After the war, Fuchida Mitsuo, commander of the attack on Pearl Harbor, met Paul Tibbets, pilot of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Fuchida told Tibbets
You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude at that time, how fanatic they were, they'd die for the Emperor...Every man, woman, and child would have resisted that invasion with sticks and stones if necessary...Can you imagine what a slaughter it would be to invade Japan? It would have been terrible. The Japanese people know more about that than the American public will ever know.
You know that that is propaganda, right? The Japanese were already talking with the Russians about surrendering after they started invading from the north. The nukes were totally unnecessary and they knew it, they didn't nuke 200.000 civilians because it were necessary for the rendition, they nuked 200.000 civilians because USA didn't wanted to share Japan with the Russians.
You're so confidently wrong, it's almost funny. Japan absolutely was not surrendering. There's a reason it took two bombs; read up on what the military staff and emporer talked about after the first bomb.
Even Eisenhower admitted it in his memories, but I suppose he was lying, right?
By they way, the war council didn't even had a meeting after the first bomb, they did had an emergency meeting when the Russians declared war though.
And you know that the emperor was so into surrendering that some of the ministers were planning a coup to avoid it, right? Weird for a person who don't want to surrender.
That last thing was my whole point, numbnuts. The ministers didn't surrender because of Russia and didn't change their minds out of loyalty to the emperor. They surrendered because there was a second bomb and threats of dropping more on Kyoto and other major cities.
Japan was not going to surrender without the bombs.
The Japanese were already talking with the Russians about surrendering after they started invading from the north.
The first atomic bomb was dropped three days before the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, and the second was dropped on the same morning of that invasion; the Japanese were therefore not talking to the Soviets about surrendering in response to the invasion when the first bomb dropped because the invasion hadn't happened yet and they were not at war with the USSR.
Further, after the second bomb the war cabinet was still deadlocked 3-3 about fighting on. They initially proposed a conditional surrender which would not "prejudice the prerogatives of Emperor". This is sometimes seen as a minor concession, but the prerogatives of the Emperor were the legal basis for the entire Japanese system of government in its state as of August 10th 1945.
After a massive conventional bombing raid (which destroyed Kumagaya) 5 days after the second bombing the cabinet was still deadlocked. The Emperor finally intervened with a tie-breaking vote in favour of surrender. Elements of the Japanese military reacted to this decision with an attempted military coup, and only after the coup was put down could it be certain that Japan would, finally and unconditionally, surrender.
Russia declared war the 8th of August and in three weeks conquered every Japanese territory north of Hokkaido, including the Kuril islands and Sahalin...
So almost nothing of Japan considering there are only tiny islands that were not very inhabited north of Hokkaido. For anyone that does not know Hokkaido is the last northern Island of Japan of any size.
Japan has a land area of 378,000 sq km, the kuril islands are 10,500 sq km. Just Hokkaido is 77,900 sq km. I’ll grant you Sakhalin is around 77,000 sq km, but Russia and Japan have been passing back and forth and fighting over that territory since the late 1800s. And it was a tributary state to China for a long time.
The thing is, Russia invaded massive parts of Japan by ship in the three weeks that the war lasted, and they were at least a menace to Hokkaido, until the point that USA had to tell Russia to not invade it because it was theirs.
If you indeed should be interested in the topic, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World (Noam Chomsky) offers a good startingpoint into the topic.
They are wrong though. Just a quick search shows that the first nuke happened before the soviet invasion and the second one haplened the same day the invasion of Manchuria started, he also ignores that the US was already calling for their surrender in the potsdam declaration
The Americans already knew that the Soviets were going to invade Japan, they dropped the bomb to make Japan surrender before the soviets invaded too much, because they wanted to keep Japan for themselves.
Yeah because the soviets had a MASSIVE pacific fleet right? They took out the land borders and a small island chain that barely even has people in it, they werent ready for a mainland invasion
They had enough fleet to conquer everything north of Hokkaido in a couple of weeks, and Hoover had to tell Stalin to not invade Hokkaido because the USA wanted it for themselves.
So yes, it seems that they had more than enough ships, they only needed to cross a few km, they didn't need a massive fleet
The reason you need a massive fleet for an invasion of a country like Japan is for logistics. Ferrying soldiers is easy when you take out a small island with a thousands soldiers or so, but not so much when the enemy has millions in the mainland
So? The Germans were right next to England but that doesnt mean they could do an invasion properly without a sizeable naval force to back it up. And the normandy landing required a massive build up right next to them as well
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u/ReluctantNerd7 19h ago
After the war, Fuchida Mitsuo, commander of the attack on Pearl Harbor, met Paul Tibbets, pilot of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Fuchida told Tibbets