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The major role of the Soviets was showing that the Japanese had absolutely no hope of a negotiated settlement since the Japanese believed Stalin to be their best hope of anything like thaat.
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Oct 24, 2016 04:28
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Completely routing the Japanese in Manchuria also helped (although this unfortunately ended up doublefucking China), but yes Soviet strengths were almost entirely on land, which isn't surprising considering they had just finished fighting the largest land war in history.
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Oct 24, 2016 04:49
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Panzeh posted:The major role of the Soviets was showing that the Japanese had absolutely no hope of a negotiated settlement since the Japanese believed Stalin to be their best hope of anything like thaat. yeah. imo the bombs didn't really push japan towards surrender, the japanese government had already demonstrated a willingness to endure massive bombing against civilian centers. the offer of unconditional surrender was unpalatable to the japanese military government and so they held out for the slight possibility of a conditional peace with russia, which went out the window when russia attacked. at that point you're better off accepting unconditional surrender from one nation rather than two competing nations so japan surrendered to the us and hey, yeah, the big awesome bombs you spend billions of dollars making totally did it, we are in awe of your technological prowess etc.
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Oct 24, 2016 05:38
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Without the bombs Japan was in a much stronger negotiating position and the will to resist was well-documented, even in significant amounts after the first bomb. Only after the second one was the point driven home, and there were still coup attempts. The Russians ended the last chance of a settlement, but the prospect of a Japanese invasion was still a pretty big bargaining chip that the bombs effectively swept off the table.
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Oct 24, 2016 05:58
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new phone who dis posted:Without the bombs Japan was in a much stronger negotiating position and the will to resist was well-documented, even in significant amounts after the first bomb. Only after the second one was the point driven home, and there were still coup attempts. The Russians ended the last chance of a settlement, but the prospect of a Japanese invasion was still a pretty big bargaining chip that the bombs effectively swept off the table. The will to resist was poorly documented and it's not unlikely we would be looking at a Japanese republic had the war gone on for another few months, the internal situation was falling apart and the japanese people were starting to realize just how much their media was a pile of lies that makes the Iraqi information minister's statements look like accurate, factual representations of the second gulf war.
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Oct 24, 2016 06:08
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Agnosticnixie posted:The will to resist was poorly documented and it's not unlikely we would be looking at a Japanese republic had the war gone on for another few months, the internal situation was falling apart and the japanese people were starting to realize just how much their media was a pile of lies that makes the Iraqi information minister's statements look like accurate, factual representations of the second gulf war. They were still horribly terrified of westerners and what would happen to them if they were invaded. They may have been grumbling about their leaders internally, but they weren't going to lay down for a homeland invasion.
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Oct 24, 2016 06:11
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new phone who dis posted:They were still horribly terrified of westerners and what would happen to them if they were invaded. They may have been grumbling about their leaders internally, but they weren't going to lay down for a homeland invasion. imo this is weirdly orientalist
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Oct 24, 2016 06:24
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Agnosticnixie posted:The will to resist was poorly documented Okinawa documented it pretty well actually. The US really really didn't want to fight Okinawa again but on a 100x scale unless it absolutely had to. boner confessor posted:imo this is weirdly orientalist Less "orientalism" and more "the military junta that ran Imperial Japan had convinced the population at large that the Americans would do to them what the Japanese had done to the Chinese." People were literally hurling themselves and their families off of cliffs at Okinawa to spare them the massacre that they were sure would be coming. (One of the ways that the Japanese government portrayed Americans this way was by saying "Look they have black men in their armies, and we all know that they're insatiable jungle rapists!")
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Oct 24, 2016 06:34
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The idea that the population was 100% behind resistance and would fight to the death isn't entirely supported. Military morale was collapsing in the closing months of the war, with soldiers often going AWOL and taking as much with them as they could carry. The Japanese government figured that they could outmaneuver/convince the Americans and preserve as much of the kokutai as possible, and that this was a better gamble than risking popular rebellion that would jeopardize the entire social order and certainly the Emperor's centrality in the political system.
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Oct 24, 2016 07:08
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The US's own Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the bombs weren't necessary to end the war. Virtually every leading US military figure of the time from MacArthur to LeMay are on record saying the bombs weren't necessary to end the war. That's enough to convince me the bombs weren't necessary to end the war. However, most Americans are very stubborn when it comes to admitting that their country did something wrong, particularly with respect to the "good war". So they'll tie themselves in knots trying to find a justification for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Which is what we're witnessing in this thread.
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Oct 24, 2016 07:39
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I remember this discussion came up in a previous thread on this subject and either you or one of the other "A-bombs were horrible war crimes" guys had to link to a Holocaust deniers blog for evidence.
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Oct 24, 2016 07:55
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Fojar38 posted:Less "orientalism" and more "the military junta that ran Imperial Japan had convinced the population at large that the Americans would do to them what the Japanese had done to the Chinese." this has a lot more to do with civilians making decisions in the context of being trapped in a horrible battlefield with fanatical armed militarists looming over their shoulders. i doubt how effective this phenomenon would be on the home islands Chomskyan posted:The US's own Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the bombs weren't necessary to end the war. Virtually every leading US military figure of the time from MacArthur to LeMay are on record saying the bombs weren't necessary to end the war. That's enough to convince me the bombs weren't necessary to end the war. However, most Americans are very stubborn when it comes to admitting that their country did something wrong, particularly with respect to the "good war". So they'll tie themselves in knots trying to find a justification for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Which is what we're witnessing in this thread. you have to draw a distinction between american governmental attitudes towards the use of nuclear vs. conventional weapons against civilans (we didn't care) as well as japanese governmental attitudes towards civilian centers being bombed (they didn't care) boner confessor fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Oct 24, 2016 |
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Oct 24, 2016 07:56
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Fojar38 posted:I remember this discussion came up in a previous thread on this subject and either you or one of the other "A-bombs were horrible war crimes" guys had to link to a Holocaust deniers blog for evidence.
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Oct 24, 2016 07:58
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new phone who dis posted:They were listing loving WHALING BOATS as part of their pacific fleet at the time. This on its own indicates nothing, whaling ships were used at least by Japan also, they were no small brittle dinghies, they were huge factory ships with advanced and mechanized storage facilities that were as able to serve the military effort as any converted civilian ship. Anyway, regardless of their ability to reach Hokkaido, people tend to forget that in August 1945 the last real fighting formations and military stores of the Japanese army were located outside of the Home Islands, and the Soviets were responsible for capturing / destroying those.
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Oct 24, 2016 08:51
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Fojar38 posted:Okinawa documented it pretty well actually. Invasion plans extrapolating from Okinawa were quite optimistic about casualties.
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Oct 24, 2016 08:54
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Fojar38 posted:Okinawa documented it pretty well actually. quote:"the military junta that ran Imperial Japan had convinced the population at large that the Americans would do to them what the Japanese had done to the Chinese." The military junta's leadership was afraid to go out at night by 45, and not just, by far, because of the bombings.
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Oct 24, 2016 09:34
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Helsing posted:nuclear physician
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Oct 24, 2016 09:49
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Always kinda wondered why they didn't drop like at least a warning bomb or something in some random patch of forest right outside a city so people could see the destruction without it actually killing thousands of innocent people. Is there like any historical record that such a plan was even considered? Also not even two pages and there's already been unironic charges of orientalism lol
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Oct 24, 2016 11:26
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Back to this subject again, but I think the fear wasn't that the Soviets could seriously move into the home islands but maybe defend few beach-heads on Hokkaido while what was left of the IJA was defending Honshu from an American invasion. The Soviets would have struggled but the issue was who would claim what after the war was over and it would be impossible to dislodge the Soviets if they could have even gotten one decent portage. The Soviet Pacific Fleet was quite small, but there also wasn't a lot left to oppose them either and the Soviets would have had time to move fleet elements considering the timeline for Olympic. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 11:44 on Oct 24, 2016 |
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Oct 24, 2016 11:41
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boner confessor posted:imo this is weirdly orientalist all the excuses for dropping the bomb are. the us committed an atrocity that hasn't been repeated to this day and we paper over it with racism like "the japanese are just too proud and loyal, they would have extincted themselves instead of surrendering unless we dropped the bomb on them.
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Oct 24, 2016 12:16
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steinrokkan posted:This on its own indicates nothing, whaling ships were used at least by Japan also, they were no small brittle dinghies, they were huge factory ships with advanced and mechanized storage facilities that were as able to serve the military effort as any converted civilian ship. Iirc, before we dropped the bomb Japan was willing to surrender under the terms they get to keep their emperor and we refused because it wasn't unconditional surrender. After the bombs dropped and they surrendered unconditionally we still let them keep the emperor.
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Oct 24, 2016 12:47
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Japan was most certainly unwilling to surrender, because they wanted to negotiate favourable surrender conditions with the aid of Soviet mediators. When the USSR joined the war, Japan lost its last hope for getting any sort of peace guarantees, and folded. Whether the nuclear bombs made the decision to surrender any faster, is a still debated question. What we know is that the first nuclear explosion didn't even result in an emergency meeting of the Supreme War Council.
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Oct 24, 2016 12:56
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Chomskyan posted:The US's own Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the bombs weren't necessary to end the war. Virtually every leading US military figure of the time from MacArthur to LeMay are on record saying the bombs weren't necessary to end the war. That's enough to convince me the bombs weren't necessary to end the war. However, most Americans are very stubborn when it comes to admitting that their country did something wrong, particularly with respect to the "good war". So they'll tie themselves in knots trying to find a justification for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Which is what we're witnessing in this thread. A lot of people said that the bombs weren't necessary, you're correct. Operation Starvation would have ended the war on its own, like I said on the first page. Estimates of starvation deaths were in the millions, and that was the stated goal of the program everyone points to when they say the atom bombs were warcrimes. Congrats on wanting to starve a few million to death in the name of doing the "right" thing, I guess. Secular Humanist posted:Always kinda wondered why they didn't drop like at least a warning bomb or something in some random patch of forest right outside a city so people could see the destruction without it actually killing thousands of innocent people. Is there like any historical record that such a plan was even considered? My post from last page VikingSkull posted:As an aside, this is why popping a nuke off in the ocean for the Japanese to see might not have worked Seizure Meat fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Oct 24, 2016 |
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Oct 24, 2016 13:59
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steinrokkan posted:This on its own indicates nothing, whaling ships were used at least by Japan also, they were no small brittle dinghies, they were huge factory ships with advanced and mechanized storage facilities that were as able to serve the military effort as any converted civilian ship. I've always thought that even a limited landing on some backwater stretch of Hokkaido's coast would have probably allowed the Soviets to go "oh yeah and we're totally occupying Hokkaido now", regardless of any military utility or capacity for a larger invasion.
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Oct 24, 2016 14:08
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mrbradlymrmartin posted:R I P Major Dick Bong His name lives on at the Richard Bong Recreational Area at least.
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Oct 24, 2016 14:40
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Kemper Boyd posted:I've always thought that even a limited landing on some backwater stretch of Hokkaido's coast would have probably allowed the Soviets to go "oh yeah and we're totally occupying Hokkaido now", regardless of any military utility or capacity for a larger invasion. Maybe, if they really wanted to, but I don't think Stalin was interested in stirring poo poo outside zones granted to him through previous deals with the Western Allies. He was pragmatic, and wouldn't have jeopardized the legitimacy of his claims in Europe because of some tenuous grasp on Japanese periphery.
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Oct 24, 2016 14:47
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steinrokkan posted:Maybe, if they really wanted to, but I don't think Stalin was interested in stirring poo poo outside zones granted to him through previous deals with the Western Allies. He was pragmatic, and wouldn't have jeopardized the legitimacy of his claims in Europe because of some tenuous grasp on Japanese periphery. Especially not after the Allies had agreed to let the Soviets take Berlin. Had the Soviets then invaded Japan it would have been seen as a land grab and possibly led to a confrontation with Russia.
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Oct 24, 2016 14:54
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Condiv posted:Iirc, before we dropped the bomb Japan was willing to surrender under the terms they get to keep their emperor and we refused because it wasn't unconditional surrender. After the bombs dropped and they surrendered unconditionally we still let them keep the emperor. Plucky little Imperial Japan
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Oct 24, 2016 19:20
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Fojar38 posted:Plucky little Imperial Japan RIP Glorious Nippon and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. 
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Oct 24, 2016 20:40
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Fojar38 posted:Plucky little Imperial Japan japan sucked rear end (sucks rear end in a lot of ways still I hear) but the a-bomb was a gigantically hosed up thing to drop on anyone it's messed up that we try to pass it off as some humanitarian undertaking
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Oct 24, 2016 21:38
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Condiv posted:japan sucked rear end (sucks rear end in a lot of ways still I hear) but the a-bomb was a gigantically hosed up thing to drop on anyone Other options: - Bomb conventionally, causing similar if not greater amounts of destruction in a different way - Blockade, causing mass starvation and the slow deaths of millions - Accept conditional surrender and let the Emperor off scot free when for all anyone knew he orchestrated the entire war At a certain point the blame starts to lie with the Japanese government for not ending the war sooner, or better yet not launching it at all.
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Oct 24, 2016 21:40
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Condiv posted:japan sucked rear end (sucks rear end in a lot of ways still I hear) but the a-bomb was a gigantically hosed up thing to drop on anyone It's silly that destruction wrought by A-bombs is seen as some special kind of evil compared to the same amount of destruction wrought by a fuckton of conventional bombs.
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Oct 24, 2016 23:16
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blowfish posted:It's silly that destruction wrought by A-bombs is seen as some special kind of evil compared to the same amount of destruction wrought by a fuckton of conventional bombs. The firebombing of Tokyo was the deadliest bombing raid of the entire war. e- Here's Robert McNamara illustrating how savage the conventional bombing was
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Oct 24, 2016 23:19
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Yeah A-bombs are really just big bombs, the fact that they are so feared/revered nowadays is because of the half century of media interpretation.
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Oct 24, 2016 23:33
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well, things got ratcheted up a notch when everyone went thermonuclear
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Oct 24, 2016 23:42
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:Also, the Russians were also offering to "help" the U.S. invade Japan at this point. The thing is, when the Russians invade a country, they just sort of... stay forever. They were already parked in much of Europe with no sign of agreeing to leave, and Roosevelt and Truman were already looking ahead to the Cold War. Dropping The Bomb was as much Truman's show of force against the Russians as it was against the Japanese. It mostly worked. "Stay forever" At the time of the first atomic bombing of Japan the war in Europe had been over for two months. Germany was stateless and was ruled directly by the four great powers for the next four years. You're assigning Truman a motivation that makes no sense because it relies on knowledge of far future events. Incidentally I'm wondering what "it mostly worked" means. If the reason for nuking Japan was to scare the USSR back out of Europe then by all accounts it was a huge failure. If it wasn't that, then why don't you say what it was actually for, instead of just declaring it a successful attempt at [mystery]? HorseLord fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Oct 24, 2016 |
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Oct 24, 2016 23:43
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I think the issue people get tripped up on is calling the atomic bombs a war crime. It definitely was, but here's the thing.... the only other choices available were also war crimes, and some of them were an order of magnitude worse. I'm just not comfortable saying the US should have waited Japan out, when that was estimated to cost 5-10 million deaths by way of starvation.
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Oct 24, 2016 23:47
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Try nuking somewhere near you so you can understand the scale! http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ They are big, especially the ridiculous tens of Mt ones made during the cold war, but the ones dropped on Japan weren't really even that big. For example, if we dropped a Hiroshima sized bomb on the Denver International Airport, it wouldn't even destroy all the runways. If you dropped it on Alcatraz, the blast radius would be confined to the Bay. If you dropped it in downtown Honolulu it wouldn't even touch Waikiki. You can imagine why, after years of completely obliterating Japanese cities with firebombing raids, the US military didn't think it was that big of a step.
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Oct 24, 2016 23:50
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VikingSkull posted:I think the issue people get tripped up on is calling the atomic bombs a war crime. It definitely was, but here's the thing.... the only other choices available were also war crimes, and some of them were an order of magnitude worse. At this point you will usually start getting into Imperial Japan apologism in response, ie "they wanted to surrender but the mean old US wouldn't agree to their perfectly reasonable conditions!"
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Oct 24, 2016 23:51
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Fojar38 posted:At this point you will usually start getting into Imperial Japan apologism in response, ie "they wanted to surrender but the mean old US wouldn't agree to their perfectly reasonable conditions!" To be fair, the unconditional surrender part would be a valid criticism. No one ever takes that angle, though, because no one really digs into what the alternatives were. "They were beaten! Just wait them out!" *winter rolls in, food runs out by September*
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Oct 24, 2016 23:57
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