Interesting Aricle In todays Boston Globe

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Skyros
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Interesting Aricle In todays Boston Globe

Post by Skyros »

What ended World War II?

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For nearly seven decades, the American public has accepted one version of the events that led to Japan’s surrender. By the middle of 1945, the war in Europe was over, and it was clear that the Japanese could hold no reasonable hope of victory. After years of grueling battle, fighting island to island across the Pacific, Japan’s Navy and Air Force were all but destroyed. The production of materiel was faltering, completely overmatched by American industry, and the Japanese people were starving. A full-scale invasion of Japan itself would mean hundreds of thousands of dead GIs, and, still, the Japanese leadership refused to surrender.

But in early August 66 years ago, America unveiled a terrifying new weapon, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a matter of days, the Japanese submitted, bringing the fighting, finally, to a close.

On Aug. 6, the United States marks the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing’s mixed legacy. The leader of our democracy purposefully executed civilians on a mass scale. Yet the bombing also ended the deadliest conflict in human history.

In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa - a highly respected historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara - has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan’s surrender. His interpretation could force a new accounting of the moral meaning of the atomic attack. It also raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period. And it suggests that we could be headed towards an utterly different understanding of how, and why, the Second World War came to its conclusion.

“Hasegawa has changed my mind,” says Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” “The Japanese decision to surrender was not driven by the two bombings.”

President Truman’s decision to go nuclear has long been a source of controversy. Many, of course, have argued that attacking civilians can never be justified. Then, in the 1960s, a “revisionist school” of historians suggested that Japan was in fact close to surrendering before Hiroshima - that the bombing was not necessary, and that Truman gave the go-ahead primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union with our new power.

Hasegawa - who was born in Japan and has taught in the United States since 1990, and who reads English, Japanese, and Russian - rejects both the traditional and revisionist positions. According to his close examination of the evidence, Japan was not poised to surrender before Hiroshima, as the revisionists argued, nor was it ready to give in immediately after the atomic bomb, as traditionalists have always seen it. Instead, it took the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, several days after Hiroshima, to bring the capitulation.

Both the American and Japanese public have clung to the idea that the mushroom clouds ended the war. For the Japanese, Hiroshima is a potent symbol of their nation as victim, helping obscure their role as the aggressors and in atrocities that include mass rapes and beheading prisoners of war. For the Americans, Hiroshima has always been a means justified by the end.

“This seems to touch a nerve,” observes Hasegawa.

That may help explain why Hasegawa’s thesis, which he first detailed in an award-winning 2005 book and has continued to bolster with new material, is still little known outside of academic circles, says Ward Wilson, a nuclear weapons scholar who has drawn on Hasegawa’s insights in his own recent work. Measured against the decades of serious and settled thinking about World War II, Hasegawa’s scholarship feels radical. But another reason, Wilson argues, is that to look at history in this new light is to entertain what seem like shocking ideas. That the destruction of cities does not sway leaders. That what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not overly remarkable. And, strangest of all: That nuclear explosives may not be particularly effective weapons of war.

The Pacific War began in 1941 with the violent humiliation at Pearl Harbor. Japan already held parts of China, and quickly invaded New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and Singapore. Manila fell. The country enjoyed air supremacy across most of Southeast Asia; in February 1942, it even attacked Australia. Japan’s control was tightening, and it appeared unstoppable.

After the epic Battle of Midway in the summer of 1942, however, the United States and its allies gained the momentum. Still, progress was slow as Marines hopped from atoll to island to atoll: wading through bloody coral shallows under a rain of shelling, engaging an enemy that was dug in, highly trained, and willing to fight to the death. The names of these tropical hells - Gaudalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa - have become Marine Corps legend. The casualties were heavy.

By the summer of 1945, the Americans had cornered Japan and assembled a final invasion plan, codenamed Operation Downfall. The first stage was scheduled for the fall, and would have opened with the landing of more than 700,000 troops on Kyushu, the southernmost of the big four islands. It would have been a larger operation than D-Day, certain to result in a bloody slaughter.

Americans, then and today, have tended to assume that Japan’s leaders were simply blinded by their own fanaticism, forcing a catastrophic showdown for no reason other than their refusal to acknowledge defeat. This was, after all, a nation that trained its young men to fly their planes, freighted with explosives, into the side of American naval vessels.

But Hasegawa and other historians have shown that Japan’s leaders were in fact quite savvy, well aware of their difficult position, and holding out for strategic reasons. Their concern was not so much whether to end the conflict, but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war crimes trials, and preserving the imperial system. The Japanese could still inflict heavy casualties on any invader, and they hoped to convince the Soviet Union, still neutral in the Asian theater, to mediate a settlement with the Americans. Stalin, they calculated, might negotiate more favorable terms in exchange for territory in Asia. It was a long shot, but it made strategic sense.

On Aug. 6, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped its payload on Hiroshima, leaving the signature mushroom cloud and devastation on the ground, including something on the order of 100,000 killed. (The figures remain disputed, and depend on how the fatalities are counted.)

As Hasegawa writes in his book “Racing the Enemy,” the Japanese leadership reacted with concern, but not panic. On Aug. 7, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo sent an urgent coded telegram to his ambassador in Moscow, asking him to press for a response to the Japanese request for mediation, which the Soviets had yet to provide. The bombing added a “sense of urgency,” Hasegawa says, but the plan remained the same.

Very late the next night, however, something happened that did change the plan. The Soviet Union declared war and launched a broad surprise attack on Japanese forces in Manchuria. In that instant, Japan’s strategy was ruined. Stalin would not be extracting concessions from the Americans. And the approaching Red Army brought new concerns: The military position was more dire, and it was hard to imagine occupying communists allowing Japan’s traditional imperial system to continue. Better to surrender to Washington than to Moscow.

By the morning of Aug. 9, the Japanese Supreme War Council was meeting to discuss the terms of surrender. (During the meeting, the second atomic bomb killed tens of thousands at Nagasaki.) On Aug. 15, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally.

How is it possible that the Japanese leadership did not react more strongly to many tens of thousands of its citizens being obliterated?

One answer is that the Japanese leaders were not greatly troubled by civilian causalities. As the Allies loomed, the Japanese people were instructed to sharpen bamboo sticks and prepare to meet the Marines at the beach.

Yet it was more than callousness. The bomb - horrific as it was - was not as special as Americans have always imagined. In early March, several hundred B-29 Super Fortress bombers dropped incendiary bombs on downtown Tokyo. Some argue that more died in the resulting firestorm than at Hiroshima. People were boiled in the canals. The photos of charred Tokyo and charred Hiroshima are indistinguishable.

In fact, more than 60 of Japan’s cities had been substantially destroyed by the time of the Hiroshima attack, according to a 2007 International Security article by Wilson, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In the three weeks before Hiroshima, Wilson writes, 25 cities were heavily bombed.

To us, then, Hiroshima was unique, and the move to atomic weaponry was a great leap, military and moral. But Hasegawa argues the change was incremental. “Once we had accepted strategic bombing as an acceptable weapon of war, the atomic bomb was a very small step,” he says. To Japan’s leaders, Hiroshima was yet another population center leveled, albeit in a novel way. If they didn’t surrender after Tokyo, they weren’t going to after Hiroshima.

Hasegawa’s work is an important new entry into the scholarly conversation, reconstructing the conflicting perspectives of Russians, Americans, and Japanese, and concluding that the bomb played a secondary role. Barton Bernstein, a professor of history emeritus at Stanford University, is the unofficial dean of American atomic bomb scholarship and counts himself as both a fan and a critic of Hasegawa. Hasegawa’s ability to read three languages, Bernstein says, gives him a unique advantage over other scholars. Hasegawa spent years working through primary documents, with a deep understanding of linguistic and cultural nuance. His knowledge was especially valuable because historians of the period face such fragmentary and contradictory evidence, in part because the Japanese destroyed many documents.

But therein lies the weakness of the Hasegawa interpretation as well, Bernstein says. After a long war and in the space of a few days, the Japanese leadership was hit with two extraordinary events - Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion - and sorting out cause and effect, based on incomplete documentation, may prove impossible.

“When you look through all the evidence, I think it is hard to weigh one or the other more heavily,” Bernstein said. “The analysis is well intentioned, but more fine-grained than the evidence comfortably allows.”

Yet Bernstein, Hasegawa, and many historians agree on one startling point. The public view that the atomic bomb was the decisive event that ended World War II is not supported by the facts.

What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has framed the world’s thinking about nuclear weapons. Those days in August remain the only instance of nuclear war. The sheer horrors of the destruction, and the lingering poison of radioactivity, inform what has come to be called nuclear deterrence: No sane nation would bring a nuclear attack on itself, and so having nuclear weapons deters your enemies from attacking. When two rival nations have nuclear weapons, as during the Cold War, the result is stalemate.

Hasegawa’s scholarship disturbs this simple logic. If the atomic bomb alone could not compel the Japanese to submit, then perhaps the nuclear deterrent is not as strong as it seems. In fact, Wilson argues, history suggests that leveling population centers, by whatever method, does not force surrender. The Allied firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945 killed many people, but the Germans did not capitulate. The long-range German bombing of London did not push Churchill towards acquiescence. And it is nearly impossible to imagine that a bomb detonated on American soil, even one that immolated a large city, would prompt the nation to bow in surrender.

If killing large numbers of civilians does not have a military impact, then what, Wilson asks, is the purpose of keeping nuclear weapons? We know they are dangerous. If they turn out not to be strategically effective, then nuclear weapons are not trump cards, but time bombs beneath our feet.

Whatever the merits of this position, it suffers the great handicap of trying to change, fundamentally, how several generations have thought about the atomic age, says Linton Brooks, who has served in arms control and nuclear policy positions in several administrations. “Fifty years of telling ourselves that these things are different has sort of made them different,” says Linton. “That is the mystique of nuclear weapons.”

Hasegawa’s own relationship to the events of August of 1945 testifies to the degree to which, all these years later, they resist clear appraisal. As a child, Hasegawa watched the Tokyo firebombing from his roof, and he can still recall the eerie orange glow on the horizon. Growing up, he felt anger at the Japanese government for bringing the conflict onto its people. Later, working as a scholar in America, he accepted the position that the atomic bombing was necessary to end the war. Today he views America’s bombings of Japan’s cities - Hiroshima and Tokyo included - as war crimes. Yet, he adds, they are crimes America should not apologize for until Japan comes to terms with war crimes of its own. These are the evolving views of a man who has mustered the courage to look at an ugly period of history without flinching - something that most people, Americans and Japanese alike, have found themselves unable to do.

Gareth Cook is a Globe columnist and former editor of Ideas.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
Buck Beach
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Post by Buck Beach »

Thanks for posting it.

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Post by mooreshawnm »

The United States didn't start the war. Heard all this in college in the 90's...America bad, everyone else innocent. Did Japan have the opportunity to surrender? Yes. Did they before the use of atomic weapons? No. Too bad so sad.
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Post by PaxMondo »

Interesting, and plausible as it relates to what caused Japan to surrender. Certainly, Japan was always concerned about the Soviets.

Not sure I agree with the other assorted conclusions though. The implication of an atomic bomb being equal to fire bombing is ludicrous, not matter what the "profs" say. They overlook a critical fact: fire bombing requires the accurate and coordinated delivery of tens of thousands of pieces of ordnance, an atomic bomb requires a single delivery system. Then and now, this one fact is the fundamental difference and is what creates all the concern.
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Post by 5thGuardsTankArmy »

Well, I have said this all along.  Nice to finally see a representative from a US university drawing the same conclusions as i said for 2 years ago on this very forums.

The Soviet Union won WW2,  not the Allies. Claiming other just proves your a victim to Western Propaganda.
Soviet Union Defeated the German's, the Land Leace did indeed help them (despite that research done in the 2000's scale down its effect a bit) and the Soviets entry into the Pacific scared the shit out of the Japs.

The Soviets got their nation terrorized, but comed out of it as a  unified and strong nation with greater industrial potential then ever before, its political strength in 1946+ can't Evan be compared to its  pre war political influence.



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Post by Nikademus »

I'd recommend Richard Frank's "Downfall" for those interested in this area of study, and the Japanese situation in the last months of the war in general. It pretty much vetted all the stuff in this article already, but the most sobbering account in the book was the breakdown of Olympic and how it might have indeed produced huge US casualties. I've personally always felt the bomb was justified. As this article touches on, as does Frank, and other books about Strategic/Terror bombing etc......the thing that made Hiroshima so horrific was that the results were all produced by a single weapon. That would give anyone pause to think. In terms of the casualties....not to sound unfeeling but similar and worse results had been achieved before using traditional TNT and incendiaries. As such, its not suprising to read that Japan's leaders didn't instantly hit the panic button.

The Soviet invasion was the last straw. Japan was hoping and expecting that they wouldn't attack as soon as they did. They were wrong. The Soviets own plan was also wrought with political tension....the speed of the plan was dictated by the STAVKA goal of achieving their goals in Manchuria and Korea + the Kurriles and even Northern Japan BEFORE Japan surrendered to the Allies.
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Post by Klahn »

I came to the same conclusion as this prof a long time ago. A government who will willingly commit it's people to suicide attacks is not going to surrender because yet another city is wiped out regardless of the weapon used. The Japanese government knew there was one thing that could happen to them that would be worse than death: The brutality of Soviet occupation.

Interesting factoid: The Japanese people weren't generally aware they had been hit by atomic weapons until after the nation surrendered. Knowledge of what had actually occured was limited to government officials.

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Post by Cribtop »

I will carefully avoid the politics of this (although I have my own opinions). However, I will say that the world probably benefitted from seeing a nuclear bomb used in anger. It helped to inform both sides of the Cold War of the madness of a full on nuclear exchange.

The one conclusion I will take strong issue with is the idea that modern nuclear weapons would not be strategically effective. Today's MIRV H-Bombs would be FAR more devastating than Fat Man or Little Boy. I remember reading someone's analysis of a few Soviet 100 megaton strikes off the East Coast of Florida. The estimated result - no more Florida. That kind of destruction would have been self-defeating. There would be no leadership left to callously ignore casualties. More Fallout 3 than Hiroshima.
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Post by msieving1 »

ORIGINAL: Ryvan

Interesting factoid: The Japanese people weren't generally aware they had been hit by atomic weapons until after the nation surrendered. Knowledge of what had actually occured was limited to government officials.

Not sure that this is true. I read Hiroshima Diary many years ago. As I recall, the doctor recorded in his diary that Japanese officials announced that Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb a few days after the bombing. The officials also said that Japan had long had an atomic bomb of their own, and that they had destroyed San Francisco in retaliation.
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Post by decaro »

ORIGINAL: Ryvan

I came to the same conclusion as this prof a long time ago. A government who will willingly commit it's people to suicide attacks is not going to surrender because yet another city is wiped out regardless of the weapon used ...

My understanding was that the Imperial Japanese leadership surrendered because they feared the A-bomb would eventually destroy their very culture, not just all their cities.
ORIGINAL: 5thGuardsTankArmy

The Soviet Union won WW2 ...

Wasn't that after the nullification of the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact -- aka the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact -- when Germany invaded in '41?
ORIGINAL: PaxMondo

Not sure I agree with the other assorted conclusions though. The implication of an atomic bomb being equal to fire bombing is ludicrous ...

According to author Vonnegut, weren't more people killed during the fire-bombing of Dresden -- >130,000 -- than from the (initial) estimated casualties in the Hiroshima A-bomb blast: 60-70,000 killed or missing.
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Post by warspite1 »

Not sure that I agree with the idea that Nuclear Weapons are not the ultimate deterent. Sure, at the time the two bombs were dropped on Japan - given the limited bombs available, the method of delivery etc - this may have been the case (but even then, only in the hands of a fanatical regime). But post WWII, when the nuclear powers each have a great many such weapons - and each many times more powerful than Little Boy and Fat Man, then I do not think this stands up to argument.

As to what actually ended the war and brought the Japanese to the peace table: I think it would be great to have a definitive answer, but would suggest it does not really matter. Whether it was the atomic bomb or the Soviet declaration of war is not that important. Fact was, the surrender saved countless Allied/Japanese/Soviet casualties that would have been incurred had a conventional war continued; so let's be thankful for that.
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Post by House Stark »

The Soviet invasion definitely was a major factor in Japan's surrender, and the fact that the bombs followed right on its heels just helped even more. It was a brutal 1-2 punch to a collapsing country.
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ORIGINAL: Joe D.
ORIGINAL: PaxMondo

Not sure I agree with the other assorted conclusions though. The implication of an atomic bomb being equal to fire bombing is ludicrous ...

According to author Vonnegut, weren't more people killed during the fire-bombing of Dresden -- >130,000 -- than from the (initial) estimated casualties in the Hiroshima A-bomb blast: 60-70,000 killed or missing.
Please go back pull the rest of my statement. Taking those two sentences out of context. I'm not stating whether fire bombs killed more than the a-bombs. That is like saying heart attacks killed more than bullets during wwii. It might be true, but it isn't relevant to the discussion. I stated that extrapolating and thinking that a-bombs are not the terrible weapon they are because fire bombing killed more is ludicrous. Again, read my entire statement.
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Post by JeffroK »

Sub Blockade
Fire Bombing
Soviet attack (despite having a "non aggresion" treaty"
Atomic bombs
Carrier & BB attacks on coast
Shrinking defense perimiter.

They all added up to the japanese finally seeing sense.
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Post by Terminus »

Nothing "new" in this article at all.
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Post by Sredni »

I could certainly see the imminent soviet activation as having a major impact on the japanese leaders line of thought. The soviets were just as brutal as the japanese during the war in regards to their own people, to pow's, and to civilians of enemy nations.
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Post by Terminus »

It really isn't worth the bandwidth. He's just re-hashing stuff that anybody who knows 0.5% more about WWII than the ever-shrinking standard has known forever.
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Post by Klahn »

ORIGINAL: House Stark

The Soviet invasion definitely was a major factor in Japan's surrender, and the fact that the bombs followed right on its heels just helped even more. It was a brutal 1-2 punch to a collapsing country.

The bomb came before the Soviet invasion. In fact, the second bomb was dropped on the day the Soviets attacked.
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Post by khyberbill »

has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict
I always thought it was spam that defeated the Axis powers.
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Post by decaro »

ORIGINAL: PaxMondo

Please go back pull the rest of my statement. Taking those two sentences out of context. I'm not stating whether fire bombs killed more than the a-bombs. That is like saying heart attacks killed more than bullets during wwii. It might be true, but it isn't relevant to the discussion. I stated that extrapolating and thinking that a-bombs are not the terrible weapon they are because fire bombing killed more is ludicrous. Again, read my entire statement.

OK
ORIGINAL: PaxMondo

... The implication of an atomic bomb being equal to fire bombing is ludicrous, not matter what the "profs" say. They overlook a critical fact: fire bombing requires the accurate and coordinated delivery of tens of thousands of pieces of ordnance, an atomic bomb requires a single delivery system. Then and now, this one fact is the fundamental difference and is what creates all the concern.

However inaccurate, the fire bombing of Dresden resulted in a fire storm that killed more than 130,000 vs. initial estimates of 60-70,000 KiA and MiA from one A-bomb at Hiroshima.

Vonnegut thought the considerable carnage of Dresden -- about twice that of Hiroshima --was downplayed and forgotten just because of the (one) A-Bomb.
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