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An invasion of the Japanese main island was never the plan. We never planned to send our troops to occupy Tokyo.
If the bombs had not been dropped, the strategy was to continue the step by step island hopping that had been the basic US strategy all along.
Our troops would have slowly moved northward from Okinawa up the archipelago to Amami, using each new island as the next forward base. All the while, the conventional bombing would have continued, along with an ever-growing naval and air blockade.
It would have been very slow and very grinding on the Japanese, but not so much on the American forces.
Once Okinawa was taken, it was a given that Russia would enter the war from the north, and a war of attrition would have ensued. It would have been like a siege to a city- Japan would have been starved for oil, with all its heavy industry destroyed, a starving population, and ever-increasing fewer ways to resist by force of arms.
America was tired to the bone of war, but the Japanese were even tireder, and by August, winter is only a few months away. After a 4-month break, a re-provisioned and rested American military could have forced a capitulation by a partial invasion of Kumamoto Island with the same time, attacks coming from Russia on Saporo Island in the north.
At that point, an invasion would not need to be large and extensive to work. If one failed, it would have been very easy to pull our troops back out and remove them back to Okinawa, to wait for a better day to return. Japan would have been whip-sawed back and forth by the Russians and the Americans.
THAT was the plan. The war would have continued for about another year, but not at an enormous cost of American lives.
Remember that the Americans who built the bombs never were sure if they would work or not, or how well they would work if they did. The commanding generals sure knew that, and they had fully developed invasion plans that were, in fact, far less risky than betting it all on a couple of doubtful bombs.
But since the bombs did work, the Japanese essentially fell for a lie. The main thing the bombs accomplished was to impress the Emperor to give up his throne. By doing so, he lost his religious immortality, which in turn robbed his people of the will to protect him at all costs.
It would have been another year before we could have dropped any more A-bombs on them if their Emperor had chosen to still resist.
If he made that choice, we would have invaded in small bits after the bombs were dropped, following the plan of attrition. Any invasion would have been more a feint than a full invasion, just enough to keep the Japanese aware we were still fully promoting the war.
Once the bombs worked, another one or two would have been enough to prove to the Japanese we had the ability to keep them coming, so it was only a matter of time.
If we had agreed to a negotiated surrender instead of a complete surrender, taking Okinawa might have been enough on it's own to cause the Japanese to surrender in time.
Once the will to fight is gone, the war is lost, but losing the will to fight does not depend on massive slaughter alone. Most of it is psychological.
We would not have sent our troops in to be slaughtered again like they were in Normandy. But Normandy showed the Japanese our willingness, and the odds were all in our favor by 1945, while theirs were almost all spent.
We wanted it to end, but the Japanese people wanted it even more than we did. By 1945, they had been at war for almost 8 years. Allowing their Emperor to live was, for them, a good enough reason to finally give up.
Last edited by banjomike; 08-06-2018 at 08:09 PM..
Japan started it with Pearl Harbor, and we educated them on why that was not a wise move to make.
Revenge for Pearl Harbor has to be the weakest of all rationalizations for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By July 1945, Tokyo had already been firebombed with 100,000 civilian deaths. Pearl had been avenged hundreds of times over.
Revenge for Pearl Harbor has to be the weakest of all rationalizations for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By July 1945, Tokyo had already been firebombed with 100,000 civilian deaths. Pearl had been avenged hundreds of times over.
There is no rationalization requirement. War is war. Victory is the goal, with the least loss of life to our side. Just as the enemy wants that for their side.
I am grateful Truman had the courage to go through with this very efficient method of avoiding any additional risk to American lives.
There is no rationalization requirement. War is war. Victory is the goal, with the least loss of life to our side. Just as the enemy wants that for their side.
I am grateful Truman had the courage to go through with this very efficient method of avoiding any additional risk to American lives.
The war devolved into "total war", with little moral distinction made by any of the combatants between the killing of enemy troops and civilians. Such was not the case in prior wars fought by civilized nations, nor is it considered acceptable today. Hopefully WWII was an aberration, and we will never again reach that level of barbarism.
THAT was the plan. The war would have continued for about another year, but not at an enormous cost of American lives.
Instead, the war lasted about another week, and with virtually ZERO cost in American lives. Plus far less cost in Japanese lives than the alternative, though that was not a factor in the planning.
The Bomb proved its worth, and was by far the best way to end the war.
In “Mandate for Change,” Eisenhower’s autobiography, Ike related this exchange: “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”
“When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the Emperor.” That’s from “The Pathology of Power,” by Norman Cousins.
“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part from a purely military point of view in the defeat of Japan. The use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.” - - Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Adm. William Leahy, President Truman’s Chief of Staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir I Was There that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.… in being the first to use it, we…adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
Truman's advisers told him that surrender was likely if the United States let it be known Japan could keep its Emperor, a clarification the President told several top officials he had no fundamental objections to (and which he subsequently offered).
He was one of the ultimate masterminds behind dropping the nuke and one of the geniuses that developed the science to make it. He sat in on the committees deciding on whether or not they should drop it. Von Neumann's bio has very good first hand historical accounts of the decision processes that were used by the Target Selection Committee rather than looking up some quotes from the internet. They wholeheartedly believed that it'd take a massive invasion and millions of lives more to invade Japan and make them surrender.
There may have been dissenters, but they were not of the caliber of minds like Von Neumann and those sitting on the Target Selection Committee. Again, read first hand historical records for more accurate portrayal of the situation and thought that went into dropping it.
73 years ago today, on August 5, 1945, the first atomic bomb used in war was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. (In Japan it was August 6, since they are across the International Date Line from us.)
Three days later, the second atomic bomb used in warfare was flown to its primary target of Kokura, Japan. They found the city obscured by clouds and smoke, and so flew to the secondary target of Nagasaki instead and dropped the bomb there.
Shortly afterward, Japan realized they had no way to stop the Americans from dropping bomb after bomb, wiping out city after city until the Japanese islands became uninhabitable. It also helped that Russia declared war on Japan that day. Japan surrendered, and WWII was over.
Japan didn't know at the time, that those were the only two complete atomic bombs the Americans had been able to produce at that time (plus one more shot off in July as a test in New Mexico). They could eventually produce more of the needed fissile material, but it would have taken months or years, so the Americans kept quiet.
The Army estimated that those two bombs, which killed approx. 150,000 Japanese, saved the lives of between 500,000 and 1 million Americans who would no longer have to invade the Japanese home islands to force a surrender, plus saving a million or more Japanese who would have defended their homes to the death.
Hanford was making plutonium as fast as they could, and there was to be one bomb available by the end of August, and at least seven more by November 1, when Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu was to start. There was discussion about using them as tactical weapons near the invasion beaches.
Would America have dropped an Atomic Bomb in the European Theater ??
Based on the US population's overwhelming European heritage, would there have been any hesitation to nuke Germany if Japan had surrendered first ??
No, there was no hesitation. If one had been ready in time, an atomic bomb would have fallen on Germany first. Looking at the bomb totals for Germany and Japan, the RAF and USAAF dropped 1,588,000 tons of bombs on Germany, and only 160,800 tons, (plus the 35,000 ton equivalence of the two atomic bombs) on Japan. Heritage was irrelevant.
Yeah, because the ability to wipe out every man, woman, and child on the planet is a good thing.
God help and forgive us.
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Originally Posted by jeffdoorgunner
no......God save us from leaders like Hitler,Tojo and Mussolini...…….
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Originally Posted by LS Jaun
She probably thinks that the US started the war
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Originally Posted by BobNJ1960
It is a good thing in our hands, as we do not look to start trouble, using our strongest weapons.
Japan started it with Pearl Harbor, and we educated them on why that was not a wise move to make.
The three of you need to go back and look again at what I wrote. I did not say it would have been a good thing in someone else's hands, or that we started the war. I said, or rather implied in a way I thought would be clear to anyone, that it is a horrible weapon I wish no one on earth had. For the sake of all humanity, I still wish that, and always will.
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