Of all the hypothetical histories, Operation Olympic, the American invasion of Japan, is perhaps the most hotly contested. On it hinge two popular, and clashing, certainties about American power.
The first says it is essentially bloodthirsty and genocidal, that Truman A-bombed a Japan he knew was on the brink of collapse led by men yearning to surrender, and that he did so because he wanted to impress the Soviets with America's new weapon. The other holds that the bomb put a quick end to a long war, and, through the cruel calculations of the god of battles, the deaths of tens of thousands in a few minutes in two cities spared the lives of hundreds of thousands -- U.S. GIs, Japanese civilians, starving slave laborers, occupied Indonesians -- by convincing Japan to stop fighting at once. In this view, America can be ruthlessly efficient in war, but not radically more violent than is necessary to win.
What this evidence illuminates is that one central tenet of the traditionalist view is wrong--but with a twist. Even with the full ration of caution that any historian should apply anytime he ventures comments on paths history did not take, in this instance it is now clear that the long-held belief that Operation Olympic loomed as a certainty is mistaken. Truman's reluctant endorsement of the Olympic invasion at a meeting in June 1945 was based in key part on the fact that the Joint Chiefs had presented it as their unanimous recommendation. (King went along with Marshall at the meeting, presumably because he deemed it premature to wage a showdown fight. He did comment to Truman that, of course, any invasion authorized then could be canceled later.) With the Navy's withdrawal of support, the terrible casualties in Okinawa, and the appalling radio-intelligence picture of the Japanese buildup on Kyushu, Olympic was not going forward as planned and authorized--period.But this evidence also shows that the demise of Olympic came not because it was deemed unnecessary, but because it had become unthinkable. It is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs in this circumstance.
Japanese historians uncovered another key element of the story. After Hiroshima (August 6), Soviet entry into the war against Japan (August 8), and Nagasaki (August 9), the emperor intervened to break a deadlock within the government and decide that Japan must surrender in the early hours of August 10. The Japanese Foreign Ministry dispatched a message to the United States that day stating that Japan would accept the Potsdam Declaration, "with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler." This was not, as critics later asserted, merely a humble request that the emperor retain a modest figurehead role. As Japanese historians writing decades after the war emphasized, the demand that there be no compromise of the "prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler" as a precondition for the surrender was a demand that the United States grant the emperor veto power over occupation reforms and continue the rule of the old order in Japan. Fortunately, Japan specialists in the State Department immediately realized the actual purpose of this language and briefed Secretary of State James Byrnes, who insisted properly that this maneuver must be defeated.
The maneuver further underscores the fact that right to the very end, the Japanese pursued twin goals: not only the preservation of the imperial system, but also preservation of the old order in Japan that had launched a war of aggression that killed 17 million.
This is all quite irrelevant. The Japanese government had been attempting to negotiate a conditional surrender for at least six months. They were willing to accept the loss of their territories off the island as well as the occupation of Japan by US forces and the dismantling of their military. They only had one condition, that they be allowed to keep the Emperor as their ceremonial leader.
Note that the Japanese got this condition anyway.
The source of this information is apparently MacArthur, references by a reporter named Trohan in the Chicago Tribune in late August 1945.
This likely the reason why MacArthur, along with liberal peaceniks like Eisenhower and Hoover, opposed the use of nukes.
The Japanese government had been attempting to negotiate a conditional surrender for at least six months.
Some non-powerful and not particularly well connected folks well down in the civilian government had been negotiating, but they had no power to back them up. The military leadership was running things in Japan, and they were vehemently opposed to any sort of surrender but the most conditional ones.
The "only protect the Emperor" idea comes from some very narrow readings of a couple of memos in recent years, and isn't really borne out by the general attitude of the Japanese government at the time. The Japanese populace would only accept defeat if they had to surrender unconditionally, and a surrender of that type helped shut down any future aspirations of militarism by the leftover hardliners.
Macarthur "opposed" nukes mostly because they used them without checking with him first. He was well in favor of using them in Korea, or versus China to remove the Communists from power.
If you go back to the variants of Plan Orange, it generally assumes that blockade and bombing would be sufficient to win the war. So in that context, the mining of the inland waterways (cutting off food shipments from the farms to the cities), the bombing of cities with HE, fire, and eventually fission weapons were in accordance with our prewar plans from 40 years earlier. The invasion of Japan proper was an anomaly in war planning, based on the public wanting the war to be over quickly.
Days before Hiroshima, the Japanese cabinet, in a formal meeting, explicitly rejected what were the eventual surrender terms. So, the claim that they were willing to surrender on what the final terms were (Emperor keeps throne as figurehead, but otherwise complete surrender) do not hold up.
Note that between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US repeated its demands and Japan did not respond.
Ever after Nagasaki, the cabinet was divided. Perhaps they would have eventually agreed to terms without the Emperor's intervention, but we'll never know. There were many private feelers, but they did not have the backing of the cabinet and government, any more than did the people who wanted to continue fighting even after the Emperor's address to surrender.
TJ: ... that they be allowed to keep the Emperor as their ceremonial leader.
The Tenno was no mere ceremonial leader. It is not necessary for a ceremonial leader to announce that he is not a god, as we made Hirohito do in 1946.
It was Hirohito who broke the deadlock and ordered surrender on August 14th, in order to "save human civilization". According to him, it was the first time he'd been asked to express his will on the subject.
My father would have been among the Americans invading Japan. Now my wife is Japanese. Go figure.
They were willing to accept the loss of their territories off the island as well as the occupation of Japan by US forces and the dismantling of their military. They only had one condition, that they be allowed to keep the Emperor as their ceremonial leader.
Richard Frank explicitly addresses this point in his book. During the summer of 1945, the Japanese government attempted to negotiate through the Soviets. The Japanese ambassador in Moscow informed Tokyo that the best the Soviets could get for them was unconditional surrender, with the exception of keeping the Emperor. The Japanese government sent back a message stating that this was not acceptable. Truman apparently knew all this, because the last message was intercepted and decoded by American signals intelligence.
The bottom line is that Japan was not about to surrender prior to Hiroshima, at least not on terms remotely acceptable to the allies.
Perhaps it is true that Japan could have been induced to surrender some months earlier. The question is, "At what cost?" The allies had the bitter experience of World War One, after which they had punished Germany as a country, but had done nothing to punish the individuals who were believed responsible for the aggression. They had also done nothing to eliminate German militarism as a guiding philosophy. These failures were (with some justification) believed to be a cause of the second World War.
The allies were quite right to demand that all of their suffering at least bought a long-term peace with Japan. The war needed to continue until Japan was forced into that kind of surrender.
This entire discussion is absurd and always has been. Truman didnt have the benefit of hindsight, he had the responsibility for hundreds of thousands of US fighting men and the security of the United States to worry about. This pernicious lie that Japan was about to surrender has been debunked to death. The bigger lie is that blockade and bombing would have been any less horrific than the nukes. More people died in the Toyko fire bombing in a single day than were killed at Hiroshima. Starvation could have killed millions. That was the 'compasionate' answer? Lets also not forget that nukes didnt have the kneejerk reaction of horror that they do now. They were big bombs that ended the war in a day without the uncertainty of relying on the Japanese to decide if, when, and how they would accept surrender. History's biggest no-brainer.
Anyone who can believe that the Japanese were just flirting on the edge of surrender for months before Hiroshima has never studied the Battle for Okinawa. Anyone who understood the carnage of that battle, wilfully engaged upon by the Japanese, would conclude that - without the shock of a nuclear weapon - that the endgame of the Pacific War was going to be more horrific than anything seen before or since.
Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more than 50 million lives. From an article I wrote years ago:
We were going to gas the Japanese from the air like bugs (aiming at civilians in cities first) had the A-bomb not induced surrender. That decision was made on June 18, 1945.
First of all, let me say that I think that the use of indiscriminate firebombing and then the atomic weapons on Japanese cities did "marr" the U.S. victory in the Pacific. I think it let the Japanese think of themselves as the victims to a great extent, and morally it was retrorgrade. However, other than the part that racial animosity towards the Japanese was a factor in those decisions, I don't blame the Allies for doing it.
1. One needs only look at the level of casualties ) to see what the potential for civilian casualties would have been in an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Note: Probably most of the casualties in Okinawa and Saipan were self-inflicted or encouraged by a failure of the civilians to leave hiding places such as caves, cellars and tombs, leading to military acion among the Japanese civilian populations on Saipan and Okinawa. These two islands were the only two Japanese civilian populations of any size that the U.S. or Britain ever conquered in WW2. I don't know if the Russians overran any large Japanese colonial populations in Manchuria in the last couple weeks of the war, or what the response of those populations to the Russian advance might have been.
2. Japan had forfeited a lot of good will within the U.S., first by launching a surprise attack to start the war, second by their treatment of Allied POWs, third by their treatment of Chinese and Phillipine civilian populations. For example, I read that 1 million Phillipinos died in WW2. Thats an awful lot of people for a nation whose people were only involved in the combat for the first 5-6 months of the war really. The reason for the high casualty figures was a brutal Japanese counter-insurgency campaign after early 1942, and steps such the Japanese naval troops decision to not follow the army into the mountains of Luzon, and instead fight it out to the death in Manila.
3. The "cult of death" among Japanese soldiers. The fanatical devotion of Japanese soldiers to fight until death was a significant factor. The Allies had no evidence that this fanaticism was eroding. Indeed, the Japanese casualty rates at the major 1945 battles at Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Manila and their continued and ever-increasing use of kamikazes and other suicide vehicles demonstrated that if anything, the level of fanaticism in defeat was probably getting larger.
4. If the bombs had not been dropped, the rationale for keeping Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the other 5-6 cities that had been largely preserved to be targets of atomic attack (the Americans were prepared to use these cities as "guinea pigs" to see what the A-bomb could do) from being targeted by the conventional bombing campaign would have been removed. These cities would have most certainly all been conventionally attacked in July or early August of 1945, leading to great levels of casualties and destruction before even the historical Japanese surrender--much less any surrender that was delayed by the lack of the shock value of the historical atomic attacks.
5. Fear of U.S. causualties. The U.S. ground soldier casualty rate on Okinawa was about 35% of all the soldiers who went ashore. Extrapolating that figure to the 800,000 or so troops that were originally planned for use in invading just Kyushu, you would come away with 280,000 allied ground casualties, much less any air or naval losses.
6. Increased Japanese preparations for defense. In the case of Kyushu, the Japanese increased the divisions on Kyushu to twice the number expected in the original invasion planning. Quite likely, even if the invasion had gone forward, far more allied ground troops would have been necessary than the originally projected 800,000 I mentioned above. Then there was the prospect of conquering the other home islands.
Tom Holsinger:
There is an even more emphatic aspect to how bloody an invasion of Japan could have been, one that has received remarkably little public attention.
Barton Bernstein in "Understanding the Atomic Bomb and Japanese Surrender" Diplomatic History 19, Spring 1995, pointed out that US Chiefs of Staff were considering the use of atomic bombs as "tactical" weapons in the invasion of Kyushu, in addition to the sustained atomic bombing of cities.
Speculation: in this context, it might be that the potential of plutonium bombs for faster production, compared to the uranium weapon, was the reason that the success of the TRINITY test was so welcome. If it had been thought that one or two bombs would do, the uranium design would have sufficed.
Even if the Kyushu invasion had been called off due to intelligence on Japanese strength, there would have been immense pressure for seizing Shikoku, or at the very least several smaller islands of the Japanese archipelago.
Navy staff appear to have concluded that for prolonged "blockade and bombardment", close-in island bases were essential. Taking these might have been less bloody than Kyushu: perhaps "only" as bad as Okinawa. In other words, appalling carnage on both sides.
Even with no invasions at all, "blockade and bombardment" would have continued to take a toll on aircrew, submariners and sailors.
Plus continuing fighting in other theaters by US and Allied forces, and the plight of civilians and POW's under Japanse control.
In short, had Truman (or Roosevelt, had he lived) not used atomic bombs, he would have been lucky not be lynched, never mind impeached.
Revisionists have made much of Senator Byrnes' pondering, while heading the "Interim Committee", on the impact of atomic weapons on Soviet-American relations. I would reply that, aware he was slated for the Secretaryship of State, had not considered the implications he would have been unfit for that office.
John Farren,
The A-bombings ended the war just in time. The following would have occurred in late September had Japan not surrendered:
1) The British would have landed in Malaya and the Japanese would have started butchering all the Allied civilians they could catch everywhere they had ground forces. This would have killed scores of millions of people - possibly more than had died in all of World War Two to date. Check out Tenozan by George Feifer - look up the word "Teruachi" in the index for the reference to the Magic decrypt of the order from Imperial GHQ about this.
2) We were about to destroy the railroad bridges (and, I think, tunnels) essential for distributing food in much of Honshu given the collapse of water transportation due to Allied pressure mines. The US Navy's estimate is that this would have caused mass starvation within a month for somewhere between ten and forty million Japanese, and forced the end of the war within no more than another month. Only it wouldn't have given that the Japanese Army would have locked the Emperor up to prevent that per pre-arranged plans (and they almost did it anyway despite the A-bombings).
Even with the political leadership to end the war in October under the US Navy's scenario, millions of Japanese would have starved to death by November, and many milllions more Allied civilians would have been butchered by the Japanese Army.
Only there would have not been such Japanese leadership given the Japanese Army's pre-set plan. The war would have gone on and we would have invaded behind a cloud of poison gas to eliminate all resistance and/or the all the Japanese. And we would not have been much inclined to accept surrenders given the butchery of Allied civilians and POW's. "The only good Japs are dead ones."
It would have been unimaginably horrible.
Thank god for the atom bomb.
My father was executive officer of the 96th Division's reconnaissance company at the time. He had been a rifle platoon lieutenant in the 96th on Okinawa.
I've been "liveblogging" the events surrounding the first test and use of the atomic bomb ---well, timeshifted by 60 years--- on my weblog, 2020 Hindsight (Here's a category permalink to all of the bomb-related entries)
I've been doing this as an exploration (didn't have mind made up re: traditionalist/revisionist/ technocratic-momentumist reason for bomb drop at the outset)... but this evening, I've been having the hardest time composing the posts as Enola Gay nears her destination.
I read Frank's article aloud to my boyfriend, who called me, depressed, after reading an editorial by the authors of the new Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus. (Their position, near as I can tell, is the revisionist/critical one Frank describes). I said, let me read this thing to you which I had skimmed earlier. Knowing that there's more data out there, more meaningful data to support Truman's decision to use the bomb lifted my spirits. A bit. There's more to explain the "Yet another transmission from Japan that Stalin told Truman about, but the Americans already knew that" stuff that's mentioned often in a book on Potsdam by Mee (whose Revisionist perspective makes me wary, especially as I don't have something to counterbalance his obvious take on events).
I still have to go to that point where I have left the bomb bay door open. And describe what happens afterwards. It is hard, and I feel as though yes, I am studying war (not a favorite or natural subject), and the posts will be hard to compose still. But Frank has made it easier.
Anyway, the purpose of my Bomb Blog project isn't to take a single position, but to put the writer and the readers back to that point in time--as much as one obsessed person can do in 6 weeks' time. Come by for a visit.
From your bomb site:
"Blog like it’s 1945!"
Oooh, Susan... why does that make me think of an Andrews Sisters - Dorsey big-band orchestra arrangement of that Prince song? The horn section in my head -- make it stop! I can't take this much boogie-woogie this early in the day!
Seriously, I've only dipped my toe in and it's great stuff so far.
NNC has a post that looks at Hiroshima reminding us that war is about Choices Among Craziness, and adds some useful insights that mesh well with this discussion.
She also links (as several others did) to Paul Fussel's Thanks God for the Atom Bomb essay (Originally "Hiroshima: A Solider's View" in The New Republic, 1981, PDF format), which revolves around the difference in retrospective approach and attitude between those with front-line experience of the war as he had, and those without. Nice mesh with A.L.'s warnings about the danger of "professional experts".
Nortius,
Funny you should mention all that music, all that brass. (I swing dance, so I'm well familiar with the genre.) At one point, early on in the bomb-blog I was thinking of linking to the extant music/radio dramas of the era, as a way to get you In The Mood. But Dismuke.org and another one I can't think of off the top of my head don't do music from the 40s. Only earlier. Copyright expiration and all that. But there are links to radio shows for things like The Great Guildersleeve and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Heck, I can still do that. No wait, I still have many more posts to do.
Thanks for the compliment; glad you're liking it. :)
>>We were going to gas the Japanese from the air like bugs (aiming at civilians in cities first) had the A-bomb not induced surrender. That decision was made on June 18, 1945.
I'm very amused by arguments of the form, "If we hadn't done horrific and abominable thing A, we would have done the even more horrific and abominable thing B." Sort of like, "Stop me before I kill again."
Notions like "50 million Japanese would have died in the invasion" have two problems. One: The Germans resisted Soviet occupation a LOT. The Soviets were EXCEPTIONALLY brutal. The German casualties: 1.5 million civilians and maybe 3 million soldiers, tops. Two: The Japanese Islands were . . . islands. With no remaining capacity for manufacturing modern aircraft. Whose shipyards were being reduced to rubble. The only remaining threat posed by the Japanese government was to its own population as a result of starvation caused by blockade. Why was invasion so necessary?
Now, the "the war needed to end now to avoid mass Japanese starvation" argument might hold some weight with me except I'm quite sure NONE of those involved in making the decisions gave a DAMN about those civilians. Which is really the problem with terrorists of all sorts.
While we are pondering these why's and what if's, think about this one...
Is Japan better off today having been occupied than had a conditional surrender been negotiated?
And T.J., the end of WW2 was fought in the context of total war. I know this is a subtlety but try to consider it in your analysis. It's interesting though seeing moral equivalence coming from the right.
>>Is Japan better off today having been occupied than had a conditional surrender been negotiated?
Maybe the SURVIVORS were better off. Those who got incinerated weren't. When Japanese citizens are polled about how well their life is going, the Hiroshima victims and their non-existent descendants don't get to vote.
>>And T.J., the end of WW2 was fought in the context of total war.
So the Rape of East Prussia was excuseable because it was "fought in the context of total war?" How about Japanese torture of PoWs? Are you willing to cut the enemy the same slack as you are the USG on this one?
>>It's interesting though seeing moral equivalence coming from the right.
I assume by "moral equivalence" you mean the notion that what's wrong for our enemies is wrong for us as well? Note that without this principle, we have no ethical basis to crititize our opposition other than "they oppose us." We lose the right to whine about Bin Laden, Stalin, Hitler, etc. except from the standpoint of "It should have been US killing all those people and taking their stuff."
This is not true because the Emperor of Japan was about to surrender because they knew after being repulsed that they would lose the war and did not want any further casualties and was ignored by either the President of the U.S. or the General in charge of both atomic bombings. This is the thruth released after the death of the last member of power in these injustifiable acts. Japan was about to surrender without the a-bombs being dropped, except you Americans went and blew off every touch of logic pre-bombings and say it is justified when it is not, if the a-bombs were dropped in N.Y.C. then Japan would own up to the truth that it was not justifiable to kill citizens who wanted to surrender and have been attempting but it you cowards and this is one thing i do not want to ever happen again but we all know it will repeat itself in the future (and it may be against the Americans what with the number of countries opposed to America at one point or another and WHEN YOU LEARN YOUR LESSON IT WILL BE TOO LATE TOO RECALL WHY IT HAPPENED).
Error: it (was) you cowards (insert in 13th line)