Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/why_did_japan_surrender/?page=full

by luckysahaf • 12 years ago

81 71 12 years ago

chaostheory3• 12 years ago

Hasegawa’s ability to read three languages, Bernstein says, gives him a unique advantage over other scholars. Hasegawa spent years working through primary documents, with a deep understanding of linguistic and cultural nuance. His knowledge was especially valuable because historians of the period face such fragmentary and contradictory evidence, in part because the Japanese destroyed many documents.
But therein lies the weakness of the Hasegawa interpretation as well, Bernstein says. After a long war and in the space of a few days, the Japanese leadership was hit with two extraordinary events - Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion - and sorting out cause and effect, based on incomplete documentation, may prove impossible.

There's something else barely examined in the article as well (beyond 2 sentences). I would imagine that totalitarian governments will behave differently from democratic republics when their own people are dying.

jihokoo4• 12 years ago

The article also poses the idea that its unlikely that the U.S. would surrender a war after a city was destroyed.

Article also gives the example of UK not giving up after German bombing in WW2.

frozenport2• 12 years ago

Don't forget that France surrendered.

rhino3692• 12 years ago

Would America surrender if SF or NYC was nuked? No.

Would America surrender if we were essentially defeated, blockaded, and the enemy were bombing our cities with impunity? Of course we would.

It isn't like America just snuck two nukes into Japan. It had totally defeated the Imperial Navy and was essentially bombing Japan without any resistance.

The comparison between Japan in August 45 and UK during the Blitz is just stupid.

Even if the Soviet attack was the last straw, it was only a straw. They were trying to use the Soviets to negotiate a better peace and it failed. This is like blaming your QB for missing the Hail Mary for losing the game. It was the first 59 minutes of game that caused you to lose.

People online (not real historians) like to hype this up to bandwagon the "US didn't win WWII, the USSR did" mythology. The truth is it was a huge combined effort.

chaostheory3• 12 years ago

Yes, as I've already mentioned it deserves more thought than just two sentences when you're trying to sell the idea that nuclear weapons are not deterrents to large scale wars. So far modern history has already disproved Hasegawa's opinion. Ever since the advent of global ballistic weapons, we have yet had another major world war besides conflicts here and there. They have kept the peace.

sandworm3• 12 years ago

Hasegawa also hesitates to suggest that there were forces within the Japanese elite who were working to end the war. That would be to suggest treason. Imho the use of nukes gave them that opportunity.

nabla9• 12 years ago

August 6: bombing of Hiroshima

August 7:

1. Japanese nuclear scientists determine that the bomb was indeed nuclear device.

2. Imperial Navy estimates that US has only one or two more bombs and Japan could endure the attacks.

August 9:

1. bombing of Nagasaki

2. USSR declares war to Japan & Manchurian Strategic Offensive started.

3. Hirohito worried because USSR declared war and held an Imperial conference that authorized minister Tōgō to surrender with only one condition: status of the Emperor must be preserved.

August 15: Japan Surrenders

Even after Hirohito made the personal decision to surrender, the intention was to continue the war if the kokutai (Imperial institution and national polity) would not be preserved.

cbd1984• 12 years ago

Even after Hirohito made the personal decision to surrender, the intention was to continue the war if the kokutai (Imperial institution and national polity) would not be preserved.

And here's where I don't understand the reasoning: Did they seriously think the kokutai would have been preserved if they had fought on? Did they seriously think the Allies would have allowed Japan to continue as it had? It seems the most obvious thing in the world to blockade and bombard the Home Islands for six to eight months, destroying farmland especially, and then engage in the beachhead assault that had already been planned.

The American Armed Forces are still using Purple Hearts made specifically for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. They're all new-old stock, to use the common phrase; that's how serious the plan was.

hga5• 12 years ago

They're still using Purple Hearts from the first batch MacArthur ordered, which was 1/4 of what he expected to need. And he didn't believe the solid intelligence that revealed Operation Olympic, the initial invasion of the home island Kyuushuu, was not going to work (too many divisions moved to that island, 6,000 or so kamikazes (an underestimate) would be ready and would not have to navigate all the way down to Okinawa ... many people don't know that the Battle of Okinawa was the single most expensive in lives for the US Navy...).

Those planning Operation Downfall, the overall one to capture the home islands (well, the regime would fell after the 2nd invasion of the main island), who didn't know about the Manhattan Project were planning to make liberal use of chemical weapons. Those who did ... well, if the 2nd bomb failed, there's a very good chance future production would be reserved for Olympic, with up to 8 of them being used....

As for their strategy, they started the war with an assumption that we weren't tough enough to see it through. It's said that the truth didn't sink into the IJNavy until we lost 2 Rear Admirals (2 stars) in a single night action off of Guadalcanal, in a body of water that earned the name Ironbottom Sound, so many USN and IJN ships were sunk there.

So when it came to the home islands, they hoped they could make it expensive enough we'd give up before the regime fell. Even after we'd firebombed all their major urban centers minus Kyoto (politically critical for the Emperor) and the 4 a-bomb targets and alternates....

It's a very good thing for the world everything came together in that August and they surrendered. And if I had a time machine, I'd never ever try to change anything in history going up to that point, the horror of those a-bombs, even if each caused less loss of life than the first Tokyo firebombing (in only it and one other attack did everything come together including the weather and winds).

vaadu• 12 years ago

"If killing large numbers of civilians does not have a military impact, then what, Wilson asks, is the purpose of keeping nuclear weapons?"

The writer stupidly jumps from the idea that if nukes have less than a major impact then they have no impact. Does anyone think the UK or USSR would not have surrendered if the Germans had nukes?

If the US had today's nukes on 8 Dec 1941 the war would not have lasted nearly as long. Every island stronghold, port, airfield, city and fleet would have been taken out early. the remnants would have been mopped up by the Marines.

Sharlin• 12 years ago

I don't think the USSR would have even considered surrendering had the Germans had two 15 kiloton nukes and used those against them.

thrownaway2424• 12 years ago

Indeed. The USSR was already down ~5 million people, why would it have made a difference for the Germans to kill a few tens of thousands more? That would just make the Russians even more angry.

hackuser2• 12 years ago

"If killing large numbers of civilians does not have a military impact, then what, Wilson asks, is the purpose of keeping nuclear weapons?"

I just was reading about this [1]. Unguided weapons miss their targets, almost always. As a result you need to mass together and fire large numbers of them to hit even one target with any reliability. Also, because of the large numbers needed and the need to fire them near the target (because accuracy decreases as distance increases), they become a valuable target, vulnerable to the enemy.

Nuclear weapons solved these problems (with a some serious drawbacks). One weapon will do the job, and its blast area is so large that accuracy is unimportant.

(Modern guided weapons also solve many of these problems).

[1] http://www.cnas.org/20YY-Preparing-War-in-Robotic-Age

yourapostasy• 12 years ago

I hypothesize that the ongoing refinement of modern guidance will have a far greater future impact upon warfare than is generally currently recognized. The logical direction to take this refinement is not just enhancing the metre-level precision today to centimetre-grade precision, but also high-precision remote ID. When you possess the capability to real-time ID and track a single individual human target from tens, hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and direct precise fire control upon that target, then it opens an entire new dimension to violent statecraft, with many new challenges.

sandworm3• 12 years ago

Lol. This topic is just about the most sensitive things I can imagine. The concept that America "won" both the pacific and European wars is an integral part of American identity. Shortly after the war, with the rise of the cold war, US students were brought up on the one narrative. Any suggestion that the Soviets were a driving force in ending the war forces them to confront deeply held beliefs regarding the use of force and violence generally.

Another aspect not covered in the OP is the efficiency of US nukes. Much/most of the damage done was not from the bombs. If you measure damage through the heat energy released, most came from the burning of the cities rather from the fission in the bomb itself. The firebombing of a city releases as much energy as a nuclear explosion, doing a comparable amount of damage. At the time, a firebombing raid required fewer resources than a nuke. So, from an energy standpoint, the nukes were not an economical means of destroying Japanese cities.

Why then were they used? Why were they used in the pacific and not in europe? (Insert massive screaming rants here.)

Someone• 12 years ago

The trinity test was in july 1945, two months after the surrender of Germany.

We don't know whether atomic bombs would have been used on, say, Berlin or the Ruhr area (maybe even tactically, to speed up the allied advance in the west), but I think the USA would have used one, if only to send a message to the soviets.

sandworm3• 12 years ago

I have heard discussion that those in control were worried about dropping a nuke over Germany for fear that, should it not explode, it would wind up in the hands of enemy scientists. Japan was not considered capable of repaiting and turning around such a device. Some artillery and anti-aircraft shells during WWII were not permitted to be used over land for similar reasons.

The timelines, the actual dates that the bombs became available, are a little secondary imho as this was a multi-year developmental program. I still doubt they would have dropped a bomb on germany for a variety of reasons both technological and sociological.

walshemj• 12 years ago

That's what they where designed for and if d day had stalled they would have been used in the rhur.

There is also strong evidence that Stalin wanted to get to berlin first to grab some of the German nuclear materiel in Berlin

mc323• 12 years ago

They were used on Japan and not Germany because they barely were okayed for use a few weeks prior to their detonation over enemy territory. The Germans had no compunction about dropping them on us had they had a working one so I don't think we would have had any issue deploying one over Germany --just like we had little issue firebombing Dresden. At the time saw both Japan and Germany as mortal enemies and would have used any resource at hand to defeat them militarily.

rhino3692• 12 years ago

Actually, I think there is a big open issue about the difference between the US policy on strategic bombing in Japan and against Germany.

US bombing in Germany was designed to specifically attack industry. They flew during daytime, despite that leading to much higher causalities among their crews, and used bomb targets.

It was the UK that firebombed Dresden during night without bothering to aim at specific targets. The British always flew night raids and just aimed to cause carnage.

American policy on the Western campaign didn't target civilians. They used precision bombing (what it was called at the time, it wasn't very precise) to target real targets.

Yet, the policy against Japan ended up much different. At the beginning precision bombing was attempted. But by 1945 they started to resort to firebombing entire cities.

I wonder if there was a racial aspect to it. A lot of Americans consider themselves ethnically German.

Animats• 12 years ago

Recommended reading: "Japan's Longest Day", the nonfiction book, not the movie or novel (Review: http://www.warbirdforum.com/end.htm). This was written in the 1980s by a group of Japanese historians who interviewed almost everyone still living who had been directly involved in the decision to end the war.

The key thing to understand is that nobody was firmly in charge. The 6-member Supreme War Council, with representatives of the Army, Navy, and the civilian government was running the war. They had been operating by consensus, despite severe disagreements. The civilian government was much weaker than the military. (This stemmed from the February 26, 1936 attempted coup. Long story there.) The Japanese army and navy never got along. A strong faction in the Army wanted to continue the war to the bitter end. (They tried a coup against the Emperor on August 14, 1945, just before the surrender, captured the Imperial Palace, and almost succeeded.) War Minister Anami (the Army head on the Supreme War Council) said, after the Hiroshima bomb, "I am convinced that the Americans had only one bomb, after all." After the second bomb was dropped, Anami still wanted to fight on, but the Emperor decided otherwise. Anami committed ritual suicide.

It was a close thing. If Anami had supported the coup, or the coup had succeeded in capturing the NHK radio station or the Emperor himself, the war probably would have continued.

GCA102• 12 years ago

Well said. I'm remembering other accounts saying that one of the Navy commanders at the end was eager to see everything go up in a giant conflagration if necessary. Some strange, distorted sense of heroism.

In such settings, I think it makes sense to regard the combination of Soviets and A-bombs as decisive. Most really big events in history have multiple causes.

waps• 12 years ago

From the article

Their concern was not so much whether to end the conflict, but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war crimes trials, and preserving the imperial system.

Shows again how leaders think. The factors, probably in order of importance :

1) Holding on to territory : Retaining the power structure itself (I would argue that this is typical of extreme nationalists governments. Our politicians would never sacrifice themselves to save the United States, but the Japanese emperor and other leaders probably would have)

2) Avoiding war crimes trials : Not getting personally convicted (ie. personally remaining in power, this certainly seems a consideration of US politicians)

3) Preserving the imperial system : Retaining the power of the system over it's territory/subjects

Safety and welfare of their subjects isn't even mentioned.

moo3• 12 years ago

The imminent Soviet invasion of Manchuria surely played a role in the U.S. decision to use the atomic bomb, end the war quickly to end the prospect of post war Soviet occupation of Japanese held territory.

tomohawk• 12 years ago

At the Potsdam Conference (24 July) Truman told Stalin that the US would use nukes against Japan as a goad to get Stalin to enter the war against Japan.

It appears to have worked.

moo3• 12 years ago

Churchill is quoted as saying the U.S. wanted the Soviets out of the war. At the Tehran Conference in Nov 1943 and at the Yalta Conference in Feb 1945, Joseph Stalin had agreed to declare war on Japan three months after Germany would be defeated. Stalin was told something at Potsdam because the Soviets were still allies, but not that the weapon was atomic.

htns• 12 years ago

Hundreds of Japanese cities were leveled by firebombing. Having a town nuked every few weeks was not such a big consideration against that background. If only they had trucked on for a few more months we wouldn't have to read these articles.

jeffdavis• 12 years ago

There's a difference between "leveled" and "nuked", especially before guided weapons existed.

rdl• 12 years ago

"Why/how did WW1 end" is an interesting question, too.

Aside from cursory school classes and then some reading, I've never really looked into it in great detail.

The elementary school version is "tanks broke the stalemate, and the US/UK rolled through to victory", but it was a lot more nuanced than that, with internal revolutions in multiple countries. WW1 clearly could have kept going for some extended period longer than it did.

Sophistifunk• 12 years ago

World War 1 Ended when Russian troops stormed what was left of the Reichstag in 1945.

GCA102• 12 years ago

It's fascinating. I just finished "To End All Wars," by Adam Hochschild. He points out that Germany's military was doing quite well in July 1918 ... but that blockades had ruined Germany's ability to feed its people. Folks were getting by on 1000 calories/day; starvation was common, and with the Bolsheviks having stirred up Russia, socialist/pacifists were totally tired of fighting. After modest military setbacks, Germany's will to fight collapsed.

Large German units started surrendering to small Allied forces. Yes, tanks and the U.S. arrival helped clinch everything. But the meltdown inside Germany was quite amazing. Think of the U.S.'s final decision in 1973-75 to get out of Vietnam no matter what. And then multiply that breakdown of the warrior mentality by 100.

The Kaiser lost control of his country in the war's final weeks, and the German authorities naively hoped that they would get an OK armistice/settlement if they called it quits. When they didn't, that created such deep German resentment over the next 20 years that a resumption of the war became inevitable.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

As if WW 1 and 2 are in fact a single event with a strange picnic pause in the middle.

whatusername• 12 years ago

If you haven't -- check out the "Hardcore History" podcast. The last 4-5 episodes have been on WW1 and have been a fantastic introduction to a lot of the complexity (and horrors) of WW1 for me.

cmdkeen2• 12 years ago

Quite the opposite. Tanks were a decidedly underwhelming weapon due to the initial use being squandered by the British - though it was part of the push to relieve pressure on Verdun and thus keep France in the war.

The real lesson from tanks is the impression on the German psyche which led to Manstein, Guderian and Rommel, the concept of Blitzkreig and the fall of France in 1940. Post war tank warfare on the allied side was (generally) very staid comapred to German thinking. Though there were some good thinkers, included Liddell-Hart who showed you could take tanks through the Ardennes...

WW1 ended because Germany exhausted herself utterly in the failed Spring offensive of 1918. The UK's blockade of Germany was having horrific consequences on the home front. Meanwhile the advances that were made in Spring 1918 by Germans led to them capturing lots of supplies from the newly entered USA, thus undermining their morale further.

alricb• 12 years ago

Obligatory anti-Lidell-Hart comment:

He was an idiot. There is no such thing as "Blitzkrieg", just dumb luck and huge mistakes on the French's part.

ArkyBeagle2• 12 years ago

The most interesting version I have read is that the naval mutinies rendered Kaiser Wilhelm unable or unwilling to continue the war.

Pershing being a West Pointer, noted that there was no decisive victory on land in WWI and that it would be resumed in a generation. Remarkable prediction.

moo3• 12 years ago

A bigger obfuscation is the cause of WWII. We are given the history of WWI, geopolitical alliances, assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, harsh Treaty at Versailles, collapse of German currency, WWII continuation of WWI, failure of Chamberlain appeasement, German Soviet non-aggression pact. No mention of German genocide of African Herero and colony in South-West Africa ( Namibia ), Italian occupation and war against Ethiopia, and Russo-Japanese War. The Axis powers shared that they were late to the game of Western imperialism and they came into conflict with the long standing imperialists.

peterfirefly• 12 years ago

Getting back Elsaß wasn't really all that unreasonable. Annexation of the Sudetenland wasn't, either: it was overwhelmingly German, it used to be in the Holy Roman Empire, it was now a minority in a country created to cater to Slavs. A merger between Austria and Germany wasn't unreasonable, either. Getting back the land Poland stole/was granted after WWI was, again, not entirely unreasonable. Protecting the German cities of Danzig and Stettin was, again, not unreasonable.

Furthermore, much of the rhetoric about the Jews sounded awfully much like the current rhetoric about the rich, the banksters, the international finance, the 1%, etc.

Other things we usually don't hear about is how scary Socialism was in Germany from, say, 1917 to 1933. Have you heard about the Bavarian Soviet Republic, for example?

jihokoo4• 12 years ago

Maybe Hasegawa's interpretation has new implications regarding nuclear deterrence theory, but not how the author suggests. The idea that the nuclear bombings were not decisive factors in Japan's surrender does not mean that nuclear weapons do not serve as a deterrence. Nuclear weaponry advanced so much in the aftermath of WW2 that now nuclear countries can literally reduce entire nations to pixie dust. And the potential of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) all but guarantees that nuclear countries will never attack each other for fear of nuclear escalation.

pmoriarty3• 12 years ago

"the potential of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) all but guarantees that nuclear countries will never attack each other for fear of nuclear escalation."

I would feel a lot more secure in the efficacy of MAD if war was rational in the first place. History shows it is anything but.

It hasn't even been 100 years since the last nuclear weapon was used offensively, but already the world has come dangerously close to starting a nuclear war.

Numerous accidents involving nuclear weapons have happened. Critical and very dangerous errors were made in detecting that nuclear war had already begun when it hadn't. Countries with nuclear weapons have come close to going to war with each other (India and Pakistan, Cuban Missile Crisis). Weapon-grade nuclear material and nuclear weapons have gone missing. The American nuclear weapon launch codes were all 0's for something like 20 years.

It is an open question how a nuclear power will react to having a nuclear weapon exploded on their soil (potentially by terrorists under a false-flag operation) but it likely won't be a calm and measured response against the perceived perpetrator. If this happens in a poweder-keg like the Middle East, the ensuing chaos could easily draw in other nuclear powers.

Crumbling nuclear-weapons and launch-detection infrastructure in the former Soviet republics is still a major concern because of continued and increasing potential for accidental launches of weapons still aimed at their former Cold War foes, not to mention the renewed possibility of a second Cold War that has been in the news recently, and Putin's overt threats of the use of nuclear weapons.

hga5• 12 years ago

You are absolutely right to be skeptical about MAD, the invention of genius civilians like Robert Strange McNamara who also brought up the horribly fought Vietnam War, the previous generation F-35, the M16/M4, etc. etc. etc.

The Soviets never bought into it, and rightly judged us to be utterly evil to target their children in their homes instead of military targets like we'd done prior the the early '60s.

As you implicitly note, we can be sure nuclear weapons will again be used in anger. Although the dangers from a false flag operation are potentially less than you think, in that each weapon has a radioisotope signature which tells you everything from its design to where the fissionable materials came from. So we'd know who manufactured it, or so I gather and believe from my study of all this (born when Eisenhower was still president, I'm a child of the cold war with e.g. my mother's Civil Defense Block Mother sign a dozen feet from me).

jihokoo4• 12 years ago

I don't think its right to judge the rationality of decisions based on their outcome. The question is whether war was a rational decision at the time. From a realist perspective anything decision is rational if it can lead to an improvement in the chances for survival. If war leads to a relative increase in my power even if I may lose soldiers and resources, then its worth it.

If country A has 100 soldiers while country B has 20 soldiers, even if the cost of war is a 2 to 1 loss in soldiers, war would result in the absolute power of country A.

In a conflict between two countries with nuclear weaponry, the core logic is the same, but the paradigm is different. Nuclear warfare can erase both countries off the face of the earth. This follows from the fact that to combat nuclear attacks, countries started adopting hair-string triggers to destroy the adversary before they can send more warheads their way... except now every country is doing the same thing. In this case, forget the relative nonsense, anyway you cut it, nuclear warfare is not rational for countries because it will end their survival.

My belief is that MAD is sound. And my underlying assumption is that countries tend to think rationally when dealing with international relations. Regardless of leadership, countries do whats best for them an overwhelming majority of the time. Case in point, how often has the U.S. (the bastion of freedom) voluntarily helped countries/people when the U.S.' interests were not directly involved? Also, observe how a seemingly crazy country like North Korea plays the game shrewdly by varying is strategy depending on its adversary.

I agree that there is a threat that nuclear weapons will get in the wrong hands and, in that case, I think its more than probable that disaster would ensue. But the safety and standards for handling infrastructure degradation has improved significantly since the early days of nuclear weapons (when many were lost to the ocean and never recovered) . As for Putin's threats, its nothing a good back and forth of denouncing and condemning can't fix.

thomasmarriott• 12 years ago

'...Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization...'

— Hirohito, August 14,1945

comeonnow42• 12 years ago

The comparisons made in this article and comments below seem to all but forget one major fact that completely changes everything. That is, Atomic bombs are NOT the same as carpet bombing say Tokyo. Why? RADIATION. If the major cities and sites of Japan suffered a disaster due conventional bombing The thinking would be – afterward we rebuild. You don't think that when your left with a radiation zone. So the theory that atomic bombs would have carried the same level of concern due to simply looking at leveled cities and that carpet bombing does the same as nukes is short sighted to say the least.

pmoriarty3• 12 years ago

I was under the impression that the long-term effects of radiation and nuclear weapons weren't well known at the time of the Japanese surrender. If that's so, it is unlikely such concerns as you describe played much of a role.

the_watcher• 12 years ago

Interesting. Perhaps I need to actually read Hasegawa's work, but this piece skips over a pretty important possibility (to me): that while the atomic bombs did not, on their own, convince the Japanese to surrender, they may have been major factors in the Soviets deciding to enter the war on the side of the Allies.

iand2• 12 years ago

You mean enter the war against Japan? USSR were already on the Allies side fighting the Nazis in Europe.

hga5• 12 years ago

But after a very sharp action which the IJArmy lost very badly, commanded in part on the other side by an obscure Soviet general named Zhukov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Zhukov who unlike his two counterparts managed to avoid the 1941 purge), they signed a neutrality pact, reaffirmed after Operation Barbarossa, that they scrupulously observed. Being faced with another even more bloodily minded opponent certainly didn't hurt the surrender decision.

herendin• 12 years ago

They could have been a factor, but the Soviets also had an agreement with the Allies that they would declare war on Japan before August 9. They declared war a few minutes before midnight on August 8

foobarqux• 12 years ago

The article below from Foreign Policy magazine is much better

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vdqHpr...

nefreat• 12 years ago

There's a thread on reddit a while ago that explains this quite well. http://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2j3xar/til_tha...

crazychrome• 12 years ago

help me to interpret this: amongst 60 comments of this article, nobody mentioned China despite the fact China had fought against jp for 8 years (since 1937, or 14 years since 1931) and (arguably), pinned down jp Army, given the original jp's plan was "conquer China in 3 months".

Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

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