OK, was it wrong to bomb Japan?

I think he was suggesting that an I-400 could sail an A-bomb up to a coastal city, surface, and then explode it inside the sub as if it were a nuclear Kamikaze.

 

You admit it yourself, only minority was trying to prevent surrender when Emperor was ready to, yet bombings happened. Weren't nazis in WW2 following same pattern, sometimes executing every civilian in village, if few locals happened to be a partisan?

 

so the emperor and his closest advisers did not meet in secret to discuss this because they were afraid of their own high ranking officers which comprised the new samurai class? and less than a hundred years before world war 2 there was no event called the Meiji restoration which restored power to the emperor from the tokugawa shogunate which had for hundreds of years prior kept the emperor as a puppet?

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if the minority is your military arm then they wield a disproportianate amount of power compared to their numbers.

 

Japan's Soviet gambit was to have the Soviets mediate between Japan and the US, but mediate in bad faith and pressure us into terms that were favorable to Japan. In exchange for doing this, the Soviets would receive Japan's cooperation and friendship after the war.

Specifically the conditions that Japan wanted were:

a) for Japan to be in charge of criminal justice for Japanese war criminals

b) for there to be no occupation of Japan

c) for Japanese soldiers to simply pack up and go home without being disarmed

d) for Hirohito to retain unlimited dictatorial power (power which really belonged to the Japanese military, who exercised power in Hirohito's name)

I'm expressing those conditions in my own words, but that was the gist of it.


Neither we nor the Soviets knew exactly what Japan was aiming for, because all Japan ever got to say to the Soviets was "Please let Prince Konoye come and talk to you about our new idea." Since the Soviets never agreed to let Prince Konoye into their country, no one ever heard his proposal.

US intelligence figured it was just an attempt to end the war in a draw. Given the four terms that we now know Japan wanted, I think that was a fair assessment.


It has been suggested by other posters that Hirohito would have swept in and forced the Japanese military to accept whatever terms we demanded (like he did after the A-bombs) had Japan failed to get anywhere with the terms they were hoping for. That might actually be true. But I'm not sure what the US was supposed to have done about it if that is the case. We didn't know what Hirohito was planning, and since Japan was communicating to the Soviets on a channel that we were not willing to admit that we were listening to, there wasn't much opportunity for us to seize the initiative even if we'd known Hirohito's plans.

All the non-Soviet attempts were by individuals acting without the authority of the Japanese government. The US government suspected as much, but pursued the contacts anyway in the hopes that they would evolve into real contacts with the Japanese government.

The Japanese government put a stop to the contacts as soon as it found out about them. Before our victory on Okinawa the Japanese government only wanted to keep on fighting. After our victory on Okinawa Japan only wanted to pursue their gambit with the Soviets.

 

Had the war continued just a few months longer, ten million Japanese civilians would have starved to death. Meanwhile, Asian civilians were dying at a rate of over 100,000 per month under the tender mercies of Japanese occupation. And American POWs were not faring all that well either.

On top of that, the entire world was tired of the war and needed it to end immediately. No one was in the mood for some silly scheme to delay the war for no good reason.

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Sure he can. All he needs is to be familiar with history.

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If we had given it a few weeks, right now you'd be saying we should have given it a few more weeks.

War isn't about pausing to give your enemy time to regroup. War is about pounding the enemy relentlessly until he surrenders. Especially when the war is against an enemy as horrible as WWII Japan was.

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The millions of civilians who would have starved to death wouldn't have thought it cost nothing.

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Because we needed to end the reign of terror that Japan was inflicting upon the world.

If they had not been forced to change, they just would have rebuilt and resumed inflicting their reign of terror upon the world.

 

In terms of the bad faith negotiating, how do you know? It sounds plausible, but the best thing I've seen so far are these telegrams, which says things like:

Unfortunately, that telegram is earlier than what's on the page, so I do not know if it supports what you say or not.

 

Would have been the worst move as that's where the center of government was. Without them effecting a country wide surrender you would never win as seventy million people would be against you for killing their God King.

 

War crimes are supposed to be defined by international law.

I'm sure Truman was very interested in what the Interim Committee had to say about post-war energy policy.

They were still the committee that decided how the bombs were to be used.

The wikipedia article is wrong. The first duty of the Interim Committee was to plan future post-war energy policy.

This is silly. The fact that we warned them that we were about to destroy the city with a huge napalm raid, and did not mention the A-bombs, does not make a bit of difference.

Japan was the one who refused to surrender until after the A-bombs were dropped.

 

It seems pretty clear it was a matter of not accepting unconditional surrender. It was no secret they were open to conditional surrender, at least since we had broken their codes. We didn't need to confess we had their codes to open negotiations. It would just give us an advantage at the table. So why was it reasonable to demand unconditional surrender, as opposed to having negotiations?

Other interesting excerpts:

 

Unconditional surrender would entail the dismantling of the militaristic society and ensure that there would never be another world war with Japan as there was when the flawed treaty with Germany led to WWII.

 

LOL and I mean LOL as they was not looking to attack shipping all they needed to do was stay always for shipping lanes to disappear as the oceans are large and there was no satellites.

I do not know if they was equip with snorkels or not but there was zero reasons why they could not be so equip and that would mean that you would need to search all of the oceans for a pipe sticking out of the water and with 1940s technology.

Good luck doing that.

 

First it was only after the two bombings that the Emperor was ask to and decided to take part in deciding if they was to surrender or not.

Up to that point the hard line military was in firm control and they was talking about throwing their population as a whole again the invaders and the blood bath that would had then occur would had put all their casualties to shame including the bombings of the cities with or without nuke.

 

True fact.

 

Just because someone's politicians join the office right from the trailer park, does not excuse mass extermination of civilians. Even kids know how to play on someone's pride with chicken callings, and imperialists, like Japan at that point of history, were extremely prideful. This war wasn't driven just by military wing but whole Japan population and it already was starving and on the verge of surrender if offered more or less honorary way. US at that point of time had monopoly on nuclear weapons and despite scientists protests, preferred to test it on live subjects instead of sending a warning to Japan or everyone by testing it in controlled environment. It was uncalled barbaric act on par with nazi pseudo-science experiments on living humans.

 

So prideful that they wished to keep their God King and military society intact which would have led to a rejuvenation of the same problem that led to Germany's resurgence and World War II. You think the US lost a hundred thousand men in order to have to fight it again.

Strange, Lemay is on record as saying the dropping of the bomb was to allow the scientists to see their work to completion. Didn't mention they were against it rather this was to help them.

 

Lemay was a general who surely loved to bomb stuff... his career shows it clearly.
Regarding scientists: http://members.peak.org/~danneng/decision/usnews.html

 

In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

--Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his memoir, The White House Years

 

True. Don't know why on earth the anti bomb types bring him up as a voixce for their cause. He was quite out to lunch as was most of their mistaken shills.

 

Very good Sam. Strange that he can say that well after but at the time he had no idea that japan actually was not about to surrender at all and was in fact deadlocked for almost a week after the first bomb and at least a day and three meetings after the second on whether to surrender.

No Ike, they were far from surrender and defeat in their eyes.

 

Reading comprehension fail -1

 

You were quoting Ike were you not? If you were then you fail if not then I fail. In either case, Japan was not going to surrender until after the second bomb.

 

They never would have made it to a major American city. The home islands were totally blockaded and US anti-sub capabilities were extremely strong.

 

You are aware that US anti-submarine aircraft were equipped with radar that could find snorkels and that the Japanese did not have snorkel technology, yes?

 

That may be so, but law has to be interpreted and enforced.

I'm sure Truman was interested in what they had to say when he felt he needed advice on issues that were put before the committee.

They did not decide how the bombs were used. The President of the United States made those decisions.

Regardless of whether it was the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh duty, the Interim Committee did indeed discuss how the weapon was to be used. That is a fact.

What is silly is your insistence that we warned the residents of Hiroshima that we were going to drop an atomic bomb on them and what its effects would be. Not only that, but we knew full well when we dropped the bomb that tens of thousands of innocent people would be killed. The time of day being 8:00 a.m. when people would likely be going to the center of the city, the target location, was especially barbaric. Of course it does not make a difference to you because you did not have to suffer in the way that the victims did.

Japan would have surrendered without the use of the weapon and that is partly why Eisenhower and MacArthur (if I remember correctly) advised against its use.

 

Once more good luck in finding a snorkel in millions and millions of square miles of ocean.

Even with the technology of today finding subs or even one ship is a hard task indeed.

I find it strange that you have so must faith in 1940s anti submarine technology when even with today technology diesel-electric subs are consider useful weapons of war.