A big Day in WWII History...

[Greg_W]

Enola Gay dropped the big one on Hiroshima, the beginning of the end of WWII. Thanks to all our WWII Veterans who are still living. Too many are dying at too quick a rate, hopefully their stories will live on.

[b-rock]

Indeed. And perhaps a good time to remember the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed because of that day as well.

[Greg_W]

And the hundreds of thousands of lives saved due to ending of combat actions soon after.

[b-rock]

Indeed.

[bird]

I am still amazed at how different my life is from those two generations from mine. Talking to my grandma I can't fathom some of the shit she went through as a young woman in Germany during WWII.

[JoshK]

And the hundreds of thousands of lives saved due to ending of combat actions soon after.

 

Not so straight forward. Lots of evidence points to very serious surrender talks within the japanese upper ranks. like anything in history, it can be debated to no end. who knows what would have happened:

 

Check this out, I haven't read all of it, but the parts I have were very good:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684813785/qid=1091833264/sr=ka-1/ref=pd_ka_1/103-6205257-6743065

[Greg_W]

The review says the first 250 pages are good, but then it's a steaksauce.

 

All evidence I've read pointed to a protracted land war with the Japanese had we landed. They are a warring people, I'm sure it would have been ugly. I want to do more reading on the War in the Pacific as that's where my Grandfather served.

[JoshK]

yeah, reviews are the official word On the opposite take, my history prof,a PHd in 20th century american history thinks very highly of it.

 

My grandfather served in teh pafific as well. guadal canal is the most famous battle I recall that he was in.

 

I guess my point is really that whether it ended up stopping the war sooner or not, it's not the event I would choose to bring up in rememberence. I, like any of us, cannot judge whether it was the right situation while sitting here 60 years later, but the fact remains it is somewhat of a blemish on our country's history.

[JoshK]

If the first 270 pages of this book had been published separately, they would have made up a lively, insightful, beautifully written history of theoretical physics and the men and women who plumbed the mysteries of the atom. Along with the following 600 pages, they become a sweeping epic, filled with terror and pity, of the ultimate scientific quest: the development of the ultimate weapon. Rhodes is a peerless explainer of difficult concepts; he is even better at chronicling the personalities who made the discoveries that led to the Bomb. Niels Bohr dominates the first half of the book as J. Robert Oppenheimer does the second; both men were gifted philosophers of science as well as brilliant physicists. The central irony of this book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, is that the greatest minds of the century contributed to the greatest destructive force in history.

 

 

I actually read that as "the first 270 pages are so good they could have been a book on their own, but the entire thing makes it epic.

[Greg_W]

If the first 270 pages of this book had been published separately, they would have made up a lively, insightful, beautifully written history of theoretical physics and the men and women who plumbed the mysteries of the atom. Along with the following 600 pages, they become a sweeping epic, filled with terror and pity, of the ultimate scientific quest: the development of the ultimate weapon. Rhodes is a peerless explainer of difficult concepts; he is even better at chronicling the personalities who made the discoveries that led to the Bomb. Niels Bohr dominates the first half of the book as J. Robert Oppenheimer does the second; both men were gifted philosophers of science as well as brilliant physicists. The central irony of this book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, is that the greatest minds of the century contributed to the greatest destructive force in history.

 

 

I actually read that as "the first 270 pages are so good they could have been a book on their own, but the entire thing makes it epic.

 

I actually read the 270 pages comment and glossed over the rest...oops, so much for good reading comprehension.

 

Regarding your comment stating that this day was a blemish on our history, I would say that there are some who would take exception. This was a momentous and horrible day, for sure, but it sped up the end of a horrible deadly war. For that, many feel it was a day to remember.

 

Oh yeah, I have to add that for those of you who oppose nuclear weapons and the using of them, it was a Democrat that did it first. hehehe

[JoshK]

come to think about it, it's more of a blemish on humankind. then again, so was the whole war in reality.

 

it is one huge big question for the ages. I am certainly not one of those people that thinks dropping it was absolutely horrific. I'll be honest, if I knew for certain that it was the only way to end the war sooner and it killing 200,000 japanese saved 200,000 american lives then as harsh as it sounds, it was the right decision. It's horrible thinking about it as numbers, since many of those civilians had no choice, but they were the ones who started it, so to speak.

[dlofgren]

It wasn't a blemish on our history; we beat an enemy who attacked us first, and then turned around and helped to build that nation into a world-class economic power (the same with Germany). That's been our history.

 

BTW, the father of the fellow who taught me climbing survived the Bataan Death March. THAT'S a blemish on a nation.

[graupel]

It's horrible thinking about it as numbers, since many of those civilians had no choice, but they were the ones who started it, so to speak.

 

Or to be more specific, their government started it.

 

If folks think it is appropriate that a citizen dies that has no connection with the military or political structure of the country, then why should we be so distraught about deaths associated with September 11th? Should all war be fought to see who can intimidate the other side more by killing as many citizen non-combatants as possible?

[markinore]

We have always been taught that dropping the bombs was necessary because 1) the Japanese were so fanatical that they would fight to the death otherwise, and 2) it ultimately would save American lives. The following suggests an alternative hypothesis (http://www.counterpunch.org/price08062004.html):

 

In the Shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

 

The Cultural Conditions of Unconditional Surrender

 

By DAVID PRICE

 

Today's fifty-ninth anniversary of the United States' bombing of Hiroshima finds most Americans still satisfied that President Truman's decision to use the bomb was a difficult but necessary one designed to bring peace and save lives. It seems unlikely that many Americans will reconsider their positions on this issue. To some Hiroshima has become the paradigm of the very notion of "bombing for peace," and one's variance from this position tends to mark an individual as holding liberal or radical political tendencies. But a few days ago as I was reading through the papers of the late sinologist and cold warrior George Edward Taylor at the University of Washington I encountered some documents which reminded me that questioning the wisdom of using atomic weapons against Japanese civilians to end the Pacific War is not a position reserved for the contemporary left: even at the time of these bombings there were embedded conservative members of the military-intelligence community who viewed the use of these weapons as unnecessary folly.

 

George Taylor was a classic Twentieth Century international man of intrigue. He ran intelligence operations in Japanese occupied China, during World War Two served as Deputy Director for the Far East of the Office of War Information (OWI), later worked with Rand, State, other articulations of the Twentieth Century's revolving door of American intelligence agencies and universities. During World War Two Taylor brought anti-Communist sinologist Karl Wittfogel to the United States, after the war he helped establish a safe nest for then "useful" Nazi-collaborator Nicholas Poppe, and during the McCarthy era he betrayed his former friend Owen Lattimore before Senator McCarran's Internal Security Subcommittee. His support for the Vietnam War on the University of Washington campus marked him as a Nixonian reactionary. Taylor was a sort of Third Man who shape-shifted through the foreground and background of various Twentieth Century theatres of conflict-and his correspondence finds him holding court with the likes Henry Kissinger, Edward Lansdale and Harold Lasswell.

 

In 1996 I met Taylor at his spectacular penthouse home atop Seattle's Pill Hill-- overlooking the city and the Olympic and Cascade Mountains--to conduct a lengthy interview covering his contacts with Wittfogel, the McCarthy period and his years supervising a small army of anthropologists weaponizing anthropology against the Japanese at the Office of War Information (OWI) during the Second World War.

 

At OWI Taylor's team of social scientists studied Japanese culture and created cultural-specific propaganda-primarily leaflets dropped from airplanes on Japanese soldiers and civilians. Because Taylor believed that an understanding of culture was vital to the success of his OWI team he recruited over a dozen anthropologists and other social scientists to work on his Japanese analysis and propaganda campaigns. Among other resources, Taylor's team had access to five-thousand diaries seized from captured and killed Japanese soldiers, and these heartfelt writings were used as important resources for voicing the OWI's successful propaganda efforts. Ruth Benedict's OWI work resulted in her post-war publication of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword which analyzed the culture and personality of the Japanese. Benedict's work focused on the role and importance of the Emperor in Japanese culture and reflected many of the institutional views of Taylor's OWI division.

 

When I interviewed Taylor I was surprised by his insistence that at the beginning of the war he viewed his psychological warfare programs as a means of ending the war by helping the Japanese overcome all the cultural obstacles preventing their surrender-however, as the war advanced and the American advantage became clear he came to see his job as being to convince U.S. civilian and military leaders that they did not have to engage in acts of genocidal annihilation to end the war. Racist stereotypes of maniacal Japanese soldiers and citizens fighting to the death dominated the War Department and the White House, and Taylor and his staff increasingly strove to battle this domestic enemy as a prime deterrent of peace. It was with great difficulty that Taylor and his staff of anthropologists worked to convince civilian and military personnel that that Japanese were even culturally capable of surrender.

 

Taylor's papers contain numerous typewritten speeches capturing his efforts to convince U.S. military strategists that the Japanese could surrender. In one such undated speech (probably from 1944) he argued that,

"If we accept, as we must, the view that Japanese soldiers, in spite of their indoctrination, are as human as other troops, we shall be the less surprised at the mounting evidence of their very human reactions to defeat. We are taking more and more prisoners. Two years ago it would have been very unusual for sixty men to allow themselves to be picked up out of the water when their transport had been sunk. In New Guinea and Burma stragglers are coming in out of the jungles to surrender without a struggle. We have known for a long time that many Japanese officers have been evacuated from indefensible positions and that their reaction on places such as Attu, where escape was impossible, was not to fight to the last man."

 

But it was just this sort of reasoned analysis--arguing against the War Department's pull for a genocidal campaign to obliterate a "race" believed incapable of surrender--that was ignored by the War Department and White House. The OWI had little success in convincing President Roosevelt of the importance on not including the demise of the Japanese Emperor in America's demands for unconditional surrender, but as Taylor told Sharon Boswell in a 1996 interview "fortunately Roosevelt died and Truman came in."

 

Taylor maintained that Truman understood the OWI's insistence that surrender could be negotiated and he seemed to grasp the importance of exempting the Emperor from conditions of "unconditional" surrender. Taylor said that Truman authorized the OWI to communicate this to the Japanese. As Japan's war effort collapsed there was a growing interest in surrender.

 

A few days ago I found among Taylor's papers and correspondence some blurry photocopies of declassified intelligence reports from the codename "MAGIC-Diplomatic Summaries." These are translated Japanese diplomatic intercepts that were secretly being decoded and read by American military intelligence during the war. A May 11, 1945 MAGIC intercept supports the views of Taylor, others at the OWI, and elsewhere in military intelligence that the Japanese military were ripe for surrender:

 

 

"Report of peace sentiment in Japanese armed forces: On 5 May the German Naval Attaché in Tokyo dispatched the following message to Admiral Doenitz:

'An influential member of the Admiralty Staff has given me to understand that, since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard, provided they were halfway honorable.'

 

Note [by U.S. military intelligence]: Previously noted diplomatic reports have commented on signs of war weariness in official Japanese Navy circles, but have not mentioned such an attitude in Army quarters."

 

This mention of "halfway honorable" terms of surrender was exactly why the anthropologists in Taylor's group had been focusing on the importance of the emperor in Japanese society. But such considerations were easily ignored by a War Department whose cost benefit calculations weighed the coming hundreds of thousands dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki against the balance of specifying the acceptable conditions that came to follow unconditional surrender.

 

Even more tragic is a July 20th MAGIC intercept in which Japanese Ambassador Sato advocated his desire for a Japanese surrender if the United States would assure him that the "Imperial House" would remain in existence. These MAGIC Documents are a sad testimony that in the days before the attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American intelligence had good evidence that Ambassador Sato was close to surrendering to the Americans. But neither the knowledge gleaned from these intercepts nor the general advice of social scientists at the OWI dissuaded American plans to unleash nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians.

 

Perhaps it is George Taylor's gloomy credentials as a hawk, a dangerously-anti-Communist-conservative, and as an intelligence insider that makes his voice such an intriguing one in the chorus of those questioning the necessity of Truman's deployment of the A-Bomb. While out of the A-Bomb decision making loop Taylor and others at the OWI knew Japan was ripe for (pseudo-unconditional) surrender. Like many others, Taylor later came to believe that Truman's decision to use of nuclear weapons had more to do with "scaring the hell out of the Soviet Union" than it did with saving the inflated estimates of American lives some argued would be lost in a Japanese invasion and occupation.

 

But beyond the obvious message sent to the Soviet's, Truman's decision to use his doomsday weapon (twice) without presenting the Japanese with the actual conditions of his unconditional surrender revealed elements of an important American post war trajectory-a trajectory of violence where American military force became the tool of preference selected over the promise of diplomacy.

[cj001f]

BTW, the father of the fellow who taught me climbing survived the Bataan Death March. THAT'S a blemish on a nation.

Compared to the rape of Nanking? Or the Rape of Berlin?

[murraysovereign]

...Truman's decision to use of nuclear weapons had more to do with "scaring the hell out of the Soviet Union" than it did with saving the inflated estimates of American lives some argued would be lost in a Japanese invasion and occupation.

 

This I agree with - there's no question Truman was hoping not only to send a clear message to Stalin, but also hoping to bring the war to a speedy end so as to cut the USSR out of any post-war settlement with Japan. If the war with Japan was over before the Soviets became directly involved, it would undercut Stalin's pursuit of territorial claims as "compensation" for war losses. Somehow he still managed to get hold of the Kirules, but he wanted considerably more.

 

However, I think Price takes the point a little farther than necessary by then suggesting this was evidence of

 

...elements of an important American post war trajectory-a trajectory of violence where American military force became the tool of preference selected over the promise of diplomacy.

[Fairweather]

Your article is bizarre revisionist History.

 

 

Militarism was so entrenched and ingrained into Japanese culture and society that an invasion would have been catastrophic for both American soldiers, and Japanese civilians. The ferocity with which the Japanese (soldier and civilian alike!) defended Okinawa led to this logical conclusion. Additionally, over one MILLION civilians had already been killed that spring and summer by Lemay's B-29's as he sysematically burned city after city with incindiaries. More civilians were killed in Tokyo/Yokohama on the night of March 23rd, 1945 than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined!

 

After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the emporor recorded his capitulation message for the Japanese public. Military leaders tried to take the recording by force and basically held the emporor captive for several hours. Several defenders of the emporor were slain. It is only by sheer luck that the recording arrived at the NGK studios for broadcast.

 

All this said, I believe the bombing of Nagasaki was probably unnecessary. More time should have been given for the Japanese to analyze the Hiroshima attack and reach the logical conclusion that they were defeated. I believe that the untested plutonium-cored Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki was no more than sick scientific/military curiosity. Perhaps an off-shore demonstration would have been more appropriate.

[Fairweather]

re Nagasaki:

 

http://history1900s.about.com/library/prm/blbombthatended1.htm