Mothra said:Sam's not stupid. Just morally bankrupt.Bear8084 said:Mothra said:You might want to provide a little background before attempting to argue that the Allies insistence on "unconditional surrender" was somehow unreasonable.Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith…maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble…Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much…Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender…because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace…one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Japan wanted to retain most, if not all, of the territory it had conquered during WWII, which was a nonstarter for the Allies. It was unwilling to negotiate anything less than retention of at least a large portion of conquered lands. This was a problem for the Allies because of, among other things, Japan's brutal treatment of those under its control, which the Allies were well aware of. Japan was particularly brutal toward the Chinese, and committed genocide on a mass scale in China (approx. 6 million Chinese, by some low estimates), though it also killed its fair share of Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese.
There were proposals at one point that Japan could keep its current regime in power, but would have to give up conquered lands. This was likewise a nonstarter for the Japanese.
Look, I know this is probably falling on deaf ears for a guy who thinks America wasn't justified in entering WWII after being attacked, and should have just let Germany march across Europe - a guy who has the temerity and lack of moral compass to justify Russian actions in Ukraine - but it is worth mentioning.
Yuuuuup. Color me shocked Sam's history takes are as stupid as his pro-Russian ones.
Ah, fair enough.
