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vyelkin posted:The "what if the Allies negotiated" isn't worth a ton of thought because all three of the big Allies were committed to forcing unconditional surrender one way or another. Thanks for the post, that condenses a lot of information for me. I agree that in practice none of the Allies were interested in negotiating, im just wondering about that hypothetical political argument as opposed to the utilitarian argument of the bomb vs the invasion. I get the argument that the Japanese holding into their conquered territory would have been A Bad Idea, but it seems like that was obviously a non-starter and the peace faction was eventually willing to settle for preserving the empire?
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Jul 23, 2023 14:50
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StashAugustine posted:Thanks for the post, that condenses a lot of information for me. I agree that in practice none of the Allies were interested in negotiating, im just wondering about that hypothetical political argument as opposed to the utilitarian argument of the bomb vs the invasion. I get the argument that the Japanese holding into their conquered territory would have been A Bad Idea, but it seems like that was obviously a non-starter and the peace faction was eventually willing to settle for preserving the empire? Personally I think the big thing was that by summer 1945 all three of the Allies knew the war was already won and they were looking ahead to the postwar world and Cold War competition. The US and UK wanted to impose unconditional surrender on Japan because they wanted to turn Japan into a loyal postwar ally and military base in East Asia, which would require completely renovating the country and rewriting its laws and politics. The Soviets wanted to secure the Far East against future threats, which meant retaking south Sakhalin and the Kurils from Japan and doing something about Manchuria and Korea. For them, pursuing the war until unconditional surrender would guarantee that the US and UK didn't negotiate a partial peace that would prevent the Soviets from securing those regions. From the Japanese side, it's possible that a guarantee of the emperor's position might have been enough to secure peace a few weeks or months earlier, but it's really hard to say. Right up until the atomic bombings, prominent leaders in the cabinet were refusing to countenance any kind of surrender. There's a diplomatic exchange between the Japanese ambassador in Moscow and the Japanese foreign minister in mid July in which the ambassador says the best they can hope for is unconditional surrender, the foreign minister responds: quote:Although the directing powers, and the government as well, are convinced that our war strength still can deliver considerable blows to the enemy, we are unable to feel absolutely secure peace of mind ... Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians' mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender. the ambassador replies: quote:It goes without saying that in my earlier message calling for unconditional surrender or closely equivalent terms, I made an exception of the question of preserving [the imperial family]. and gets the foreign minister's response on 21 July 1945: quote:With regard to unconditional surrender we are unable to consent to it under any circumstances whatever. ... It is in order to avoid such a state of affairs that we are seeking a peace, ... through the good offices of Russia. ... it would also be disadvantageous and impossible, from the standpoint of foreign and domestic considerations, to make an immediate declaration of specific terms. So just 2-3 weeks before Hiroshima the official word from the cabinet to the one guy they hoped might be able to negotiate a peace for them was that not even preserving the emperor would be enough for them to consider surrendering.
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Jul 23, 2023 15:13
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Obligatory reminder that by July of '45 Allied warships could just cruise up to the coast of the Japanese home islands and shoot at whatever they wanted with total impunity
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Jul 23, 2023 15:24
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Obligatory reminder that by July of '45 Allied warships could just cruise up to the coast of the Japanese home islands and shoot at whatever they wanted with total impunity yeah it should also go without saying in all of this discussion that no matter what the Japanese negotiating stance, dropping the atomic bombs on Japanese cities was an unconscionable crime against humanity. They were beaten, everyone knew they were beaten, and the US leadership decided to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians anyway just to prove a point.
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Jul 23, 2023 15:32
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has anything been released on the decision making to drop the bomb before august 6? everything i can recall seeing was a post-hoc justification after the bombs had already been dropped
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Jul 23, 2023 15:51
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So I guess the response to "the US had to drop the bomb because otherwise Japan would have rearmed" is "the Japanese government was full of lunatic hardliners, but we can't know what terms might have happened because the Allies didn't try negotiating because they were more concerned with their postwar strategic position (ie dickwaving at the Soviets)." The historical question for me is how consistent were the hardliners- even after Hiroshima they were willing to attempt a coup to continue the war, and it seems like the bombing and the Soviet invasion just made it so a) the peace faction was willing to accept unconditional terms b) the emperor definitively sided with the peace faction. But (and ofc idk how much this is or even can be known) how many people were previously willing to fight to the bitter end and changed their tune after Hiroshima?
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Jul 23, 2023 16:16
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StashAugustine posted:So I guess the response to "the US had to drop the bomb because otherwise Japan would have rearmed" is "the Japanese government was full of lunatic hardliners, but we can't know what terms might have happened because the Allies didn't try negotiating because they were more concerned with their postwar strategic position (ie dickwaving at the Soviets)." the coup attempt was by lower ranking officers rather than the war faction of the supreme war council. korechika anami as war minister was the arch-hardliner on the council who advocated continued fighting after the bombings but admitted the war was lost in a private meeting with foreign minister togo following hiroshima. but even he accepted surrender after the emperor's decision was known, refused to challenge it or resign from the council, and committed suicide rather than join the coup attempt. given that the war faction was always looking for the one decisive battle that would save japan from unconditional surrender but the faction's acceptance of the surrender decision suggests to me that the hardliners primary concern was saving face after 4 disastrous years of war by forcing a pyrrhic victory upon the americans in operation olympic. once the emperor made the decision for them and took the option of fighting to the death off the table, the hardliners accepted it. so really it was more the emperor than the bombings that caused them to change their tune at all. the story should actually probably be about the bombings forcing the peace faction to get off their asses before being vaporized in a third nuclear strike
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Jul 23, 2023 17:08
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Raskolnikov38 posted:the coup attempt was by lower ranking officers rather than the war faction of the supreme war council. korechika anami as war minister was the arch-hardliner on the council who advocated continued fighting after the bombings but admitted the war was lost in a private meeting with foreign minister togo following hiroshima. but even he accepted surrender after the emperor's decision was known, refused to challenge it or resign from the council, and committed suicide rather than join the coup attempt. given that the war faction was always looking for the one decisive battle that would save japan from unconditional surrender but the faction's acceptance of the surrender decision suggests to me that the hardliners primary concern was saving face after 4 disastrous years of war by forcing a pyrrhic victory upon the americans in operation olympic. once the emperor made the decision for them and took the option of fighting to the death off the table, the hardliners accepted it. so really it was more the emperor than the bombings that caused them to change their tune at all.
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Jul 23, 2023 17:38
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Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology, 1815 - 1870", by Jeffrey Zvengrowski Chapter 4, part one  ...  ...  ...  at this point I am taken somewhat aback by all the antagonism towards Britain, even long after the War of 1812. I suppose it befits the United States being an up-and-coming great power and looking to break out of Britain's attempts to contain it, setting aside the ideological conflict.    ...  ...  that first highlight seems trenchant in that "a return to the times when people could work across the aisle, when the parties weren't so polarized" is a song we've heard before and then the second highlight betrays the increasing viciousness of the rhetoric as the contradictions sharpen with the growing strength of abolitionism and the Republican party
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Jul 24, 2023 11:10
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StashAugustine posted:So I guess the response to "the US had to drop the bomb because otherwise Japan would have rearmed" is "the Japanese government was full of lunatic hardliners, but we can't know what terms might have happened because the Allies didn't try negotiating because they were more concerned with their postwar strategic position (ie dickwaving at the Soviets)." I mean should the Allies have negotiated with them? Would you, StashAugustine, accept it if the Allies made a negotiated peace with the Nazi’s instead of demanding unconditional surrender?
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Jul 25, 2023 06:18
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Raskolnikov38 posted:has anything been released on the decision making to drop the bomb before august 6? everything i can recall seeing was a post-hoc justification after the bombs had already been dropped Wellerstein argued that there wasn't exactly a "decision to drop the bomb". The decision had been made years earlier to bomb Japanese cities with TNT, and then with napalm, and then with the atom bomb. To Truman and his generals, there was no question whether it should be done, only the question of what target would be best.
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Jul 25, 2023 06:41
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galagazombie posted:I mean should the Allies have negotiated with them? Would you, StashAugustine, accept it if the Allies made a negotiated peace with the Nazi’s instead of demanding unconditional surrender? Yes? Obviously a huge portion of the question comes down to "what would the demands be?", and "conditional surrender" as the opposite of "unconditional surrender" tends to carry the implication that the defeated party gets some/lots/most of what they want as part of the negotiation process... but what if they didn't? If you came to the German government on, say, March 25, 1945, after the Western Allies had already secured crossings over the Rhine river, and made demands such as a demilitarization of the country, the freeing of all political prisoners, the handover of every Nazi official that historically was incarcerated or executed by the Nuremberg trials or killed themselves in anticipation of defeat, and so on and so forth, would that not be worth the lives of everyone who died between then and V-E Day? Hell, if you call it at that date, the firebombing of Dresden still happens anyway Or if the terms I'm mentioning isn't enough, then what would be enough? Because yes, a "conditional" surrender means you have to negotiate, but that doesn't mean that the losing side has to be happy about it, doesn't mean that the losing side gets to keep a bunch of their stuff And especially when you put it in the context of what the Allies did after the war ...  ... where we might make the argument America ultimately did not hold enough of the fascist leadership accountable for their actions, because they were already looking ahead to how this is going to shake out vis-a-vis the Soviets In that context, the virtue of extracting an "unconditional surrender" from Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany seems to be lacking when they didn't really maximize the opportunity it afforded them. gradenko_2000 has issued a correction as of 08:20 on Jul 25, 2023 |
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Jul 25, 2023 08:17
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I feel like demanding an unconditional surrender and then not taking full advantage of it would have some diplomatic advantages, as well as advantages when it came to the post-war administration of those territories. Which is not to say that they prioritized correctly, just that being magnanimous in your overwhelming victory probably isn't the worst idea.
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Jul 25, 2023 09:12
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That's an interesting idea, I would suggest that this strategy didn't work out so well for the USA accepting the defeat of the confederate states of america in the civil war. That said, a global conflict in 1945 against Japan is very different from a national civil war 90 years earlier. There could very well be some diplomatic advantages that were lost with Japan and east Asia. To me it does seem like the US largely made a vassal state out of Japan for many decades so in many ways accomplished its imperial goals. Which additional concessions would the US have asked for that it didn't eventually get anyway? Just idly asking/commenting, I'm certainly no expert.
palindrome has issued a correction as of 10:03 on Jul 25, 2023 |
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Jul 25, 2023 09:50
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I feel like demanding an unconditional surrender and then not taking full advantage of it would have some diplomatic advantages, as well as advantages when it came to the post-war administration of those territories. Which is not to say that they prioritized correctly, just that being magnanimous in your overwhelming victory probably isn't the worst idea. you do have a point what I was trying to get at was, if we consider that the Allies did not go "all the way" in punishing Germany and Japan, for their own reasons, then the gulf between unconditional and conditional surrender is not as large as we might think, from the perspective of what the Allies were willing to accept
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Jul 25, 2023 10:28
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palindrome posted:That's an interesting idea, I would suggest that this strategy didn't work out so well for the USA accepting the defeat of the confederate states of america in the civil war. That said, a global conflict in 1945 against Japan is very different from a national civil war 90 years earlier. There could very well be some diplomatic advantages that were lost with Japan and east Asia. To me it does seem like the US largely made a vassal state out of Japan for many decades so in many ways accomplished its imperial goals. Which additional concessions would the US have asked for that it didn't eventually get anyway? Just idly asking/commenting, I'm certainly no expert. As for what the US ended up getting out of Japan, I feel like what actually happened fits perfectly well with what I posted? In my view, they did exactly what I wrote in my post - treated Japan super nice and got a loyal subject out of it. If they had tried a more classical imperial approach, Japan would probably have been poorer and more restless. gradenko_2000 posted:you do have a point
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Jul 25, 2023 10:57
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Oh I misunderstood then, I was coming at it from the standpoint that the US negotiated relatively harsh terms with the Japanese, including nuclear bombing their cities. I was imagining what the benefit of signing a peace treaty prior to that and allowing Japan to keep more territory would have been. Japan would presumably be more of a power in Asia and even more economically important today. Or maybe there would have been many more wars in the interceding period, who knows.
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Jul 25, 2023 11:04
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With Reconstruction, given how thoroughly Johnson hosed it up and how the Union gave up on it a decade later, there's a lot of wiggle room between the historical result and "literally hang every CSA colonel or higher"galagazombie posted:I mean should the Allies have negotiated with them? Would you, StashAugustine, accept it if the Allies made a negotiated peace with the Nazi’s instead of demanding unconditional surrender? I mean yeah depends on the terms? Even as a fanatic republican, how many thousands of lives are worth "not only are we going to occupy and disarm your country but also the emperors gotta step down too"? And to turn it around, what happens if Trinity is a bust and Okinawa turns into a bloody stalemate? Of course the issue is that we're discussing this from a moralistic perspective- which is fine for the discussion were having, but the point is that everyone involved wasn't thinking about how to maximize the good for the people of the world but about how to come out on top of the postwar world. And as noted, a whole lot of fascist criminals got swept under the rug- unit 731 got blanket immunity in return for research only useful for more indiscriminate killing!
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Jul 25, 2023 12:30
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I'd also note that as much as we're criticizing the Allies ofc the disclaimer is that the Axis was still orders of magnitude worse and there's no question who was in the right. The issue is that we Americans did not learn the lesson "even a patently justified war is horrible and we need to avoid it as far as possible" but "our enemies are all implacable evil and the only way to defeat them is indiscriminate slaughter until they accept unconditional terms."
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Jul 25, 2023 12:34
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What went on in Germany post-WWI was also knocking around in their heads. Germany signed the armistice because they knew they were beaten and if they didn't stop the war then foreign armies were gonna be breaking their defensive lines and rolling over German territory soon. But propaganda turned the fact that there weren't foreign troops on German soil into the idea that their army was betrayed rather than on the verge of collapse. Obviously, they should have negotiated but for unfortunate material reasons, they weren't going to let the Japanese people save face. There's probably a world where the Allies accept surrender on the condition of the emperor still being the head of state but more or less like the UK now, but there was no world where the Allies don't occupy Japan and remake their society pretty much as they did.
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Jul 25, 2023 12:47
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StashAugustine posted:The issue is that we Americans did not learn the lesson "even a patently justified war is horrible and we need to avoid it as far as possible" but "our enemies are all implacable evil and the only way to defeat them is indiscriminate slaughter until they accept unconditional terms." precisely - that the Allies were "the good guys" does not mean their methods of waging war are/were above reproach, and this a lesson that is all the more pertinent today, when people rationalize sending arms to Azov battalion and cluster munitions to Ukraine on the basis of "they were invaded by Russia, Russia is the aggressor[, and Ukraine is therefore the good guy, and therefore can do whatever it wants in its defense]"
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Jul 25, 2023 12:52
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gradenko_2000 posted:Yes? the problem is that until august 1945 the Japanese demanded retaining conquered areas of Asia so that they could continue to kill and enslave millions of Asians. there’s no reason for China, one of the big four allied powers, to accept a negotiated settlement that sees japan retaining Formosa, Manchuria, and/or Korea. any chance of influencing the war’s outcome or shape vanished for Japan in October 1944 after the battle of Leyte gulf. that the war continued for another 10 months lies entirely on the Japanese hardliners who refused to admit the war and Japanese empire were over
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Jul 25, 2023 13:13
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Azathoth posted:What went on in Germany post-WWI was also knocking around in their heads. I was gonna bring this up so thanks Az. There are obviously multiple reasons for insisting on unconditional surrender, but two of the biggest ones came from the experience of WWI. The first was to ensure none of the Allied powers would accept a separate peace. For all that they cooperated during WW2, the Big Three didn't actually trust each other very much, and there were always underlying anxieties that one or another party might become exhausted or get what they wanted out of the war and stop fighting. Some of that came from remembering what happened to Russia in 1917-18, when the empire collapsed and the result was a separate peace that let Germany prolong the fighting on the Western front. But the even bigger reason was that the Allies had not insisted on unconditional surrender to Germany in 1918, and the result was a twenty-year armistice followed by an even bigger and deadlier war. Germany was as beaten in 1918 as it was in 1945 but the Allies negotiated a peace to save lives and stopped short of a full invasion and occupation of Germany, which also meant stopping short of forcibly integrating Germany into a postwar settlement, leading to interwar Germany being the strongest country in Europe and constantly undermining and refusing to abide by the parts of the peace treaty designed to limit its economic and military potential. The German people never saw troops in the streets, never experienced the war as a defeat, and refused to accept that they were beaten, leading to the deadliest revanchism in world history. It's easy to look back now and say "everyone knew the war was over, so the Allies should have stopped to negotiate and saved those lives" but we don't know what history would look like if the Allies had stopped at the Rhine and the Oder in March 1945, leading to the people of Berlin and Hamburg and Munich and Vienna never seeing Allied soldiers marching through the streets of their cities and their leaders thrown in prison by force. On the other hand, the leaders of the Allied powers were certain that they did know what history looked like if they did that, and it looked like Europe from 1918-39.
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Jul 25, 2023 13:30
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StashAugustine posted:So I guess the response to "the US had to drop the bomb because otherwise Japan would have rearmed" ive never heard this hypothetical before because it just sounds incredibly silly on its face the japanese were blockaded and literally starving to death because theyd lost access to all of the stuff they needed to keep the country running how the gently caress were they going to rearm to any degree in a situation like that
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Jul 26, 2023 20:01
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Some Guy TT posted:ive never heard this hypothetical before because it just sounds incredibly silly on its face the japanese were blockaded and literally starving to death because theyd lost access to all of the stuff they needed to keep the country running how the gently caress were they going to rearm to any degree in a situation like that when for a day or two after Nagasaki it looked like Japan still might not surrender, the US launched an enormous bombing raid that levelled Japan's only remaining oil refinery, which kinda begs the question of why they didn't just do that before nuking several cities
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Jul 26, 2023 20:26
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A Buttery Pastry posted:
they treated japanese imperial leadership super nice not japan itself the actual japanese people had far more resentment toward the japanese empire than we did and most of our politicking in the postwar years was explicitly designed to counteract this sentiment this doesnt exactly contradict your post but i feel like its worth clarifying that what we did had gently caress all to do with what japan wanted which isnt how our historical propaganda frames the meaning of unconditional surrender at all we explicitly avoid going into postwar japanese history in any serious detail to the point that people incorrectly believe that the japanese were samurai fanatics who were ready to fight to the death while the germans and all the other eastern european collaborators were guileless innocent victims of the nazis when the actual historical evidence makes it clear that it was the other way around
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Jul 26, 2023 20:47
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and now for something completely different https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDTeE7zkr_k
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Jul 26, 2023 21:03
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Some Guy TT posted:they treated japanese imperial leadership super nice not japan itself the actual japanese people had far more resentment toward the japanese empire than we did and most of our politicking in the postwar years was explicitly designed to counteract this sentiment But as a social historian, only the people can enact the will of the government!
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Jul 26, 2023 21:07
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boy sure seems like the cia toolkit of assassinating political leaders and inciting insurrections might have come in handy there. I realize that's absolutely the wrong lesson to take here
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Jul 26, 2023 21:08
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vyelkin posted:when for a day or two after Nagasaki it looked like Japan still might not surrender, the US launched an enormous bombing raid that levelled Japan's only remaining oil refinery, which kinda begs the question of why they didn't just do that before nuking several cities That just makes the question “What’s so bad about a nuke if the fire bombing is just as bad?” And to be fair I am entirely down with the argument that “Strategic bombing regardless of if it’s one nuke or 1000 B-24’s is equally a warcrime.” But that still makes it the issue of why single out the nukes like they were something beyond what was already happening.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:10
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galagazombie posted:That just makes the question “What’s so bad about a nuke if the fire bombing is just as bad?” And to be fair I am entirely down with the argument that “Strategic bombing regardless of if it’s one nuke or 1000 B-24’s is equally a warcrime.” But that still makes it the issue of why single out the nukes like they were something beyond what was already happening. the firebombing was also a war crime
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Jul 26, 2023 21:11
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nukin people? thats a war crime. firebombin cities? thats a war crime. oppressing local populations? thats a war crime. committin to a century of imperial dominion where local subjects have no meaningful autonomy? oh you better believe thats a war crime
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Jul 26, 2023 21:16
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vyelkin posted:when for a day or two after Nagasaki it looked like Japan still might not surrender, the US launched an enormous bombing raid that levelled Japan's only remaining oil refinery, which kinda begs the question of why they didn't just do that before nuking several cities Some Guy TT posted:they treated japanese imperial leadership super nice not japan itself the actual japanese people had far more resentment toward the japanese empire than we did and most of our politicking in the postwar years was explicitly designed to counteract this sentiment
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Jul 26, 2023 21:29
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it's not a bad habit. everyone knows what you mean. or should. lol at regarde getting banned for that one time
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Jul 26, 2023 21:30
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vyelkin posted:when for a day or two after Nagasaki it looked like Japan still might not surrender, the US launched an enormous bombing raid that levelled Japan's only remaining oil refinery, which kinda begs the question of why they didn't just do that before nuking several cities I know you know this, but something that shouldn't get lost in discussion of the atomic bomb drops is that they were also not significantly more destructive than firebombing, which to be clear, was also a war crime. The only military value the bomb had over the usual bag of crimes against humanity was the shock value. Beyond announcing to the world that we have it and aren't afraid to use it the next time someone starts something, a big motivator to use it was to get Japan to surrender before the Soviets could fully shift their military to the Far East. Everyone knew that when that happened, no one was going to be stopping them and that included rolling up the Home Islands, so a fast surrender from the US perspective was necessary to maximize how much territory they would have in their postwar sphere of influence. The Japanese, for their part, hoped that they could negotiate with the Soviets to at least stay neutral if not actually broker a conditional surrender so they weren't going to surrender until that was no longer possible. It's another reason why the second bomb especially was so worthless. The Soviets invading Manchukuo was the end of the last hope the Japanese had of a negotiated surrender and it happened hours before the second bomb was dropped. At that point, the only remaining question was who was going to occupy their country, the Americans or the Soviets, and they chose the Americans.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:32
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Cuttlefush posted:it's not a bad habit. everyone knows what you mean. or should. lol at regarde getting banned for that one time
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Jul 26, 2023 21:36
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Azathoth posted:I know you know this, but something that shouldn't get lost in discussion of the atomic bomb drops is that they were also not significantly more destructive than firebombing, which to be clear, was also a war crime. The only military value the bomb had over the usual bag of crimes against humanity was the shock value. The American justification for the second bomb was "what if they don't believe we have a big stockpile of these and they think it was one and done, we'd better blow up another hundred thousand civilians just to show we can"
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Jul 26, 2023 21:36
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A Buttery Pastry posted:it's a bad habit because it legitimizes their rule, not because people don't understand you lol what
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Jul 26, 2023 21:37
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galagazombie posted:That just makes the question “What’s so bad about a nuke if the fire bombing is just as bad?” And to be fair I am entirely down with the argument that “Strategic bombing regardless of if it’s one nuke or 1000 B-24’s is equally a warcrime.” But that still makes it the issue of why single out the nukes like they were something beyond what was already happening. The firebombing of Dresden and the firebombing of Tokyo were just as much war crimes as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki. Similarly, John Glenn talks in his memoirs about flying missions in Europe in WW2 where after the Luftwaffe ceased to be able to offer significant resistance they would just go out and fly around enemy territory shooting at anything that moved. That, as well, is a war crime. The atomic bombs get actual attention as war crimes because (1) almost nobody's fathers and grandfathers dropped atomic bombs but a whole lotta guys dropped incendiaries and other bombs on children and (2) it was an effective strategy for the anti-nuclear movement to paint anything nuclear as evil and regular bombing didn't have an ongoing political fight outside of the larger war/peace political dynamic.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:41
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Azathoth posted:The firebombing of Dresden and the firebombing of Tokyo were just as much war crimes as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki. Well yeah that’s what I’m saying. I find any complaining about Hiroshima and Nagasaki suspicious because it’s really about defaming nuclear power in favor of the fossil fuel industry(whether knowingly or as a patsy). If it’s all war crimes all the way down there’s no need to point out those two cities while suspiciously never mentioning the other completely obliterated cities.
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Jul 26, 2023 22:00
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