Originally Posted by SouthWestPacificVet

Robert,

If you look back at my original post, before someone shortened it for a quote. That was the thinking of the day, also the invasion force preparation was not a last minute idea if the bombs didn't work, we were involved in training assault troops stateside for the invasion, and that was in the late spring of '45. When I use the term "we" at times, I do not mean the country in general, I was assigned a company to oversee the task along with a number of men I knew overseas, watching all the eager teenage faces drilling and learning to fight, and those kids had no idea what they were getting into. I'm glad none of them ever had to find out.

Originally Posted by Slipdigit

It is amazing to me that it still took 6 days after the second atomic bomb, 9 after the first, for the Japanese to accept the surrender terms.

In other words, they still had people arguing for the continuance of the war even after that, and apparently numerous and powerful ones.

Originally Posted by Weisenwolf

This is covered quite well in 'Nemesis' by Max Hastings. It is quite a complicated issue but basically a way had to be found to achive the end of the war without the Emperor's cred being too badly damaged.

What is even more bizzare is that this still very nearly did not happen and there seem to be plenty of influential folk willing to go for National suicide!

Originally Posted by chocapic

"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so 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'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: "...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary."

William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512.


And Hiroshima was a big populated city which included military installations, not just a military base like Truman said.

If this meant the same thing, I wonder why, for example, some people would have bothered inventing such a concept as surgical strike