Jebus

As others have pointed out in this thread, Japan's surrender was, for the most part, due to other factors such as continuing territorial loss, not the atomic bomb. The Russians were already advancing on the areas you have listed, as were the Americans, and a full blockade of Japan would have resulted in the capitulation of Japanese forces outside the island, and eventually the empire itself.

Philogogus

Eventually. Theres the key word.

Japan has very very few natural resources. They are/were incapable of growing enough food to feed the population and have absolutely no oil/rubber/ANYTHING of their own to fuel their civilian economy under a blockade... much less a war machine.

Why do I mention this? Japan had a population of 72 million in 1945. The only way to win a siege is to starve the people out. How many millions of Japanese civilians would have died before the government capitulated? No one knows, thats speculative history which only amatuers dabble in.

The idea that the atomic bomb did not shorten the war is laughable. We had taken nearly every Japanese Pacific holding in the island hopping campaign. Do you know how many merchant ships over 10,000 tons were left in Japan in August of 1945? One. We had sunk the rest of them. Yet, the Japanese did not surrender.

What makes you think that when the Russians pushed the Japanese out of China that the Japanese would have surrendered? The Japanese Army in China was virtually useless anyway. They had no way of getting reinforcements, no way of getting resupplied from the Japanese mainland because of the 'forementioned lack of significant cargo ships (assuming that they could even get from Japan to the mainland before being sunk by the circle of American ships and submarines... which is unlikely).

It would have taken at LEAST 6 months for the Russians to effect a victory in China. The Russians undertook an impressive military logistical feat in transfering vast numbers of soldiers and armor to the east after the end of the war. But the terrain in China is radically different from Europe. The Japanese forces were not in the vast plateus... they were in the mountains. The Russians had little experience fighting in such terrain and would have suffered greatly.

Of course, this is completely skipping one of the primary reasons the American administration wanted to end the war quickly. They didn't want to have Japan partitioned like Germany was. If the Soviets entered the war and made any significant contribution to the defeat of Japan, this would have happened. While this is delving into speculative history, do you really think Stalin would have allowed US hegemony in Japan if the Soviets had lost a half-million or so soldiers pushing the Japanese out of China?

While it may be the height of irony to state that the world most destructive weapon by a few dozen orders of magnitude was used to minimize deaths both to American and Japanese soldiers/civilians, it is a simple fact. Conservative estimates on American losses were in the MILLION range. Since poorly trained Japanese civilians were the backbone of the Japanese territorial defense plan, their casualty rates would have been even higher. This makes the quarter million or so immediate/long-term deaths from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem paltry in comparison.

Truman had a infintely difficult decision to make, and he made the right one.

avon

Philogogus, good post!! However, I have to admit that I don't seem to share your humour on this on. By early 1945, the Japanese leadership possessed two strategies that would’ve (they hoped) led to a negotiated end to World War II: they would either convince the Soviets to mediate or fight one last decisive battle to inflict so many casualties that the United States would agree to more acceptable surrender terms. The bombing of Hiroshima did nothing to alter these plans. Instead, the Soviet declaration of war made both plans impossible. Thus ended the feasibility of continuing the war. In fact, it would be entirely cogent to state that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese-held territory was the event that dramatically changed the strategic landscape and left Japan with no option but to surrender unconditionally. A corollary of this is that the Hiroshima bombing was merely, in technical terms, an extension of an already fierce bombing campaign; in terms of Japanese endurance, it was but another devastating attack … and not even the most devastating one at that.

But then, ‘the bomb’ has taken on a life and reputation of its own. The US scientists thought they were making a war-ending weapon, the expectations that it would end the war led to the assumption that it must’ve ended the war. The explicit promotion of the idea that it did was intentional primarily as a means of facing down the Soviets and western allies (the nuclear monopoly served the US well in the immediate postwar years). Similarly, the Japanese found refuge in the notion that they had been defeated by an unimaginably terrifying weapon as it disguised the fact that they had been seeking a ‘cowardly’ negotiated surrender. Losing the war to two nuclear attacks camouflages any possible lack of bravery or intelligence. The false notion that the bomb ended the war served the ends of both nations.

Now, I expect you’re probably gonna want me to make good on this. Okay then, let me first look at the Japanese plans for exiting the war before looking at what the Hiroshima attack actually meant to them. (For those who don’t appreciate long-windedness, maybe it’s time to see what’s happening in some other thread!! … Perhaps you already have done!)

By spring, 1945, the Japanese leadership had already accepted that they had been mostly defeated and so hoped to win better terms of surrender through either diplomacy or battle. Japan’s leaders were largely united in their goal (bringing the war to a close); they were divided only over the best means to achieve that end. They had no other plan for securing an acceptable end to the war. The “peace” faction, led by Togo (with the support of Yonai and Kido) postulated an effort should be made to inveigle Stalin into mediating a settlement between themselves and the US and the Allies. Having signed a neutrality pact in 1941 that allowed the Soviets to move troops from the east to fight Hitler in the west, the Japanese believed that Stalin would give them a favourable ear and, at the same time, had sufficient influence with the Allies to secure a surrender that preserved their present form of government and possibly some of their conquered territory. This diplomatic effort was neither inexplicable or unrealistic but, as Togo knew, it didn’t have a large chance of success. Of course, given the tensions that had developed between the Soviet Union and its allies, and the fact that they were willing to cede substantial territorial concessions in Asia, it was still seen as possible. (The Japanese obviously did not know that Stalin had already given Truman his assurance that he would join in the fight.)

Propounding the alternative means to the same ends, the “hard-liners,” led by Minister of War Anami (with Umezu and Toyoda), sought a military solution to Japan’s crisis could be found. Despite all the costly defeats that the Japanese had suffered (bearing in mind that their economy had been almost entirely crippled and their navy (as you point out) incapacitated) Japan still had a significant number of soldiers willing to fight (to the death if need be) and so one last-ditch battle, is was felt, could compel the US to concede better surrender terms. There was nothing ill-fought-out or fanatical in this line of reasoning. If you choose to view this through the prism of Japan’s warrior culture and their experience in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War, such a plan was not illogical. Desperate perhaps, but not illogical. In fact, one might even postulate that it would’ve had some impact if not the desired effect given that talk in the US (and ever since) has circled around the potential high-casualty figures that the US might’ve suffered in invading the home islands: using the threat of US casualties as leverage is almost validated by this concern. Whilst it is unquestionable that Soviet intervention ended Japanese hopes for mediation, this same intervention also impacted gravely on the military plan. The large Soviet force in Manchuria made rapid progress and frightened the Japanese into predicting that a Soviet invasion of the home islands could be effected from this direction. Any effective defence against such an invasion from the north would have been difficult given that the Japanese forces had been steadily shifted south toward the island of Kyushu where the Americans were expect to strike first. Given the task of defending the northern island of Hokkaido, the Japanese Fifth Area Army was militarily weak and, additionally, dug in on the eastern side of the island. Soviet plans called for an invasion of Hokkaido from the west. Besides the logistical difficulties of moving the Fifth, the strategic difficulties of fighting a necessarily decisive battle on two fronts at once would almost certainly have been clear. So, although both plans for obtaining better terms (diplomatic and military) had little chance of success, each had some merit and the Japanese leadership saw them as the only two viable options for securing better terms. Both options were being actively pursued at the end of July and into early August. The plans only became invalidated once the Soviets intervened on 9 August. At a single stroke, a Soviet stroke, all their options for securing better surrender terms were eliminated. Of course, all this was occurring whilst the Japanese cities were being bombed almost out of existence. That’s what we need to look at next.

. . . /

avon

From the US perspective, the atomic bomb was very obviously something new, something completely different, something spectacular. They had set to the work hundreds of their best scientists, spent about $2 billion building it and, even before it’s testing, had endowed it with a deep sense of portentous power. Almost immediately after Truman became President, James Byrnes (a long-time proponent of the bomb) told him that the new weapon might even “be powerful enough to destroy the whole world.” [See http://www.eagleton.rutgers.edu/e-go...WWII-4bomb.htm] The bomb, and its potentialities, really frightened the Americans. But whilst the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is presented as a horrifying event (and I wouldn’t deny that it was), there remains significant doubt as to whether or not the Japanese leaders considered it to be appreciably different from any of the other attacks carried out in that period. Many of the (conventional) attacks by the US during the spring and summer were almost as large as the Hiroshima bombing and often caused more damage. If one remembers that 66 other Japanese cities were also attacked that summer, it may have been hard to differentiate the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It is easy to assume that the Japanese attitude toward the bomb matched or even surpassed the US attitude towards the bomb and understood how different a weapon it was, but there is no evidence to support such an assumption. For one thing, the scale of the bomb blast and immediately visible effects was not radically different. For instance, any typical raid of 500 bombers might deliver as much as 4 or 5 kilotons of bombs to their targets. Given that the Hiroshima bomb was the equivalent of 16 kilotons of TNT, the attack on Hiroshima was only three to four times as powerful as a typical conventional raid that summer. But then all that power was concentrated into an epicentre that confined much of the damage. The effect of thousands of bombs was a more evenly distributed range of damage where the appearance of total destruction would be potentially similar to that of a single nuclear blast. To anyone who had not seen the actual attack the end results of the two different attacks might have been quite as easy to appreciate than one might expect. But also, beginning in March 1945, U.S. bombers had conducted a campaign of air attacks against Japanese cities that killed more than 330,000 civilians and wounded 472,000, made more than 8 million homeless, and burned more than 177 square miles of urban area (according to United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Vol. 9, ‘Pacific Report No. 66’). So many cities had been either destroyed or virtually destroyed that U.S. military planners had begun directing attacks toward ‘cities’ with as few as 30,000 people. (By my reckoning, most people would count that as a town rather than a city.) Japanese cities had been bombed at an average rate of one every other day. In the three-week period prior to the Hiroshima bombing, twenty-five cities were attacked. Of these, eight had suffered greater damage than Hiroshima though they all had fewer casualties (which was not determined at the time). But in what way (measured by the immediate result it produced) was it differentiated from other attacks of that summer?? Also, bearing in mind that the Japanese didn’t actually know that this had been a nuclear attack, if Hiroshima’s two-thirds destruction caused the Japanese to surrender, then why didn’t the destruction of 66 other cities not result in their surrender?? How could 66 other devastating attacks not encourage the Japanese to surrender but Hiroshima did??

Conventional bombing damage to Japanese cities in WWII

City % area destroyed

Nishinomiya 11.9
Amagasaki 18.9
Ube 20.7
Yawata 21.2
Sendai 21.9
Moji 23.3
Fukuoka 24.1
Nobeoka 25.2
Miyazaki 26.1
Miyakonojō 26.5
Ōita 28.2
Aomori 30
Kumamoto 31.2
Okazaki 32.2
Omura 33.1
Yokkaichi 33.6
Osaka 35.1
Omuta 35.8
Kawasaki 36.2
Shimonoseki 37.6
Ōgaki 39.5
Nagoya 40
Chiba 41
Ujiyamada 41.3
Sasebo 41.4
Kure 41.9
Shimizu 42
Numazu 42.3
Utsunomiya 43.7
Choshi 44.2
Saga 44.2
Sakai 48.2
Tokuyama 48.3
Hiratsuka 48.4
Himeji 49.4
Wakayama 50
Akashi 50.2
Tokyo 51
Kumagaya 55.1
Kōchi 55.2
Kobe 55.7
Ichinomiya 56.3
Isesaki 56.7
Yokohama 58
Hamamatsu 60.3
Toyohashi 61.9
Kagoshima 63.4
Gifu 63.6
Imabari 63.9
Matsuyama 64
Maebashi 64.2
Nagaoka 64.9
Hachioji 65
Tsuruga 65.1

[The following cities suffered proportionately more damage than Hiroshima -avon]

Shizuoka 66.1
Takamatsu 67.5
Mito 68.9
Okayama 68.9
Nara 69.3
Tsu 69.3
Hitachi 72
Kuwana 75
Kofu 78.6
Fukuyama 80.9
Tokushima 85.2
Fukui 86
Toyama 99

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II]

Well, as it happens, there is clear evidence that the campaign of city bombing did not loom large in the minds of Japan’s leaders. First, they did not act as if the bombings were decisive. As I have pointed out, whilst the continual attacks continued, they persisted to plan on seeking better terms. Second, the things they said do not attest to any obvious sense of crisis amongst the leadership. When the leadership met on 9 August, Hiranuma asked Umezu about what measures the military were going to take against atomic bombs. The reply stated quite blankly that the army wouldn't surrender under the duress of air-raids. This suggests that there was little difference to them whether or not the attacks were conventional or nuclear. [Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, p. 211] which seemingly compares the nuclear attack with the conventional air attacks, which is striking. The casualness of the question and answer betrays some feeling that aerial attacks had little impact on the leadership … that’s how far removed they seem to have been from the Japanese population. As far as is determinable, the members of the Supreme Council mentioned city bombing only twice: once in May and then again in August. It is thus difficult to argue that the Hiroshima bombing was central to Japanese considerations. In fact, it might equally be difficult to assert that the whole devastating strategic bombing campaign was central to Japanese thinking. (If the experience of Britain and Germany are to be taken into consideration, city bombing seems to have stiffened rather than weakened the will of the countries that were bombed.)

So, as noted earlier, the Japanese leadership did not display a sense of crisis after Hiroshima. The first reports of any attack on Hiroshima reached Tokyo on August 6 and were then confirmed the next day by more comprehensive Japanese reports and then (surprisingly) by Truman’s announcement [see http://everything2.com/node/748837] that a nuclear weapon had been used in the attack. But yet, even after all this had been confirmed the Supreme Council still did not meet for two days (or three days from the actual attack). Whether or not the Council ever put the attack on the agenda for discussion remains unclear. What is clear, is that it was discussed at the meeting on August 9, but then this all-important meeting looks to have been called as a result of the Soviet invasion and not as a result of the nuclear attack. If the bomb had really touched off a crisis or forced the Japanese to reconsider their position, then this delay is inexplicable … bizarre … extraordinary. Despite the fact that Togo requested a meeting after the attack, three full days elapsed after the bombing in which the Supreme Council did not even discuss the bombing. [See Sadao Asada, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender: A Reconsideration,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 67, No. 4 (November 1998), pp. 477–512] HOWEVER, on the other hand, when the Soviets finally played out their promise to intervene on August 9, word of the invasion reached Tokyo at around 4:30 a.m. and the Supreme Council were in full session by 10:30. Similarly, when, on 14 August, the US dropped leaflets that revealed the surrender negotiations going on between the Japanese and the Allies, Kido met with the emperor almost immediately, within the hour of seeing one of these leaflets. After being joined by Suzuki, they agreed that fully accepting the Allied terms was the only real option left to them. The Supreme Council meeting scheduled for 13.00 was moved forward to 11.00. Given the punctillious response to this potential catastrophy (that the Japanese people might finally rise up against them), it is clear that there was little lethargy in the ability of the leadership or the Emperor to act. [See Frank, Downfall, pp. 313–314.] The contrasting reactions of the Japanese to these events, Hiroshima on the one hand and the Russian invasion and threat of uprising on the other, surely betrays something not unimportant.