Asia/Japan

The Germans were at least willing to surrender. Japan would fight to the death if it wasn't for the nukes.

The American invasion of Okinawa brought foreign troops onto Japanese soil, and the senior statesmen recognized that it was time to seek an end to hostilities. The army, however, refused to be a party to any such consensus. The previous year a surprisingly effective ground campaign against Chiang Kai-Shek's forces had brought several additional provinces under Japanese control and reinforced the army's sense of dignity and resolve. By the time the Americans came ashore on Okinawa, events in the China theater were no longer crucial to the outcome of the Greater East Asia War, but the army still had 5.5 million men in uniform, and it preferred to fight to the bitter end than to agree to any surrender that might, from its viewpoint, threaten Japan's future integrity or jeopardize the continued existence of the imperial institution. Confronted with the army's intransigence, the senior statesmen in late Aprl 1945 advised the emperor to accept the resignation of Prime Minister Koiso and appoint Suzuki Kantaro to head a peace cabinet. The retired admiral enjoyed the confidence of the emperor- Suzuki's wife, Taka, had been the monarch's wet nurse, while Suzuki himself had served as grand chamberlain from 1929 until 1936- and the senior statesmen hoped that Suzuki could use his prestige to bring the army to heel.

The advocates of a negotiated settlement had been seeking out one another for a considerable time. Even as Japan's military ranked up victories in 1942, Yoshida Shigeru and several important members of the inner circle of bureaucratic and business elites covertly discussed the possibility of initiating a peace dialogue with the United States. As a former ambassador to Great Britain in the 1930s Yoshida had regarded cooperation with those two powers as essential for Japanese security, and like other members of the Anglo-American clique within the prewar Foreign Ministry, he was staunchly Anti-Communist. His fears ran in two directions. On the one hand, the longer the war continued, he believed, the more likely it became that Tojo's organizational controls and centralized economic planning would end up turning Japan into a Communist-style state. On the other hand, Yoshida was not seduced by Japan's early successes in the Greater East Asia War. He predicted ultimate defeat, and he worried that in the subsequent chaos a revolutionary movement might arise within the nation and destroy its traditional polity. Thus, he calculated, Japan ought to negotiate a gentlemanly settlement with the Americans, who, he believed, would grant generous peace terms.

Yoshda drew around himself a circle of like-minded individuals, dubbed the "YOHANSEN," an acronym for "Yoshida Anti-War," by the police who monitored their activities. Associated with the clandestine YOHANSEN were such luminaries as the former prime minister Wakatsuki Reijiro, the retired managing director of the Mistui zaibatsu Ikeda Seihin, and even the moody and unpredictable Konoe Fumimaro. Originally, Konoe had conceived of a New Order in East Asia as a bulward against both Communism and Western imperialism, but in the middle years of the war he modulated his critique of the United States. Increasingly, in the teeter-totter of his mind, the three-time prime minister became obsessed with a dread that the deteriorating war situation would somehow enable Communists supposedly hidden within the army, IRAA, and universities to concoct a revolution in Japan.

With Yoshida's support, Konoe prepared a lengthy memorial and arranged to present it to the emperor on February 14, 1945. In his presentation, Konoe called the emperor's attention to the Soviet Union's successes in the European war and suggested "the considerable danger that the Soviet Union will eventually intervene in Japan's domestic affairs." Moreover, the prince warned the emperor, on the "domestic scene I see all the conditions necessary to bring about a communist revolution": declining living standards, labor unrest,"a pro-Soviet mood," and "the secret maneuvers of leftist elements who are manipulating this from behind." The greatest danger, Konoe hinted darkly, came from the "many young military men who seem to believe that our kokutai and communism can coexist." The only way to save the situation, he counseled, was to end the war "as soon as possible."

Konoe's morose fears about Japan's fate did not spur the emperor to action in February, but in the spring, when Suzuki became prime minister, Konoe again materialized to offer his advice and service. With Japan encircled and its cities increasingly devastated, Suzuki and other moderates within his cabinet decided to ask the Soviet Union to broker a settlement with the United States, just as the United States itself had extended its good offices to mediate a peace agreement between Japan and Russia a generation earlier. In June the emperor signaled his support for the plan, thus indicating that he now desired to find an honorable way to end hostilities. Even though the Kremlin turned aside from Japan's initial overtures, Suzuki remained hopeful, and in early July the prime minister asked Konoe to carry to Moscow a personal letter from the emperor stating His Majesty's heartfelt hopes for peace, an assignment the prince agreed to after a private meeting with the monarch.

Before Konoe could complete his arrangements to travel to Moscow, however, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman gathered at Potsdam, Germany, to discuss Japan's surrender. The American president was aware of Japan's peace-feelers, but he doubted their sincerity and did not suggest pursuing them. Nor was Truman inclined to show any mercy towards Japan, especially after he received news of the successful test explosion of an atomic device at Alamogordo, New Mexico. On July 26 the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding that Japan surrender "unconditionally" or face utter destruction. The declaration further called upon the Japanese government to purge itself of its militarist leaders, disarm its military, limit its sovereignty to the territorial borders established at the beginning of the Meiji period, and accept an Allied occupation of the country. Nothing was said about the fate of the emperor, the foundation of Japan's revered kokutai.

Suzuki was in a bind. The army still was determined to fight to the end. Moreover, no matter how much some members of the cabinet were inclined toward peace, they could not bring themselves to accept an open-ended surrender that would permit a foreign army of occupation to dismantle the imperial system and to indict Japan's reigning monarch as a common war criminal if it so chose. Suzuki, fearful that he would provoke Truman further if he rejected the Potsdam terms, outright, announced that Japan simply would "ignore" the declaration. It was an unfortunate choice of words by the seventy-eight-year-old prime minister; his exact expression, "mokusatsu," carried the nuance of "to treat with silent contempt," and Truman responded by hurling unrestrained violence against a Japan that already was teetering on the brink of collapse.

On July 24 Truman authorized the US Army Strategic Air Forces to use a "special bomb" against Japan if Suzuki rejected the Potsdam Declaration. With the war in Europe over and his country longing to return to the normal routines of life, the American chief executive was determined to end hostilities in the Pacific as quickly as possible. In addition to avoiding the further loss of American lives, the president had an eye on Russia. The Soviets were mustering forces along Manchukuo's borders and across the straits from Hokkaido, and if Truman could end the Pacific war before Russia entered it, he would foreclose the possibility of a divided Japan and thus escape the sorts of problems that a partitioned Germany already was posing for postwar Europe.

Moreover, Truman was new to his office, and the project leading to the production of the atomic bomb had built up its own relentless momentum. Everyone involved expected the bomb to be used; that was why America had expended so much money and effort to develop it. Truman, still unsure of his presidential footing, saw no good reason to question the assumption or to consider at length alternatives to dropping the atomic bomb on the Japanese, such as setting off a demonstration blast over a deserted island or simply waiting for the combined effects of the continued firebombings and an American naval blockade to persuade Japan to surrender. Additionally, he screened out any moral qualms he might have had about using the new weapon; he simply was employing the best available technology to end a horrible war on the soonest possible day. "Let there be no mistake about it," he wrote, "I regard the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used."

Later Truman and his advisers claimed that using the atomic bomb saved lives. In 1947 Harry L Stimson, secretary of war under Roosevelt and Truman, contributed a special essay to Harper's Magazine that became the administration's official, approved version of events. An invasion of Kyushu in the fall of 1945 followed by landings on Honshu the next spring, Stimson wrote, would have "cost over a million casualties, to American forces alone." The secretary apparently pulled that number out of thin air, however, for army estimates submitted to Truman in July 1945 predicted that the projected landing on Kyushu would result in a maximum of 33,500 Americans killed, wounded, or missing. Against that number of US Military losses, Truman knew that when his air force dropped the new atomic bomb over an undefended Japanese city, the explosion "would inflict damage and casualties beyond imagination." Yet, in a war in which few people any longer regarded the other side as fellow human beings, Truman and Stimson judged such sacrifice to be reasonable and acceptable.

At eight-fifteen on the morning of August 6, a single B-29, the Enola Gay, dropped a "special bomb," 9.8 feet long and 2.3 feet in diameter, on the men, women, and children of Hiroshima. The atomic device exploded about sixteen hundred feet aboveground, and the temperature at the hypercenter below reached more than seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Everything within a mile-and-a-quarter radius of the eruption burned, and all within that killing circle who were exposed to the heat waves died, their skin and internal organs ruptured by the incredible temperatures. A wall of shock waves spread out from the epicenter at the speed of sound, obliterating concrete buildings, blowing apart wooden structures, and tearing limbs from bodies. Radiation was everywhere. Firestorms ravaged the city, and moisture collecting on rising ash came back to earth as radioactive "black rain." There are no accurate figures for the number of dead at Hiroshima, although a 1977 government estimate set the number at between 130,000 and 140,000.

On August 8 Foreign Ministry monitors picked up a Soviet radio broadcast announcing that country's intent to declare war on Japan and to invade Manchuria, the Kuril Islands, and Korea. Just before noon on the following day, August 9, the Americans dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki and killed another 60,000 to 70,000; in all nearly 500,000 civilians now had perished in the bombing of Japanese cities. Through all that travail and agony, the army minister and the army and navy chiefs of staff refused to endorse Suzuki's pleas for surrender. Total defeat, they contended, still might be avoided somehow, and further resistance might yet win from the Americans a guarantee for the throne's postwar existence.

On the night of August 9-10 and again on the morning of August 14, Suzuki convened imperial conferences and asked the emperor to intervene and break the deadlock between the prime minister and the military. Each time the emperor spoke on behalf of peace, and in the second meeting he instructed the military to comply with his wishes. That evening he affixed his seal to a rescript ending the war and then recorded the text for broadcast the next day. At noon on August 15 Japanese families huddled around their radios at home or gathered in front of loudspeaker hooked to a single village receiver to listen to the emperor's words. It was the first time in Japanese history that the semidivine monarch spoke directly to his subjects, and many had difficulty understanding his somewhat archaic phrasing as he praised the ideals for which the people of Japan had fought and suffered and then called upon them to "endure the unendurable" and accept defeat in order "to pave the way for a grand peace for all future generations to come."

Russia

Quote from: MyNameIsCharlie on August 25, 2016, 12:40:21 AM

Quote from: Inhuman on August 25, 2016, 12:32:43 AM

Russia

Russia was brutal. No doubt. But which was the most brutal theater?  Where was the real fight?

I'm going with Asia.

It's a meme you dip

Quote from: Inhuman on August 25, 2016, 12:43:04 AM

Quote from: MyNameIsCharlie on August 25, 2016, 12:40:21 AM

Quote from: Inhuman on August 25, 2016, 12:32:43 AM

Russia

Russia was brutal. No doubt. But which was the most brutal theater?  Where was the real fight?

I'm going with Asia.

It's a meme you dip

I know. I started it. WWII Russia vs Master Chief.  That was me.

Quote from: MyNameIsCharlie on August 25, 2016, 12:47:31 AM

Quote from: Inhuman on August 25, 2016, 12:43:04 AM

Quote from: MyNameIsCharlie on August 25, 2016, 12:40:21 AM

Quote from: Inhuman on August 25, 2016, 12:32:43 AM

Russia

Russia was brutal. No doubt. But which was the most brutal theater?  Where was the real fight?

I'm going with Asia.

It's a meme you dip

I know. I started it. WWII Russia vs Master Chief.  That was me.

You did not start WWII Russia.

Quote from: Raven on August 25, 2016, 04:30:29 PM

Quote from: MyNameIsCharlie on August 25, 2016, 12:47:31 AM

Quote from: Inhuman on August 25, 2016, 12:43:04 AM

Quote from: MyNameIsCharlie on August 25, 2016, 12:40:21 AM

Quote from: Inhuman on August 25, 2016, 12:32:43 AM

Russia

Russia was brutal. No doubt. But which was the most brutal theater?  Where was the real fight?

I'm going with Asia.

It's a meme you dip

I know. I started it. WWII Russia vs Master Chief.  That was me.

You did not start WWII Russia.

Find one before this

From what I remember of Year 10 History, Japanese soldiers routinely made their newer recruits line up and each stab captured soldiers in the stomach with their bayonets on top of something about raping civilians in China. Even keeping in mind campaigns like the Siege of Tobruk, I'd say Southeast Asia, Australia and the US definitely had a harder time in the Pacific theater.

At this stage I'm kinda suspicious that History classes are just shilling for their Countries' major engagements though, Europe could well have been the harder/dirtier fought theater.