Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
Nothing you say here is factually correct.
Post Right Wing looniness here
- Thread starter Seattle Husker
- Start date
Nothing you say here is factually correct.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
I don't know. Maybe he did, but he didn't have Eisenhower, MacArthur, or LeMay. I showed you evidence for my case which you have ignored. Find your own evidence for your case.
Actually it is. Just like with the Israel-Palestine conflict you create your own revisionist history. It was clear what Japan was doing.
I ignore then because Japan's military was actually saying something else.
I don't care about the opinions of those. I only care about the actions and thoughts of Hirohito and what he would've done without the bomb. Garmel explained it.
People like these U.S. generals tried to look at Japan through a Western viewpoint. There was no hope for Japan and most westerners could see that. However, the military of Japan followed the code of Bushido which doesn't have the word surrender in their vocabulary. We would have won a ground war but the death counts on both sides would have been high.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
Yet, Japan didn't follow what the military was saying. You proved your conclusion wrong by your own argument.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
No. He didn't. I linked an article that answers what Japan was thinking before and after the bomb.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
Yet, Japan once again didn't follow the military leaders and Bushido. There was still much fighting they could have done even after the atomic bombs. But we see from those closest to the situation from the US side, Japan was ready to negotiate peace.
No, because the emperor overruled them.
It took two bombs to make the emperor surrender and without the bombs we go into a long ground war.
Show me where the emperor before the bombs where made a serious overture toward peace. I'm not talking about a slap on the wrist type of surrender either.
We weren't going to let them keep their government where they can sit back and rebuild and we have to go through this again 10-20 years in the future.
Read what Japan wanted in the Potsdam Declaration.
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Because the emperor declared surrender and nobody disobeyed him. It was an authoritarian state after all.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
Show me where the emperor changed his mind
Bombed on the 6th and 9th and surrendered on the 15th of August 1945. Do you think that was a coincidence?
Japan had no idea how many more we had.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
I haven't seen any statements from the emperor or thos
US military personnel thought Japan would surrender by Nov-Dec of 1945 without further attacks. Everyone knew Japan's military was defeated including Japan. It was simply a matter of time. Did the bombings accelerate the timing? Maybe. But my point was that I agree with many in the US at the time that surrender was inevitable without atomics or an invasion. Japan was in dire straits already.
US military personnel thought Japan would surrender by Nov-Dec of 1945 without further attacks. Everyone knew Japan's military was defeated including Japan. It was simply a matter of time. Did the bombings accelerate the timing? Maybe. But my point was that I agree with many in the US at the time that surrender was inevitable without atomics or an invasion. Japan was in dire straits already.
And it should say "some" US military personnel. Truman's military advisors and people knowing the Japanese culture say otherwise.
The most the Japanese would do is ask for more ridiculous conditional surrender options.
Not always. And do you think the Japanese entertained a lot of conditions of surrender when they were pillaging throuh Korea, Manchuria, and French Indo-China? I doubt it. The point is that they likely weren't relying on us capitulating on that point, and if they were, that's their own fault. We had greater resolve than they assumed.
You're right. To get an unconditional surrender in WWI, the Allies would have had to go all the way to Berlin like they did in WWII. Instead, a stalemate was reached, and both sides agreed to an armistice. Wilson and other progressive foreign policy advocates pushed for and got some pretty harsh points into the various agreements. But like most modern Democrats, Wilson and his allies spewed much harsher rhetoric than their resolve was willing to back up. I don't think they should have insisted on terms that harsh, but if they were going to, they needed a hell of a lot of resolve to back it up.
Do I think there would have been a lasting peace had the terms been less harsh? Maybe, but I don't think we can assume that. Why? Because Germany thought it got screwed - not just by the Allies but even more so by its own leadership, which was politically weak. Remember, the Kaiser didn't sign the armistice (and sure as hell didn't sign off on Versailles) and soon went into exile. The new government was somewhat corrupt and fighting off revolutionary movements by the far left (the Communists and their mob of Red Front Fighters) and far right (the predecessors to the Nazis and the SA such as the Steel Helmets and other groups).
The Imperial Army wasn't moving forward anymore at the time of the armistice, but it wasn't retreating and hadn't been defeated on the battlefield. Military leaders like Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorf frequently and publicly highlighted that fact and gave the public the impression that the Army had been stabbed in the back by corrupt politicians. Of course, the Nazis massively exploited that sentiment, and the bottom line is that a hell of a lot of Germans wanted to keep fighting and finish off the Allies. So even if Versailles hadn't been so harsh, there's at least a decent chance hostilities would have resumed anyway.
WWII was different. No sane person in Germany questioned their defeat. Their cities were in ruins. Their fuhrer was dead. There were millions of American, Soviet, British, and Canadian troops all over their country literally with guns at their heads. They were a defeated people. But I also think at least the Western Allies learned from the mistake of WWI and didn't clobber them with the harshest possible terms (despite there being an unconditional surrender), and of course, before too long, we did the Marshall Plan - basically the opposite of reparations. That was the right way to go - total defeat but the extension of an olive branch.
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Yeah, not everybody was on board with the bomb, including some big names. But you know what? History proved them wrong. They can say the Japanese would have surrendered, but you know what? When given the chance to, they didn't.
Also, did it occur to you that perhaps some of these military leaders had an agenda? War is good for generals. Yes, it means risk. But it also means a purpose. It means higher ranks and more money. It means glory. I'm not saying Eisenhower and these guys wanted the war never to end, but I suspect they wanted it to end as it did in Europe - with a big nasty invasion that they can lead. That didn't happen, and we're much better off that it didn't.
This is the bottom line right here. It ended much better than it could have ended.
And now, Japan is one of our best allies and friends.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
That isn't a fair statement though. They didn't surrender right on the spot. Yeah, nobody ever did so that isn't a reasonable requirement. It didn't prove anything one way or another, because surrender would have come.
The generals were saying a land invasion wasn't necessary either, so I don't think extension of the war was the motivation. Even Curtis LeMay who in every other case wanted to bomb anyone and anytime was cautious about atomics. The purpose of the bombs wasn't military strategy. I think it was something else.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
Yeah, that was the problem the Allies couldn't do that in WW1. There was a real stalemate. But then the British blockaded Germany once the peace negotiations started. Germans were dieing from starvation. It was an underhanded tactic to allow for harsh terms.
Yep. But we will never know, because the conditions did give the Nazis genuine grievances to exploit. What we do know is that the situation which caused hostilities in the first place, the intertangling of treaties and alliances, didn't exist anymore. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved. The threat of violence against Serbs wasn't there to draw in Russia. Remember Germany's motivation for starting WW1 though still flawed wasn't to conquer Europe. It was to protect Austria from France and Russia. The solution was to secure Austria and Serbia. In that case the major players had their incentives met.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
I wonder why. It just happened, right?
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
There were possibilities both better and worse. I too am glad we didn't get the absolute worst possibility.
I think what we demonstrated after WWII was the correct procedure on how to handle defeated enemies. We do need an unconditional surrender but instead of unnecessary punishments we try to get the offending country back on the right track, which we didn't do after WWI. Look at Germany and Japan now.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
I think it depends on what the conditions are and how much more war it takes to get an unconditional surrender. There is always a difficult calculation to make.
Well, one is that we can't let them keep an authoritarian government.
A reasonable requirement? This is an example of you being wildly unfair to the US and holding them to a standard to which you'd never hold our enemies. Japan can bomb Pearl Harbor and do things in East Asia that would have made the worst Nazis uncomfortable, but you'll call us out for being unfair in the timing of our surrender demands, as if we owed them something. It was a war. We didn't owe them ****. We didn't have to warn them about the bomb. We didn't have to even give them a chance to surrender. Doing so was an act of mercy that they rejected.
The invasion (Operation Downfall) was already planned and ready to go. Nimitz and MacArthur were planning and ready to do it. It was the next logical step. The speculation that they were going to surrender is a classic "if my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather" scenario. Maybe they would have, maybe they wouldn't have. But the point is that when given multiples chances, they didn't. They chose total destruction over unconditional surrender.
And that's where these "conditions" breakdown. The Nazis would have surrendered too if we let their leaders stay in power, etc. Sorry, but any self-respecting country is going to say "**** no" to something like that.
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