[FredPret]

Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable given that they were the aggressor and had a million troops in China, and wanted to hold on to their conquests after the war. Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it.

Your points about the Communists stand, but keep in mind that the West always considered them the least bad option. They started out on Hitler's side and they only got half of Europe because they already had it occupied with masses of troops. The West couldn't have pushed them back to Moscow unless they were willing to fight a couple more years, killing millions more.

[pdonis]

> Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it.

All this is true, but it's also true that the nukes weren't the only factor involved. A good case can be made that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which started at midnight local time on the same morning that Nagasaki was bombed, that gave the peace faction in the Japanese government enough leverage to get the Emperor to intercede. The Japanese still weren't exactly sure what the nuclear bombs were, and they had already been firebombed for months so having two more cities incinerated was not the huge change that later US propaganda made it out to be. But the Japanese had been trying for many months to get Stalin and the USSR to broker a peace agreement, and Stalin and Molotov had been stringing them along without any real intention of helping, to ensure that Stalin would have time to enter the war against Japan. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria shocked the Japanese government into realizing their true position and made surrender an urgent priority since Japan greatly preferred being occupied by the US to being occupied by the USSR. The nuclear bombs were a convenient way for the Emperor to save face and not have to admit that it was really the strong desire of the Japanese to surrender to the US and not to the USSR that drove the decision.

See the excellent book Racing the Enemy by Hasegawa for a detailed and thorough exposition:

https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/...

[FredPret]

This is an excellent point. This is why it was necessary to beat the Germans first - so the Russians could invade or at least threaten Japan.

Even so, a land conquest of Japan would have cost vast numbers of lives - far more than the nukes.

When people die one by one in war, the emotional impact is blunted. But when a million die in one bomb, it seems much worse, even if the overall body count is lower.

[pdonis]

> This is why it was necessary to beat the Germans first - so the Russians could invade or at least threaten Japan.

That was the strategy that FDR and Churchill agreed to, but the primary person driving it was Stalin, because he didn't want the US and Britain to defeat Japan before he got a chance to attack them, and he knew he would not be able to attack them until Germany was defeated. (He wanted to attack them so he would have a pretext for taking over territory that Russia had lost in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-1905.) As events proved, the US and Britain did not need any help from the USSR to defeat Japan militarily, and with different diplomatic choices they probably could have gotten Japan to surrender before the USSR attacked.

Once FDR died and Truman took office, btw, it was no longer clear that having the USSR enter the war against Japan was a US objective. Truman, unlike FDR, was not a fan of Stalin and viewed him as a geopolitical threat, not an ally. Which, historically speaking, was a sounder view.

[gmoot]

> with different diplomatic choices they probably could have gotten Japan to surrender before the USSR attacked.

Such as?

[pdonis]

Clarifying the status of the Emperor if Japan surrendered. I have posted about that elsewhere in this discussion.

[fpoling]

Soviet Union were preparing to invade Hokkaido. My grandfather was staged near Vladivostok and everybody in Soviet military there in summer 1945 expected there would be invasion of Japan.

Japanese knew that Soviet rulers did not care if another million of soldiers died and Soviet occupation was considered much worse outcome. That contributed to their surrender to US.

[arrowsmith]

I recently rewatched Band of Brothers and this scene hit me really hard (starting at about 1:50):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y43-p3xLDyo

This is from the final episode of the series. Easy Company have fought their way from Normandy to Germany, losing hundreds of their friends and brothers in battle after brutal battle. Now the Nazis have surrendered and they finally have some respite - but their celebrations are shortlived. Their commanding officer informs them that they're to be redeployed to the Pacific. The war isn't over, and the expression on Malarkey's face at 2:09 says it all.

Whatever anyone says about the atomic bombings, I bet those men were damn happy to hear about Japan's surrender. Imagine if they'd been sent to invade Japan, in another brutal campaign that would have taken months if not years, costing hundreds of thousands more Allied lives.

Then imagine telling them that the government had secretly developed a powerful new weapon that could have ended the war earlier and avoided all this bloodshed - but they hadn't used it because they were worried about the moral implications. I don't think they'd have agreed it was the right choice.

[themaninthedark]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast

The emperor directly mentions the atomic bomb in his address; "Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization."

He only tacitly mentions the battle situation; "But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state, and the devoted service of our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest."

[pdonis]

> The emperor directly mentions the atomic bomb in his address...He only tacitly mentions the battle situation

I know that. And I said why: to save face. He didn't want to tell the Japanese people that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was the reason. The atomic bomb made a much better reason for public consumption. That doesn't mean it was the actual reason that drove the decision, which was made in private.

[themaninthedark]

So without the atomic bomb, the emperor and the peace faction did not have a way out and the fighting would have continued.

[pdonis]

> without the atomic bomb, the emperor and the peace faction did not have a way out

That's not clear either. Without the atomic bomb they might well have found another way to save face.

[themaninthedark]

If the argument is that "We can't say that the atomic bombs were the catalyst for Japan surrendering because the surrender happened after a bombing and Soviet war declaration therefor they are confounding factors" then the same holds true for the argument that the Soviet invasion was the catalyst for surrender.

Now I will say that I have not read Hasegawa's book but Wikipedia says that it is "challenging the widely accepted orthodox view that the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the most decisive factor in Japan's decision to surrender ending the war against Japan."

It will be interesting to read but it looks like that it is not the accepted theory and that primary sources from the era were destroyed on all sides.

[Aeolun]

Hmm, the books I’ve read in Japan make it seem more like the emperor was just tired of an unwinnable war. The nuclear bombs and soviet invasion were simply a catalyst. They just got a surrender note from the US at the proper time for that to be the topic under consideration (aside from, you know, surrendering to the people that tricked you being a generally bad idea).

I like how they ultimately accepted the unconditional surrender, but still tacked on a condition that the emperor was not to be blamed.

[arrowsmith]

> the emperor was not to be blamed.

Even though he should have been:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/hirohito-the-war-crimina...

[Aeolun]

Maybe. He was pretty young at the time, and surrounded by old guys telling him what to think.

Contrary to what this article says, I’m absolutely convinced that not prosecuting the emperor was the right call. The country would have more or less literally exploded overnight.

The fact the man himself told everyone to surrender was of more importance than almost anything else done, both at government and civilian levels. Most of the internal efforts to stop the surrender were around stopping him from declaring as such.

[soperj]

Literally the only condition was that the emperor was preserved.

[Aeolun]

I think that was the condition they tacked onto the unconditional surrender xD

I imagine there were more before that.

[soperj]

The last conditional surrender before atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was the only condition. There were previous conditional surrenders. They wanted to drop those bombs though.

[FredPret]

And conquests retained

[xcv123]

> Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable

And some would argue that nuking entire cities is completely unacceptable.

[FredPret]

Allied options were:

1. Invade. Expected Allied casualties of 300k all the way to much more than a million. Expected Japanese casualties: tens of millions, perhaps up to literally all of them. Previous Japanese strongholds fought to the last man, earlier in the war the Allies invaded an island with 11000 Japanese soldiers, and I think 47 of those eventually surrendered. The rest died. The civilian populations on these islands infamously committed suicide in huge numbers rather than be captured by the Allies. How much harder would an invasion of the home islands be!? The Japanese government issued an order that every single person must fight to the death.

2. Starve them out. The allies had submarines all around Japan and completely blocked all food and oil imports. This was working. But given the Japanese fighting spirit, likely tens of millions would have died before any change took place. It's also possible that the population could drop so low that the islands would become self-sufficient and then the war would drag on literally forever.

3. Conventional aerial bombardment. The Allies were already trying this with great gusto, to little diplomatic effect.

4. Demonstration nuke off the coast. The Allies only had two nukes left after the test one, and weren't 100% sure it would work. A failed demo would only strengthen Japanese resolve. There were concerns whether one demo nuke would be scary enough to force a surrender. Given that one actually used nuke wasn't, these concerns turned out to be valid.

5. Actually drop a nuke. This option turns out to have had the lowest bodycount in the end and had the unexpected side-effect of ushering in an unprecedented era of global peace.

[philwelch]

> Starve them out. The allies had submarines all around Japan and completely blocked all food and oil imports. This was working. But given the Japanese fighting spirit, likely tens of millions would have died before any change took place. It's also possible that the population could drop so low that the islands would become self-sufficient and then the war would drag on literally forever.

Probably the biggest share of the blockade at the end was done by naval mines. At the end, the US airdropped naval mines in Japanese harbors to prevent them from importing food, and this sunk more Japanese shipping than the submarines ever did. It was even called “Operation Starvation”.

[xcv123]

6. Accept Japan's request for peace negotiations. Stop fighting and begin negotiating their conditional surrender.

[FredPret]

And let them continue to fuck up China and the whole Pacific region, only to come back swinging a couple of decades later

[scotty79]

And now US fears China instead. You can't come out on top. Why not commit less atrocities on the way wherever you are going?

[lupusreal]

"Commit less atrocities" in this case is just code for permitting others to commit whatever atrocities they want. American "atrocities" against Japan pale I comparison to what the Japanese were inflicting on the rest of Asia.

[Aeolun]

> This option turns out to have had the lowest bodycount in the end

Given that you don’t know the body count of the other options, given they didn’t happen, that’s a bold statement to make.

[pie420]

The firebombing of tokyo killed 200K people, more than both nukes. the firebombing was an attempt to end the war via conventional means and it did nothing to weaken japanese resolve.

The reason hiroshima and nagasaki (small cities) were chosen as nuke targets was because every other bigger city was already mostly destroyed due to firebombing campaigns.

[Aeolun]

I am not sure how this is relevant to the point I made. Lots of people died. You still don’t know (and never will) how much would have died due to the other options. It’s speculation at best.

[pdonis]

Your survey of the options is basically the one that the US government put out after the war to push back against criticism. However, historical scholarship since then has shown that it wasn't that simple.

First, there is no evidence of any actual casualty estimates made during the war that were anywhere near as high as the ones you give in option 1. Those numbers were made up after the war. The wartime estimates were about an order of magnitude lower.

Second, you left out an option: clarify the status of the Emperor if the Japanese surrendered, which the US government well knew, since they were reading Japanese diplomatic traffic and also had plenty of intelligence from spies, was the only real obstacle in the way of the Japanese surrendering. The final surrender agreement left the Emperor in place as the head of the Japanese state. If the Japanese had known that was going to be the final outcome of surrender earlier, it is highly probable that they would have surrendered earlier. The status of the Emperor was the primary weapon the military war faction in the Japanese cabinet used to quash surrender proposals.

Third, to call the time since WW II "an unprecedented era of global peace" is a bit much. What the bombs ushered in was an era of nuclear stalemate. The US does deserve credit for not using the bombs again, even though the US was the only nuclear power for at least four years after WW II. It is also true that many people after WW II expected a nuclear conflict to happen as soon as the USSR got nuclear weapons, and none did. But that didn't stop plenty of conventional conflicts from continuing to break out all over the world, nor has the US kept out of such conflicts.

[FredPret]

First, the casualty estimates are just for US soldiers and is likely low. They fough against Japanese troops with a kill ratio of between 1:1 and 1:20 (in favor of the Marines) so it’s easy to extrapolate massive US casualties when fighting the then 80 million strong Japanese on home soil.

I don’t know much about the second point, so you may be right.

Third, you have to look at stats, not emotions. Battle deaths - in absolute terms and per capita - dropped like a stone after 1945.

[pdonis]

> Battle deaths - in absolute terms and per capita - dropped like a stone after 1945.

After rising like a rocket when WW II started. If you leave out WW I and WW II, it's not clear that post-1945 was more peaceful than pre-1914.

[FredPret]

My original and subsequent posts were that the nuke made the world safer. Post-1945 battle deaths dropped to near-zero by comparison to pre-1945.

Even one battle death is too many but having them go down overall is very good.

[pmontra]

Nuking cities or conventional bombing them is the same thing. The bombing of Tokyo resulted in about 100 k deaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

Only the emotional impact was different. A nuke was an otherworldly weapon that marked a technological superiority that was impossible to overcame during the war, hence the surrender. Carpet bombing would have to go on until enough Japanese cities and industries were reduced to hash. Then maybe an invasion. As somebody pointed out, the surrender of the Japanese troops in China was a goal of the war and they could not carpet bomb or nuke China.

[pdonis]

> they were the aggressor

Only because the US froze all trade with Japan and intentionally refused all Japanese attempts at diplomacy to negotiate some kind of arrangement. The US did that knowing that the Japanese government would go to war, since the US had broken the Japanese codes and was reading all Japanese diplomatic traffic. In other words, the US intentionally provoked Japan into going to war.

[FredPret]

Yes, they froze Japanese trade. But only to stop outrages being committed all over the area, including annexing Manchuria and invading China. The Japanese were doing all of this with imported US oil. Stopping the oil exports hardly places responsibility for Pearl Harbor on the US.

[pdonis]

If those things the Japanese did were "outrages", so were the things the US, Britain, and other European countries did to build their empires. The Japanese viewed their actions as simply taking their rightful place as an imperial power alongside those other countries. Yes, by today's standards, or at least today's Western standards, such things are Not Done, but if we are going to judge WW II Japan by those standards, we should judge the WW II Allies by those standards too.

[FredPret]

Point me to the rapes of Nanking the allies did. Or maybe just stop spreading Soviet propaganda.

[pdonis]

> Point me to the rapes of Nanking the allies did.

The Soviets were allies. Look up what they did in Germany at the end of WW II. And that's not even looking at all the other atrocities they had perpetrated before the war started, many of them on their own people.

Also, the empire building I referred to on the part of the US, Britain, and other European countries took place well before WW II. That doesn't mean it can just be ignored.

> Or maybe just stop spreading Soviet propaganda.

It seems to me that you are the one spreading Soviet propaganda since you are not even acknowledging the moral implications of having the Soviets as allies in WW II.

[FredPret]

My point is that stopping all Axis aggression in WW2 was good for everyone. The West may have been imperfect but was orders of magnitude better.

You don’t have to convince me that the Soviets were evil. They were part of the Allies purely because Hitler put them there.

They then immediately started propagandizing the world to undermine the genuine contributions and general legitimacy of the West.

[Aeolun]

Uh, 2000 years of European history not enough? Just because it happened a few hundred years earlier doesn’t make it better.

[FredPret]

Yes it does. Moral progress is a real thing. Standards rise over time. Alexander the Great would be a war criminal today, and yet he was considered a relatively easygoing ruler at the time.