7 ms·

Why did Japan surrender?

28 points by yarapavan 15y ago

ck2 15y ago
If true, it makes the fact of not one but two large cities vaporized and thousands of civilians including many, many children made to slowly die in agony from radiation poisoning even more vile of an act, no?
- jessriedel 15y ago
  The only thing that might change the morality of the bombing is if Truman's objective was actually to intimidate the Soviets (as was suggested but never convincingly argued in the article) rather than end the war (as is commonly assumed). Simply changing the reason why Japan surrendered shouldn't much change the morality of Truman's decision, since you're holding fixed what Truman believed. Analogously, most people think it's moral for a SWAT team to shoot and kill a hostage taker. The fact that the hostage taker was actually going to release the hostage anyway (unbeknownst to the SWAT team) if he wasn't shot doesn't really change the morality of the shooting. But really, 99% of the morality is decided by whether you think strategic bombing can ever be acceptable (either because you are a pure consequentialist, or because you subscribe to the Doctrine of Double Effect and accept that the bomb's actual target was the industrial base of the Japanese cities rather than their citizens). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    99% of the morality is decided by whether you think strategic bombing can ever be acceptable Perhaps this is why the bombings are so divisive even to this day- that dividing line is really pure opinion, and you know what they say about opinions...
  - ck2 15y ago
    Except one important fact - there was a large group of scientists who begged the US government to drop the bomb offshore Japan instead to demonstrate it's power. There's even a letter to prove this. President decided to ignore that and drop it on civilians first anyway. It's just military bloodlust. Remember half the US was practically foaming at the mouth to kill any Japanese at that point (we even had concentration camps for Japanese-Americans) so the mentality was there would be no repercussions, certainly no-one vocal enough to protest the morality.
- hasenj 15y ago
  Was it somehow "not so vile" before?
  - emil0r 15y ago
    You reap what you sow.
    - cema 15y ago
      Well, that seals it for the Japanese. The question is, what about the Americans. Still controversial, after more than six decades. And I think will stay controversial for quite a while.
      - emil0r 15y ago
        What about them? They were in a war and rightly more concerned about the lives of their own soldiers over those who wrongly attacked them, were fanatical in their defenses and were looking to drag the war on as long as possible for as favourable terms as possible in a cease-fire. Had the USA gone down the route of a land invasion it probably would've dragged on for several more months, possibly stretching into years. In the end you would've ended up with a peace treaty with the same war-mongering people in charge as before. Not a recipe for success.
        dicemoose 15y ago
        "In the end you would've ended up with a peace treaty with the same war-mongering people in charge as before." The Allies conditions for surrender by the Axis powers were for an unconditional surrender. All the Axis powers surrendered unconditionally regardless of whether they took an A-bomb or not.
- njharman 15y ago
  Those cities didn't get vaporized. Relatively small sections around impact did. As the article pointed out the allies had been fire bombing cites for awhile. Which does as much or more death and destruction. We should be agonizing over slaughtering civies to compel our enemies to surrender, A bombs or not.
jerrya 15y ago
That was a very interesting read, thank you yarapavan. (If anyone else gets hit with a registration page, the print article link will let you read the whole thing.)
- plaes 15y ago
  Ah, cool to know. I used bugmenot.com, though ;)
ajpatel 15y ago
Oh my...I had no idea! Fascinating...but yeah, you're right...it'll never catch on. Just cool to know something that only the relative minority of people will ever know...
huhtenberg 15y ago
Here's an interesting if only tangentially related bit of information. Every year on Hiroshima bombing anniversary Japanese activists (of some faction) hold a protest next to an embassy. This includes anger tantrums, shouting, throwing empty bottles into the wall and some such. Here's the fun part. The embassy is Russian. Apparently the logic behind their anger is that it was Soviet Union who caused the bombings by silently agreeing to it when they had a chance to stop them. Americans however did nothing wrong, they merely showed Japanese how caught up in the war they were and helped them to see the light. This is clearly not a widely shared opinion, but it just goes on to show how really contrived the subjective part of the issue is.
- dicemoose 15y ago
  Actually, the demonstrations are usually held by right wing Japanese organizations on August 9th, the day of the bombing of Nagasaki. This was also the day that the Soviet Union broke the neutrality pact with Imperialist Japan and invaded Manchuria and other parts of the Japanese Empire. The protests are usually against this invasion and consist of calls to get the Northern Territories of Japan returned. Also, there are angry tantrums and shouting, but there are no throwing of empty bottles at the walls of the embassy because the riot police do quite an impressive job not letting any of the protestors through. It's a bit of a charade and an annoyance when you're trying to conduct business in the area, but the reality is different from the story you're sharing.
  - huhtenberg 15y ago
    It is a charade, and you are right about Nagasaki/Hiroshima mixup on my part. The bottle throwing I witnessed myself though it was in mid-80s, and it was a part of the same charade. Police let that happen, but things generally remained under control. People who worked in the embassy not long ago said the same show was still being put on, but finer details I don't know. The Soviet Union inaction with the bombings angle -- this also comes from the embassy people and I have no reason not to believe them. Not that it means it was/is a central part of these protests.
- nandemo 15y ago
jessriedel 15y ago
This is a plausible alternative theory, but it seems this is a case where the media gives too much attention to non-mainstream views in Academia. Is there any claim that the consensus among historians has shifted? Also, I find it hard to believe that there aren't some personal accounts or primary sources that could more or less decide the issue.
- nhebb 15y ago
  I read the article wondering the same thing. It didn't spell out whether the historian had formed his opinions based on personal accounts and comments, or whether he accumulated evidence to support a theory.
sliverstorm 15y ago
Two thoughts: 1) Why do we continue playing the blame game with something that happened 65 years ago? I for one, no matter how bad I feel about what happened then, am not going to apologize. Seeing as my parents had not yet been born, I don't think I'm especially responsible, and I think it's pretty much the same across the board. 2) What is with this postulating about how "maybe nuclear weapons are not as good of a deterrent as we thought"!? They were certainly a good deterrent for... I don't know... the entire Cold War!? It doesn't really matter if they deliver the destruction we fear. As a deterrent, the only thing that matters is how much we fear them, which we obviously do! (Just look at the folks wringing their hands over Fukushima) P.S. As I understand it, modern nuclear warheads make Little Boy and Fat Man look like toys. The US had a bomb of 25 megatons in 1961. Little Boy was 15 kilotons. May be wise to consider this when claiming nuclear weapons are no more consequential than some firebombing- leaving aside the part where one can be delivered from a submarine hundreds of miles away, and the other requires an entire squadron of bombers to do a flyover.
- dialtone 15y ago
  It's not a factual blame issue. Are then only those that dropped the bomb responsible? It's a mentality problem, people feel guilty because they don't think anything changed in their society and feel powerless and afraid that something like that could happen again, which is also why they keep writing about it, to keep awareness high and try to change society. And with this I'm not saying that you should feel responsible instead. I'm simply saying that dismissing this by saying "My parents weren't around 60 years ago" without including an analysis of the context and environment is a pretty weak argument. For example, would you have made the same decision in the same circumstance in 1945?
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    For example, would you have made the same decision in the same circumstance in 1945? I have absolutely no way of knowing. Not in the least because I don't know what I would have known, and that is often my issue with this sort of hindsight-criticism. Besides the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont aspect of these types of huge decisions (I'm quite sure Truman would have received plenty of criticism if he decided NOT to drop the bomb), they often assume- this one somewhat included- perfect knowledge. Sure, the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria. Did the President know that? Sure, Japan was secretly hoping to use the USSR as leverage in negotiations with the USA. Did Truman know THAT? It goes on. I suppose perhaps I do dismiss it a little too quickly, but I wish more revisionist criticism would focus a little less on what is right from the grand, 20/20 all-knowing-birds-eye-view and a little more on individual knowledge and perspective.
Mz 15y ago
But Hasegawa and other historians have shown that Japan’s leaders were in fact quite savvy, well aware of their difficult position, and holding out for strategic reasons. Their concern was not so much whether to end the conflict, but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war crimes trials, and preserving the imperial system. The Japanese could still inflict heavy casualties on any invader, and they hoped to convince the Soviet Union, still neutral in the Asian theater, to mediate a settlement with the Americans. Stalin, they calculated, might negotiate more favorable terms in exchange for territory in Asia. It was a long shot, but it made strategic sense. This piece sounds very plausible to me and helps make this new theory sound fairly solid as far as the ultimate conclusion that Russia's declaration of war was the final straw. The article really doesn't convince me that the nuclear bombs played no role. It indicates that after the first one was dropped, Japan sent a message to their ambassador in Moscow asking him to press for a reply from the Russians. The article says: The bombing added a “sense of urgency,” Hasegawa says, but the plan remained the same. So there was concern, there was a reaction, but apparently not what we have been historically taught that the bombs simply caused the Japanese to cave in horror and surrender unconditionally. No, they opted to surrender to the US in preference to a Russian invasion as the lesser evil. It sounds like a savvy decision making process when faced with sucky options.
1010011010 15y ago
Years ago, a cab driver in Japan told me that MacArthur was a hero to the Japanese because he saved them from Russia.
majmun 15y ago
TL; DR; ?
pella 15y ago
Battles of Khalkhin Gol ( 1939 ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Aftermath http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Afterma... ---##--- " Historians rethink key Soviet role in Japan defeat (google.com) " http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608923 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608923 http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=11402184 http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=11402184 The impact of the lightning Soviet advance comes through in the words of Japan's wartime prime minister, Kantaro Suzuki, urging his cabinet to surrender. He is quoted in Hasegawa's book as saying, "If we miss (the chance) today, the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea and Sakhalin, but also Hokkaido. We must end the war while we can deal with the United States." V-J Day, the day Japan ceased fighting, came on Aug. 15 (Aug. 14 in the U.S.), and Japan's formal surrender followed on Sept. 2. Dominic Lieven, a professor of Russian government at the London School of Economics, said anti-Soviet sentiment in the West tended to minimize Soviet military achievements. Also, "very few Anglo-Americans saw the Soviet offensive in the Far East with their own eyes, and Soviet archives were not open to Western historians subsequently," he said. More surprising, even in Russia the campaign was largely ignored. Although the scale of the Soviet victory was unprecedented, 12,000 dead against Japan hardly compared with the life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, in which 27 million Soviets died. "The importance of the operation was huge," said retired Gen. Makhmut Gareyev, president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences, who took part in the 1945 campaign. "By entering the war with militarist Japan ... the Soviet Union precipitated the end of World War II." ''

28 points by yarapavan 15y ago

ck2 15y ago

If true, it makes the fact of not one but two large cities vaporized and thousands of civilians including many, many children made to slowly die in agony from radiation poisoning even more vile of an act, no?

jessriedel 15y ago
The only thing that might change the morality of the bombing is if Truman's objective was actually to intimidate the Soviets (as was suggested but never convincingly argued in the article) rather than end the war (as is commonly assumed). Simply changing the reason why Japan surrendered shouldn't much change the morality of Truman's decision, since you're holding fixed what Truman believed. Analogously, most people think it's moral for a SWAT team to shoot and kill a hostage taker. The fact that the hostage taker was actually going to release the hostage anyway (unbeknownst to the SWAT team) if he wasn't shot doesn't really change the morality of the shooting. But really, 99% of the morality is decided by whether you think strategic bombing can ever be acceptable (either because you are a pure consequentialist, or because you subscribe to the Doctrine of Double Effect and accept that the bomb's actual target was the industrial base of the Japanese cities rather than their citizens). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  99% of the morality is decided by whether you think strategic bombing can ever be acceptable Perhaps this is why the bombings are so divisive even to this day- that dividing line is really pure opinion, and you know what they say about opinions...
- ck2 15y ago
  Except one important fact - there was a large group of scientists who begged the US government to drop the bomb offshore Japan instead to demonstrate it's power. There's even a letter to prove this. President decided to ignore that and drop it on civilians first anyway. It's just military bloodlust. Remember half the US was practically foaming at the mouth to kill any Japanese at that point (we even had concentration camps for Japanese-Americans) so the mentality was there would be no repercussions, certainly no-one vocal enough to protest the morality.
hasenj 15y ago
Was it somehow "not so vile" before?
- emil0r 15y ago
  You reap what you sow.
  - cema 15y ago
    Well, that seals it for the Japanese. The question is, what about the Americans. Still controversial, after more than six decades. And I think will stay controversial for quite a while.
    - emil0r 15y ago
      What about them? They were in a war and rightly more concerned about the lives of their own soldiers over those who wrongly attacked them, were fanatical in their defenses and were looking to drag the war on as long as possible for as favourable terms as possible in a cease-fire. Had the USA gone down the route of a land invasion it probably would've dragged on for several more months, possibly stretching into years. In the end you would've ended up with a peace treaty with the same war-mongering people in charge as before. Not a recipe for success.
      - dicemoose 15y ago
        "In the end you would've ended up with a peace treaty with the same war-mongering people in charge as before." The Allies conditions for surrender by the Axis powers were for an unconditional surrender. All the Axis powers surrendered unconditionally regardless of whether they took an A-bomb or not.
njharman 15y ago
Those cities didn't get vaporized. Relatively small sections around impact did. As the article pointed out the allies had been fire bombing cites for awhile. Which does as much or more death and destruction. We should be agonizing over slaughtering civies to compel our enemies to surrender, A bombs or not.

jerrya 15y ago

That was a very interesting read, thank you yarapavan. (If anyone else gets hit with a registration page, the print article link will let you read the whole thing.)

plaes 15y ago
Ah, cool to know. I used bugmenot.com, though ;)

ajpatel 15y ago

Oh my...I had no idea! Fascinating...but yeah, you're right...it'll never catch on. Just cool to know something that only the relative minority of people will ever know...

huhtenberg 15y ago

Here's an interesting if only tangentially related bit of information. Every year on Hiroshima bombing anniversary Japanese activists (of some faction) hold a protest next to an embassy. This includes anger tantrums, shouting, throwing empty bottles into the wall and some such. Here's the fun part. The embassy is Russian. Apparently the logic behind their anger is that it was Soviet Union who caused the bombings by silently agreeing to it when they had a chance to stop them. Americans however did nothing wrong, they merely showed Japanese how caught up in the war they were and helped them to see the light. This is clearly not a widely shared opinion, but it just goes on to show how really contrived the subjective part of the issue is.

dicemoose 15y ago
Actually, the demonstrations are usually held by right wing Japanese organizations on August 9th, the day of the bombing of Nagasaki. This was also the day that the Soviet Union broke the neutrality pact with Imperialist Japan and invaded Manchuria and other parts of the Japanese Empire. The protests are usually against this invasion and consist of calls to get the Northern Territories of Japan returned. Also, there are angry tantrums and shouting, but there are no throwing of empty bottles at the walls of the embassy because the riot police do quite an impressive job not letting any of the protestors through. It's a bit of a charade and an annoyance when you're trying to conduct business in the area, but the reality is different from the story you're sharing.
- huhtenberg 15y ago
  It is a charade, and you are right about Nagasaki/Hiroshima mixup on my part. The bottle throwing I witnessed myself though it was in mid-80s, and it was a part of the same charade. Police let that happen, but things generally remained under control. People who worked in the embassy not long ago said the same show was still being put on, but finer details I don't know. The Soviet Union inaction with the bombings angle -- this also comes from the embassy people and I have no reason not to believe them. Not that it means it was/is a central part of these protests.
nandemo 15y ago

jessriedel 15y ago

This is a plausible alternative theory, but it seems this is a case where the media gives too much attention to non-mainstream views in Academia. Is there any claim that the consensus among historians has shifted? Also, I find it hard to believe that there aren't some personal accounts or primary sources that could more or less decide the issue.

nhebb 15y ago
I read the article wondering the same thing. It didn't spell out whether the historian had formed his opinions based on personal accounts and comments, or whether he accumulated evidence to support a theory.

sliverstorm 15y ago

Two thoughts: 1) Why do we continue playing the blame game with something that happened 65 years ago? I for one, no matter how bad I feel about what happened then, am not going to apologize. Seeing as my parents had not yet been born, I don't think I'm especially responsible, and I think it's pretty much the same across the board. 2) What is with this postulating about how "maybe nuclear weapons are not as good of a deterrent as we thought"!? They were certainly a good deterrent for... I don't know... the entire Cold War!? It doesn't really matter if they deliver the destruction we fear. As a deterrent, the only thing that matters is how much we fear them, which we obviously do! (Just look at the folks wringing their hands over Fukushima) P.S. As I understand it, modern nuclear warheads make Little Boy and Fat Man look like toys. The US had a bomb of 25 megatons in 1961. Little Boy was 15 kilotons. May be wise to consider this when claiming nuclear weapons are no more consequential than some firebombing- leaving aside the part where one can be delivered from a submarine hundreds of miles away, and the other requires an entire squadron of bombers to do a flyover.

dialtone 15y ago
It's not a factual blame issue. Are then only those that dropped the bomb responsible? It's a mentality problem, people feel guilty because they don't think anything changed in their society and feel powerless and afraid that something like that could happen again, which is also why they keep writing about it, to keep awareness high and try to change society. And with this I'm not saying that you should feel responsible instead. I'm simply saying that dismissing this by saying "My parents weren't around 60 years ago" without including an analysis of the context and environment is a pretty weak argument. For example, would you have made the same decision in the same circumstance in 1945?
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  For example, would you have made the same decision in the same circumstance in 1945? I have absolutely no way of knowing. Not in the least because I don't know what I would have known, and that is often my issue with this sort of hindsight-criticism. Besides the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont aspect of these types of huge decisions (I'm quite sure Truman would have received plenty of criticism if he decided NOT to drop the bomb), they often assume- this one somewhat included- perfect knowledge. Sure, the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria. Did the President know that? Sure, Japan was secretly hoping to use the USSR as leverage in negotiations with the USA. Did Truman know THAT? It goes on. I suppose perhaps I do dismiss it a little too quickly, but I wish more revisionist criticism would focus a little less on what is right from the grand, 20/20 all-knowing-birds-eye-view and a little more on individual knowledge and perspective.

Mz 15y ago

But Hasegawa and other historians have shown that Japan’s leaders were in fact quite savvy, well aware of their difficult position, and holding out for strategic reasons. Their concern was not so much whether to end the conflict, but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war crimes trials, and preserving the imperial system. The Japanese could still inflict heavy casualties on any invader, and they hoped to convince the Soviet Union, still neutral in the Asian theater, to mediate a settlement with the Americans. Stalin, they calculated, might negotiate more favorable terms in exchange for territory in Asia. It was a long shot, but it made strategic sense. This piece sounds very plausible to me and helps make this new theory sound fairly solid as far as the ultimate conclusion that Russia's declaration of war was the final straw. The article really doesn't convince me that the nuclear bombs played no role. It indicates that after the first one was dropped, Japan sent a message to their ambassador in Moscow asking him to press for a reply from the Russians. The article says: The bombing added a “sense of urgency,” Hasegawa says, but the plan remained the same. So there was concern, there was a reaction, but apparently not what we have been historically taught that the bombs simply caused the Japanese to cave in horror and surrender unconditionally. No, they opted to surrender to the US in preference to a Russian invasion as the lesser evil. It sounds like a savvy decision making process when faced with sucky options.

1010011010 15y ago

Years ago, a cab driver in Japan told me that MacArthur was a hero to the Japanese because he saved them from Russia.

majmun 15y ago

TL; DR; ?

pella 15y ago

Battles of Khalkhin Gol ( 1939 ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Aftermath http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Afterma... ---##--- " Historians rethink key Soviet role in Japan defeat (google.com) " http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608923 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608923 http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=11402184 http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=11402184 The impact of the lightning Soviet advance comes through in the words of Japan's wartime prime minister, Kantaro Suzuki, urging his cabinet to surrender. He is quoted in Hasegawa's book as saying, "If we miss (the chance) today, the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea and Sakhalin, but also Hokkaido. We must end the war while we can deal with the United States." V-J Day, the day Japan ceased fighting, came on Aug. 15 (Aug. 14 in the U.S.), and Japan's formal surrender followed on Sept. 2. Dominic Lieven, a professor of Russian government at the London School of Economics, said anti-Soviet sentiment in the West tended to minimize Soviet military achievements. Also, "very few Anglo-Americans saw the Soviet offensive in the Far East with their own eyes, and Soviet archives were not open to Western historians subsequently," he said. More surprising, even in Russia the campaign was largely ignored. Although the scale of the Soviet victory was unprecedented, 12,000 dead against Japan hardly compared with the life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, in which 27 million Soviets died. "The importance of the operation was huge," said retired Gen. Makhmut Gareyev, president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences, who took part in the 1945 campaign. "By entering the war with militarist Japan ... the Soviet Union precipitated the end of World War II." ''