Staskala said:
Yet China was liberated from Japanese rule by Russia. Funny, huh, almost seems like the allies didn't care that much after all.
I'm saying it again, Russia would have solved the thing alone, the allies didn't have to do anything.
I really don't like this "but an invasion would have cost America so many soldiers" argument when there never was any need for an American invasion.
I shudder to think of a world where the soviets gained control of Japan, but that is really beside the point, not only would many of the invadind goldiers die, the casualties on the Japanese home islands would dwarf even those suffered by the Germans in East Prussia. Consider Hitler's Gotterdammurang (very poor spelling there on my part) the twilight of the gods, he planned that all of germany would go down in flames with him. This fell apart due to rationality prevailing and most germans chooding simply to surrender instead. The Japanese would not have followed this, every man and most women and children would have attacked. I don't really blame them, they had just been conditioned that way by the state, but the fact is unaviodable; In a conventional land invasion, it would be nessecary to kill a very signifigant proportion of the population to subjigate the Japanese home islands.
And russia was heavily supplied throught the lend lease program, to the point that the primary method of supply transportation on the eastern front was an american truck.
Add to that the very underwhelming streagnth of the red navy and the soviets would have both suffered heavy casualties and harboured resentment (or , you know, more resentment) at the west for letting them shoulder the burden of the pacific so soon after VE day and the fact that the nuclear deterant has not surfaced in this scenario, and we could se operation unthinkable play out in early '46.
stompy said:
And yet they insisted on unconditional surrender? The Americans weren't stupid, they knew how much the Emperor meant to the Japanese and they should have known that the Japanese had attempted to make peace through the Soviets. They could have negotiated (as they could have done before Pearl Harbour*) but they chose to use the bomb.
I'm not going to argue that the average American citizen would have thought anything but "The Japanese attacked us without warning and without provocation! They deserve no mercy." The US government on the other hand... have you heard of the McCollum Memorandum? If the US provoked Japan, then their behaviour in regards to the A-bomb is the same as their behaviour in regards to Pearl Harbour, weakening the argument that the bomb was justified.
After the treaty of versailles, there was a kind of aversion to conditional surrenders, just a bit, I would like to quote someone, while doing them the great disservice of remembering their name, but, 'this is not peace, this is an armistance for twenty years' if Japan had been allowed to perform a similar build up to 1930s germany in the nuclear age, the results would have been horrifying. Now as to Mcallum,
A. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore
B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies
C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang-Kai-Shek
D. Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore
E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient
F. Keep the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific[,] in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands
G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil
H. Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire
To my knowldge, only C, F, G and H were actually implemented, as this was not official policy, only the advice of a LT Commander, and looking at those four, are they really so unreasonable, supporting Chiang kai Shek in the Sino-Japanese war brings us back to the point that japan was fighting a war of imperial aggression there. At the time, the US' greatest threat was Japan, so keeping the majority of their naval power in Hawaii makes sense for essentially the same reason that France had more troops on the Maginot line than at the pyrenees. As to the two embargo points, this was to keep Japan from expanding further, as they needed the oil and Iron to keep invading China. All in all none of these make for a rational Cassus Belli.
The things any other person has done are NEVER an excuse for any of your own actions (except self-defense and its gonna be hard to explain how A-bombs were self-defense). That said the bombing of Hiroshima was plain wrong as wrong as the Bombing of London, Dresden and any other major city during the war. The A-Bombs however were a whole new dimension. There is never any excuse for mayor killings of civilians in any given situation in opposition to smale scale casualties that occur while i.e bombing a military convoy. For that sole reason where the bombings wrong and there is no point arguing over the justification of a war crime through the war crimes of others. Its like everytime any country does something horrible its like: "at least we are not like Germany in WWII" those are things that you can not relativize by comparing it to other things that were even worse and especially not by comparing the casualties to the loss of military personell during a combat operation(i.e invasion) especially not your own.
This you're example is a bit off mate, as the allies were not useing the actions of a third party to justify their actions, but necessity and the actions of the Japanese themselves. I was not argueing that that immediatly made it right, but that that would have been a contributing factor in the process.
Also, your language is slightly unclear, so I appologise in advance if this is not what you meant, but I am tired of the argument that it is a soldiers job to die, that it would be in any way acceptable for a general to let one hundred of his men die because otherwise one hundred and one civlians of the enemy nation would die. As the son of a soldier, athe brother of a soldier and (hopefully) as of next week a soldier myself, I would hate to be in the position of explaining to the families of those who died in operation downfall that their sons lives were worth less than those of the Japanese, that they had a method for ending the war with the possiblity of the least death and that they didn't take it because they thought it was the wrong thing to do. A governments first responsibilty is to its own people and that includes her soldiers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
And the comfort houses were where women from captured populations were forced into sexual slavery.
