bombing was to frighten the civilians
and get them to leave the cities and stop weapons production. It worked.
The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A
million lives
were not saved.
No one can possibly say how many lives were saved. If the war had
dragged on another six months, hundreds of thousands would have
starved to death. (Several thousand people starved to death after the
surrender, including ~20,000 Japanese P.O.W.s in Southeast Asia, who
were half dead when they surrendered.) The invading Russians would
have killed hundreds of thousands more, as they did in Manchuria.
The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director
of the
Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated
enemy."
No one disputes that. The problem was, even though they were defeated
they did not want to stop fighting. Roughly 2 million Japanese people
had been killed, or 3% of the population. But they might have fought
on and lost another 7 million people (10% of the population). During
WWII, Germany lost 7 million people (9%) and Russia lost 25.5 million
(13%). In the U.S. Civil War, the Union states lost 1.4% of the
population and the Confederacy lost 2.5%. There have been wars in
modern history in Central America in which half the male population
was killed off, and medieval European wars which depopulated entire
fiefdoms.
And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among
themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug.
3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.
They could hardly disagree about that! The Japanese government was
sending them cables asking for peace, and they were tapping and
decoding the Japanese ambassador's correspondence from Moscow to
Tokyo. The only issue was the terms of the peace. The Japanese did not
want to surrender their colonies, allow an occupation, war crimes
trials, any change in the status of the emperor, or any changes to
their constitution or government. (They were willing to surrender
their military forces and leave China.)
Within days after the bombing, many columnists and opinion makers
began to speculate that the real reason the US dropped the bomb was to
send a message to Moscow. I have read many of Truman's papers,
biographies and the books that he himself wrote and I have not found a
one sentence to back this up. Truman described his motivations and
actions in detail. If he had felt this way he would have said so. He
was a hard-line cold warrior. He did not hesitate to go to war in
Korea. There is no question he was willing to sacrifice lives in the
fight against communism: American, Koreans and Chinese lives, and
Japanese lives too. He summed up his own views about Hiroshima many
years after the war with a single sentence, a quote from Macbeth:
"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing."
That seems like an excellent summary to me. That pretty much describes
all wars.
- Jed
