For the WWII buffs

[deleteduser]

I have been wondering lately why the USA droped the atomic bomb on the residents of the two Japaneese citys. It seems that the scientists at the time were in favor of not dropping it while the political leaders at the time, Truman and Jimmy Byrns were for droping it, more in a poltical stand point to prove something to Russia? Am I correct on this or am I missing something. I feel like it was more of a terrorist attack than really accomplishing anything. The Japs were ready to surrender as Russia entered the war.

[guids]

I was always under the impression that the japanese were super fierce, and tenacious fighters, and if we wouldnt have dropped the bomb there is no way they would surrender due to their culture.

[deleteduser]

No I think that was more of the excuse they used to drop the bomb, the Japaneese knew they could not keep fighting with the Russians entering the war. They also were only fighting till the end if their emperor was going to be put to shame as they thought he was half man half God and would fight till the end for him.

[BCPVP]

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I feel like it was more of a terrorist attack than really accomplishing anything. The Japs were ready to surrender as Russia entered the war.

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Firebombing of Tokyo.
It's not terrorism when we do it.

[Chips Ahoy]

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No I think that was more of the excuse they used to drop the bomb, the Japaneese knew they could not keep fighting with the Russians entering the war.

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What matters is not what the Japanese knew, but what the Americans thought the Japanese would do. Your theory is the entry of the Russians changed the Japanese viewpoint. Let's assume that and look at the timeline:

August 5: Atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.
August 8: Russia declares war on Japan.
August 9: Atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki.

Any change of heart due to the entry of Russia is obviously too late.

You might also ask why all sides used strategic bombing. It killed plenty of civilians, often with little military benefit.

To answer your question directly, the US wanted to win the war and calculated that no country could continue a war against a country willing to use nuclear weapons.

[BCPVP]

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I was always under the impression that the japanese were super fierce, and tenacious fighters, and if we wouldnt have dropped the bomb there is no way they would surrender due to their culture.

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IIRC, the terms they surrendered to were the same as those we refused to accept before we dropped the bombs.

[deleteduser]

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No I think that was more of the excuse they used to drop the bomb, the Japaneese knew they could not keep fighting with the Russians entering the war.

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What matters is not what the Japanese knew, but what the Americans thought the Japanese would do. Your theory is the entry of the Russians changed the Japanese viewpoint. Let's assume that and look at the timeline:

August 5: Atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.
August 8: Russia declares war on Japan.
August 9: Atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki.

Any change of heart due to the entry of Russia is obviously too late.

You might also ask why all sides used strategic bombing. It killed plenty of civilians, often with little military benefit.

To answer your question directly, the US wanted to win the war and calculated that no country could continue a war against a country willing to use nuclear weapons.

[/ QUOTE ]

The Japaneese knew Russia was planning on entering the war before the bombs were droped. They held meetings with russia officals urging them not to enter the war, in hopes they would remain nutral. The specifc dates that the bombs were droped is also coincidental. We drop a bomb the whole world sees the effect, Russia enters the war, we drop another bomb proving we will use them at no prevail. In a sense proving we were "strong" feirce fighters, in reguards to nuclear power, this backfired obviously because it set the stage for the cold war.

Many of the Japaneese generals knew their fate was dim before Russia entered. Russias entry locked a victory, and the bombs were used to prove our dominace to the world more specifically Russia.

[andyfox]

"Your theory is the entry of the Russians changed the Japanese viewpoint. Let's assume that and look at the timeline:

August 5: Atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.
August 8: Russia declares war on Japan.
August 9: Atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki.

Any change of heart due to the entry of Russia is obviously too late."

Not quite sure what you're saying here. Are you saying that the entry of Russia into the war is obviously too late to effect the Japanese decision to surrender?

As is often the case in history, no one explanation suffices to explain the use of the atomic bombs. Several factors to be considered:

-We were at war and had spent a lot of time and money on developing the weapons. It didn't really take a "decision" to use them; it would have taken a big one not to.

-Racism played a major role in how we Americans viewed the Japanese. They were vilified in a much more racist way in both the popular and scholarly press than were the Germans or the Italians. Revenge for the treachery of Pearl Harbor was also a factor.

-We wanted to end the war as soon as possible in order to both minimize casualties and to end it before the Russians entered the Pacific War, as they had promised to do on August 8.

-Byrnes in particular felt usage of the bomb would be a trump card in out post-war dealings with the Soviets.

-The bombs were in some ways not viewed as anything special. We had killed 100,000 people in one day with conventional firebombing of Tokyo and all the major Japanese cities with the exception of Kyoto had been firebombed. While Roosevelt had pleaded with England and Germany to not bomb civilians, the war had developed into a total war where civilians were terrorized on all fronts.

There is a tremendous literature on the issue. Some recent publications of interest are:

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy which posits a "race" between Stalin and Truman to achieve Japanese surrender.

Hasegawa (ed.), The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals, a series of essays, most revisionist in their critique of the use of the bombs.

Michael Kort (ed.), The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb, which contains primary documents; the commentary by Kort basically takes the traditional position of the necessity for the bombs to end the war.

Michael D. Gordon, Five Days in August, which argues that that the military did not clearly understand the atomic bomb's revolutionary strategic potential, that the Allies were almost as stunned by the surrender as the Japanese were by the attack, and that not only had experts planned and fully anticipated the need for a third bomb, they were skeptical about whether the atomic bomb would work at all.

Robert James Maddox (ed.), Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism , a series of essays defending the decision to use the bombs

Some good websites:

http://www.h-net.org/%7Ediplo/roundt...l#statlerjohns: scroll down to volume VII, no. 2, which discusses Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy.

http://home.kc.rr.com/casualties/ which argues in favor of high projected casualty figures for an invasion of Japan.

http://hnn.us/articles/24482.html, a blast at Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy

http://hnn.us/articles/24566.html, a response by Hasegawa to his critics

[deleteduser]

Great post thanks, thats a lot of info I will look at tommrow. Japaneese were willing to surender given that their emporer would remain in power. Truman did not want this, he wanted unconditional surender, "however I believe he remained in power after all?" I believe that there was no real imediate reason to drop the bomb on Japan, and that the true reason for droping it was more political than necessary. Sorry if this didnt make sense im dozing off.

[Nonfiction]

Short essay from a foreign relations of the US since 1914 class (Had to be shorter than 4 pages, so doesn't go into as much detail, but can get the general idea).

The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan during World War 2 remains one of the most controversial decisions in history. President Truman, only recently having replaced his predecessor President Roosevelt, chose to use the atomic bomb on Japan to force them to surrender. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 5th, 1945, and the second on Nagasaki on August 9th. . The decision to use the bomb not only killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, it also ushered in the new, horrible atomic age of warfare, and cast the United States in the role of being the only country to have used atomic weapons against another. At the time, with the information available to the President, it was the right decision to use the bomb. However, in hindsight, knowing what we know now, the use of the bomb was a terrible decision.

By summer 1945, Imperial Japan was utterly defeated. It was forced back to its Home Islands, losing all of its conquests in the Pacific, as well as territories that it had even before the war such as Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Japan’s navy, the pride of the empire when it inflicted defeat after defeat on the Allies, was now nearly nonexistent. The air force was training young men to fly one way missions, utilizing their planes as kamikazes, suicide attackers. Many of Japan’s cities had already been destroyed through a constant bombing campaign by the Americans. With the Soviets massing on the Manchurian border, Japan would soon face a new powerful enemy on a new front. However, still it refused to surrender unconditionally (the key demand of the Allies). Japan would have to be forced into the surrender.

The American invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa gave an early warning on the kind of fighting the Allies would experience when fighting the Japanese. Initial estimates of an invasion of the Home Islands put casualties at “500,000 to 1,000,000 American lives” (Paterson 224). This, above all, appeared to be Truman’s main motivation for dropping the bomb. He figured that not only would so many soldiers die, millions of civilians would die as well. It seems a very simply math calculation that the hundreds of thousands killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are several scales less than the potential millions of casualties had there been an invasion. However, the war could have been ended without either an invasion or the bomb.

The other logical reason to drop the bomb was to intimidate the Soviets. The USSR, having only recently captured control over all of Eastern Europe from the Germans, was the ideological enemy of America, despite being temporary allies. The Soviet army seemed invincible, smashing back the supposedly unstoppable German Army like a bulldozer. Allied troops in Europe were heavily outnumbered by the Soviet army, and in the minds of the Allied commanders, little could stop the Red Army if it simply kept going all the way to the English Channel. Allied and Soviet troops stared at each other across the occupation zones in Germany. The Cold war was already starting before the “Hot war” was over, as the two new superpowers jostled for post war influence in Europe and the world. By dropping the bomb, Truman thought he could use the monopoly on atomic weapons to not only end the war in the Pacific before the Soviets could make more gains, but to prevent the Soviets from trying anything in Europe. One of the greatest fears was that the Japanese Home Islands would be invaded by the Soviets, creating another situation like in Germany, with the country divided into a Communist and Capitalist part. However, despite seeming quite logical during the time the decision to use the atomic bomb was made, hindsight shows us it was wrong.

Despite the dropping of the first bomb on Hiroshima on August 5th, the Japanese still refused to surrender and remained defiant. However, with the Soviets keeping their promise to the Allies and declaring war on Japan on August 8th, even Japans fanatical leaders knew the end was near. “Now the jig is up,” Said Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki (Paterson p227). The Soviet invasion scared the Japanese even more than the atomic bomb. The casualties caused by the atomic bomb, although horrible, were after all similar in size to the casualties caused by previous American firebombing attacks on Tokyo and other Japanese cities. However, the Japanese could do nothing against the unstoppable Soviet Army in Manchuria, which smashed through the pitiful Japanese resistance and steamrolled all the way to Northern Korea. While the Red Army was all powerful on land, the Soviet Navy in the Pacific was nearly nonexistent, and could in no way pull off an amphibious invasion of Japan, meaning a divided occupation zone would not occur. With Japan realizing that it could not simultaneously fight the two most powerful countries in history at once, it would have soon surrendered. A simple blockade and continued bombing campaign would have, in conjunction with the continued Soviet offensive on the mainland, forced the Japanese to make peace in a similar timeframe. No invasion needed to occur, no millions of dead soldiers and civilians, and most importantly, no bomb needed to be dropped.

The other reason for dropping the bomb, intimidating the USSR, is similarly faulty reasoning. The Soviets were thoroughly exhausted and worn out in Europe, at the end of their supply lines after an unprecedented advance throughout all of Eastern and Central Europe. They were of little threat of further invasion of the West, and in fact feared that the Allies might invade them. They only wished to consolidate their gains, and in no way expected a continued offensive. More importantly, by using the atomic bomb, the United States single-handedly initiated the atomic arms race, the impact of which we still feel today. Although the Soviets knew through espionage that the Manhattan project existed, Stalin “had no conception of the impact” of atomic weapons until after the use of the bomb on Japan (Paterson 226).” Whereas prior to the bomb, the Soviets had the world’s mightiest Army, they realized their millions of soldiers were nothing compared to the power of an atomic bomb. The USSR soon began a crash program to research and build atomic weapons of its own, which placed the entire world at risk of nuclear annihilation.

The decision to use atomic weapons on Japan was one of the most discussed decisions by any President. While at the time it seemed to be the right move to drop the bomb on Japan in order to force them to surrender, in hindsight it appears to have been the wrong decision. Many of the reasons for dropping the bomb have proven to be inaccurate, illogical, or simply faulty. Not only that, but the United States has been forever branded as the first and only nation to ever use atomic weapons against another country. Furthermore, the use of the atomic bomb initiated a global atomic weapon race which escalated the Cold War, and may result in millions of casualties in a future nuclear war. If the bomb had not been dropped, Japan likely would have surrendered anyways, as they were helplessly being smashed by the two greatest armies the world has ever seen.