idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
Well, the documents of the time show that Japan was moving towards surrender before the bombs were even dropped, because their last strong front, in mainland China, was being rapidly pushed back by Russia, and they knew there would be no victory.
That's a neat trick, given that the first bomb was dropped on Aug 6th, the second on Aug 9th, and the Soviets launched their attack on Aug 8th (and the Japanese were not expecting it at that time either).
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And, in any case, the Emperor ordered his Generals and Prime Minister to start the process of ending hostilities the day before the second bomb was dropped. It was completely and totally unnecessary.
There's a lot of historical questions about what various orders may have actually meant, and even if they would have been followed out without being far more direct, but if this were strictly speaking true and the Emperor had already decided to sue for peace at that point, then your earlier statement that it was because they were losing ground against the Soviets can't be true, since the day before the second bomb was the same day the Soviets first attacked.
That's not to say that both events didn't influence the eventual call to lay down arms on Aug 15th, but I think discounting the bombs as a major factor is more a point of anti-nuke re-writing of history than accurate assessment. Let's not forget that even after the Emperor made that public speech calling for the Japanese military to stand down, some parts of the army, especially on the mainland still continued to fight anyway. That's actually one of the reasons why the Russians advanced so far into China during that time period. Some of the Japanese were still fighting and some weren't, giving them a legitimate target to attack, but severely weakening the opposition.
We could similarly argue that absent the dropping of those bombs, the Japanese might not have even considered surrender (almost certainly would not have), they would not have been caught off guard by the Soviet attack, and would not have acted on conflicting orders, and things would have turned out very very differently. Obviously, we can play what might have happened games forever and never be sure, but we also shouldn't discount any of the factors involved in what did happen.
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This isn't even considering whether or not the bombs could have been justified if they were the sole reason the war ended early (and I'm not personally convinced that they would have been). Considering I heavily doubt that they did anything but push surrender up by a week or two...
/shrug. Conflicting history I guess. We can find evidence that Japan was considering a peace process prior to the bombs being dropped, but then we can find other evidence that even after both bombs were dropped many in the Japanese military still wanted to fight. The estimates of the loss of life if Japan had continued to fight and the US would have had to attempt to directly assault the main islands in order to force a surrender are pretty massive though. The Japanese would have lost more people, and the US many many many times more. I've seen estimates of as many as a million lives saved as a result of the events occurring as they did.
Of course, that assumes that Japan wasn't going to surrender. But that puts us back to the guessing game, doesn't it?
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And let's be realistic--if the goal was to show Japan the destructive power we had available, then bombing a depopulated country-side would have had the exact same effect. There was no good reason to targets civilians instead, if the purpose was to show Japan that they could not win.
We'd have felt pretty stupid if we used the only two nuclear weapons in existence, representing years of research and ridiculous amounts of money and all the materials we could muster, to bomb a couple empty fields only to have Japan continue to fight. And both targets were legitimate military targets by the rules used at the time.
We tend to over emphasis the horribleness of the atomic bombs, because they were atomic bombs. But the fact is that more people died in the firebombing of Tokyo on Mar 10th than died in either of the atomic bombings on Aug 6th and 9th. The point of the atomic bombs was to show a level of capability which they could not hope to match (and certainly also to send a warning at the Soviets).
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And the number of military leaders that didn't completely regret their (or their country's) decision afterwards is actually pretty low.
I think you've got that backwards. Well, or you're making a misleading statement. "Regret" can mean many things. Lots of people regret the loss of life during war, while still maintaining that it was still necessary. Very very few US military leaders involved in the decision to drop the atomic bombs ever changed their minds later and said that it was an unnecessary loss of life. IMO, that's the far more relevant question.
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And most of the voices strongly against the bomb were those serving in the Pacific Theater. They all felt that this was NOT an act of War--it was barbarism.
Again, I don't know where you're getting your information. That's pretty much 100% the opposite of everything I've read or heard. Most people, from soldiers, to generals, to politicians, who were involved in any way with those bombings have stated that they were necessary, definitely a legitimate act of war, and absolutely *not* barbarism.
