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When I read these revisionist pieces, I often see the same phrase you quoted: "ready to surrender." If someone is "ready to surrender," what does that mean? Wel

When I read these revisionist pieces, I often see the same phrase you quoted: "ready to surrender." If someone is "ready to surrender," what does that mean? Well I'll tell you what it certainly doesn't mean: It doesn't mean that they've _actually_ surrendered. What a lot of revisionist writings gloss over is that yes, certain parts of the Japanese leadership were "ready to surrender." But it is well documented that some were only ready to surrender if conditions X and Y were met. Others were only ready to surrender with conditions Z and A. And of course others weren't ready to surrender at all. Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual. And so if this phrase, "ready to surrender," is taken alone (notwithstanding its distinguished source), then it is facile in that it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership, and the complex process which was necessary for the leadership to converge and make a firm, unified political decision.

soperj 13y ago
When they are actively trying to surrender, then they're probably "Ready to surrender". The US wouldn't negotiate because the bombs were on the way. What were the conditions? Because if they were "you help us rebuild" or "and we get a grill-cheese sandwich" then really they're not much. Plenty of peace treaties have taken place with conditions.
- Scramblejams 13y ago
  "Negotiate?" The US had no appetite for negotiation at that point -- only unconditional surrender was acceptable. I won't do your research for you, but various factions within the Japanese leadership wanted to put lots of significant things on the table, like maintaining the seat of the emperor, the existing political structure, etc. All were showstoppers to the US.
  - soperj 13y ago
    Yes, that's what I wrote. They wouldn't negotiate because the bombs were on the way. It wasn't unconditional anyway, there were plenty of conditions in the potsdam declaration.
    - Scramblejams 13y ago
      You're badly misunderstanding the history. The Japanese didn't participate in Potsdam. The Allies wrote the declaration by themselves as an ultimatum and issued it to Japan, warning the Japanese of complete destruction if they didn't fully accept it. "Unconditional" doesn't mean "there are no terms." It means that the loser dictates no terms, while the victor dictates all the terms.
  - fancyketchup 13y ago
    > All were showstoppers to the US. But that isn't true. The seat of the emperor was maintained, at least nominally, so it clearly wasn't a showstopper. The US may have demanded unconditional surrender before the atomic bombings, but it accepted a conditional surrender after.
    - rat87 13y ago
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/2/newsid_3582000/3582545.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/2... 1945: Japan signs unconditional surrender > Japanese officials have signed the act of unconditional surrender, finally bringing to an end six years of world war. > Under the terms of the ceasefire, Japan has agreed to end all hostilities, release all prisoners of war, and comply with the terms of the Potsdam declaration, which confines its sovereignty to the four main islands which make up Japan. > Under the terms of the ceasefire, Japan has agreed to end all hostilities, release all prisoners of war, and comply with the terms of the Potsdam declaration, which confines its sovereignty to the four main islands which make up Japan. > It has also agreed to acknowledge the authority of the US supreme commander. Although Emperor Hirohito will be allowed to remain as a symbolic head of state. --- I'm pretty sure the surrender was unconditional and later the Allies announced that the Emperor would keep his position(probably mostly to help ease the occupation) --- > www.history.com/this-day-in-history/japan-accepts-potsdam-terms-agrees-to-unconditional-surrender At the behest of two Cabinet members, the emperor summoned and presided over a special meeting of the Council and implored them to consider accepting the terms of the Potsdam Conference, which meant unconditional surrender. "It seems obvious that the nation is no longer able to wage war, and its ability to defend its own shores is doubtful." The Council had been split over the surrender terms; half the members wanted assurances that the emperor would maintain his hereditary and traditional role in a postwar Japan before surrender could be considered. But in light of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, Nagasaki on August 9, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, as well as the emperor's own request that the Council "bear the unbearable," it was agreed: Japan would surrender. -- > www.history.com/this-day-in-history/japan-accepts-potsdam-terms-agrees-to-unconditional-surrender
      - fancyketchup 13y ago
celoyd 13y ago
Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual. But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians. (To the argument that it wasn’t possible to target the military apart from civilians: that’s exactly why nuclear weapons are so problematic.) it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership An alternate interpretation is to not take it alone, and to see it as deliberately summarizing the wide diversity of opinion which was already going through the complex process that you rightly point out. News of Nagasaki’s destruction interrupted a meeting by the Japanese Supreme War Council, not so much about whether to surrender as about how. I don’t think it’s facile at all to call this, in context, “ready to surrender”. The US did not know the details of the meeting, of course, but they chose to spend 70,000 human lives on an assumption with no particular justification, while under no special immediate military threat – at that point, Japan was relatively contained, and the fear was that if left alone it would reach out again in a matter of months or decades, not weeks. The threat was diplomatic: that Japan might surrender to the USSR. That seems worth presenting as something other than the rueful conduct of justified, proportional warfare as an absolute last resort. As an American, sometimes I look at other countries that haven’t come to terms with major war crimes – the Armenian Genocide, for example, or indeed Imperial Japan’s crimes in China – and I shake my head. Then I remember that the US has the A-bombs on our record, and we’ve made it almost 70 years now without admitting as a nation (meaning in standard textbooks, in mainstream entertainment, etc.) that these were, by any sensible definition, crimes against humanity of the highest gravity. There’s this objection people sometimes raise: that it’s easy to say these things if you weren’t there, if you weren’t under the pressures of command, knowing your nation’s people were dying by the day. That’s true. I don’t know what that was like. It’s easy for me to moralize from a distance. But that argument isn’t actually justifying the act of the A-bombings, merely moderating judgment on the people who did it. Saying they didn’t really know what they were doing is very different from it was a good idea.
- hga 13y ago
  "The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians." Extraordinarily efficient, one plane, one bomb, one city, but we'd already methodically bombed pretty much every other city (along with Kyoto for political reasons, the A-bomb targets and their alternates were reserved), with e.g. the firebombing of Tokyo killing a conservative 100,000.
hga 13y ago
You also have to factor in that long before then, the Japanese had developed a culture of political assassination, see for example the end of this section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto#1920s_and_1930s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto#1920s_and_1930.... That substantially raised the barrier to getting to the "ready to surrender" point of the group that was making the decisions. And that decision did not meet with universal acclaim, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_military_coup_d.27.C3.A9tat_.28August_12.E2.80.9315.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_mi...
SiVal 13y ago
Here's the opinion of the leader of the US military at the time Yes, later Leahy apparently said, "It is my opinion," not, "At the time we all believed" ["that the Japanese were defeated and ready to surrender...."] I'm willing to believe that some, maybe including Leahy, thought the US had only to stand back and wait for the inevitable surrender, with no ratcheting up of force necessary. But, at the same time, somebody [not including the Fleet Admiral?] was also preparing for a full boots-on-the-ground invasion of the Japanese mainland, which (going by the US death tolls of previous island invasions) would have sent thousands of Americans to their deaths. Unless that invasion plan was entirely fake--something nobody is suggesting--there were obviously plenty of people at the top who thought that the Japanese might not be ready to surrender. Suddenly a middle option appeared between just waiting and hoping and sending thousands of Americans to their deaths: drop atomic bombs. Even though an atom bomb would actually kill fewer people than the firebombings, it would represent an even greater threat of what could happen if they didn't surrender immediately. Maybe the Japanese were about to surrender. Maybe they would keep fighting and Americans would keep dying. Maybe the atom bombs would convince them to surrender. Or maybe not. Maybe nothing short of a full invasion would be required. Maybe even that wouldn't be enough to end it quickly, and the dying would continue for a very long time. The Japanese in many places had gone on fighting until they were dead without ever surrendering. In that context, with no benefit of hindsight, to say that the bomb was not dropped to win the war but just to intimidate the USSR is nonsense.
- cema 13y ago
  In that context, with no benefit of hindsight, to say that the bomb was not dropped to win the war but just to intimidate the USSR is nonsense. Not just nonsense, but also part of a propaganda war. I cannot read it otherwise (unless the comment had offered a more profound historical analysis, which it has not).
  - SiVal 13y ago
    I'm willing to give the HN commenter above the benefit of the doubt that he/she might just be parroting something picked up on campus, but I agree with you that this claim has been part of leftist propaganda for decades.
refurb 13y ago
I have to agree. Remember there were TWO bombs dropped. Japan didn't surrender after the 1st one. The only thing that matters is that Japan surrendered. That they were "thinking" about it or "close to it" is pretty much irrelevant.
- gruseom 13y ago
  Remember there were two bombs dropped. Japan didn't surrender after the 1st one. But they convened the council to discuss surrender before the second one. The timeline given by the article is: Hiroshima bombed Soviet declaration of war Surrender council convened Nagasaki bombed Surrender
  - Scramblejams 13y ago
    They should have discussed faster.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Agreed. The cherry-picking on this topic is extreme. One guy claims Lehey was the leader of the U.S. Military during WWII. He was not. He was the senior-serving military official, who worked as chief of staff to Roosevelt. You could call him an early CJCS, or you could just use his title: chief of staff. Marshall was probably the closest we had to a senior person actually running the war, as anybody with a modicum of WWII history can tell you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall The only reason to pump up Lehey is to add authority to the quote, which was made years later during a completely different political situation. When you see this kind of thing, it never bodes well for the argument. But you beat down one red herring and three more pop up. It's like talking to those 9-11 guys. They already know the answer. Just a matter of selectively arranging facts in a convincing narrative. The author gives it away towards the end "...There is real resistance to looking at the facts. But perhaps this should not be surprising...They fill an important psychic need." Well there you go. From the author's comments, and those on this board, I take it this is supposed to be some kind of argument between "patriotic" Americans and the facts (as told to us by the revisionists), instead of what it is: rewriting history to suit current fashion. I actually wish the revisionists well. Maybe they can get their way and we can go through 100 years or so of believing that the A-bomb was not the proximate cause of the end of WWII. Then a new fashion will take hold, and we can come back to believing what 95% of the people at the time it happened believed. The neat thing about this is that people get educated about history. Frankly, if history is your passion and you spend time on this and know your stuff, I could care less which theory you pick. These stories need to be remembered. Whenever this topic comes up I reminded of this quote: But perhaps George M. Elsey, a young naval intelligence officer assigned to the Truman White House, provided the best reply to revisionist historians and others who question the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Asked by David McCullough for his biography of the President (Truman, Simon & Schuster, 1992) about the decision, Elsey replied: "Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made. He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track. It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing." http://hnn.us/articles/44729.html http://hnn.us/articles/44729.html
- gruseom 13y ago

soperj 13y ago

When they are actively trying to surrender, then they're probably "Ready to surrender". The US wouldn't negotiate because the bombs were on the way. What were the conditions? Because if they were "you help us rebuild" or "and we get a grill-cheese sandwich" then really they're not much. Plenty of peace treaties have taken place with conditions.

Scramblejams 13y ago
"Negotiate?" The US had no appetite for negotiation at that point -- only unconditional surrender was acceptable. I won't do your research for you, but various factions within the Japanese leadership wanted to put lots of significant things on the table, like maintaining the seat of the emperor, the existing political structure, etc. All were showstoppers to the US.
- soperj 13y ago
  Yes, that's what I wrote. They wouldn't negotiate because the bombs were on the way. It wasn't unconditional anyway, there were plenty of conditions in the potsdam declaration.
  - Scramblejams 13y ago
    You're badly misunderstanding the history. The Japanese didn't participate in Potsdam. The Allies wrote the declaration by themselves as an ultimatum and issued it to Japan, warning the Japanese of complete destruction if they didn't fully accept it. "Unconditional" doesn't mean "there are no terms." It means that the loser dictates no terms, while the victor dictates all the terms.
- fancyketchup 13y ago
  > All were showstoppers to the US. But that isn't true. The seat of the emperor was maintained, at least nominally, so it clearly wasn't a showstopper. The US may have demanded unconditional surrender before the atomic bombings, but it accepted a conditional surrender after.
  - rat87 13y ago
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/2/newsid_3582000/3582545.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/2... 1945: Japan signs unconditional surrender > Japanese officials have signed the act of unconditional surrender, finally bringing to an end six years of world war. > Under the terms of the ceasefire, Japan has agreed to end all hostilities, release all prisoners of war, and comply with the terms of the Potsdam declaration, which confines its sovereignty to the four main islands which make up Japan. > Under the terms of the ceasefire, Japan has agreed to end all hostilities, release all prisoners of war, and comply with the terms of the Potsdam declaration, which confines its sovereignty to the four main islands which make up Japan. > It has also agreed to acknowledge the authority of the US supreme commander. Although Emperor Hirohito will be allowed to remain as a symbolic head of state. --- I'm pretty sure the surrender was unconditional and later the Allies announced that the Emperor would keep his position(probably mostly to help ease the occupation) --- > www.history.com/this-day-in-history/japan-accepts-potsdam-terms-agrees-to-unconditional-surrender At the behest of two Cabinet members, the emperor summoned and presided over a special meeting of the Council and implored them to consider accepting the terms of the Potsdam Conference, which meant unconditional surrender. "It seems obvious that the nation is no longer able to wage war, and its ability to defend its own shores is doubtful." The Council had been split over the surrender terms; half the members wanted assurances that the emperor would maintain his hereditary and traditional role in a postwar Japan before surrender could be considered. But in light of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, Nagasaki on August 9, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, as well as the emperor's own request that the Council "bear the unbearable," it was agreed: Japan would surrender. -- > www.history.com/this-day-in-history/japan-accepts-potsdam-terms-agrees-to-unconditional-surrender
    - fancyketchup 13y ago

celoyd 13y ago

Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual. But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians. (To the argument that it wasn’t possible to target the military apart from civilians: that’s exactly why nuclear weapons are so problematic.) it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership An alternate interpretation is to not take it alone, and to see it as deliberately summarizing the wide diversity of opinion which was already going through the complex process that you rightly point out. News of Nagasaki’s destruction interrupted a meeting by the Japanese Supreme War Council, not so much about whether to surrender as about how. I don’t think it’s facile at all to call this, in context, “ready to surrender”. The US did not know the details of the meeting, of course, but they chose to spend 70,000 human lives on an assumption with no particular justification, while under no special immediate military threat – at that point, Japan was relatively contained, and the fear was that if left alone it would reach out again in a matter of months or decades, not weeks. The threat was diplomatic: that Japan might surrender to the USSR. That seems worth presenting as something other than the rueful conduct of justified, proportional warfare as an absolute last resort. As an American, sometimes I look at other countries that haven’t come to terms with major war crimes – the Armenian Genocide, for example, or indeed Imperial Japan’s crimes in China – and I shake my head. Then I remember that the US has the A-bombs on our record, and we’ve made it almost 70 years now without admitting as a nation (meaning in standard textbooks, in mainstream entertainment, etc.) that these were, by any sensible definition, crimes against humanity of the highest gravity. There’s this objection people sometimes raise: that it’s easy to say these things if you weren’t there, if you weren’t under the pressures of command, knowing your nation’s people were dying by the day. That’s true. I don’t know what that was like. It’s easy for me to moralize from a distance. But that argument isn’t actually justifying the act of the A-bombings, merely moderating judgment on the people who did it. Saying they didn’t really know what they were doing is very different from it was a good idea.

hga 13y ago
"The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians." Extraordinarily efficient, one plane, one bomb, one city, but we'd already methodically bombed pretty much every other city (along with Kyoto for political reasons, the A-bomb targets and their alternates were reserved), with e.g. the firebombing of Tokyo killing a conservative 100,000.

hga 13y ago

You also have to factor in that long before then, the Japanese had developed a culture of political assassination, see for example the end of this section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto#1920s_and_1930s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto#1920s_and_1930.... That substantially raised the barrier to getting to the "ready to surrender" point of the group that was making the decisions. And that decision did not meet with universal acclaim, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_military_coup_d.27.C3.A9tat_.28August_12.E2.80.9315.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_mi...

SiVal 13y ago

Here's the opinion of the leader of the US military at the time Yes, later Leahy apparently said, "It is my opinion," not, "At the time we all believed" ["that the Japanese were defeated and ready to surrender...."] I'm willing to believe that some, maybe including Leahy, thought the US had only to stand back and wait for the inevitable surrender, with no ratcheting up of force necessary. But, at the same time, somebody [not including the Fleet Admiral?] was also preparing for a full boots-on-the-ground invasion of the Japanese mainland, which (going by the US death tolls of previous island invasions) would have sent thousands of Americans to their deaths. Unless that invasion plan was entirely fake--something nobody is suggesting--there were obviously plenty of people at the top who thought that the Japanese might not be ready to surrender. Suddenly a middle option appeared between just waiting and hoping and sending thousands of Americans to their deaths: drop atomic bombs. Even though an atom bomb would actually kill fewer people than the firebombings, it would represent an even greater threat of what could happen if they didn't surrender immediately. Maybe the Japanese were about to surrender. Maybe they would keep fighting and Americans would keep dying. Maybe the atom bombs would convince them to surrender. Or maybe not. Maybe nothing short of a full invasion would be required. Maybe even that wouldn't be enough to end it quickly, and the dying would continue for a very long time. The Japanese in many places had gone on fighting until they were dead without ever surrendering. In that context, with no benefit of hindsight, to say that the bomb was not dropped to win the war but just to intimidate the USSR is nonsense.

cema 13y ago
In that context, with no benefit of hindsight, to say that the bomb was not dropped to win the war but just to intimidate the USSR is nonsense. Not just nonsense, but also part of a propaganda war. I cannot read it otherwise (unless the comment had offered a more profound historical analysis, which it has not).
- SiVal 13y ago
  I'm willing to give the HN commenter above the benefit of the doubt that he/she might just be parroting something picked up on campus, but I agree with you that this claim has been part of leftist propaganda for decades.

refurb 13y ago

I have to agree. Remember there were TWO bombs dropped. Japan didn't surrender after the 1st one. The only thing that matters is that Japan surrendered. That they were "thinking" about it or "close to it" is pretty much irrelevant.

gruseom 13y ago
Remember there were two bombs dropped. Japan didn't surrender after the 1st one. But they convened the council to discuss surrender before the second one. The timeline given by the article is: Hiroshima bombed Soviet declaration of war Surrender council convened Nagasaki bombed Surrender
- Scramblejams 13y ago
  They should have discussed faster.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

Agreed. The cherry-picking on this topic is extreme. One guy claims Lehey was the leader of the U.S. Military during WWII. He was not. He was the senior-serving military official, who worked as chief of staff to Roosevelt. You could call him an early CJCS, or you could just use his title: chief of staff. Marshall was probably the closest we had to a senior person actually running the war, as anybody with a modicum of WWII history can tell you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall The only reason to pump up Lehey is to add authority to the quote, which was made years later during a completely different political situation. When you see this kind of thing, it never bodes well for the argument. But you beat down one red herring and three more pop up. It's like talking to those 9-11 guys. They already know the answer. Just a matter of selectively arranging facts in a convincing narrative. The author gives it away towards the end "...There is real resistance to looking at the facts. But perhaps this should not be surprising...They fill an important psychic need." Well there you go. From the author's comments, and those on this board, I take it this is supposed to be some kind of argument between "patriotic" Americans and the facts (as told to us by the revisionists), instead of what it is: rewriting history to suit current fashion. I actually wish the revisionists well. Maybe they can get their way and we can go through 100 years or so of believing that the A-bomb was not the proximate cause of the end of WWII. Then a new fashion will take hold, and we can come back to believing what 95% of the people at the time it happened believed. The neat thing about this is that people get educated about history. Frankly, if history is your passion and you spend time on this and know your stuff, I could care less which theory you pick. These stories need to be remembered. Whenever this topic comes up I reminded of this quote: But perhaps George M. Elsey, a young naval intelligence officer assigned to the Truman White House, provided the best reply to revisionist historians and others who question the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Asked by David McCullough for his biography of the President (Truman, Simon & Schuster, 1992) about the decision, Elsey replied: "Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made. He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track. It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing." http://hnn.us/articles/44729.html http://hnn.us/articles/44729.html

gruseom 13y ago