Exactly, the soviet entry is clearly what led the leaders of Japan to surrender - the timeline also matches very closely. Not sure what we keep hearing the A-bomb propaganda such a long time after the facts.
In the end the atomic bombs weren't really any different than the other tools of total war though, like all the aforementioned fire bombings. There's a lot of reasons the Japanese capitulated, and the relentless damage being inflicted across the entire country by the US (including the atomic bombings) was a very important reason. If the US had just backed off and stopped applying pressure on Japan, the war may never have ended, at least not on the terms that we were demanding (and got). The continued bombing campaigns (including atomic bombs) was one way of continuing to apply pressure and force the war on towards its conclusion.
You can get into a more general argument about what kinds of acts are tolerated in war, but the atomic bombs don't seem to stand out either way. The real question is, is it acceptable to target a civilian population? What about even if doing so will ultimately save more lives? Look at the civilian death toll Japan had been inflicting on China, for instance; is it ethical to inflict a smaller number of Japanese civilian deaths in order to prevent a larger number of ongoing Chinese civilian deaths?
It's hard to say with certainty. It's not like we can re-run history and try it again. Japan certainly turned out well with what did happen; it's not clear that a better outcome would have resulted from a less total surrender on their part. There's a lot of value in helping to move forward when you admit that you were completely beaten, not just mostly beaten; the latter leaves the door open for a repeat.
And another factor is that we haven't had a nuclear war since Japan, which showed the horrors of nuclear warfare. Had that not happened, maybe real nuclear weapons would have been used by someone later on, when they were much more powerful and more numerous, and even when both sides possessed them? The bombings have helped ensure that something much worse hasn't happened since.
And you know what, the Japanese government deserved it. They started the war, killed millions of people in the process (including many millions of civilians in Asia), and then had the gall to try to bargain for decent surrender terms after all that horror they caused? Nope. Sometimes harsh punishment is necessary.
> And you know what, the Japanese government deserved it. They started the war, killed millions of people in the process (including many millions of civilians in Asia), and then had the gall to try to bargain for decent surrender terms after all that horror they caused? Nope. Sometimes harsh punishment is necessary.
The government yes. The people did not elect them. They had no choice in the matter, and were also trained into full propaganda mode many years before the war. So targeting civilians with fire-bombing is certainly questionable. Even McNamara said that what they did in Japan would be considered "crimes of war" in case they did not end up victorious.
A different perspective, not trying to justify killing civilians.
No matter which way a leader comes to power, the population pays the taxes and the ultimate tolls.
This means that when we are on the inside, in the country, we can't be more or less complacent with a bad dictator than a bad elected leader, we always pay the price for what they do. It's always our problem.
Back-channel peace negotiations had been taking place for quite a while before the war ended. There was a large faction in the Japanese leadership that wanted to end the war, because it was widely understood to be unwinnable.
The offer was a negotiated surrender that would end hostilities with some face-saving concessions - specifically for the Emperor.
There isn't a perfect historic record of the negotiations, but it's clear the Allies pushed hard for unconditional surrender.
If the argument is about minimising the loss of lives, the war could have been ended much earlier.
If the argument is about the post-war relationship between the allies/survivors, and which actors the bombs were supposed to send a message to, the situation is much more complex.
The face-saving concessions were an important sticking point.
The Japanese leaders didn't deserve them after what they'd did, and it really would have changed the entire post-war dynamic between Japan and other countries, and even more importantly, between the Japanese government and its own people.
Here's one term from the Potsdam Declaration, which the Japanese rejected: "The Japanese Government shall remove all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people. Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established."
It's not unreasonable to say that had the Allies not continued prosecuting the war and pushing for unconditional surrender that Japan might not have ended up with a democratic government at all. It would have been much worse if the emperor and military figures had stayed in charge, and could have easily led to more repeats of wars of Japanese imperialism.
So yeah, I think it's important to look at it holistically and see what the actual long-term outcome after the war was (which was about as ideal as was possible), vs. what would've happened had we just ended the war as quickly as possible to minimize casualties but without getting wholesale reforms in the Japanese form of government.
> They started the war, killed millions of people in the process (including many millions of civilians in Asia), and then had the gall to try to bargain for decent surrender terms after all that horror they caused?
Applying that standard, there would not be a single American left alive for the constant war they wage since the end of WW2.
The key difference is that Japan was defeated utterly; the US was never even close. The last fighting we did on our home soil was the Civil War; discounting that, 1812.
In warfare more than almost anything else, might matters.
Indeed. You better pray that the US keeps being able to keep war away from their soil, because what comes around goes around. Especially when people like you gleefully claim that civilians "had it coming".
The thousands of nuclear weapons we have make this an academic question. Everyone knows that we would use them if facing an invasion of our homeland, so there never will be a foreign invasion on our soil.
I know we've done some shitty things to a variety of different countries over the years, but those acts are never going to be reciprocated in kind because they're the kinds of acts that only the powerful can do to the weak, and the US is not weak. It's not a value or moral judgment, it's just the reality of how power and force work.
>They started the war, killed millions of people in the process (including many millions of civilians in Asia), and then had the gall to try to bargain for decent surrender terms after all that horror they caused? Nope. Sometimes harsh punishment is necessary.
Wonder what you have to say about what the US deserves after the Iraq war?
That's something that Soviets very much want the world to believe, but they have never had shown how they could even possibly get their troops anywhere near Japanese mainland, what with Russian/Soviet/Russian navy historically being more dangerous to people who serve there than any enemy. And whatever happened in Manchuria or Korea didn't really concern Japan by that point anyway.
There were no either Japanese Navy nor Japanese Air Force at this point, so quality of Soviet Navy does not matter. All they would need to do is to transport enough bodies to the islands.
Oh, they had enough troops for Manchuria, but of course at that time what happened there wasn't all that important to the mainland, and USSR had little in the way of ability to get there anyway.
What Zhukov had shown at Khalkhin Gol, just as against Germans, was that with a significant advantage in manpower and equipment (double the manpower, 7 times the tanks) Soviets can actually beat up someone.
Well the reality is that the Japanese leadership at the time didn't give a damn about the suffering and death of its own people. There were those who wanted Japanese schoolgirls to charge American tanks with bamboo spears.
After WW2 it was more convenient for everyone to say that Hiroshima was what ended the war. The picture of a bunch of crazy generals in a bunker planning Japanese resistance until literally the last man woman and child is not very flattering.
I have a U.S. Political History textbook (highschool level I believe) from 1949. The first page after the table of contents features a picture of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion, and a blurb about how the U.S.A. created an ultimate weapon that saved the lives of millions by forcing Japan to make peace. It was such a shock opening to that page the first time I opened the book... Understandable that the myth has propagated for so long; we were indoctrinating our children with this misinformation.
