So, Professor Cole showed his normal contempt for the US military and happily depended on a Western wire service messed-up translation of "al-Sharq" Arabic text. A producer for the Korean Broadcasting System, which is doing a special program commemorating August 15, 1945, recently asked me why Japan's ruling elites rejected the Potsdam Declaration. Peter: The great classic of Bushido - 'Hagakure' written in the early 18th century - begins with the words, 'Bushido is a way of dying'. I am not familiar with the scholarship of Richard Frank, a non-academic history-writer, but am certainly not impressed by his remarkably evasive and long-winded answer to a straightforward question (why wait only three days before hitting Nagasaki ?) Japan's motivation for surrender and America's decision to use the bomb are related but nonetheless distinct issues, and Bix seems unable to resist conflating the two. Truman and Byrnes introduced nuclear weapons into modern warfare when it had been militarily unnecessary to do so. Why The Emperor Of Japan Didn't Surrender Before The Bombs Were Dropped I believe in a strong, well trained and well equipped military but a military that is used with discretion, has well defined operational objectives and uses maximum force when required. By this time Tokyo was already a smoldering heap from months of fire bombing. 5. U.S. combat losses in the battle of Okinawa were approximately 12,520 killed and over 33,000 wounded. Two deficiencies of Franks article are its reluctance to court alternative explanations and its narrow view of U.S. decision-making. Second, Japan's armed forces had to comply with the government's surrender. "At this moment, with the war all but over, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the civilian center of Hiroshima; the Soviet Union entered the war; and the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb on the civilian center of Nagasaki. I don't believe we will be coming home any time soon. "Shouldn't they have cared more for the safety of their own people after the war had long been irrevocably lost? These people had many reasons to bring the lost war to an end short of Japan's further destruction and unconditional capitulation to the Anglo-Americans. Did Nuclear Weapons Cause Japan to Surrender? But if, as appears to be the case, they can be reasonably interpreted to support the Truman administration's unwavering claim that they felt they had no choice but to use the bomb, then anyone who seeks to challenge that position must account for them. Some people in the world still do not understand the cruelty of nuclear weapons and that they are absolute evil. General MacArthur would not allow him to be questioned. I find it amazing with the '06 election around the corner the administration is bantering about troop withdrawal. Mr. Ryan, Japan did not surrender until a week after the Nagasaki bombing. Yes, I'm simpleminded enough to point out that your comments are deviod of actual content, but instead rely on emotioanlly empty terms like "chickenhawk", "neo-con" and "traitor". Keiko Ogura was eight-years-old at the time and only 2.4 kilometres from the hypocentre. Nearly three million Japanese were dead, many more wounded or seriously ill, and the country lay in ruins. Selfless sacrifice, for whatever purpose, was present on all sides in the conflict. The surrender of the Japanese was held in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship USS Missouri. How can our leaders know the cost of war if they have never been there?" But the U.S. took credit to justify the bombs being dropped. What I got instead was a mixture of gibberish, pointless anti-US invective, and hopelessly simplistic analysis. To wit: Hiroshima atomic bombing did not lead to Japanese surrender, historians This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. Although I use the term chicken-hawk to describe the gutless wonders within the administration I am by no means a dove. He had simply been too frightened to give himself up. Shouldn't Mr. Bix have considered and addressed that evidence? A second bomb followed three days . We see the difficulty in suppressing resistance in Iraq a country the size of Texas with 1/3 the population of 1940's Japan and nowhere near the military capability of the Japanese. Mr. Bix's article would be more persuasive if he addressed the conflict between his opinion and what Magic shows. Mr. Ryan, If he did not act immediately with the Russians bearing down on Japan and the national capacity for protracted resistance nearly exhausted, the monarchy, which he equated with the state, would be destroyed. Bringing troops home as part of standard rotation and shipping them back out is NOT HOME IN THE SPRING! Since this is now a long, now multiple thread tangent already, I will note only briefly in passing that an interesting US Army vs Navy debate is also intriguingly brought up by Frank in the above linked piece. Professor Cole wrote, "General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, head of Iraqi intelligence, estimated on Monday that the force strength of the guerrilla insurgency was about 200,000 men. his position that most of Japanese big shots were not eager to throw in the towel prior to Hiroshima. Returning prisoners from Japan's previous major war with Russia in 1904-5 had been treated as social outcasts. You posit a strength approx. In the days immediately following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese military did not publicly respond, still holding on to their four conditions for ending the war: preservation of the imperial institution, leaving demobilization in the hands of Japanese headquarters, no foreign occupation of the Home Islands, Ko. The Comparison of Napoleon's Russian campaign is only to open the discussion as to why the US is not changing our tactics to combat the insurgents more effectively. Through much of World War II, Allied bombers would sometimes drop leaflets warning of impending bombing of a city. Google his speech. No photo's of the coffins, no visits to pay respects at funerals, continued reductions in veteran benefits and the lack of funding to treat the wounded stateside. "Also, morally it was wrong. Mr. Rodriguez, Comparing combats deaths in Iraq to D-Day or 911 is absurd. Go pedal your defeatist nonsense elsewhere please. WOW! -- Bixs take on Russias role in Japans surrender is nearly incoherent. I do not consider the Weekly Standard, a relatively new and polemical organ, to be a reliable source of historical knowledge. The America That Americans Forget - The New York Times Shahwani actually said 20,000 to 30,000 fighters in a Baghdad speech (Jan 3, just prior to the election). Why didn't the Japanese surrender earlier in World War II? In early 1941, General Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Far East, reported that one of his battalion commanders had lamented, 'Don't you think (our men) are worthy of some better enemy than the Japanese?'. when I say "partial exception", I mean to Mr. Ebbitt's post, not to my point about disagreeing with PCism. Why Did Japan Really Surrender in WW2? Mr. Richardson, 2.) They are surely not conclusive -- no single piece of evidence could be on such a topic -- and they may well contain ambiguous or even contradictory evidence within them. This is wrong. I come from a military family and although I did not serve after high school in 1978, as I chose college, I currently serve the DAV and have spent many weekend afternoons at VA Hospitals. Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (Part 1) I had no idea that the rules of debate limited me to ONLY commenting on posts made in regard to articles under which they appear. And a few posters here seem to strongly support civilian leaders calling the shots for our military. And these historians are driven by ideology (US = bad) and must ignore a mountain of evidence to maintain this point of view. 7 Things You May Not Know About the Japanese Surrender on - SOFREP It's one of those things that has a . 2rascallydogs 7 min. The atomic bombs and the Soviet invasion gave Japanese decision-makers a good justification for ending the war. How could they lead and preserve their system of rule after peace returned? After all, the United States employed the strategy of letting the Soviets wear down the Germans in Europe before attempting the amphibious landings at Normandy. 7) The 'Mighty Mo'. This service may include material from Agence France-Presse (AFP), APTN, Reuters, AAP, CNN and the BBC World Service which is copyright and cannot be reproduced. Potsdam Declaration, ultimatum issued by the United States, Great Britain, and China on July 26, 1945, calling for the unconditional surrender of Japan. ), but the main issue raised on this page is actually not the much ballyhood evergreen & unresolvable question about whether the 1945 A bomb drops were justified, notwithstanding the efforts of several posters here to make it so, nor the desire of the HNN editors to cast things in that light, nor the money to be made (by Frank etc) recycling old debates. When Emperor Hirohito made his first ever broadcast to the Japanese people on 15 August 1945, and enjoined his subjects 'to endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable', he brought to an end a state of war - both declared and undeclared - that had wracked his country for 14 years. The severely-weakened Japanese Imperial army had no capacity to fight the Soviets on a second front in China and Northern Japan. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, fears arose that if the United States pursued an unconditional surrender policy in Japan, it would result in a coup against said peace party (and the Emperor) by dominant militarists. Please provide the solid numbers of the Iraq security forces you write of. On August 8, 1945, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, as agreed to by Joseph Stalin during the Tehrn . Yes, I am stating that the only people qualified to make military command and control decisions are those in positions and with experience in actual warfare. So they have to find some non-legal arguments to self-justify the conduct, that they annihilated 210,000 civilians," he said. Adding a zero to numbers of the enemy is bad enough, but telling the world the US military is incompetent becomes disgraceful. .Japanese fighting men did not surrender, even in the face of insuperable odds. The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima by the Americans did not have the effect intended: unconditional surrender by Japan. With everything at stake, he stepped forward live, as it were, in the form of a recorded message, speaking directly to the Japanese people in their worst moment of pain. Hirohito (1901-1989) was emperor of Japan from 1926 until his death in 1989. Why not get the Japanese to conditionally surrender? Indeed, I noted in the first response to this article that Bix has diluted and confused his own argument with pointless asides about America during and even after the war. As a Libertarian I neither support the Democratic platform nor have I ever listened to Air America. That was a deliberate decision, indeed, and it's where the moral argument should rightly focus., The key missing link for this thread is presented and discussed below Ultimately, what mattered most was where each of them, and the institutions they represented, stood as a result of an unconditional surrender. The Iraqi Police/Army is fairing very poorly. Why did Japan not immediately surrender after Hiroshima? Why did It was a war without mercy, and the US Office of War Information acknowledged as much in 1945. So we come to the question of ideology, or the national polity and essence, which they called kokutai. But for the record the US has spent $800B on this current effort. First, someone with legitimate authority had to make the political decision that Japan would capitulate. Read more. Governments that start or end wars of aggression characteristically care little for the safety of their own people. America's atomic attacks on Japan started a nuclear arms race which bought the world to the brink of destruction. Your suggestion to the contrary is not supported by anything in the text. Instead, it took the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, several days after Hiroshima, to bring the capitulation. By: Sarah Pruitt Updated: May 22, 2023 | Original: July 21, 2020 copy page. After twelve years of Japanese military aggression against China and over three and one-half years of war with the United States (begun with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor), American leaders were reluctant to accept anything less than a complete Japanese surrender. and found there the Richard B. Frank - Weekly Standard piece The shock and awe of the initial front has failed to break the will of the Iraqi people. With time accelerating and their sense of the urgency of the situation deepening, Hirohito responded to this defeat by forcing the army and navy leaders to agree to the idea of an"early peace." But, for a scholarly review that tends to support the use of the A-Bombs, will the following do? It seems to me that Bix is guilty of exactly the same kind Manichaean logic for which those on the left repeatedly and correctly fault the Bush administration: either you are with us, or you are with the bad buys. Hirohito, counting on the success of the Foreign Ministry's peace overtures to Moscow, resisted facing reality and never acted resolutely. My own estimate had been 100,000. Mr. Clarke- The issue will be debated on Lateline at 10.45pm. The atomic bombings probably did play a part in averting a bloody ground invasion and saving thousands of US lives, but historians like Dr Kinston said the bombs were also about sending a message to the Soviets. It was a masterpiece of propaganda packed with terms like"preservation of the national polity,""subjects of the empire," and the"indestructibility of the divine land." No Surrender for the Japanese 'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man' Are Dropped Aftermath of the Bombing On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world's first. Japan was attempting to use the Soviet Union to mediate a negotiated peace in 1945 (a doomed effort, since the Soviets were already planning on breaking off their non-aggression pact and invading). 5.) One wonders why they waste time on the odd rocket attack or car bomb? For the US to quell the violence and win the war we need more ground troops, divide Iraq into local (tribal) spheres, secure the borders especially, the Saudi border where most foreign fighters enter Iraq not Syria or Iran as the press reports and begin to show marked progress in the rebuilding effort not have contractor skim millions of out tax dollars. "A flash of light and the blast slammed me to the ground and I lost consciousness," she said. Lieutenant Onoda, by contrast, doggedly refused to lay down his arms until he received formal orders to surrender. Of course, if the "Magic" decrypts really seriously contradict Bix, then he should have acknowledged that, even in a short article, but this is not clear to me. This was intended for various reasons. The current administration seems to have been pulling a smoke and mirror campaign from the run up to the war 911 Investigation Cover-up, Downing Street Memo, Plame Game and Halliburton Profiteering then now passes off disinformation about the war itself as if the public is to ignorant to the questions of what is going wrong in Iraq. 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Letters and diaries written by student conscripts before they were killed in action speak of harsh beatings, and of soldiers being kicked senseless for the most trivial of matters - such as serving their superior's rice too slowly, or using a vest as a towel. Japan's Surrender Made Public WWII - HISTORY 4.) Mr Tanaka said it was a criminal act under international law. Protests to the U.S. On August 10, 1945, the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese government, through the neutral country of Switzerland, made a stern protest to the U.S., saying, "The use of this atomic bomb is a new crime against mankind.". So if you suspect that he didn't and you want to ding him for that, you'll have to read it or at least check the bibliography and footnotes carefully. What in some cases inspired - and in others, coerced - Japanese men in the prime of their youth to act in such a way was a complex mixture of the times they lived in, Japan's ancient warrior tradition, societal pressure, economic necessity, and sheer desperation. More notable still is the almost comically simplistic view of national and international actors they represent. In waging and losing the Vietnam war, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon never once placed the interests of the American or Vietnamese people first. Oppenheimer: The secrets he protected and the suspicions that followed him How can our leaders know the cost of war if they have never been there? The US is not in control of the Kurdish north who boast upwards of 100,000 men. None of them contradict anything I said before here, and I agree with most of your points. No wonder Iraq smells like Vietnam revisited. One of the most common invocations made in the service of "the atomic bombs weren't necessary" argument is that the Japanese offered to surrender well before Hiroshima, and that this was ignored by the United States because they wanted to drop the bombs anyway (for various other asserted reasons). Bix fails to do so, and thereby undermines some of his tangential claims. That is a counterfactual argument that cannot be conclusively proven or disproven by reference to the actual decoded intercepts. So it was with Japan's decision-makers trying to end their war of aggression while their subjects faced the real prospect of physical annihilation. We may never know the actual thinking of Hirohito when he decided to surrender. This repeats an error made by Juan Cole when he mistranslated an interview with the Iraqi Intel Chief General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani. he inquired. (Don't all the best sources?) Yo The truth about the Japanese surrender. 1. 8. At least according to Frank, who is a WWII historian, the Magic intercepts do indeed tell us that Truman and his advisors had good reason to believe that Japan had both the will and the means to continue fighting prior to the use of the bomb. Interesting how, as you build your straw man, you omit the count and contributions of the Iraqi security forces and how their numbers, commitment and effectiveness has grown over the past 6 months. Although some Japanese were taken prisoner, most fought until they were killed or committed suicide. But give credit also to the journalists, radio announcers, and government officials who interpreted the sacred, high-pitched"voice of the jewel" (gyokuon). "The troops will likely start heading home in the spring." Why did Japan surrender? - The Boston Globe "Regardless of what historians now say" Only some historians say that this was not a valid basis for the use of the bomb on Japan. His overall argument is awkward, and he equivocates a bit, but ultimately it seems clear that he is arguing that the use of the bomb was irrelevant, or nearly so. Although 911 was a thoroughly planned military attack it's aim was not the invasion of the US mainland. 50,000 higher than Saddam's Republican Guard in the "good old days", and all this strength without the benefit of a robust and secure logistical network (think Vietnam)? Why Did the Japanese Delay Surrendering? | History News Network The Big Six and later the full cabinet made Hirohito's decision official government policy. Many historians say the bombings did not lead to the Japanese surrender, and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan two days later was a bigger shock. ), this strategy would be very appealing. Frank does not, for example, address the relative role of Soviet entry in prompting Japans surrender, and he says nothing about the fire-bombing which preceeded Hiroshima. The use of the A-bomb was inevitable. "insurgency strength is estimated at 200,000." Why doesn't the administration recognize the deaths of our service men. Truman and Byrnes introduced nuclear weapons into modern warfare when it had been militarily unnecessary to do so.