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It was 1945, the Italians had surrendered, the Germans had surrendered, Japan had been under heavy under attack with conventional bombs (leaving tens of thousan
by batista 15y ago
It was 1945, the Italians had surrendered, the Germans had surrendered, Japan had been under heavy under attack with conventional bombs (leaving tens of thousands dead and most of their cities destroyed). USSR was also there (had freed Manchuria). Besides the official US line, held for political reasons, most countries in the world believe this was the case, i.e. the US was just itching to test their new weapons in a war setting.
"In his 1965 study, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (pp. 107, 108), historian Gar Alperovitz writes:
(...) In mid-April [1945] the [US] Joint Intelligence Committee reported that Japanese leaders were looking for a way to modify the surrender terms to end the war. The State Department was convinced the Emperor was actively seeking a way to stop the fighting."
I've read similar arguments and evidence in my language books, but here's some more from a quick search on the web (the source seems dubious in general, but the specific parts legit):
"Months before the end of the war, Japan's leaders recognized that defeat was inevitable. In April 1945 a new government headed by Kantaro Suzuki took office with the mission of ending the war. When Germany capitulated in early May, the Japanese understood that the British and Americans would now direct the full fury of their awesome military power exclusively against them."
and:
"It was only after the war that the American public learned about Japan's efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan, for example, was obliged by wartime censorship to withhold for seven months one of the most important stories of the war.
In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor."
- kevinh 15y agoWith all due respect, most of the arguments that you're proposing here are the result of historians rife with accusations of revisionist history - Alperovitz especially. The Japanese did express a desire for peace before the bombs were dropped, yes, but a desire for peace is not nearly the same as an unconditional surrender. At this point, the context of this war should be noted - it occurred, in part, because of the manner in which World War I ended, an armistice (however imbalanced in its terms), which was certainly a factor in the outbreak of World War II. It's understandable that the United States wished to avoid a similar situation with Japan. Is this justification for dropping two atomic bombs on a hostile nation? I don't know; I wasn't there and I definitely don't know all the details. However, it certainly isn't as one-sided as you present it.
- delackner 15y agoWhat? The unbalanced armistice was a big cause of world war 2. If anything it serves as a lesson that accepting the conditional cessation of hostilities would be, in the long run, a decent exit option.
- batista 15y agoWith all due respect, most of the arguments that you're proposing here are the result of historians rife with accusations of revisionist history - Alperovitz especially. Sure, but you can find similar information in many historical works, and most of it refers to actual evidence and sources of the era (correspondence, intelligence reports, etc). It's also only natural to have someone saying something unfavorable for a country's foreign policy actions to be attacked, in academia and elsewhere. Chomsky also gets that a lot, but what he says reflects exactly what third party countries think of us actions. The Japanese did express a desire for peace before the bombs were dropped, yes, but a desire for peace is not nearly the same as an unconditional surrender And why would any nation should accept an "unconditional surrender"? A conditional surrender would do just fine, if your goal is to end the war. Especially, when the conditional parts were quite trivial (the emperor and such). The "unconditional surrender" essentially meant the right to use Japan as an USA base for the next decades. It wasn't even about correcting the Japanese war atrocities, as Japanese were never made to apologize (and pay) for, say, their Manchurian massacres. Plus, it was exactly the "imbalances" of the armistice that led to World War II. An unconditional surrender, as a even greater imbalance, would have made it even worse.