Japan Was Already Beaten and Starving When We Dropped Nukes

Here is just some of the evidence that Japan was beaten and prostrate by no later than June 1945, some two months before Truman decided to drop nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

* By June 1945, we were losing only 0.003 of our bombers in air raids on Japan—in other words, only 3 out of every 1,000 bombers were being shot down (Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath, p. 176). Thus, Japan was virtually defenseless against air attack.

* By June 1945, every major Japanese port was mined by the U.S. Navy and Air Force. Indeed, U.S. Navy mines closed the Shimonoseki Straights, which cut off naval activity between the Japanese main islands of Honshu and Kyushu. U.S. Navy mines also shut down 18 of Japan’s 21 naval repair yards on the Inland Sea. Hiroshima’s port was shut down. Nagasaki’s port, formerly a major port, became nearly worthless.

* By June 1945, Japan had a grand total of 9,000 planes of any kind. Most of these were trainers or old planes designed for kamikaze raids, and less than half of them were properly equipped for such raids. Many of those planes could not have been flown anyway due to the lack of fuel.

* By June 1945, the Japanese Navy’s surface fleet had essentially ceased to exist. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) reported,

After the liberation of the Philippines and the capture of Okinawa, oil imports into Japan were completely cut off; fuel oil stocks had been exhausted, and the few remaining Japanese warships, being without fuel, were decommissioned or were covered with camouflage and used only as antiaircraft platforms. Except for its shore-based Kamikaze air force and surface and undersea craft adapted for anti-invasion suicide attack, the Japanese Navy had ceased to exist. (USSBS, p. 11)

* By early 1945, the vast majority of Japan’s merchant vessels had been destroyed. According to the USSBS, by the end of the war, we had sunk or disabled about 90% of Japan’s merchant fleet shipping (USSBS, pp. 72-74).

* In his award-winning book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Illustrated Edition, 2000), historian John Dower gives further details about the conditions in Japan in the last months of the war, noting, among other things, that, due to severe food shortages, starvation became a major cause of death in the Japanese army by mid-1945:

The Allied policy of “economic strangulation” had sent most of the navy and merchant marine to the bottom of the ocean by mid-1945, choking off supplies to the home front as well as to the war front. In the Southeast Asian and Pacific theaters, starvation became a major cause of death among fighting men. (p. 91)

No one who has read Dower's work on the Pacific War would accuse him of being any kind of a "Japanese apologist." Far from it. Yet, even Dower questions the need to drop nukes given Japan's prostrate condition and given our knowledge of Japanese peace feelers.

* The USSBS also reported the following about our bombing of Japanese cities and about Japan’s condition:

Not only were the Japanese defenses overwhelmed, but Japan's will and capacity for reconstruction, dispersal, and passive defense were less than Germany's. In the aggregate some 40 percent of the built-up area of the 66 cities attacked was destroyed. Approximately 30 percent of the entire urban population of Japan lost their homes and many of their possessions. (USSBS, p. 86)

Even though the urban area attacks and attacks on specific industrial plants contributed a substantial percentage to the overall decline in Japan's economy, in many segments of that economy their effects were duplicative. Most of the oil refineries were out of oil, the alumina plants out of bauxite, the steel mills lacking in ore and coke, and the munitions plants low in steel and aluminum. Japan's economy was in large measure being destroyed twice over, once by cutting off of imports, and secondly by air attack. (USSBS, p. 90)

By 1944, the average per capita caloric intake had declined to approximately 1,900 calories. By the summer of 1945 it was about 1,680 calories per capita. . . .

The average diet suffered even more drastically from reductions in fats, vitamins and minerals required for balance and adversely affected rates of recovery and mortality from disease and bomb injuries.

Undernourishment produced a major increase in the incidence of beriberi and tuberculosis. (USSBS, p. 94)

* In July 1945 the Japanese government was forced to impose yet another cut in staple food rations: a cut of 10%, in fact. As a result, the food ration per person fell below 1700 calories, well below the minimum needed to maintain basic health. Cases of night blindness due to malnutrition became common. Japan was even running so low on rice that the government announced a program to process acorns as a substitute for rice.

* Japan was so low on fuel that by October 1944 many new fighter pilots were being trained with films instead of live flight training in order to save fuel:

The Toho Motion Picture Company constructed a lake in Setagaya and filled it with six-foot models of U.S. warships. Atop a tower a movie camera on a boom took pictures of the vessels from various angles, simulating different speeds of approach. These films were shown as a substitute for flight training in order to save fuel. (John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945, New York: Random House, 2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition, p. 536)

* Japan was running so low on metal that its military aircraft were increasingly made with larger amounts of wood. In fact, in July the government announced it had established a department to make planes out of wood.

* Starting in early 1944 the lack of metals became so severe, due to the U.S. naval blockade, that the Japanese government was forced to start confiscating and melting bridge railings, metal fences, metal statues (even those in Buddhist temples), gate posts, notice boards, and even household items.

* Although Japan built underground aircraft factories, raw materials were in such short supply that only 10—yes, just 10—aircraft were manufactured in those factories.

* In March 1945, imports of crude oil, rubber, coal, and iron ore ceased—that’s right, they ceased, stopped, ended. Why? Because of the U.S. Navy’s blockade.

* As mentioned earlier, Japan was virtually defenseless against air attacks. By June 1945, the odds of a U.S. bomber being shot down in a bombing raid over Japan were 3 out of 1,000—not 3 out of 100 but 3 out of 1,000. The pitiful state of Japan’s air defenses persuaded General Curtis LeMay that he could safely remove machine guns and gunners from his bombers. Gene Santoro:

To up the B-29’s bomb capacity, as Arnold kept demanding, LeMay again boldly flaunted conventional wisdom. His analysis told him there was little low-altitude flak over Japan, and that the enemy’s night fighters were negligible risks. He stripped 325 B-29s of defensive guns and gunners to lessen their weight, allowing an increase in bomb and fuel loads; then he filled them with incendiary clusters, magnesium bombs, white phosphorus bombs, and a new product called napalm, and ordered them to fly over Japan at night at 5,000 to 7,000 feet instead of 30,000, which had his crews gnashing their teeth. . . .

The night of March 9, 1945, LeMay’s reconfigured B-29s took off. In three hours, they dumped tons of incendiaries on Tokyo, killing some 80,000 civilians and destroying the homes of a million others. The crews in the last aircraft reported being assaulted by the stench of burning flesh. Unlike in Europe, LeMay waited behind at HQ, grounded because he was one of the few to know about the atomic bomb and couldn’t risk capture and interrogation. When the planes taxied in, only 14 were lost. “Eighty-six percent of them attacked the primary target,” LeMay later wrote. “We lost just four-and-three-tenths per cent…. Sixteen hundred and sixty-five tons of incendiary bombs went hissing down upon that city, and hot drafts from the resulting furnace tossed some of our aircraft two thousand feet above their original altitude. We burned up nearly sixteen square miles of Tokyo.” (“Outkilling the Enemy,” Outkilling the Enemy)

* By June 1945, Japan posed no threat to us. The Japanese were purely on the defensive and their situation was only getting worse by the day because of our virtually total naval embargo and total control of the air. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the USSBS concluded that “in all probability” Japan would have surrendered before 1 November 1945 even if we had not dropped nukes and even if the Soviets had not invaded:

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. (USSBS, p. 26)

 

Many of the deficiency symptoms mentioned can be transferred almost 1:1 to the situation of the Third Reich since the end of 1944. Nevertheless, surrender only took place after Hitler killed himself, when the first Red Army soldiers knocked on the door of his bunker - but not a minute before!

Japan was much more extremist in its attitude towards surrender. And Washington was also aware that the Red Army had paid an enormous price in blood during its assault on Berlin - so they could calculate what would happen in the event of an invasion of the Japanese motherland.

From a humanist point of view, the use of A-bombs leaves a sour taste. Not to use them, however, would have been an unforgivable sin of omission towards one's own soldiers (and countless civilian Japanese combatants).
It is a sad fact that wars are won with the slide rule and its victims disappear in statistics.....

 

Agreed 100%. Unfortunately I do not have the skills of communication on this subject as others have displayed here. But I have read enough on the subject to understand that to not only drop the first bomb, but also the second, was the best and only way for the Japanese to show up on the deck of the Missouri on September 2, 1945. They were a brutal, merciless regime that had to be put to the Atomic bomb’s devastation.

 

The problem with Mr. Griffith is that he wants to sell an agenda, or better: his book in which he promotes it.

This thread is a wonderfully illustrative example of what makes this guy tick (beware, there are lots of $10 words to follow):

There is a long list that clearly proves how wrecked the Japanese arms industry was. Well done!
What it does not prove, however, is whether Japan was ready to surrender - and also not whether it was caused by the circumstances described.
That must be proven separately!

Furthermore, it is not enough to list long quotations from pleasing sources. It is also necessary to list at least as many sources that speak against it.
Then, and only then, comes the fine art of creating a context from these.
As a matter of principle, however, such studies must always be conducted with an open mind, because otherwise they inevitably lead to confirmation bias
(see also: "Texas sharpshooter").

I work part-time in archaeology - if I were to use methods like MTG, I would not even be trusted with a wheelbarrow.

 

In Germany we would prefer the term "Dummschwätzer"
But spammer also sums it up pretty well:

 

So that's your "response"? "Ah-ha! You copied and pasted!" Umm, well, when I quote a source, yes, of course, I will copy and paste. What does that have to do with anything? When I first began posting, you complained that I didn't provide any sources. Now that I'm providing sources and quoting from some of them, your only answer is to make the Captain Obvious point that I copied and pasted.

 

MTG, I wish you'd been around in 1945. We could have sent you to Japan as a special envoy to advise the Japanese that they were beaten. Then they could have surrendered without the need to drop the nukes. I do have one question though. If they were so beaten and ready to surrender, why didn't they do so after the first strike? You'd have thought Hiroshima would have "sealed the deal". Yet it took a second strike three days later to convince them.
Also, they didn't surrender after the Tokyo firebombing in March (9-10 March 1945) which was more destructive than either of the Atomic bomb strikes. In fact, they were particularly combative during the Okinawa campaign that kicked off the following month. So, we kill 100k people, injure up to a million and devastate 16 square miles of Tokyo and their resolve isn't weakened. This doesn't include the 100 or so additional fire bombings.

The 5-7000 foot bombing height was not due to "Japan was virtually defenseless against air attacks". It was because analysis showed that the altitude was above the effective range of light AA fire yet below the effective range of the heavy AA batteries. "His analysis told him there was little low-altitude flak over Japan", again not accurate, there was plenty of low altitude AA in Japan, but 5000 feet placed the aircraft outside effective range (not range, effective range, militarily they are two seperate things). LeMay switched to night bombing because daylight precision bombing was so ineffective. Only about 25% of bombs dropped hit their targets, largely due to high altitude winds (today we know it as the jet stream). So, oh wise and powerful MTG, how is this more humane than dropping the atomic bombs.

Also, if you follow your argument about lack of food, malnutrition and illness out to its logical conclusion, by the dates you gave for Japanese surrender without the bombings, 1 November to 31 December 1945. You're probably looking at more civilians dying from starvation and malnutrition caused illnesses than died in the bombings. Starvation is a lot harder way to die.

 

6 feet underground...

 

You are aware that a starvation caloric intake is 600 calories per day are you not?

Thus, by your own admission Japan was not starving, and the Japanese were well above starvation. US Navy estimates were that starvation would begin in Japan around late '46 - early '47.

That is not to say that it would not begin earlier in the outlier areas of Japan furtherest from supply centers and given the destruction of the transportation network. Only that massive starvation would not have any meaningful effect until much later than the November, 1945 date of the USSBS.