dowding@burdvax.UUCP (John Dowding) (10/23/84)
>Even the evidence at the time, gained from 3 1/2 years of long, >hard, bloody fighting, suggested that the Japanese would never surrender. >I don't think that we have that much better perspective of what was >going on at the time than did those who were actually there. All of >the broadcasts of Japanese radio, interrogation of the few prisoners >that were taken, and the ferocity of the Kamikazaes, and even input from >experts on Japan combined to give a fairly accurate picture of what >was going on and what sort of reception the Allies could expect if >they inveded the Japanese home islands. The Americans beat the >Japanese because, among other things, they won the intelligence war. >To say that the Allies had "no way of knowing what was going on in Japan" >is simply untrue. OK, lets look at the perspective of those people involved at the time, the joint Chiefs of Staff: Admiral William D. Leahy: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . ." General George C. Marshall: "The impact of Russian entry on the already hopeless Japanese may well be the decisive action levering them into capitulation. . ." Similarly, through most of 1945, Admiral Ernest J. King believed the bomb unnecessary, and Generals Henry H. Arnold and Curtis Lemay defined the official Air Force position in this way: Whether or not the atomic bomb should be dropped was not for the Air Force to decide, but explosion of the bomb was not necessary to win the war or make an invasion unnecessary. Finally, General Dwight D. Eisenhower said "I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon . . ." Eisenhower's judgement that it was "completely unnecessary" as a measure to save lives was almost certainly correct. This is not a matter of hindsight; before the atomic bomb was dropped each of the joint Chiefs of Staff advised that it was highly likely that Japan could be forced to surrender "unconditionally", without use of the bomb and without an invasion. One final point, the military considerations made before the weapons were used have been confirmed by numerous post-surrender studies. The best known is that of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which states: "Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." John Dowding Reference: "Twentieth-Century America - Recent Interpretations", edited by Barton Bernstein and Allen Matusow, contains the paper "Why We Dropped the Bomb" by Gar Alperovitz.