Here is some fuel for a fire relating to the use of the Atomic bombs on Japan.

The Joint War Plans Comittee prepared a report calculating cost in American lives for a planned assault on Japan, dated June 15, 1945: 40,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500 missing.

Hundreds of thousands of lives (60 percent of a population of roughly 343,000 were destroyed in Hiroshima itself, not counting radiation sickness, cancer, etc.) were lost in the bombing of the two cities, including a dozen or so U.S. POW's (kept secret for about 30 years).

Another fact was that Japan had been trying to surrender for months prior to the bombing. A cable decoded by the U.S. on May 5, 1945 "dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue for peace". The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reported not long after the war that Japan "in all probability" would have surrendered before the planned November 1st invasion.

The second bombing of Nagasaki had even less of a military justification. At 11 o'clock on August 9, the Prime Minister of Japan told the cabinet that Japan's only alternative was to accept allied terms and terminate the war. Later that day the second bomb fell.

If Japan was already persuing surrender terms, then why were the bombs dropped? By August 15th, Stalin would have offically been in the war. As stated in another post, his army was already used to great effect. Bottom line: End the war as quickly as possible before the U.S.S.R. could conquer satellite territories as was done in Europe and cut off Soviet control of East Asia. The A-Bomb also provided a warning to the U.S.S.R. that was two-fold: The U.S. has a doomsday weapon, and they used it when it wasn't militarily needed.

Some interesting thoughts and facts.

If the bombs hadn't been dropped, Japan, with it's military effectly diminished, would most likely have surrendered before an invasion could have been attempted. However, more interesting, is whether or not having the atomic bomb without a proper display of it's effectiveness would lead to a nuclear war afterwards when tensions with the Soviets were mounting.

Well said... You have some great info there. I wasnt aware that these possibilities could exhist because: Japan still had an Army in the field of over 4 million. They in many cases, were preparing to fight it out to the very end as had many times before.

I dont think that the maniac Tojo, would have surrendered that easily. Tojo definately was as Militeristic as they came. Tojo cared nothing for 1 persons life or 1 million lives. Tojo had power and wanted more.

Now I think the Emperor might have wanted to capitulate sooner to save lives but, was basically powerless since Tojo was the one running things. Hirohito was basically just a figure head like the King of England.

None the less--I liked you well done post.

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Lost are only those, who abandon themselves) Hans-Ulrich Rudel.

"If Japan was already persuing surrender terms, then why were the bombs dropped? By August 15th, Stalin would have offically been in the war. As stated in another post, his army was already used to great effect. Bottom line: End the war as quickly as possible before the U.S.S.R. could conquer satellite territories as was done in Europe and cut off Soviet control of East Asia. The A-Bomb also provided a warning to the U.S.S.R. that was two-fold: The U.S. has a doomsday weapon, and they used it when it wasn't militarily needed."

Costellos 'The Great Pacific War' takes a close look at the Japanese move towards surrender. He quotes and summarizes the Japanese government documents related to this. The Cabinent meetings, the memos between the principle Cabinent members, and coorespondence between the Cabinent and the Japanese diplomats in the USSR and Switzerland are cited. All these documents have been available for many decades, and examined by more than few historians, but ignored by the popular historys.

Costellos interpretation shows a Japanese governement negotiating for peace, before the Soviet decalration of war & the atoms bombs, with two illusions. They thought the USSR both uninterested & incapable of effectively attacking Japan, and they thought to play off the USSR vs the US. Thus the aim of the negotiations in July & early August was for a armistice. The Japanese leaders favoring peace hoped the USSR would back them up and they could not only avoid the Unconditional Surender terms, but even retain their holdings in China and other location on the Asian mainland, giving up their Pacific and British/Dutch colonial trritorys in return. It appears Stalin played along with this while he ordered preperations for war.

The Soviet DoW vs Japan was as strong a political shock as the dropping of the A bombs was a military shock. Even without the rapid conquest of Manchuria, and amphibious invasion of Korea the Soviet DoW made it clear there would be no negotiated armistice that might preserve a bit of Japans empire. the only options remaining were to surrender or be anniliated.

The abject failure of the Qwuantung army in Manchuria meant that japan imeadiatly lost a critical portion of its remaining industry and resources. making resistance even more hopeless.

The A bombs role was to break the attitude of the bulk of those who thought the Allies might be disheartened by severe casualties. The US ability to not only destroy entire cities with a single bomb, but also to disrupt electronic communications all across Japan with each bomb showed just how hopeless the militarists position was.

Even after these blows Japans governemnt still could not reach concensus. The remaining militarists prevented the pro peace faction from attaining the necessary majority in the executive Cabinent. As we all know it took the direct and unprecenteded intervention of the Emperor to initiate surrender.

Based on Costellos presentation of the internal discussions of Japans goernment leaders I really think it took both the A bombs and the USSRs declaration of war to bring Japan to surrender. Either alone would probablly not have tipped the balance in August. In that case actual invasion or possiblly mass starvation, would have been required to bring a agreement for surrender.

Tojo had been voted out of power months earlier. His war policys had obviously failed and the ruling party leaders ousted him. There are a lot of easily available source concerning his political rise & fall.

One really stupid myth of WWII is that Japan was ruled by a dictatorship. In fact it still had a Parliment (the Diet) and a Cabinent of council of ministers. The government and the several political partys were dominated by a oligarchy of powerful business families. None of these were able to accquire enough power to establish a individual as a dictator. Instead these families used a combination of business deals, party politics, parlimentary battles, and assasination to assert their agendas. Assasination was particularly rampant in Japan during the 1920s & 1930s. For instance Prime Minister Suzuki , who was the last war time prime minister and leader of the 'peace faction' in August 1945, still carried a bullet in his chest from a 1928 assasination attempt.

There were several widely diverging estimates for military casualties. MacAurthur is susposed to have ignored the estimated of his own senior surgeon (the US Armys medical branch had primary responsibility for estimating casualties.) and presented much lower numbers to Truman, Marshall, and the Joint War Plans Comittee. Using the other battles the US fought in 1945, particularly Okinawa & Iwo Jima, as a guide the ratio of casualties to total manpower of the ground forces would be much higher.

Estimates for Japanese military & civillian casualties vary widely as well, although I cant recall any estimates that were remotely as low as the losses from the A bombs.

The Soviet Union massed a huge army around Manchuria as previously noted here. And as previouslly noted they used large scale airbourne drops, and several amphibious attacks varying in scale from commando compys up to divsion size. The air drops were in support of large mechanized thrusts into Manchuria. The amhibious ops were along the Korean coast and in the Kurile islands north east of Japan.

The USSR had the air transport and sea lift to capture and use several ports along Japans northern & western coast. In August 1945 these areas were less well defended. Better protecting them would have required transfering soldiers and material from the areas at risk to the US on the southern and eastern shores. While not of the same scale as the US operations the Soviet attacks would have not been trivial.

Then after the Americans launched Operations Olympic and Coronet to the cost of at least 1 million dead, wounded and missing while extending the war by at least two years The US President would have been impeached.

IMHO, I think if there was no A-bomb, the Russians would take over Korea and force Japan to either surrender and allow the U.S. troops in, or they would have been invaded by Russia if we waited too long. I also think that there would be a good chance that instead of North and South Korea, it would be Japan that was split up.

Without the threat of the bomb, there is a possibility that the Russians would be more inclined to try and kick the U.S. out of Japan. They would be in a good position to support any operations, while the U.S. would not. A lot would depend on circumstances, but it always does.

Consider that this happens at the same time that Russia closes off Berlin and the airlift happened. We would be facing an fight on two fronts with a stronger foe than Germany or Japan. Would the American people have the desire to save Japan from the Russians? The attitude was different than against the Germans. Pearl Harbor, Bataan, and other reports of atrocities against our people made the hate more pronounced. As much cruelity as the Germans imposed on the Jews, the hatred was focused by the public on their leadership because they never directly offended our sense of honor.

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Lord, let me be the person my dog thinks I am.

I read some were once that the site the allies were going to drop several A-bombs on the area they chose to land at.

But as for casualties in an invasion, Japan would most definantly been almost destroyed, Every one in the country was prepared to die, And the allies estimated that they alone would suffer 1,000,000+ casualties.

They A-bomb saved millions.

Interesting . Japan has been used as a giant lab and the devastating effect of the two bombs prevented others from using it during the cold war.
had this bomb not been used in 1945, it would certainly have been used at least once after the war, the later the more powerful....
It could have been dropped on Corea, China, Russia etc.. Also the Russsians could have been the first ones to try it on the west during the cold war.
At least the two first bombs were not so powerful as those we have nowadays, maybe their terrible consequences are the reason we are still on this planet today.

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Without the atom bombs Japan would still surrender.

Now that more and more official records have been released from Secrecy Act time-tables, we now know that Truman knew all along that Japan was willing to surrender long before the atom bombs.

Every single one of Truman's Intelligence, military and political advisors went along with every single member of the General Staff and all his cabinet save 2...were adamantly against not only using the bombs, but Unconditional Surrender in the first place. They all agreed it was only prolonging the war.

Sec'try War Stimson(though against Japanese interment camps) felt we had to use the bombs, not to much to scare the Japanese but in his words, intimidate Stalin. Unfortunately that didn't work at all.

Byrnes(Truman's Carl Rowe) was the only other for it.

Even Curtiss LeMay of all people(who created SAC and ability to nuke cities around the world) argued he didn't want to be remembered as a 'war criminal' and sincerely felt he could be tried as such someday.

Eventhough Stalin was lying about submitting Japanese peace proposals to us since 1943, Swedish, Swiss, Argentine and other histories prove they were used as well.

Worse, we KNEW EXACTLY the Japanese position at the time in regards to the Emperor even amongst the 'peace party'. The one code we were best at breaking was their Diplomatic Code. We were reading what they were saying to eachother even before they were. We KNEW that even months before the atom bombs, the Japanese were determined to fight on over only one issue anymore, not even land, but the Emperor's safety, security and position. Something we ended up guaranteeing anyways.

That's like saying the reason I slapped you was because you weren't willing to give up "A" and then even after I slapped you I let you keep "A" anyways.

Unconditional Surrender was one of the biggest mistakes on our side.
Cabinets, Staff even the most ardent commanders like MacArthur, Patton, Montgomery and Ike were all against it from start to finish.

To start with, we had to do was recind Unconditional Surrender.
Then the Japanese would see that they would be treated differently depending upon which leaders they supported.
The militarists, who had already started losing their throat grip on the politicians even before Tojo was sacked, were already divided amongst themselves voting against the 'die to the end' extremists.

The Brits were smart.
Upon surrender, they immediately asked the Emperor's permission to keep Japanese military and re-arm them. The Brits and Dutch used these 'surrendered' Japanese garrisons, air,army even sea, to 'hold down the fort' against the communists throughout Indonesia, Borneo, Malaya/malaysia and Burma. The first Japanese returning home in 1946, the last in 1951. By doing that, the British and Dutch succeeded where the French and Americans failed in keeping the communists from power.

If you like, ignore that the Japanese still refused to surrender after touring the carnage of the first bomb, that the Soviets invaded BEFORE the second bomb and that decoded Japanese records indicate that to them, that was at least as telling a blow. Like the Germans, the Japanese would have preferred to keep the communists as far away an uninvolved as possible.

If we had agreed to do what we ended up doing anyways, leave the Emperor, we could not only have ended the war before the Soviets got involved, but also, like the British and Dutch, in such a way that by incrementally replacing the Japanese military occupying Asia with ours, China would never have become communist, there would have been no Korean nor Vietnam war. No decades of Trillions of dollars of spending in an Asian as well as European Cold War.

Without a doubt the Japanese were willing to surrender even without the atom bombs, in an even more advantageous end-scenario situation for our side as well.

What is worse, is that this isn't 'hind-sight-wisdom', Truman and our Intel and staffs KNEW this to be true. But Stimson(who did not believe the only good jap is a dead jap) believed Stalin would 'mind his place' only if we used it.

Though of course I believe he also suggested using it only on a military only target, island, maybe even (though bad for the natives too) Truk instead.

What if there was no A-bomb?

We still could have and should have won even better than we did.

Exactly right!!

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

Exactly right!!

Stalin however was working on the same kind of weapon in secrecy and the allies had no idea ( In the beginning at least ).

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

Politics, politics...

http://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Bomb-So.../dp/0300066643

Capable as the Soviet scientists were , their ideas did not receive full support from Stalin until they had been validated in the West. And so Kurchatov and his top associate Khariton had to set aside their own design for a uranium bomb and embark on an all-out effort to reproduce the plutonium weapon the Americans had tested successfully at Alamogordo, N.M. The irony is that while all this was going on, Stalin was simultaneously engaged in an attempt to root out foreign influences in Soviet life, beginning with the arts and spreading to biology. In 1948 a campaign led by the fraudulent geneticist Trofim Lysenko destroyed Soviet biological research for decades to come. The next year, in March 1949, a conference was to take place in Moscow that would censure Soviet physicists for "kowtowing and groveling before the West." At the last minute the conference was called off and, in the Russia of those days, only one man could have done that.

According to a story related by Mr. Holloway, Beria had asked Kurchatov shortly before the conference whether it was true that quantum mechanics and relativity theory were idealist and antimaterialist. Kurchatov reportedly replied that if relativity theory and quantum mechanics had to be rejected by Russian science, the atomic bomb would have to be rejected, too. According to another story in the book, Stalin phrased his decision to cancel this way: "Leave them [ the physicists ] in peace. We can always shoot them later." He could afford a charlatan like Lysenko in biology, but physics was another matter. Stalin relied on his physicists for the bomb -- and for Soviet status as a superpower. When his first atomic bomb was tested in August 1949, five months after the aborted conference, those scientists who would have been shot in the event of failure received the highest awards: Hero of Socialist Labor and so on, down the line.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/0...ay-stalin.html

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Had the A-Bomb not been dropped, Japan would have been invaded. By who is the question. The American operation was scheduled and would have been in its launching point when the biggest typhoon in the decade would have hit. This would have caused innumerable casualties to the invasion force before it set foot on Japan, had enough been destroyed in the storm, the invasion would have been left to Russia. Russia while capable of a small invasion would have had to have more shipping capability to pull off a large invasion. Time would be needed to prepare a second invasion fleet. Whether it would have been American or Russian is a good question.

During the time needed to prepare more Japanese would have starved. The Emperor, who was still the leader of the country as far as the people saw it, would have had to announced any surrender, the militarists did, and mould have been more successful without the A-bomb, try to stop any peace effort by the Emperor to the extent that they invaded his palace. To simply say that Japan would have surrounded with out invasion or the A-Bombs is simply conjecture. If you look at the past actions of the Japanese Army or Navy, surrender was not a possibility.

Was the A-Bomb dropped to show Russia what the US had? I Doubt it. If you want to show someone something like this you get it as close to them as you can. If the US had wanted Russia to know all about it they would have dropped it on a Japanese possession that the Russians would take over, like Korea or Manchuria. Remember also that most of the American were not concerned about the Russians, Roosevelt believed he could make Russia a great friend of the US.

Any notion that they way the war ended caused communism to spread is Asia is not entirely true. China had been fighting the communists since the 20’s and had a loose peace with them during the Japanese invasion of the 30’s. The US had supported Nationalist China during this time as well and continued to do so until they lost to the communists. The occupied areas in China did not become communistic upon the defeat of Japan. Korea which was invaded by communists became a democracy by choice of the people in the 40’s, but the North turned communist later in the 50’s. Vietnam was similar but delayed because of the poor handling of Pro American Vietnamese who had helped fight the Japanese, but when the Western Allies supported Frances claim to it, these Pro-Americans became communistic to liberate their country from the French and Americans.

A great first post. Welcome.

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Quoting The Oxford Companion to WWII
credit to John Toland's work 1st changing my mind.

"But the argument that the decision to use those weapons was taken strictly to save the lives of American soldiers, as Truman and Stimson reported in books, articles and public statements, has become increasingly unsupportable as documents are prised out of their archival shelters."
P75

"In the end, the issue of Japanese surrender turned on modifying the doctrine of *'unconditional surrender'....the doctrine had become something of a political shibboleth by the time Trumen entered office. But it had also become a barrier to surrender. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code (see MAGIC) early in the war, the Dep't of Stat's Far Eastern specialists were united in their belief that Japan would surrender if assured that it could maintain Emperor *Hirohito and the imperial dynasty.

In the end, after the two existnig atomic bombs had destroyed their targets, and the Soviets had entered teh war, teh Japanese continued to insist on such guarantees. They would surrender, the Japanese announced on 10 Augutst, on the condition that the Potsdam Declaration 'does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as Sovereign Ruler'. In response to subtle assurances from the USA that the emperor would continue to occupy the throne, Japan surrendered on August 14th.

'History might find that the United States,' Stimson wrote in his autobiography, 'in its delay in stating its position on unconditional surrender terms, had prolonged the war.'

(someone here ridiculed my assertion that any historians let alone top level officials on our side even, had serious mis-givings over 'unconditional surrender.)

That's a fascinating observation and to religious people could be seen as 'a sign from god' as some of my own relatives are always looking for. Literally another 'Kamikaze' the propagandists could announce like that which helped defeat the Mongols in the 1200s. Though I also wonder how it would have affected crops. Some said that the recent record crop failures were also a sign from the gods to end the war. How you spin it obviously.

I used to believe that too, but now I suggest you read more even English and American history books. As quoted above. Also read John Toland, American veteran of the Pacific war who for decades wrote history harsh on the Japanese but as more and more files were uncovered and released from protection by Secrecy Acts, he himself has reversed his opinion on the matter and shown why by OSS and Oval Office tapes and records.

P75
"When Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945 he left both a wartime and post-war legacy. The wartime legacy was that the bomb would be used militarily against Japan as soon as it was ready. The post-war legacy was that in the aftermathc of the awr it would be used diplomatically, as a bargaining chip against the USSR."

Go back and read the first quotes, or more on the bomb from even Toland, Alperovitz, Groueff, Rhodes and Sherman.

As for claims that because we chose southern targets rather than northern therefore these historians are wrong about the motive of its use and how, I suppose, off the top of my head, range limitations were a factor, the longer the Enola Gay or her decoy bomber were over Japan the more likely they could be intercepted or something go wrong. The last thing in the world we'd need is a 'broken arrow' scenario where the enemy recovered even an unusable downed bomb. One of the quoted fears of using against the Germans by Churchill and Roosevelt. Another would be we sure wouldn't want the Japanese to think it was the Russians who did it instead of us. And by bombing targets in Korea or northern Japan just so the Russians might see the light on the horizon might make the enemy think it came from them instead. I don't know, but it is clear from the above quoted authors that this was clearly the reason we used the bombs as we did, and not on a military only base in the Pacific like Truk as suggested.

P75
"As the problems with the Soviets mounted, the hopes invested in the value of the bomb increased. It was viewed as a virtual panacea for confronting the impending post-war diplomatic difficulties." Stimson wrote 'over any such tangled wave of problems between the USA and the USSR the S-1 secret would be dominant.'

"Churchill reported that Truman suddenly 'stood up to the Russians in a most emphatic and decisive manner'."

Hardly your take on things I'm afraid.