These Colours Don
Maverick said:
This is apparently a fallacy that some US generals thought up (although I'm no expert in military history, I did some reseach to write a proper commentary about this song) to justify a nuclear strike.
Japan was in fact close to surrender and was considering various options to do it without 'losing face'. The bombing of those two cities gave them a good 'excuse' to drop their weapons while retaining their honour.
But even if a ground assault on Japan could have been a slaughter, what was the purpose of dropping two bombs? Don't you think that one would have been more than enough to end the war in the Pacific?
Maverick, there are (based on my education in history, which has included courses on modern Japan) two schools of thoughts regarding the situation in 1945 in Japan. The first, as you said, is that the Japanese civil gov't was secretly reaching out for peace feelers. It's undeniable fact. Togo Shigenori, the foreign minister, was through the Swiss, attempting to open peace negotiations. However, Togo & company were only one half of the Japanese cabinet.
What we fail to realize is that Japanese gov't is not very equivalent to Western government, or was not in 1937-45. The Japanese cabinet, which made all executive decisions for the Japanese gov't, ran by consensus agreement, not majority. That is to say, that the Japanese government could not begin a course of action without all cabinet members agreeing to this course - and they
could not alter a course of action currently being undertaken without the agreement of all cabinet members.
Now. We run into a Western concept at this point - the idea that the military works for the gov't, which then work for the people. (I am not accusing anyone here of this preconception, I am recalling this from the several discussion sessions I participated in within my classroom environment.) In the Japanese cabinet, civilian and military leaders were equals. In fact, at the time of surrender, an Admiral was Prime Minister.
The Navy was far more willing to accept a surrender than the Army - the Army insisted that they be given the chance to repel the Americans on Japanese soil. And then the Allies made the Potsdam Declaration - part of which included the jailing and possible trial of Japanese leaders. Many members of the Japanese government (including the military members of cabinet) interpreted this declaration to include the Emperor as a possible war criminal. Prime Minister Suzuki rejected the demands out of hand, as he was a Navy man.
It was at this point that the President of the United States had to make a choice - drop the nuke, or invade Japan.
Operation Downfall was the overarching plan for the invasion of the Japanese home islands, and it was planned before the invasion of Okinawa - in fact, the invasion of Okinawa was imperative to the success of Downfall. The violent and suicidal defense of Okinawa only reaffirmed the military's base assumption that "operations...will be opposed not only by the available organized military forces of the Empire, but also by a fanatically hostile population."
April, 1945 estimates of the casualties placed the Operation Downfall casualties at approximately 1.2 million Allies, with untold numbers of millions of Japanese civilians killed. Perhaps this is the telltale, as to how many casualties the Americans were expecting: early in 1945 the government had 500,000 Purple Heart medals manufactured to hand out to wounded soldiers in the two-pronged invasion.
As for the point, why drop two bombs? You can ask General of the Army George Marshall, who encouraged dropping two nuclear devices on Japan. He did not believe the nuking would entice the Japanese to surrender (remember, the Emperor had to directly step in with the cabinet and urge them to accept an armistice), and wanted to try both types of weapons for determining which would be more useful as tactical support weapons during the invasion.
Thus, the second school of thought, is that the Japanese were *not* preparing to surrender. While even a majority of the populace may have considered surrender a viable option by August of 1945, those in power were most certainly not ready to give in, especially the high-ranking army officers deeply seeded with the code of
bushido. The military could easily keep the civilian government from acting on peace feelers rather easily, and the military police system set up inside of Japan made several hundred arrests on "belief of wish to surrender" during July alone.
The idea of dropping the bomb to end the war, in alternative to an invasion, is pretty much a fallacy. At least, that's not what the generals wanted - it is what Truman wanted. Marshall and co. were against dropping a nuke until in support of an invasion, for fear that possible detonation sites would be suddenly inhabited by American, British, and Chinese prisoners - basically to keep their trump card up their sleeve for as long as humanly possible. Truman made the call to preliminarily drop the nuclear devices, and he was urged by Marshall to test both types - preferrably on the same night, but Truman again decided to delay.
What actually happened, is that the generals jumped on the bandwagon afterwards, saying they wanted to give the Japanese a chance to surrender too, when it was just one man, or a handful of men (I personally believe it was FDR's lasting influence here that made Truman make the choice he did), who chose that course of action. Were the Japanese getting ready to surrender? I highly doubt it would have been possible, with the generals assuring the Emperor that they would inflict enough damage on the American landings to get a better peace treaty than "unconditional surrender", with the structure of the Japanese government and police, and indeed, with the general assumption that the Potsdam Declaration applied to the immortal and divine Emperor.
