Did the US have to drop the A-bombs on Japan?

OmCheeto

ps. I thought the OP was answered appropriately shortly after the thread started.

ergo... hmmm... Ah ha!

note to self: unsubscribe from all solved threads, as quickly as humanly possible.

phinds

You get your history from fictional movie account by a filmmaker who loves controversy? Really?

HIGHLY speculative [EDIT: speculative that they were ready to surrender, not speculative that they wanted to protect the emperor]

Yeah, I think that was a part of the motivation. Maybe 3%.

Eisenhower wasn't fighting the war in Japan.

At the end of the day, hindsight is wonderful but at the time it looked completely as though it would have cost as much as 100,000 American lives and perhaps 1,000,000 Japanese lives if we had had to invade the home islands, so the bomb seemed like a good idea at the time.

vjk2

So attack the messenger instead of actually looking at the message. That's all I hear so far.

A number of military leaders, from Douglass MacArthur to Dwight Eisenhower to Curtis LeMay stated that in their opinion it was unnecessary to drop the bomb. That's militarily. Japan was losing the war. That was obvious. Surrender was only a matter of time.

Secondly, why drop the bomb on a populated city? Why not drop it on a naval base or in an uninhabited region as a demonstration?

And why drop it twice?

Intimidation of the Soviets makes perfect sense.

Drakkith

Surrender was only a matter of time? Have you taken into account that even after 2 atomic bombs and the thread of a soviet invasion the Japanese cabinet was still deadlocked in deciding on whether to surrender or not? And when the Emperor himself stepped in and broke the deadlock in favor of surrender there were 3 separate coup attempts to avert the surrender. That doesn't sound like surrender was only a matter of time to me.
Because this is World War 2. The slaughter of entire cities, by BOTH sides, was effectively commonplace. Japan itself had massacred millions of civilians in China. MILLIONS. World War 2 was the biggest example of "Total War", in which countries mobilize nearly the entirety of their resources and population in order to carry out warfare.

The true tragedy of the war is that it was of such magnitude, of such scale, and prosecuted against foes that were so brutal that otherwise good men were forced to forget about their morals and values in order to win. That they were forced to see entire cities and their populations as numbers on reports about how valuable they were to the enemies war efforts.

Remember that this was a war that lacked precision bombs, jet aircraft, and guided missiles. How do you destroy a factory that produces munitions when they are covered by a massive Flak battery and fighter aircraft? You send 200 bombers all at once and drop thousands of bombs since you have no idea if you'll be able to hit all the targets with any less. There was no other way. You couldn't send a small strike force. Fighters can't carry enough bombs and can't fly far enough, and bombers are too big to avoid being seen well in advance. You can't send a special forces team. You have no way of safely delivering or picking them up and they had little chance of taking out huge factories anyways.

As for why those two cities, see the following link:

Minutes of the second meeting of the Target Committee
Los Alamos, May 10-11, 1945

http://www.dannen.com/decision/targets.html

Some important points from the link are:

Partly because taking out two targets is better than just one. And partly because Japan didn't surrender after the 1st was dropped. Realize that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are terrible ordeals, but they were NOT the worst bombings or invasions of the war. The firebombing of tokyo killed more people, and Japan's Nanking Massace killed 300,000 civilians.

As I said, this was a war in which entire cities had already been bombed to husks for years. If you've already been bombed, and taken part in bombings of cities in order to win the war, what real reason do you have to hold back a weapon that takes a single aircraft to accomplish the same thing that 500 did before?

While that is an obvious benefit, I don't think you can justify that intimidating the Soviets was the primary reason for dropping the bombs.

And just in case you still don't think so, if we weren't so concerned with invading Japan, why did the U.S. government order approximately 500,000 purple hearts in preparation for the extreme number of predicted casualties an invasion would have cost?

http://hnn.us/articles/1801.html

Every single purple heart given out to a U.S. Servicemember since 1945 has been one that was originally ordered for the U.S. invasion of Japan.

vjk2

They didn't want an unconditional surrender, no. They wanted to surrender and keep the emperor.

Previous bombings were done in the middle of the war. This bombing was done at the conclusion, when surrender was obviously inevitable.

Frankly, I trust the statements of high ranking generals, especially LeMay and McArthur, over some random officer's statement.

The Japanese surrendered shortly after Stalin invaded Manchuria and Korea.

Drakkith

And the militaristic lifestyle that had directly led to both the war itself and the atrocities committed during the war.

No, surrender was not obviously inevitable. At BEST you could claim that this is a disputed topic, but in no way at all can you claim that it was obviously inevitable. The US military was gearing up for a major invasion. You don't gear up for a major invasion when surrender is inevitable.

Have you researched this topic for more than 2 minutes? I have. And there is is FAR more to it that one or two generals statements.

Irrelevant. It's no secret that the Soviet Invasion played a factor in the surrender of Japan. Instead of spouting off what you BELIEVE, actually take a little while and research the topic. I believe you will find that it is VERY complicated, with multiple points of view that don't always match up.

This whole topic is purely opinion based anyways. Did we HAVE to drop the bombs? No, absolutely not. But that's not the issue. It's whether we SHOULD have dropped them. There is no answer to that. It all depends on what you believe. And unless people have done more than a minute or two of research on the topic I don't think anyone should be posting, as they would just be wasting forum space.