# What if Pearl Harbor failed?



## JoanDrake (Mar 4, 2016)

My understanding is that there were enough planes at Hickham Field to give the Japanese attackers at least a good fight if they had heeded the Radar warning they got and had them in the air waiting. (The operators thought they were returning friendly planes)

What if the attack had failed, and spectacularly because the American planes followed the attackers back and then more planes and ships from Pearl attacked the Task Force.

Would the Tojo cabinet fall? and can a government call off a war they started.


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## Ray McCarthy (Mar 4, 2016)

It did fail anyway as they only succeeded in bringing USA into the war and didn't achieve their objectives, not enough US ships and infrastructure destroyed.


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## Cathbad (Mar 4, 2016)

Ray McCarthy said:


> It did fail anyway as they only succeeded in bringing USA into the war and didn't achieve their objectives, not enough US ships and infrastructure destroyed.



But had they pressed their advantage... ?


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## Shyrka (Mar 4, 2016)

Hard to say but from what I've read it didn't make a huge difference to the war in the pacific - crucially the US didn't lose any aircraft carriers (they lost a significant number of battleships but these were quickly becoming obsolete). If they'd actually been there and had been sunk or damaged, it would have made a much greater difference.


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## Cathbad (Mar 4, 2016)

Yes, but the Japanese never even _tried_ to follow up on their attack.  That was (thank the gods) a vital strategic mistake.


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## The Ace (Mar 4, 2016)

Did you see what happened when P-40s and F4Fs tangled with Zeros ?

While Japanese casualties would've undoubtedly been heavier, Japan's superiority in fighters would've given them the advantage - the bombers acting as bait for the US fighters, and the Japanese giving them a doing.

The Japanese may've been persuaded to send in a third wave - and clobber the fuel supplies and dockyard facilities that historically survived -  but the USA would've been brought into the War on the Allied side just the same, and the war would've pretty much followed its historical course.

In some ways, Pearl Harbour _was _a failure.  Aircrews watched their planes destroyed on the ground, but survived to fight again.  Sailors leapt from their burning ships and swam ashore, and every single one of them wanted his revenge on the, "Little Yellow B*st*rds." The failure to launch a third wave simply gave them the means to make a start.


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## Toby Frost (Mar 5, 2016)

Er, shouldn't this thread be in the history forum?


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## Brian G Turner (Mar 5, 2016)

Good point - moved!


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## BAYLOR (Mar 5, 2016)

Even had it failed, it still  would have still been enough to bring the Us into the war .  It's failure would have dealt  Japan a huge blow both Militarily  and morally. It might even have shorted the war in the pacific .  But the question  is what would Germany have done in response? Would seeing a failure on the part of of Japan at Pearl Harbor make Hitler hesitate to declare war on the US?


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## BAYLOR (Mar 5, 2016)

Cathbad said:


> Yes, but the Japanese never even _tried_ to follow up on their attack.  That was (thank the gods) a vital strategic mistake.



A third  attack would taken out the fuel depots and the ship yards.


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## Foxbat (Mar 5, 2016)

Pearl Harbour was never meant than anything more than a delaying tactic.

Yamamoto knew that Japan could never defeat the USA once its industrial might had been geared for war. The plan (based on the UK's attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto) was to make it so costly for the Americans to rebuild that they'd sue for peace rather than enter a prolonged conflict. As Yamamoto put it, they had a tiger by the tail.

The fact that the USA didn't sue for peace and continued until they gained unconditional surrender means that Pearl Harbour _was_ a failure.

An even greater failure was Japanese submarine strategy. If they'd used them as the Germans did (as commerce raiders) they could have caused much more damage than they did by just targeting military vessels and would have forced the allies to commit large numbers of ships to convoy duty.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 5, 2016)

Foxbat said:


> Pearl Harbour was never meant than anything more than a delaying tactic.
> 
> Yamamoto knew that Japan could never defeat the USA once its industrial might had been geared for war. The plan (based on the UK's attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto) was to make it so costly for the Americans to rebuild that they'd sue for peace rather than enter a prolonged conflict. As Yamamoto put it, they had a tiger by the tail.
> 
> ...



Japans sat that time industrial capacity and output was about 1/5 that of the US.


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## Caledfwlch (Mar 5, 2016)

It is highly unlikely that even a severe ass kicking would have forced the Emperor and his cabinet to back away from a War.

Even losing 1 City to the first Atomic bomb was not enough. Remember, when talking about Imperial Japan in the 40's we are talking about a Civil and Military Leadership that was not even remotely sane and sensible. We are talking about a Brutal regime sent collectively mad by militaristic delusions, and the vision of their Emperor as half God.

As horrifying as the result of 2 Atom Bombs detonating were, a conventional invasion of the Home Islands would have led to incredible Allied Casualties for every single foot of land, and the Japanese casualties would have been completely mind boggling - whilst, eventually the Allies would have won, we are probably talking about a near enough extinction of Japanese Males of Military age, and just as boggling figures of women and children who have committed suicide rather than be captured/occupied.

Whilst Hitler and a lot of the top Nazis were not exactly Sane, at least many of the senior men in the Wehrmacht were.


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## Ray McCarthy (Mar 6, 2016)

Caledfwlch said:


> Even losing 1 City to the first Atomic bomb was not enough


An American distortion.
They WERE discussing surrender. The Russians were doing very well in the north.
If neither bomb had been dropped, it's plausible they would have surrendered within months, with combination of Russian advance and American blockade. Conventional bombing had killed more Japanese than an Atomic bomb and would have continued.



Caledfwlch said:


> a conventional invasion of the Home Islands would have led to incredible Allied Casualties for every single foot of land,


Another American justification. Simply faulty extrapolation of Okinawa, that was ignoring Russian gains in the North. There was no need for Americans to advance. 

The Atomic bombs were not needed. The Western governments will never admit it as they were war crimes. They may have helped avert an Atomic WWIII, as they were a strong message to the Russians / USSR.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 6, 2016)

Ray McCarthy said:


> An American distortion.
> They WERE discussing surrender. The Russians were doing very well in the north.
> If neither bomb had been dropped, it's plausible they would have surrendered within months, with combination of Russian advance and American blockade. Conventional bombing had killed more Japanese than an Atomic bomb and would have continued.
> 
> ...




Okinawa gave us a hint of what we would gotten had we invaded.   Japan's government was determined to fight on and that would meant a very costly invasion which would of meant massive casualties on both sides and it would prolonged the war fro a another year two.  The bombing of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war an ultimately saved lives and eded the war.


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## Foxbat (Mar 6, 2016)

Figures for Okinawa 
Allied casualties - 12,500 listed killed or missing. 82000 casualties in total. 
An estimated 110,071 Japanese soldiers killed.
It's estimated that between 30,000 and 100,000 civilians died. Some from mass suicides. Both sides shot at civilians indiscriminately.

I often wonder if a naval blockade would have been a better choice. The Allies could have continued to degrade what was left of the Japanese military through bombardment and bombing. 

If the Allies had been prepared to wait then the nukes might not have been necessary. I tend to think that there was an element of politics involved and that Truman wanted the Soviets to see what the Americans had in their arsenal. Also, I don't think they'd want the USSR to make too many advances and therefore went for a swift conclusion to the war.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 6, 2016)

Foxbat said:


> Figures for Okinawa
> Allied casualties - 12,500 listed killed or missing. 82000 casualties in total.
> An estimated 110,071 Japanese soldiers killed.
> It's estimated that between 30,000 and 100,000 civilians died. Some from mass suicides. Both sides shot at civilians indiscriminately.
> ...



The japanese had kamikaze planes, Ships , submarines and motorboats all ready for action. The japanese populace was also prepared to wage war against any incoming invasion force. If we had invaded would been a nightmare for everyone.


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## Ray McCarthy (Mar 6, 2016)

BAYLOR said:


> The japanese had kamikaze planes, Ships , submarines and motorboats all ready for action. The japanese populace was also prepared to wage war against any incoming invasion force. If we had invaded would been a nightmare for everyone.


Yet the Russians were dramatically advancing.

I just simply don't believe any American media / government statements about the end of the War in the Pacific any longer. They ignore the USSR rapid advance* and the Japanese documents to spin the Atom bomb justification based on the Okinawa scenario, which would not have been repeated.
Blockade.

It wasn't about winning, but sending a message to the USSR.

[*The USSR had been neutral and only declared war / started attacking Japan a little earlier as resources arrived from the west via rail]


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## nzreader (Apr 22, 2016)

The bomb was for Russia telling them to watch out. I think it gave Hirohito a wake up call too. 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## lynnfredricks (Apr 22, 2016)

Ray McCarthy said:


> I just simply don't believe any American media / government statements about the end of the War in the Pacific any longer. They ignore the USSR rapid advance* and the Japanese documents to spin the Atom bomb justification based on the Okinawa scenario, which would not have been repeated.



The US had troops cached in the Aleutian Islands in preparation for a fight with the USSR. They were not ignoring it.

Although the Japanese were considering alternatives, there was no reason for the US to wait, see and accept anything but an unconditional surrender and the end of the empire of Japan.

The few days between the two bombs seems a bit short to me. US planes dropped messages which basically said "Surrender now, look at what just happened in Hiroshima" but that had little apparent effect. Maybe there was a channel of communication open in which the Japanese could have made a decision to surrender and communicate that to the US.


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## BAYLOR (Apr 22, 2016)

lynnfredricks said:


> The US had troops cached in the Aleutian Islands in preparation for a fight with the USSR. They were not ignoring it.
> 
> Although the Japanese were considering alternatives, there was no reason for the US to wait, see and accept anything but an unconditional surrender and the end of the empire of Japan.
> 
> The few days between the two bombs seems a bit short to me. US planes dropped messages which basically said "Surrender now, look at what just happened in Hiroshima" but that had little apparent effect. Maybe there was a channel of communication open in which the Japanese could have made a decision to surrender and communicate that to the US.




Shock and Awe , It was all of that. If Japan had not surrendered even then . The US probably one to two additional devices at the most?


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## lynnfredricks (Apr 22, 2016)

BAYLOR said:


> Shock and Awe , It was all of that. If Japan had not surrendered even then . The US probably one to two additional devices at the most?



 My understanding is that they didn't have additional bombs ready, though in another few weeks more could have been available. They weren't being built off of an assembly line.


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## Ray McCarthy (Apr 22, 2016)

lynnfredricks said:


> The US had troops cached in the Aleutian Islands in preparation for a fight with the USSR. They were not ignoring it.


I mean accounts since, justifying use of the Atomic bombs.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 22, 2016)

JoanDrake said:


> My understanding is that there were enough planes at Hickham Field to give the Japanese attackers at least a good fight if they had heeded the Radar warning they got and had them in the air waiting.


Absolutely. And even more so if Kimmel had gotten the aircraft he requested. The book to read on this, and on the entire run up to Pearl is "Day of Deceit" by Stinnett. It is an extremely worthwhile book.


JoanDrake said:


> What if the attack had failed, and spectacularly because the American planes followed the attackers back and then more planes and ships from Pearl attacked the Task Force.


Which is totally plausible. As far as the U.S. aircraft go that is. The ships not so much. I don't think we had anything there fast enough unless the Japs waited for us to hit back like a bunch of suckers. But had the horseshoe nails dropped differently, it could easily have happened that way.

The declining importance of the battleship AT THAT TIME has been greatly exaggerated. They didn't form Napoleonic lines of battle and duke it out in massive fleet actions as at Jutland, but that change was already understood. It is true that their vulnerability to aircraft had been underestimated, but the vulnerability of carriers to surface ships had also been underestimated and both mistakes were soon corrected and tactical doctrine adapted. Battleships were far from obsolete. They were a huge factor in amphib ops. And the Pacific war was all about island hopping. Even in the 1990s when the last battleships were retired, the protests came mainly not from the regular Navy per se, but from the Marines. There was a significant body of opinion that even then they weren't obsolete and that in terms of support of amphibious operations the navy did not have anything quite as effective.

So, yes, OF COURSE, the immediate loss of all U.S. battleships in the Pacific, and half of all U.S. battleships anywhere made a big difference. It took a month to get 2 of the 8 back in service and a year or so for another 4. In war, that's a long time. And 2 were total losses. Furthermore, for the attack to have been a tactical failure implies the U.S. wouldn't have lost half the aircraft based there and that the Nips would have lost a lot of the attacking aircraft. That might indeed have put their carriers at risk if a counterattack was swift. And of course, with a little more accurate anticipation, a counterattack would have already been planned. Stuff like that snowballs. Very possibly the Japanese would have never taken the Philippines and if they did they certainly wouldn't have held them as long. Probably they'd have been pushed back to the home islands long before the bomb was developed.

That is where it gets interesting. With a quicker victory in the Pacific, Wild Bill Donovan (may he RIH and that's no typo) might have never backed Mao. More resources would have become available to the European theater faster. The Warsaw Pact would have wound up much smaller. The world might be very different indeed in that case. More likely better than worse, but you never know, chaos always rules.
=====================================================

Now about the stuff later posters wandered away from OP's question into:

Whether Truman was right to drop the bomb is a darned complex topic. I used to think obviously yes, for many of the reasons advanced here. Later I learned more and switched my view to no. Then I learned still more and realized it is darned hard to say.

- The Nips DID offer surrender well before the bomb was dropped. I'd have to look it up but I believe it was a few MONTHS before. Certainly more than a couple of weeks. The terms they asked for were NOT materially different from those Mac unilaterally granted as the occupying American shogun. If you want to look at it in terms of the effect on Japan, then the difference was NOT in terms of actual conditions but the different psychology of:

  -- your face has been unambiguously, undeniably ground in the dirt, indeed you have no more "face" at all, your total impotence has been demonstrated, and you have rolled on your back like a whipped dog begging for mercy, knowing Halsey can and will make good his threat ("the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell") if allowed, and the conqueror has graciously unilaterally ALLOWED you the concessions you wanted to get by negotiation, after demonstrating he can easily cause the total extinction of your culture, the near extinction of your race, and literally sterilize the home islands . . .
  vs.
  -- being allowed to save face by negotiating a peace, possibly allowing future Japanese politicians to capitalize on claims like Hitler's "stab in the back" claims vis a vis Versailles.

The trad leftist anti-war view (not counting those who just ignore the facts as inconvenient), moderated only by their loyalty to Truman's party, is that that was just pure evil on Truman's part since their was no MATERIAL difference and the war ran on months LONGER than it needed to, costing MORE lives, not less.

But realistically, you can't ignore the psychological effect. Japanese culture and politics is profoundly different than it would have been. On that score, he may have been right.

And yes, of course the bombing was a cautionary message to the Soviets. He might have been right on that score too. Damfino.

But there is another joker in history's deck almost never acknowledged, partially, I suspect, for reasons that draw on unconscious racism or cultural chauvinism, and the comforting, unstated, and false belief that westerners innovate and asians imitate. While the Germans largely kept their wartime records, the Nips engaged in massive destruction of records beginning months before the end. And, bizarrely, a huge portion of those documents that WERE captured, after being held in the U.S. for a few years, during which the majority were never scrutinized (or so it is claimed - Finagle knows what the truth is), were then returned to Japan. This may or may not have bearing on the credibility of some of what follows. Furthermore, as recently as the Clinton administration (see the excellent Pearl Harbor book "Day of Deceit" mentioned above) the U.S. still had classified documents from BEFORE Pearl Harbor that they refused to declassify. I presume they still do. Furthermore I'd presume that the refusal to do so is NOT driven by any military consideration, but a desire to spin history. Hard to say. There is a bio of Hirohito, which is worth reading. I THINK the title was simply "Hirohito", but I may misremember. I believe the dust jacket was largely white with a photo of Hirohito mounted on a horse, although it is possible I am confusing 2 different bios of the man. I remember nothing about the author, but it struck me as credible when I read it. Most of the following comes from that. There was a German submarine ordered to carry a cargo to Japan late in the war. It was in the mid Atlantic when the order came to proceed to the nearest Allied port and surrender. The Captain figured his proximity to England and New York city essentially the same and actually polled the crew to see if anyone had a preference. Not surprisingly, there was a strong preference for New York and that's where they went. Two Nips aboard promptly committed sepuku or whatever they call it, and were polite enough to use poison, rather than make a mess. The cargo being delivered was uranium. I believe it was already isotopically enriched, but I may be mistaken on that point. Meanwhile, back in the far East, there was at least one witness (I want to say a German, but I'm hazy on that point) who claimed to have seen a test fission bomb detonated by the Nipponese army on the mainland in what would now, I believe, be North Korea. It was suggested that the plan was to use the bomb on the expected invasion fleet.

Even if you assume this is true (and provisionally, I'd bet even money it is), it still seems likely that Truman didn't know it at the time the decision was made to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. However, it also seems likely that unless Truman was a lot stupider I think he was, he was probably aware that there was at least a CHANCE that something like this might be the case. This is true even if the factoid, as Mailer would say, of Japan's fission bomb program is false. And even if he evaluated that chance as very low, it is still something he would have to take into account. He also couldn't exclude the possibility that they didn't have it, but were 6 months FROM having it, for example. Imagine yourself in his position. Does that idea push you toward taking the peace offer and shortening the war, or toward the idea of waiting a little bit longer in order to damage Japanese industry in a really big way, and, bluntly, totally cow the leadership, before occupying it? The more you think about it, the more layers of complexity you see.


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## Ray McCarthy (Apr 22, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> Whether Truman was right to drop the bomb is a darned complex topic. I used to think obviously yes, for many of the reasons advanced here. Later I learned more and switched my view to no. Then I learned still more and realized it is darned hard to say.


A fair point.


Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> The cargo being delivered was uranium. I believe it was already isotopically enriched, but I may be mistaken on that point. Meanwhile, back in the far East, there was at least one witness (I want to say a German, but I'm hazy on that point) who claimed to have seen a test fission bomb detonated by the Nipponese army on the mainland in what would now, I believe, be North Korea. It was suggested that the plan was to use the bomb on the expected invasion fleet.


Fantasy. The Germans didn't get close to enriching enough uranium for a bomb and the Japanese never detonated any fission device.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 22, 2016)

Possibly.  I don't claim it IS true. I do claim it is plausible. Certainty is almost always a mistake. Nor is it implied that the Germans were the sole source. And the main point is that Truman couldn't KNOW that something of the sort wasn't happening, regardless of whether it did or not.


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## BAYLOR (Apr 22, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> Possibly.  I don't claim it IS true. I do claim it is plausible. Certainty is almost always a mistake. Nor is it implied that the Germans were the sole source. And the main point is that Truman couldn't KNOW that something of the sort wasn't happening, regardless of whether it did or not.



The Japanese had their own bomb program going right up until the end of the war. Both their army and the navy each had a their separate programs.


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## Ray McCarthy (Apr 22, 2016)

The USA had broken Japanese codes (with I think UK help). The Japanese didn't know this.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 23, 2016)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Fantasy.


Sir, you shall retract that and substitute "SF" or "alternate history" or my friend shall call on you to make arrangements. It's only fair to warn you that I've been trained in dueling by the ghost of Richard Boone.

Seriously, while I stand by my earlier reply that the point isn't whether the incident really occurred but that HST couldn't be 100% certain that something of the sort wasn't in the offing, and also by my implied guesstimate of the odds as being near 50%, I thought I should add a couple of links, lest anyone think the idea has only appeared in privately printed crackpot brochures or in the cannabis scented mumblings of people who talk about reptiloids on the trilateral commission hiding their space ship in area 51. I don't intend to delve into this subject deeply enough to form a strong opinion of what actually happened. But anyone who thinks "most mainstream historian say" is a much better argument that "everybody knows" has a much higher opinion of the general level of diligence of historians than I do. I've mentioned elsewhere on this forum my high regard for the book PAST IMPERFECT by Prof. Peter Hoffer of the University of Georgia. He is a history prof himself, but he doesn't spare his colleagues or himself embarrassment. I think it is notable that the most egregious of the frauds he describes was perpetrated by a scholar widely respected professionally and that he was NOT exposed by another historian but by an amateur, an IT geek actually.

I've read enough to assure myself that the incident with the submarine is clearly real, that the Nips were clearly trying to build a bomb, clearly intended to use it, were clearly much further along than anything that happened in Germany, that both countries had some isotopic enrichment capability (although it may not have been quantitatively adequate), that the U.S. had clearly overestimated the German capability and underestimated the Japanese one, that both "did" and "did not" voices lack some crucial evidence, and that the truth is clearly unclear.

This is a photo of the article that first brought the claim into public discourse:





Although today I think the Miami Herald might rival it, in 1946, the Atlanta Constitution was THE newspaper of the south east. I can't find a full text copy of the article from any source I trust, probably because of IP issues, but this is alleged to be and probably is:
1946 Atlanta Constitution Atom Bomb Articles

This AP article appeared in the LA Times in 1997:
New Details Emerge About Japan's Wartime A-Bomb Program

This is from the Korea Times in 2014 and mentions Japanese blueprints for bomb that came to light in 2002.
Japan Tested Atomic Bomb in NK Before End of WWII?

I don't know who these people are, and this is more about North Korea today, but unless it is total BS, it does clarify some things:
Hungnam, North Korea: Delving into Pyongyang’s Long Nuclear Past « DC Bureau

There is a huge discussion of the controversy here:
A Successful Japanese Atomic Bomb Test? - Page 3

Although I hate pdfs, this, which also appears to have been published in 2014, and apparently was a side effect of the writer's interest in Allied POWs in Japanese custody, has a lot of links to supporting documents, and is extremely detailed. The main purpose is to determine who Snell's pseudonymous source for the Atlanta Constitution article was and reached the firm conclusion that it was Suzuki Tatsuaburo, a Nipponese physicist, later president of Iwaki Meisei University. Unfortunately, the man seems to have told conflicting stories of what actually happened. There is quite a tangle here. Some relevant documents no longer exist, or at least haven't turned up. Others are known to exist but are still classified. Unlike the Germans, who carry their breast beating to an extreme, most Japanese willfully distort the history of that era. Today most Japanese teenagers aren't even aware that Japan ever fought a war with the U.S. Official understatement and denial of the atrocities in Nanking are notorious. Most people of that generation didn't brag about their wartime activities. I don't think that is entirely because they lost or that the memories were unpleasant. I think it is also because mainstream culture of the younger Japanese became pretty ardently anti-war and the oldsters didn't get the kind of positive reactions our vets did. So they tended to shut the hell up instead. Another problem is that actions took place (or didn't) in North Korea and and a part of mainland China and that by the time U.S. personnel would have been attempting to verify or refute this the Cold War had begun and indeed got hot enough for an American aircraft to be forced down there by Russians at the Chinese site. Maybe the CIA knows the truth of this. Maybe mainland China's government does. Maybe someone in Japan does. I certainly don't. But unless you are privy to information not publicly available, dismissing it out of hand is imprudent.

In reading about this, I find that whatever actually happened, my suspicion that racist misconceptions caused a major underestimate of the level of Japanese progress is strongly supported.  My thinking had not progressed to the point of wondering about the flip side, but, not surprisingly, many of the Nips were misleading themselves with the same sort of errors and grossly underestimated how far along the U.S. was. I failed to bookmark quotations to support this, but it is out there if you care.


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## lynnfredricks (Apr 23, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> The Nips DID offer surrender well before the bomb was dropped. I'd have to look it up but I believe it was a few MONTHS before. Certainly more than a couple of weeks. The terms they asked for were NOT materially different from those Mac unilaterally granted as the occupying American shogun.



There are some claims that it was under discussion as early as February, and then some activity did occur in mid July but no actual terms were proposed yet.

Not that I have taken a comprehensive survey but some living Japanese people find "Jap" and "Nip" offensive.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 24, 2016)

lynnfredricks said:


> There are some claims that it was under discussion as early as February, and then some activity did occur in mid July but no actual terms were proposed yet.


I could dismiss the existence of Antarctica as "some claims" since I haven't actually seen it, but:

The earliest distinct peace overture I'm aware of was made shortly after Midway in 1942 to the British diplomat Sir Robert Craigie. This was verbal and vague, and AFAIK, was never responded to. But Tojo wasn't stupid - at that point they knew they were beaten.
-"Journey to the Missouri" by Toshikazu Kase, Yale University Press, 1950

An explicit and very concrete offer to surrender all conquered territories and cease hostilities was made through the Swedish diplomat Widar Bagge early in 1944. Another offer was made through the Vatican in Nov 1944.

In Jan 1945, shortly before Yalta, they explicitly offered Mac essentially a total capitulation, including surrendering anyone the allies designated as a war criminal, and retaining only the emp and a token face saving degree of internal sovereignty. This was immediately relayed thru Leahy to FDR who ignored it. Some of this became public knowledge 10 days after Nagasaki when Walter Trohan covered the story for the Chicago Tribune 19 Aug 1945. Here is a photo reproduction from their archives:
JAPS FLYING TO MACARTHUR (August 19, 1945)
More details became available in the mid 60s and the same reporter with the same paper covered them again:
Ignored Japanese Peace Bids Plague U. S., West, with What Might Have Been (August 14, 1965)
but by then most people were focused on Viet Nam and the Cold War and had lost interest in WW II. Also it didn't fit neatly into the simplistic "just so" stories USnians like to tell themselves about their national history. So despite clear documentation this never became incorporated into the already crystallised popular wisdom of what "everybody knows".

----------------------

And BTW, anybody who gets upset by abbreviations and shortened forms of words would be well advised to avoid all text based fora.


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## lynnfredricks (Apr 24, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> I could dismiss the existence of Antarctica as "some claims" since I haven't actually seen it..



The newspaper articles don't make clear who the statesman was. Was that ever revealed?



Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> And BTW, anybody who gets upset by abbreviations and shortened forms of words would be well advised to avoid all text based fora.



Since those usages were used extensively during the war to describe a much caricaturized enemy and afterwards as a racist epithet, it is more than an abbreviation or shortened form. I don't get upset about words I am familiar with, but it does definitely clarify the character of the person who uses them, no matter how well read they are.


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## ralphkern (Apr 24, 2016)

Shyrka said:


> Hard to say but from what I've read it didn't make a huge difference to the war in the pacific - crucially the US didn't lose any aircraft carriers (they lost a significant number of battleships but these were quickly becoming obsolete). If they'd actually been there and had been sunk or damaged, it would have made a much greater difference.



'Only' three ships were damaged beyond repair, and two of those it was more a case they were not worth repairing. The Arizona, which was the flag ship and a major loss. The Oklahoma could have been repaired, but was not economical to do so and the Utah was a WW1 era dreadnought which had been turned into a training ship. All other ships were returned to service.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 25, 2016)

The distinction between "not repairable" and "not economical to repair" is spurious in this context. If it is cheaper and faster to build a new ship than to repair a damaged one, then from a strategic point of view, indeed from ANY practical POV, it IS not repairable.  The cost of something isn't some sort of fiction dreamed up by mysterious people wearing green eye shades to manipulate others - it represents real limitations to possible ways of deploying finite resources. Indeed, it was the US economic capability that won the war. We outproduced more than outfought them.
As I mentioned earlier, the loss of half of the US battleships in the Pacific (and I'm not counting the loss of the Utah - that's a red herring, she was neither classed as a BB, nor was she one de facto) FOR A YEAR, the diversion of resources to repairing them, and the loss of another fourth permanently was not a trivial blow.  Some 70 years later, people tend to telescope history and confuse the 40s with the 50s. The role of battleships had changed and the carrier had become of major importance, but the battleships were certainly not "obsolete" during WW-II.  The Navy continued to build battleships throughout the war.  The decision to do so was made by professionals with expertise acquired through specialized education and experience and wasn't casual or sentimental.  The Brits made the same decision independently. None of these people were being stupid. Neither were the people who decided to attack Pearl. It could have worked.  It's amazingly easy for people long after the fact to convince themselves that the particular course events took was inevitable and that highly expert men with much more knowledge of the relevant details sure were stupid not to have seen what seems obvious to them. But it ain't so.


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## BAYLOR (Apr 25, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> The distinction between "not repairable" and "not economical to repair" is spurious in this context. If it is cheaper and faster to build a new ship than to repair a damaged one, then from a strategic point of view, indeed from ANY practical POV, it IS not repairable.  The cost of something isn't some sort of fiction dreamed up by mysterious people wearing green eye shades to manipulate others - it represents real limitations to possible ways of deploying finite resources. Indeed, it was the US economic capability that won the war. We outproduced more than outfought them.
> As I mentioned earlier, the loss of half of the US battleships in the Pacific (and I'm not counting the loss of the Utah - that's a red herring, she was neither classed as a BB, nor was she one de facto) FOR A YEAR, the diversion of resources to repairing them, and the loss of another fourth permanently was not a trivial blow.  Some 70 years later, people tend to telescope history and confuse the 40s with the 50s. The role of battleships had changed and the carrier had become of major importance, but the battleships were certainly not "obsolete" during WW-II.  The Navy continued to build battleships throughout the war.  The decision to do so was made by professionals with expertise acquired through specialized education and experience and wasn't casual or sentimental.  The Brits made the same decision independently. None of these people were being stupid. Neither were the people who decided to attack Pearl. It could have worked.  It's amazingly easy for people long after the fact to convince themselves that the particular course events took was inevitable and that highly expert men with much more knowledge of the relevant details sure were stupid not to have seen what seems obvious to them. But it ain't so.



General Billy Mitchell's 1921 demonstration  on the battleship Ostfriesland proved that that the era of the battleship was passé. He got punished for being right.


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## Ray McCarthy (Apr 26, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> The Navy continued to build battleships throughout the war.


That of itself proves little.
Look what submarines, aircraft carriers, MTBs and E boats did.
Lots of battleships got sunk without doing very much.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 26, 2016)

BAYLOR said:


> General Billy Mitchell's 1921 demonstration  on the battleship Ostfriesland proved that that the era of the battleship was passé.



Mitchell proved only that unopposed land-based aircraft, given enough time, could eventually drop enough bombs to sink an unmanned target ship that was neither moving nor fighting back. Even at that it took 6 sorties spread over 23 hours and the newly produced 2000 pound bombs. The largest carrier based planes of the time might, in principle, have carried 1, count 'em, one, of these bombs, though I rather doubt any of them ever did.

Mitchell was a genius of self-promotion to the general public, rather like Teddy Roosevelt, and spun the tale into aircraft sinking an "unsinkable" ship, which made a good story for newspapermen, but was to say the least misleading. Ostfriesland was built in 1908, had a displacement of 22,808 metric tons, 12 inch guns, & 11.8 in armor, which no responsible person would have described as "unsinkable" in 1921. All the battleships damaged at Pearl were appreciably more modern, larger, and had bigger guns and thicker armor.

People love a dramatic story of a prophetic hero genius persecuted by the old fuddy duddies of the establishment, but if you look at the facts, Mitchell isn't a good fit. Certainly he was right in advocating the coming importance of air power, but he was hardly alone in that view. And as to the specifics of the coming war, he had it totally wrong - his advocacy was for land-based aircraft and he dismissed aircraft carriers as useless. And while my main point in this thread has been to moderate the very anachronistic, over-simplified, and exaggerated view of the battleships as being irrelevant in the 1940s, there is no question that this was "the carrier war" and to dismiss carriers is even more off target than dismissing battleships.



BAYLOR said:


> He got punished for being right.


He was court martialed for insubordination. AFAIK, the only officer on the court who voted for acquittal was Mac, who was later famously dismissed from his command for the same offense. The only thing Mitchel was right about was his view of the increasing importance of air power. That was hardly a unique or non-obvious belief and quite a few officers held and expressed similar views without getting court martialed for it. Furthermore he couldn't have been more wrong about the most important weapon of WW-II - the carrier.



Ray McCarthy said:


> That of itself proves little..


You dropped a little context there. Not merely "the" navy. The navies of ALL 4 major combatants on BOTH sides. Actually, not merely the navies, but the supreme command authorities of 4 nations. It certainly proves that a lot of professional men with a great deal of highly relevant specialized education and experience, and a detailed grasp of the details of the situation AT THE TIME, not only perceived the battleship as a worthwhile investment at the BEGINNING of the war, but also all the way through it. The Brits even built one after the war. Doesn't it strike you as a little odd that all those pros on the spot with far more relevant knowledge than any of us have, all made the same stupid mistake INDEPENDENTLY? I think it much more plausible that your awareness of how things would develop in the 50s and later is coloring your perception and leading you to an anachronistic view of the early 1940s.



Ray McCarthy said:


> Look what submarines, aircraft carriers, MTBs and E boats did.
> Lots of battleships got sunk  . . .


About a dozen. Do you know how many "submarines, aircraft carriers, MTBs and E boats" were sunk?


Ray McCarthy said:


> . . . without doing very much.


That's much more to the point - but incorrect. The battleships played a vital role in island hopping campaigns of the Pacific. They also convoyed carriers. Even today, carriers are almost never deployed on their own but as part of "carrier groups" which contain numerous surface ships as escorts. All you have to do is look up their service records. You might also look up the controversy surrounding the retirement of the last battleships from the USN in the 90s. Even then, a lot of Marine officers were of the opinion that no adequate replacement for support of amphib ops was yet operational.

Gents, I'm not arguing that the importance of battleships wasn't in decline, or that the carrier wasn't the most crucial capital ship of that war. I am simply arguing against an oversimplified and anachronistic claim that battleships were no longer of strategic importance in the early 40s and the corresponding claim that the attack on Pearl was just plain stupid. This sort of idea comes under the category John Denson in "The Costs of War" calls a "patriotic national myth" - that we won because the enemy were a bunch of dummies. Neither is true.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 26, 2016)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Lots of battleships got sunk . . l





Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> About a dozen.


I just realized that my response was not clear. In WW II, about a dozen TOTAL. Most of those were Axis. A few Brits. After Pearl, the USN lost exactly 0 battleships.


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## Brian G Turner (Apr 26, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> I am simply arguing against an oversimplified and anachronistic claim that battleships were no longer of strategic importance in the early 40s



Certainly the popular history here has it that the German battleship, Bismark, was a serious threat that required a dedicated force to take out. However, the North Sea is ringed with major cities, whereas the Pacific is famously empty pace.

I suspect the role of specific ship classes varied in strategic importance according to the corresponding arena. Certainly aircraft carriers would have been far more important in the Pacific than the North Sea!


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 26, 2016)

Brian Turner said:


> I suspect the role of specific ship classes varied in strategic importance according to the corresponding arena. Certainly aircraft carriers would have been far more important in the Pacific than the North Sea!


Certainly. Carriers were used little if at all in European waters, maybe once in the Med. We associate carriers with the Pacific, but actually there were more, albeit substantially smaller ones, in the Atlantic, on convoy duty. I'm not sure why the destroyers seem to get all the credit and carrier escorts seem totally forgotten.

I should also mention that the role of BBs in amphib ops wasn't limited to the Pacific. Battleships provided the most effective fire support of the landings at Normandy. Smaller gun ships didn't have enough range.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 28, 2016)

lynnfredricks said:


> US planes dropped messages which basically said "Surrender now, look at what just happened in Hiroshima" but that had little apparent effect.


Actually, the leaflets alluding to Hiroshima, although labeled Aug 6 by the Truman Library, apparently were actually composed after the Russian declaration of war, and weren't dropped until AFTER Nagasaki. The earlier LeMay leaflets explicitly listed cities that were likely to be bombed but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were NOT listed. In both cases, I think the intent was righteous, but the execution was faulty.


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## lynnfredricks (Apr 28, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> Actually, the leaflets alluding to Hiroshima, although labeled Aug 6 by the Truman Library, apparently were actually composed after the Russian declaration of war, and weren't dropped until AFTER Nagasaki. The earlier LeMay leaflets explicitly listed cities that were likely to be bombed but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were NOT listed. In both cases, I think the intent was righteous, but the execution was faulty.



I saw some copies of the leaflets in the Nagasaki Peace Park museum, but I don't believe the exhibit showed the date on which they were dropped. Nagasaki was a last minute target of course, with Kitakyushu being the original one.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 28, 2016)

lynnfredricks said:


> Nagasaki was a last minute target of course, with Kitakyushu being the original one.


"Last minute" in the sense that it was designated as the ALTERNATE target if atmospheric or tactical conditions made Kokura (now a part of Kitakyushu) inadvisable, an option the mission commander exercised, not in the sense of being unplanned for, nor in any sense that would excuse not mentioning it in the leaflets listing cities that might be bombed. It went on the list of possible A-bomb targets on 25 July. The preferred target, Kokura, wasn't listed in the leaflets either AFAIK.

I doubt this was intentional. The people preparing the leaflets were warning of conventional bombing. The cities on those leaflets WERE bombed. But the A-bomb people wanted cities that hadn't been damaged much so they could better measure the effects. Consequentially cities that weren't on the regular target list, and hence not in the leaflets, headed the A-bomb list.


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## lynnfredricks (Apr 28, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> "Last minute" in the sense that it was designated as the ALTERNATE target if atmospheric or tactical conditions made Kokura (now a part of Kitakyushu) inadvisable, an option the mission commander exercised, not in the sense of being unplanned for, nor in any sense that would excuse not mentioning it in the leaflets listing cities that might be bombed. It went on the list of possible A-bomb targets on 25 July. The preferred target, Kokura, wasn't listed in the leaflets either AFAIK.



Right. Kitakyushu is a collective 'city' made up of what were industrial townships (literally meaning "North Kyushu"), though I doubt they were very separate even then.

I don't know the exact route the plane took, but assuming it was a southern arc, there wouldn't be much between Kitakyushu and and Nagasaki worth striking, with Saga being mostly flat farmland. With the Mitsubishi shipyards in Nagasaki it was an understandable target, though ironically ground zero was a prison where some foreigners were kept.


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## Edward M. Grant (Apr 29, 2016)

lynnfredricks said:


> My understanding is that they didn't have additional bombs ready, though in another few weeks more could have been available. They weren't being built off of an assembly line.



As I understand it, they were preparing to drop the third bomb until the President vetoed it, and would have produced another one every month after that. I'm sure it's mentioned in _The Making Of The Atomic Bomb_.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 29, 2016)

Edward M. Grant said:


> . . .  they were preparing to drop the third bomb until the President vetoed it, and would have produced another one every month after that.


HST did NOT veto another bomb. He only ordered that another bombing be confirmed with him before the plane left the ground. They were building them as fast as they could and expected to finish another one in 10 days or so, with another 6 over the next 2 months.


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## Ray McCarthy (Apr 29, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> He only ordered that another bombing be confirmed with him before the plane left the ground.


That sounds like veto power.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 30, 2016)

Ray McCarthy said:


> That sounds like veto power.


Yes, it is, but the assertion was "the President vetoed it", not that he had the power to veto it. He did NOT veto it. That decision would have been made when the next bomb was ready, expected to be around the 19th. But they surrendered first.


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## BAYLOR (Apr 30, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> Yes, it is, but the assertion was "the President vetoed it", not that he had the power to veto it. He did NOT veto it. That decision would have been made when the next bomb was ready, expected to be around the 19th. But they surrendered first.



President Truman wanted the war ended . If a 3rd bomb had been necessary, he would have used it with no qualms at all.


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## Edward M. Grant (Apr 30, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> HST did NOT veto another bomb. He only ordered that another bombing be confirmed with him before the plane left the ground.



According to Rhodes, quoting the Secretary of Commerce:

"Truman said he had given orders to stop the atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, "all those kids"."

However, I just closed the book and lost the page that was on .

That said, it doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense considering conventional bombing raids were killing tens of thousands at a time.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (Apr 30, 2016)

Edward M. Grant said:


> According to Rhodes, quoting the Secretary of Commerce:
> 
> "Truman said he had given orders to stop the atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, "all those kids"."


Presumably you are quoting the 1986 book published by Simon & Schuster by the novelist and journalist Richard Rhodes. Well, without context, I don't know if Mr. Rhodes was being deliberately misleading or not. I'm pretty sure this comes from Henry Wallace's diary entry on the cabinet meeting of 10 August. AFAIK, there is no transcript of the meeting. Also, AFAIK, Wallace is the only one present at the meeting who ever made this claim. There were lots of other diarists in the military and in the administration and AFAIK none of them ever claimed the prez gave such an order.

What Wallace wrote CHARACTERIZES what he alleged HST said but for the most part does not quote it. The only words he actually quotes were "all those kids". The problematic sentence:
"Truman said he had given orders to stop atomic bombing."

Wallace may have INTERPRETED whatever HST said that way, but there is no evidence that I know of that anyone in the chain of command had received any order remotely like that other than the one I've already mentioned - that the next bombing mission was to get explicit last minute authorization from POTUS, before taking off, nor AFAIK has anyone in a position to know of such an order made such a claim. The added requirement for last minute POTUS clearance in no way affected the preparations. Nor did anyone else ever claim that HST gave any indication that he had pre-decided NOT to ok the third bomb if it came down to it.

In contrast there is plenty of evidence from people who WERE in the loop that preparations for additional bombing continued up until it was clear that the surrender was real and that the people doing the surrendering were in control. Examples:

Here you can read a transcript of a conversation between General Hull and Colonel Seeman of Grove's staff, partly in modern type in html and more completely in a pdf containing photographs of the original typewritten transcript dated 13 August 1945:

The Third Shot and Beyond (1945)

If HST had already "vetoed" a 3rd bomb, obviously these people would have known about it. Clearly their discussion does not even consider the possibility of NOT dropping more bombs absent unconditional surrender. They are instead, discussing times of availability and possible uses, particularly the possibility of shifting from more strategic targets to possible tactical targets in support of an invasion.

Here is a memo from Groves to Marshall on 10 Aug 45 indicating plans to drop a bomb during "the first suitable weather after 17 or 18 August":
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/67.pdf

At the time of the surrender, the next bomb was in already in transit to where it would fly from. Paul Tibbets in a 2002 interview said:

"See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay [chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He said, "You got another one of those damn things?" I said, "Yessir." He said, "Where is it?" I said, "Over in Utah." He said, "Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it." I said, "Yessir." I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over."
  - from an interview published in The Guardian (a Brit newspaper), full text archived here:
Nuclear special: Why the pilot of the Enola Gay has no regrets

If you prefer secondary sources this is from "Five Days in August:
How World War II Became a Nuclear War" by Michael D. Gordin who is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University published by Princeton University Press in 2007:

"Almost nobody before 14 August thought that two bombs would be sufficient: if the first bomb did not cause surrender, the American decision makers reasoned, then many would be required, at the very least a third bomb before the end of August, and likely several others before the scheduled invasion. . . .Discussion of target and timing for the Third Shot—most likely Tokyo on 19 August— proceeded actively both before and after Nagasaki. Such preparations continued even between surrender and the beginning of the American Occupation of Japan on 2 September, a transitional period when Allied forces feared that a militarist coup might restart hostilities. The Third Shot was a reality in progress until unconditional surrender—seen as the two bombs’ success—began the rapid and mostly unconscious process of expunging it from historical memory."

Against this kind of information we have the single diary entry of one slightly kooky (he dabbled in spiritualism for example) Secretary of Commerce who had never been in the military, whose expertise lay in farming, and who was in no way involved in war planning, paraphrasing, but not quoting, what he claimed Truman SAID he had done. Maybe he did say it. It's possible. HST was not a totally honest man. He often gave conflicting accounts of his own actions. See "Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution" by Ralph Raico in "Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom" edited by John Denson, which BTW is one of the most persuasive essays arguing the bombing-Hiroshima-was-evil position I've seen. I have great respect for both Raico and Denson. They might even bring me around to their point of view.

But regardless of what was SAID, continuing to build bombs as fast as possible and preparing to drop them was what was DONE.


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## 2DaveWixon (May 5, 2016)

Foxbat said:


> Figures for Okinawa
> Allied casualties - 12,500 listed killed or missing. 82000 casualties in total.
> An estimated 110,071 Japanese soldiers killed.
> It's estimated that between 30,000 and 100,000 civilians died. Some from mass suicides. Both sides shot at civilians indiscriminately.
> ...



I agree, and the example of what the Russians did in eastern Europe certainly supports an argument that it was important to keep the USSR from getting a toehold -- or more -- in the Japanese archipelago. I have no doubt that the upper echelons of U.S. leadership were fully aware, by spring of 1945 if not earlier, that they could not afford to let Russia have any more; with the USSR then apparently in total control of the Chinese mainland, Japan had to be kept available as a vitally-needed base on the edge of Asia...

Dave Wixon


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## 2DaveWixon (May 5, 2016)

Brian Turner said:


> Certainly the popular history here has it that the German battleship, Bismark, was a serious threat that required a dedicated force to take out. However, the North Sea is ringed with major cities, whereas the Pacific is famously empty pace.
> 
> I suspect the role of specific ship classes varied in strategic importance according to the corresponding arena. Certainly aircraft carriers would have been far more important in the Pacific than the North Sea!



Absolutely correct! As shown by the fact that the American losses in capital ships, after Pearl, were principally aircraft carriers... Carriers HAD to be paramount in the Pacific, because their planes gave them the reach to cover the vast distances; battleships were only of use when they got within cannon range of a target, which was usually land. (And carriers took the casualties because the Japanese, too, knew that they were the biggest danger, and concentrated on finding and attacking them...).

Dave Wixon


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (May 5, 2016)

2DaveWixon said:


> Absolutely correct! As shown by the fact that the American losses in capital ships, after Pearl, were principally aircraft carriers...


So first the "fact" that "lots of battleships were sunk" is touted as evidence of their inconsequentiality, and then when I point that the actual number was 0, THAT is claimed to be evidence of the same thing. Y'all are really attached to this idea.

Certainly WW II was "the carrier war" and I've never said otherwise but there is persistent oversimplification and exaggeration in this thread. Certainly carriers were targeted. But also we lost a lot because we HAD a lot. Half a dozen or so at the time of Pearl and we built another 27 during the war. Also we lost a lot because they were the most inherently vulnerable capital ships ever built. Which is why they were never deployed without escorts of conventional ships.



2DaveWixon said:


> battleships were only of use when they got within cannon range of a target


Absolutely incorrect! Battleships were the most puissant anti-aircraft gun platforms at sea during the Pacific War. Carriers were not only high value targets, they were vulnerable ones, lightly armored and even more lightly armed, they had to be escorted by conventional ships. Recognition of the importance of the escort role is why the USN shifted priority from the production of Montana class BBs to building more of the Iowa class which, although less powerful for shore bombardment than the Montanas would have been, were faster and more suitable for escort duty. Being short of BBs we had to make do with cruisers and even destroyers but there is no realistic question that IN THE 1940s, BBs were the most effective escort vessels in existence. No ship of that era carried as much AA firepower. They were also by far the hardest to sink. Your implication that the US lost no BBs because they weren't attacked simply isn't true. I am in possession of a bit of crumpled up fuselage, a remnant of a Kamikaze that crashed into the Idaho. It did no damage, which is fairly typical of this type of attack. The same kind of attack on a destroyer typically sank it.

Nor was the role in fire support of amphibious landings trivial. People weren't shooting at each other in the middle of the ocean just for the fun of it. In the end, it all comes down to putting boots on the ground ON LAND. Read accounts of the island hopping campaigns from the grunts' POV.  Without BBs it would have been a lot harder, a lot slower, and maybe not even possible, given the technology OF THE TIME. With more BBs sooner, it would have gone a lot faster. Manpower was not the limiting factor.

The loss of BBs at Pearl was absolutely NOT strategically trivial. For a whole year the US diverted resources that could have accelerated the building of the Iowa class BBs or carriers into repair of 4 existing BBs. 2 more were total losses. After Pearl we had NO BBs in the Pacific and until the South Dakota class was deployed our total in both oceans was halved.


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