The Atomic Bomb & Soviet Union

The Soviets had fought the Japanese not only 40 years earlier, but in several border clashes in the 1930's, the most well known being the Battle of Lake Khasan in 1938 & a series of battles at Khalkhin Gol in 1939.

 

The question about the Glantz book is how much of the Soviet plans revolved arround getting more shipping or log support from the US? Looking at the operation Hula stuff the US was offereing a fair amount of aid in that respect into the summer of 45. Whether or not that would continue is another matter. The problem with plans that were never executed is that they make assumptions about conditions that may never have come to pass.

I have read some of Glantz work by the way. In particular The Bear Went Over the Mountain which is quite good but totally off topic as it discusses the Soviet experiance in Afghanistan ... On futhrer thought it may not be all that much off topic. Certainly there would have been some parallels.

 

Some good thoughts and suggestions in the thread. Thnx all for your contribution.

 

The Japanese up until the Soviet attack and A bomb were still expecting to be allowed to hold on to their conquests in China. One condition they gave the US was the right to try their own "war criminals"
There is a book about an attempted coup against the Emperor after his surrender announcement was made, but not yet broadcast over the radio. These officers wanted to seize the tapes and prevent a surrender. The officers were willing to see every Japanese civilian die in order to avoid the shame of surrender. A bomb in the woods may not be effective in showing the capacity to destroy a city and remember it took two of them before the Emperor decided to surrender.
Note the US allowed the Soviets to lose 100,000 men to take Berlin and then have to give up half of it to us. Who out smarted who?

 

There is a Japanese film depicting the attempted coup called 'Japan's Longest Day' (1967). I saw it a few years ago and thought it very good, though I didn't know much about the actual facts at the time, so didn't know how accurate it was to actual events. It was the first time a Japanese Emperor was played by a Japanese in a film.

Interesting thought about letting Russia take Berlin.

 

I am of the opinion that there was not just one reason for "The Bomb".
Ending the war...it was ending one way or another. Japan had started some kind of dialogue with Russia.
Who knows what would have happened if we did not use Fat Man & Little Boy.?
Nobody can predict the past.

Certainly helped to usher in The Cold War.

Was also a giant science experiment for The USA. How many other Planes/B-29 were involved in both bombings.? Planes that carried, scientists, film crews, and monitoring/scientific equipment.
How fast did the USA get to Ground Zero...with who and how many people.? A lot of that information is classified, "lost", or not addressed.
Lots of things going on then.

Truman should not have even been in The White House. FDR was pressured into "firing" the popular incumbent VP.

If not for legal/military gag orders.....how many of the staff at Los Alamos would have spoken out against the use of the Bombs they helped to create.?
A whole plethora of un-answered and un-asked questions regarding those two bombs.
The USA had definitely started its quest for World Domination. The World Bank was already kicking up its heals.
good luck
.

 

FDR was most certainly not "pressured" into anything. Wallace, during his four years as VP, had been creating ever increasing headaches for FDR. In fact, FDR essentially "fired" Wallace as the head of the Board of Economic Warfare in July, 1943, when Wallace's ongoing feud with Jesse H. Jones, Secretary of Commerce, boiled over into the public spectrum. While Wallace may have been popular with the general public, as is evidenced by more than a few political polls, he, however, had either offended or made outright enemies with many politicians of both parties. By the last year of his term as VP, wallace had become far more of a political liability for FDR, than Wallace's public popularity could ever hope to make up for...And we all know how FDR dealt with his political liabilities.

In short, Wallace was his own worst enemy. Had he been a more astute political "player", he would not have caused FDR the grief that he did and likely would have been nominated as FDR's fourth term VP, and thus would have become the next President on FDR's passing. To that end, the 1944 Vice Presidential race was one of "who do you want to be President." and not a popularity contest. As such, a great many democrats, including FDR, did not see Henry Wallace as being Presidential material.

 

The other options if not the bomb were to invade or embargo and both would have resulted in tens of millions of deaths mostly civilian, so the bomb was actually far more humane.

 

Steve,

I think you mean blockade, not embargo.

 

This thread isn't about whether the bomb should have been dropped or not.

By August of 1945 there was no way we would blockade Japan because this wouldn't end the war by August 9, and the Soviet Union would join the fight- something we didn't want to happen. The issue of dropping the bomb had already been decided weeks before. This situation was set in motion by FDR, when he invited the Soviet Union to help us invade Japan at Yalta. A decision which was a terrible one, in my opinion.

The other issue raised in this thread was that we could have, and in my opinion should have, negotiated peace with Japan 6 months earlier. It was, again, terrible decision-making in my opinion (and extremely risky) which forced us to ultimately drop the bomb. Incidentally, I just saw on the Military Channel tonight an excerpt recited from Stimson's diary by McGeorge Bundy, who wrote a biography of Stimson. He quoted Stimson as saying, soon after the Japanese surrender (paraphrasing here) "what we ultimate got from Japan we could have got much earlier, and not had to drop the bomb."

If it had then it's possible that we wouldn't have lost men at Okinawa or the Indianapolis.

 

Everything you are setting out here is in HINDSIGHT.

I don't know if the US has the equivalent of the War Cabinet Papers\Conclusions but I have read and do read the British ones avidly. And you can then see just what lack of, false and misleading information (and often out of date) the likes of Churchill and Roosevelt were having to base their decisions on.

At Yalta, FDR still had hopes of taming Stalin but in any case he had no way of knowing that progress on the bomb would be so fast or so successful (and remember there were only two made by Summer 1945 - with further deliveries I think posited for 6 month later). Japan was definitely going to be a very tough nut to crack. Risking loss of control of a Japanese island or two was worth the cost of vastly reducing the potential American killed.

I certainly don't agree that peace should have been negotiated 6 months earlier, even though the eventual peace imposed by MacArthur was so soft it almost equated to the terms that the Japanese were asking earlier.

History of the last couple of Centuries from Napoleon to Saddam Hussein via Versailles teaches us that the defeat has to be complete and the Rulers deposed and seen to be de-deified and humiliated and preferably chopped off otherwise the Hydra lashes out again.

In some ways it would have been better if there had been no bomb and the Allies had invaded and completed the destruction of Japan, expensive thought that would have been in lives. Then the current view prevalent in Japan that it was the Victim, that it was strangled by American sanctions and that it fought to liberate Asian peoples could be exposed for the lie that it is.

 

As was mentioned earlier in this thread, more people died when we sent 300 B-29s over Tokyo with incendiary bombs than died initially when we bombed H & N. Plus we flattened 50 square miles of Tokyo. We also dropped incendiary bombs over 66 other cities in Japan, destroying 50-90% of their area and killing approximately 1,000,000 people (this is all stated by Robert McNamara who helped formulate the low-flying bombing strategy of LeMay).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmJDj-oLYyM

How would you have completely destroyed Japan if this is not it?

Given the close relationship we now have with Japan, and one that is growing in importance these days due to the problem with China and the East China Sea, I find it difficult to imagine a better outcome than what we achieved. Your suggestion to 'completely destroy Japan' may be justified from an emotional point-of-view, but it certainly would have left us in a much weaker position had we done that. MacArthur predicted country-wide guerrilla warfare and having the need to place U.S. soldiers at each corner if we had tried the Emperor for war crimes.

One of the areas we think differently is that you think negotiating with the Japanese would have made us weaker. I think not negotiating with them put us in harm's way- and it also potentially cost the lives of soldiers on Okinawa and elsewhere- which is what we were precisely looking to avoid.

 

Maybe completed the defeat of Japan would have been a better phrase. No emotion - the Japanese mind-set has not changed.

MacArthur said it - well it must be true! I seem to remember there were similar predictions which proved false about Nazi Were wolves or some such.

There is still a lot of real anger in the Far East concerning Japan's provocative stance on its war crimes

Be careful that Japan does not drag you into something not in your interest. I study with interest the Japanese nationalist who bought those islands.

 

Actuallly at that point we were blockading Japan. At the end of July asside from the hope that the atomic bombs would end the war there were two strategies the US was looking at. One was the blockade and the other was the invasions of Operation Downfall. Intell collected in the summer of 45 and coming to the attention of the higher ups in August indicated that the Japanese had figured out which area we were going to invade first and were busy fortifying it. This might have been enough to postpone the invasions until the spring of 46 leaving the blockade as at least the defacto strategy. It wasn't clear that anything would end the war by August 9.

It's not at all clear there is any correlation there at all. Certainly the option to drop the bomb was open but it was hardly decided at Yalta. Indeed Truman could have canceled it very late in the game.

We could have negotiated a peace but at what price? Would the Japanese willingly have surrendered their holdings in China and Korea for instance? Then there's the problem that many saw at the time, i.e. that the conditional peace treaty that ended WWI lead to WWII. Unconditional surrender was meant to prevent that from happening again.

The problem is that's a flawed conclusion based on the facts available at the time or now for that matter.

 

Yes, I should have been clearer. In my opinion, once we felt there was a good chance that the atomic bomb would work, the decision to use it was clear- the strategy to get Japan to surrender by blockade took a back seat. Namely, because the blockade wouldn't meet the 4 objectives that the bomb could achieve- 1) Revenge 2) Potential to end the war quickly so the Soviet Union would stay out of Japan 3) To show the Soviet Union that we had the bomb, and 4) To save lives

Yes, you are right. The development and use of the bomb could have been stopped at any time by either FDR or Truman. My point was that FDR created a political situation at Yalta which, by August, forced us to use the bomb as quickly as we did - in order to prevent Russia from invading Japan. This was a necessity which existed because of a policy decision made by FDR at Yalta.

And this is just speculation, but if FDR had not done that, might it been possible to use the blockade? I don't know much about the blockade and what was behind it- perhaps you or others on here know. But if we didn't have the bomb why was an invasion chosen over a blockade?

This is a very good argument against the idea of signing a peace treaty earlier. We just don't know what would have happened. On the one side if you believe what the Swedish diplomats said, and MacArthur, the Japanese laid out conditions that were very similar to what was ultimately signed. On the other hand, the Japanese still held Manchuria and Korea, they had part of the War Council who wanted to fight until the death. Then they had the officers who attempted the coup d' etat against the Emperor when they tried to steal his surrender tapes. So who knows? We may have well been unsuccessful but my point is that we should have at least tried to talk to them.

And I don't say that from just a moral point of view, but also from a strategic one. As I mentioned if we didn't get the bomb when we did, it's likely Japan would have been split up. But more importantly, the U.S. Government predicted up to 1,000,000 casualties if we invaded Japan. In the spring-early summer of 1945, when we were hearing that Japanese wanted to negotiate peace, and we were anticipating invading Japan because we didn't have the bomb at that point, some policymakers thought about this and decided it was better for the U.S. to say f*** you to Japan, and not even talk to them, even if it meant losing a million U.S. soldiers, or twice the amount of total casualties we had in WW2.

Again, I know the revenge factor was high. I know WW1 and Versailles was on people's minds. But there were very compelling reasons that should have made us willing to at least sit and listen, in my opinion. That's not hindsight, it's not wishful thinking. I think it's pragmatic decision-making.

 

You are fairly far off the mark in your points 1 through 4.
Point 1) Revenge - Continuation of the naval blockade had the distinct potential of causing far greater deaths than both Atomic Bombs. Once starvation of the Japanese people set in, deaths of the Japanese would have numbered in the millions. So, if there is a revenge factor, an American blockade had that in spades. However, estimates to reach this point varied from mid '46 to mid '47.
Point 2) Ending the war quickly. Of course we all no that a Blockade would be the most time consuming option. FYI, the American population was also tiring of fighting and they were growing increasingly restless over the lack of consumer goods and continued rationing, especially since the war "appeared" already won - to everyone but the Japanese. Also, their is the financial cost to be considered...America, although a very wealthy country, was not a "bottomless" pool of money, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to acquire finances with which to fund the war. By continuing the war for another two years, at least, would require a large outlay of cash to fund.
Point 3) As always, the political effect on the Soviet Union has always been hotly debated. Not to mention the fact that the sooner, the Soviets saw the power of the bomb, the sooner they would "race" to acquire their own weapon.
Point 4) Saving lives - Well, American lives anyway. The Blockade would have been fairly cheap in terms of lives, since the Japanese had little with which to combat it. The IJN was next to non-existent, and those few ships and submarines which were still afloat lacked fuel to sortie. The Japanese still possessed several thousand aircraft, but suffered from the same lack of fuel, and even if used as kamikazes, once they were spent there would be nothing left. The upwards of 2 million troops and 28 million civilian soldiers in the home islands would be totally useless in combating the blockade.

Well, Truman canceling the Bomb would not happen. The main reason being that he had been "kept out of the loop" regarding it's development, and only found out about it, late April '45, shortly after he assumed the Presidency once FDR had passed. As such, he had had no time to fully understand and grasp the potentialities of the program, and as such, he relied very heavily on his advisers, all most all of which were pressing for the Bomb's use. Further, given Truman's work on the Truman Committee, aka "Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program", given that the Bomb program had already run up a tab of $2 Billion dollars and was nearing fruition, he is unlikely to have stopped it and wasted all that money. It might have been a different story if the bomb had been nowhere near completion.

It discussed the blockade earlier in this post, but briefly - the largest issue would be the cost of fighting the war for another two years minimum, then there was the "war weariness" of the American public for fighting a war for another two years, just because the Japanese were to stubborn to admit that they had been defeated.

I'm taking this out of order for a reason. I wanted to say this earlier, but had not had the time to post.

Allowing the Japanese to keep the Emperor as part of a surrender agreement most certainly is not wishful thinking nor hindsight(although your argument using of the Battle of Okinawa and the loss of the USS Indianapolis is - these events had not yet occurred, and the Indy's sinking could not be predicted). The United States State Department had been arguing long and hard, since at least early 1945, for this "term" to be given to the Japanese. However few were willing to listen. Their reasons varied from "political death", after all it is one thing to allow the Japanese to keep the Emperor after the war had ended, it was something totally different to give the Emperor a "pass" while the war was still going on. Along those lines, the vast majority of the American public, was looking for the Emperor to be tried and, likely, executed. Once the war had ended, and the American public was allowed to get on with their lives, the were much more pliant to being manipulated into abiding by the more "pragmatic" option. The American politicians and military leaders also had little reason to listen, as they were well on their way to winning the war without "losing face" by going back on their "unconditional surrender" claim. In all outward aspects, the US military was winning the war handily and had no reason to yet offer terms, and the atom bomb was quickly nearing completion. All in all, there was little compulsion for the United States to go back on their Unconditional Surrender option - at this time.

Also, the United States Armed Services were all posturing for the expected post-war demobilization and they all wanted to be the "top dog" in retaining the largest slice of the budgetary "pie." Remember Lemay's proudful boast that the Japanese would surrender when he ran out of targets in September - October 1945, although the Japanese were showing every sign of enduring his bombing just as their British and German counter parts did. The US Navy had already been blockading Japan for sometime with mines and submarines, and in mid February, 1945, they took to the then unheard of task of attacking the Japanese home islands with aircraft carriers. They would return again in July-August 1945 to add insult to injury not only by conducting more carrier raids, bu this time their battleships would bombard the Japanese Home Islands. Finally there was MacArthur and the US Army with their expected invasion of Japan.

The problem with the Swedish diplomats, as well as all other Japanese "attempts" at offering terms, is that none were done officially! The Japanese Ambassador to Switzerland also tried quite hard in this area, however Japan never gave him anything concrete to work with or negotiate from, thus, all his efforts came to naught. So, no, I cannot say that I put much faith in Japanese attempts at surrender, they were all done either by individuals or groups of individuals without any official support from the Japanese Government.

At no point in time did the Japanese officially contact the United States or any of it's Allies and offer surrender terms. Instead the Japanese continuously attempted to use diplomatic "back door channels", which allowed them "plausible deniability." One could conceivably look upon the Japanese "under the table" attempts as a trick(which more than a few Americans did). For instance, the Japanese use these "back door" methods, and the United States does retreat on it's "unconditional surrender" and offer terms. Now, the Japanese have their "A ha!" moment, and respond to their troops and population, by saying that the Americans are offering terms...See, they are weak and cannot finish this war...What's that? No! Of course we never had any dealings with the Americans! The Japanese have then provided themselves with A.) Better motivation for their troops and population to continue the war. Or, B.) Graciously accept the American terms without having to admit to being defeated, while still being able to deny any accusations of collusion.

Further, because the Japanese attempts at surrender were all unofficial, there was always the question that these attempts lacked any real support of the Japanese leadership, and rightly so.

Therefore, it was not all that clear cut, at the time, about offering or accepting any Japanese attempts at surrender that were not done through official channels.

It was not the U.S. Government that predicted 1 million casualties from an invasion of Japan, but Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, one of the main proponents for using the atomic bomb. Other "official" US Army casualty estimates for the invasion of the Japanese Islands are 136,000(+/-) and 274,000(+/-). It has been supposed that Stimson inflated his casualty estimate to garner more support for the Bomb's use. However, the lower US Army estimates were made before the depth of Japanese defenses was well known, and IIRC, they did not take into account the several thousand suicide craft the Japanese set aside to defend their homeland(this was not known until post-war US intelligence missions uncovered them) - but still, their effectiveness can be, and is, often debated.

 

Yes, I am saying revenge was not major or deciding factor. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson successfully lobbied to have the Japanese city of Kyoto removed from the list of Primary targets for the Atomic Bomb, and General Groves fought him long and hard on this, but in the end Stimson won out. Stimson cited the fact that Kyoto was the cultural and intellectual capital of Japan, and he was quite taken with the city when he had visited twice in the past years. Groves argued that because it was considered the intellectual center of Japan, then those people would have the greatest appreciation of the Bomb's power. Also, as I have stated, had revenge been high on the list, continuing the firebombings, or going with the Blockade Option would have produced far greater Japanese casualty numbers than the Atomic Bombings.

As has been pointed out several times, talking with the Japanese was ending the war on Japanese terms, not American terms. You only ask for terms if you are defeated or can no longer sustain the war. You don't ask for terms when you are decidedly winning the war.

The Soviet Union always figured into WW2, what is debated is that one of the primary reasons for dropping the atomic bomb was to serve as a "warning" to the USSR. Certainly, the US wanted to end the war before the Soviets could accomplish their "land grab." Just as certainly, the US was not about to let the Soviets maintain any hold on the Japanese Home Islands - given Stalin's treatment of Poland.

We were giving German scientists the same treatment as soon as the war had ended in Europe, in fact we were doing it before the war ended in Europe. There were several Operations that were conducted to grab Italian, French, German, etc. intellectuals almost as soon as US troops had taken over given areas. We wanted the technology all for ourselves and then we would decide what to pass along to our Allies. IIRC, the British and Soviets were also following similar policies.

While 12,725 sounds impressive, it does not address how many of these aircraft were operational, nor does it take into account that the US would be bringing it's own aircraft into the battle, or what effect a continued bombing would have on such. IIRC, the Japanese stored some of these aircraft many miles from the airfields in an attempt to disperse them. It also had the effect of greatly reducing the reaction time to get their aircraft airborne. Still, the Kamikaze were hardly an underestimated threat. And as always, Japanese plans only took into account that the US "played" by Japanese rules only.

I would also point out that the Free Republic is a "somewhat less" than an unbiased source.

Perhaps we would have, if the Japanese had made any "official" attempts at ending the war or had contacted the United States or Great Britain directly. Had they done so, this would have at least signified an honest attempt at peace. A negotiated peace would not have settled anything, and, most likely, only would have postponed the problem for some time in the future. So, while it may have saved Anerican lives in the short term, the American view was that it would probably lead to a far costlier war later on. Better to solve the problem now, while the US had the tools on hand to accomplish it, then to postpone the problem until a later date.

So, no, I cannot agree that a "negotiated peace" may have save American lives in the "long run." Again, just look at the negotiated peace that ended World War I, it only led to a far bloodier World War II.

You defeat your own argument by stating "however, that “plausible deniability” is practiced all the time in diplomacy and is no big deal." Thus, there is no guarantee the United States can give that it cannot later go back on. Once, American troops occupy Japan, they can do whatever is their wish, as such, the only real way that the Japanese troops can "protect" the Emperor is to keep the Americans off their shores.

No, the Emperor was never used as "bait". As has been several times, negotiations were not considered part of the Allied peace process, only unconditional surrender.

Lots of casualty estimates were being passed around. "The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb" by Michael Kort discusses many of them
Here is the online Google books preview of that section: http://books.google.com/books?id=YqmTx028OtgC&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=April+1945+report+projected+casualties+of+1,202,005&source=bl&ots=JqpyWQA129&sig=d9fX7_f_mk75yBo0-Edh3sh6NLw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=WDKwUt70D-ipsAS_74DIDA&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=April%201945%20report%20projected%20casualties%20of%201%2C202%2C005&f=false

 

As others have stated your objectives are seriously flawed.
1) Already answered clearly but to reiterate. It was no longer a major objective and if it was then the blockade would have met it much better than the bombs.
2) Ending the war quickly was the key objective but keeping the USSR out of Japan was hardly the main or even an important reason for dropping the bomb.
3) We didn't need to drop the bomb on a Japanese city to show the Soviets we had it.
4) Saving lives was an important consideration and a major factor in the final decision to actually drop the bombs.

In reference to a later post of yorus. Be careful basing things on the knowledge of the high command in late July. A significant amount of new intel had become available in July and early August and the analysis of it was working its way up the chain of command. By September enough may have been known to affect decsions on the invasion.