Quote:
Originally Posted by Mason Malmuth
Hi DrChesspain:
Just a side note, but it's my understanding that the United States had run out of firebombs before the nuclear bombs were dropped. And if this wasn't the case, many more people would have been killed by these incendiary devices than actually were.
Best wishes,
Mason
But the US was continuing to use conventional and incendiary bombing in the days intervening between Nagasaki and the actual surrender. And this misses the point that the US could have produced more in relatively short order because its industrial capacity already dwarfed Japan's, not even taking into account the utter ruin of Japan's cities. Japan was at near total mercy of the US due to air and naval supremacy at that point.
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Originally Posted by gangnam holmes
According to MacArthur (I recall in the book "American Caesar"), 1.2 to 1.5 million military and civilian. Much more than Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The atomic bombs saved lives, ironically.
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Originally Posted by campfirewest
Didn't they estimate there would be 1 million+ American casualties if there was a conventional invasion of Japan? No doubt the Japanese casualties would have been even higher in that scenario. Using atomic weapons resulted in fewer deaths overall.
No and no. I am amazed that these estimates continue to resonate in the American consciousness. MacArthur's estimates, and those of his team surrounding Operation Downfall were based on faulty intelligence, and moreover, the incredibly shaky and frankly racist assumption that Japanese civilians would resist US personnel with deadly force and fight "to the last man." There is no evidence to support this, aside from the constant civilian defense drills that Japan ran, which were par for the course among fascist powers (and there was relatively modest civilian resistance in Germany by 1945 as the Wehrmacht collapsed), and not altogether dissimilar from drills run in the US. There was an overwhelming sentiment that the Japanese were fanatical and nearly automaton-like in their loyalty to the emperor, which had been reinforced by years of propaganda and "yellow peril" media circulated in the US. The likelihood of a coordinated resistance on the scale MacArthur imagined (which was always a "worst case scenario") is profoundly unlikely, as the average Japanese civilian had little training and was increasingly malnourished by 1945.
Japan had been reduced to utter ruin by summer 1945 and had already been seeking a negotiated surrender using the Soviets as an intermediary. The US rejected calls for anything other than "unconditional surrender," yet in the aftermath of the atomic bombings, the US did in fact accept the condition that Hirohito would be allowed to remain on the throne, and Japan might well have accepted that condition before the bombings as well.
67 cities had been almost totally destroyed by US bombing even before Hiroshima.
More civilians died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone than there were
total US fatalities in the entire Pacific theater of the war. The "saving lives" rationale is incredibly hollow. Japan had almost no capacity to fight, and was having to invent its own highly optimistic estimates for repelling US invasion just to continue to survive. They trained thousands of kamikaze pilots, but barely had enough functioning aircraft to deploy them, and their petroleum reserves were almost non-existent. That is why they didn't even bother to scramble air defense against
Enola Gay, because the commanders assumed that it was simply a US feint meant to waste Japan's air resources.
As for the much-quoted MacArthur, hardly the portrait of humility or a man reluctant to use brute force, several of his contemporaries had a much grimmer view of the use of nuclear weapons:
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Originally Posted by William Leahy
Once it had been tested, President Truman faced the decision as to whether to use it. He did not like the idea, but he was persuaded that it would shorten the war against Japan and save American lives. It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and that wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
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Originally Posted by Henry Arnold
It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.
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Originally Posted by Eisenhower
I had been conscious of depression and so I voiced to (Sec. Of War Stimson) 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. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.'
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Originally Posted by John McCloy
I am absolutely convinced that had we said they could keep the emperor, together with the threat of an atomic bomb, they would have accepted, and we would never have had to drop the bomb.
Even Truman himself was aware of Japanese peace overtures through back channels:
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Originally Posted by Truman's diary
P.M. [Churchill] & I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap [sic] Emperor asking for peace.
Japan, as much as the US, was concerned about the prospects of Soviet rather than American occupation. The US could have used the carrot approach to turn Japan to the American sphere, but they opted for the stick, for a variety of reasons, but "saving lives" is an invented one, a rationalization meant to make the US look beneficent and merciful. This had been the rationale for aerial bombings of all sorts for years, to no avail.
This isn't to say the atomic bombings were particularly savage in comparison to other contemporary bombings. I tend to agree with
Dan Carlin that once the basic logic and rational of aerially bombing civilians as a means of legitimate warfare is adopted, the choice to drop a nuclear bomb is rather a trivial one. So the impact of US bombings as a whole should be under scrutiny.
But the question still stands as to the "necessity" of the bombings. The most damning piece of all, from the
most comprehensive military analysis of the campaign after the war, when heads were cooler:
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Originally Posted by US Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946
Certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
And this was no bleeding-heart retrospective; the study's tone and findings were fairly positive when it came to aerial bombings overall.
The US dropped "the bomb" for a variety of reasons: political, strategic, even scientific. But revising the decision as some sort of morally upstanding act that saved lives is a convenient fiction, and one that has led Americans away from examining its military conduct in subsequent conflicts as well.
