The Only Correct Decision, Part IDropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not only justified, but the best possible decision given the circumstances.
This is the first part of a three-part series of historical essays breaking down the decision and impact of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. You can find Part II and Part III here. IntroductionThis year, 2025, is the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of the most horrific warfare that the world has ever seen: World War II. That civilization-rending conflict saw the cataclysm of total war engulf nearly the entire planet, less than three decades after what contemporaries called the ‘War to End All Wars’. As awful as the killing and devastation of the Great War was – a war that permanently destroyed classical European society and ended the lives of a generation of young men – it paled in comparison to its successor. The Second World War killed millions of combatants, POWs, and civilians, often in grotesque and inhumane fashion. It spawned the modern conception of genocide, brought totalitarian polities to the forefront of global consciousness, and led to a sea change in the laws of war. It shaped the face of the 20th century and has already shaped the first quarter of the 21st. The war is still the most commonly referenced and analogized conflict in modern history, even eight decades later. It is ubiquitous in popular culture, political debate, and history classes, perhaps to the point of oversaturation. But the way its conclusion is narrated is quite wrong. The victory over Nazism is universally celebrated, as it should be. It earns the vast majority of focus in the public mind, far outstripping the war in the Pacific. It does have its fair share of legitimate historical controversies – Holocaust denial not included – but is generally well-understood. The USSR’s contribution is likely overstated, especially given the fact that the war’s European genesis was a joint Nazi-Soviet project, but this is debatable. The strategic decisions made by the Allied powers are questionable, as is the post-war partition of Europe. Altogether, though, the generally-accepted narrative on the European front and the war’s end in Berlin is fairly solid. This is entirely different from the way the end of the Pacific war is understood by the public. Instead of being viewed as a triumph of Allied willpower, technology, strategy, and military prowess, the victory over Imperial Japan is depicted as a deep moral stain on the victors, namely America. Of course, this is entirely due to the manner of achieving that victory: the atomic bomb. A meager two of these munitions devastated two sizable cities, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens in the process. These novel and profoundly destructive weapons were the key factor in the Japanese surrender, eclipsing all else. To date, this remains the only time that nuclear armaments have been used in combat. And that fact has been incredibly hard to swallow for a great many people over the past eight decades. Revisionist historians, both in the United States and abroad, have shifted the narrative strongly in their favor in the popular imagination. They have emphasized the idea that the use of the atomic bombs was unnecessary, unjustifiable, and profoundly morally wrong. They claim that the Japanese were close to imminent surrender, that the alternatives were clearly preferable, and that this one decision cost far more lives than it saved. They argue that the bombs were needed more as a signal to the Soviet Union in the budding Cold War than they were to defeat Japan. They say that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected for cynical purposes despite being purely civilian targets. In all, they present the history as one where America is a malicious power needlessly murdering defenseless Japanese civilians. This undermines the Allied victory over Japan, casting it in an entirely different light. The atomic controversy has almost entirely overshadowed the remainder of the Pacific war in the public mind, largely due to the revisionist historians and their wholesale embrace by the political left, the academy, and the media. Their version of events is taught in schools, presented in documentaries, dramatized by Hollywood, and published in well-resourced books. It has become common wisdom, particularly among those with greater educational attainment and younger cohorts. It has increasingly crossed party lines, with the most recent example being the Trump administration’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. And it will be the primary focus of the vast majority of news and commentary articles over the course of this 80th anniversary period. But is it true? The answer to that question is a resounding “no.” The use of the atomic bombs to force Japan’s unconditional surrender was necessary, justified, lifesaving, and correct. The best way to make historical judgments on difficult issues like this is to understand the past on its own terms. One should proverbially step into President Harry S. Truman’s shoes, trying to comprehend the situation he was in, with the attendant pressures he faced and the information he had. Doing this gets at the very heart of how history actually unfolded, explaining the past far better than one can ever do at a far remove from the on-the-ground reality. Using this approach, the decision that Truman made was clearly correct at the time. Still, even in the full light of history and with the benefit of perfect hindsight, the outcome remains the best possible. For those steeped in the popular narrative, this may sound shocking. But the weight of the primary sources, the facts on the ground, and the postwar aftermath all show it to be accurate. The first step in appreciating this reality is taking into account the situation going in to the summer of 1945, the months in which the war concluded. The Build-upThe Nazi government of Germany surrendered to the Allies in Berlin on May 8, 1945, just over a week after Adolf Hitler shot himself in the Führerbunker. Berlin had been conquered by the Red Army on May 2 and the remaining Allied forces were rapidly rolling through the rest of the country. Germany had been fully defeated, its economy destroyed, its population left starving, and its military in shambles. Their unconditional surrender was a major reversal from the end of the Great War thirty years prior and set a precedent for the Allies to follow. The capitulation ended a European conflict that began in September 1939, bringing peace to a continent that had been ravaged by total war. It allowed for the occupation and division of Germany, shuffled populations around the region, and stopped the genocide of European Jews. It was celebrated in capitals across the West and still is to this day. But it did not end the Second World War. The Imperial Japanese began their war two years before the Germans (and Soviets) did, invading the Chinese heartland in 1937 and proceeding to the remainder of the Western Pacific within a few years. They had begun their rapid territorial expansion on the Asian continent in 1931, forging a pretext to conquer Manchuria, part of the Chinese state. They attacked and took over wide swathes of the region, displacing native governments and Western powers alike. The Japanese gained control of the East Indies and Java (modern Indonesia), Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, French Indochina (modern Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam), Burma (modern Myanmar), Papua, and myriad islands in the South Pacific – all on top of their existing control over Formosa (Taiwan), the Korean Peninsula, and parts of China. They fought to the death, often eschewing surrender, to defend each and every mile of that territory. And unlike the Nazis, they remained an intransigent and deadly foe on May 9, 1945. The Japanese Empire was clearly on the back foot when Berlin fell, but it was nowhere near surrender, despite what revisionists may have you think. When Harry Truman was raised to the presidency by the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945, he was presented with the best estimates of the remaining resistance for both the Germans and Japanese by his general staff. They firmly believed that the Nazis would fall within six months, even if Hitler moved to southern Germany to make a final alpine stand, but did not foresee the war in the Pacific ending for at least eighteen months – putting the Japanese surrender no earlier than October 1946, nearly five full years after Pearl Harbor. Even then, the experts were unsure as to whether the Japanese would surrender in an organized and complete fashion at all. They predicted a long, drawn-out campaign across the Home Islands and mainland Asia to mop up remaining pockets of fierce Japanese resistance. And the military planners had very good reason for this assessment given the reality of the Pacific war.
Island HoppingThe nature of the combat in Asia was entirely different than that in Europe; unlike with the Wehrmacht, there were few large-scale surrenders of Japanese forces, even when victory or retreat was impossible. In the years leading up to the atomic bombings, Japanese soldiers fought to the death across the Pacific theater, even over tiny islands and atolls that were never part of the established Japanese homeland. The traditional Japanese military honor culture, based partially on bushidō, the samurai way of the warrior, was not merely a dogma of the elite, but of the rank-and-file as well. It heavily militated against surrender and capture by the enemy, seeing death as far preferable to dishonor. This made for a very difficult potential conclusion to the war, with the Japanese government potentially unable to actually force the surrender of its military cadres. Famously, there were isolated Japanese holdouts throughout the region who lasted decades before capture, including one man who was found on Guam in the 1970s. But that was the exception to the rule; the vast majority of defeated Japanese servicemen were killed or wounded, not captured. In 1943 and 44, this fanatical bravery and unwillingness to capitulate were on full display. In May 1943, a garrison of about 2,300 Japanese soldiers on the Aleutian Island of Attu was defeated with a fatality rate of 98.8 percent. In Tarawa that November, a force of more than 2,500 Japanese at the battle’s outset ended with a mere eight surviving prisoners, a casualty rate of 99.7 percent. A smaller island nearby, Makin, saw a lone Japanese survivor out of 300 men. In 1944, similar situations played out at the Marshall Islands (3,472 deaths to 51 POWs, a 98.5 percent death rate) and Kwajalein (4,938 dead to 79 POWs, a 98.4 percent fatality rate). The worst yet occurred on Saipan, a battle which ran from June 15 to July 9, 1944. This was a much larger Japanese force, numbering about 30,000 troops. Fewer than 1,000 were captured alive, costing American forces 14,111 casualties, 3,426 of whom died, in the process. Pacifying Saipan inflicted a casualty rate of 20 percent on the Americans, with approximately seven Japanese soldiers killed for each American fatality. And that only takes into account the military deaths; Saipan also had a considerable population of Japanese civilians, estimated at over 20,000 before the battle took place. Of that total, only about half surrendered to the occupying forces within a month of the fighting’s end. Days after the Japanese loss, over 1,000 civilians killed themselves and their families, despite entreaties to spare themselves by the US Marines and their fellow countrymen who gave in. The carnage was a horrifying result of Japanese government propaganda falsely claiming that Americans would torture, rape, and murder civilians, arguing that mass suicide was a preferable and honorable alternative. 1945 did not temper this devastation. The fighting in the Philippines was brutal and massive. In the campaign to retake Luzon and liberate Manila, the largest island in the archipelago and the capital, respectively, more than 10,000 Americans died and a further 36,550 were wounded. Those losses paled in comparison to those suffered by the Japanese, who had between 200,000 and 230,000 combat fatalities. Filipino civilians were killed en masse by the Japanese as well, with deaths conservatively estimated at 120,000 and total casualties potentially surpassing half a million. As the US moved closer to the Japanese homeland, resistance became even fiercer. On Iwo Jima, a tiny, rocky island of just over eight square miles, the Imperial Japanese Army garrison fought to nearly the last man. They were outnumbered almost four to one, but held on for five weeks by digging into cave networks and building fortified underground strongholds requiring hand-to-hand combat to penetrate. Only 216 of the 18,000 Japanese soldiers were captured alive, a feat that killed more than 6,000 Marines and wounded a further 20,000. The most important battle of the campaign to capture the approaches to the Japanese homeland came in April 1945 with the American invasion of Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands. Capturing this large, populous, and heavily defended island would allow American air power to hit mainland Japanese targets with regularity, weakening the country before a potential amphibious assault. The Japanese defenders were seriously outnumbered, even when their poorly-trained local Okinawan militias were included, numbering only 100,000 compared to a total US Army, Navy, and Marine force of 182,000. They were also outclassed, lacking in major firepower, air assets, naval support, and ammunition. But they made up for these shortcomings by engaging in an incredible campaign of fortification and digging in the southern half of the island, essentially ceding the northern half and its critical airfields to the Americans without a fight. The network of underground tunnels, fortified positions, and caves were used to mount a stunning defense that forced the fighting into World War I tactics – mass rushes at prepared defensive positions in terrible environmental conditions made worse by constant bombardment. Direct testimony from veterans of the battle is eerily similar to those of the Western Front in 1916, down to the repeatedly uncovered graves, the omnipresent putrefaction, the never-ending roar of the shells, and the widespread psychological toll. The battle lasted 82 days and only concluded when unorganized pockets of Japanese resistance fell prey to capture. At the end of the combat, about 7,400 Japanese defenders, local militia included, were captured alive. The remaining 92,000 defenders perished. The toll on the American side was staggering. By the official count, more than 12,500 servicemen died and another 36,613 were wounded. For the navy and the Marines, their casualties at Okinawa comprised almost 17 percent of the total casualties they took during the entire war. For the United States, Okinawa was the bloodiest battle of the Pacific war and was only eclipsed by the Battle of the Bulge as the worst of the whole conflict. Okinawan civilians were even worse off. Estimates of noncombatant deaths vary, but most historians believe somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 Okinawans perished during the three months of vicious fighting. The carnage on Okinawa – the first battle that took place in the traditional Japanese homeland, even if on the fringes – was widely seen as a precursor for what was to come. Another aspect of Okinawa that would come to characterize the Japanese defense strategy were suicide attacks. These tactics were used throughout the battle against key American naval assets providing logistical support, air cover, shore bombardment, and troop transport for the invasion. They took a heavy toll, sinking 36 ships, including 12 destroyers, and American airpower was able to do little to stop it. Nearly 5,000 sailors were killed during the battle, mostly by suicide attacks. The use of suicide attackers allowed Japan to punch above its weight and create maximum damage and chaos with its relative paucity of firepower. The success of these tactics at Okinawa and beyond turned them into mainstays of Japan’s plan to beat back the US and force a favorable peace, one driven by the American public’s unwillingness to countenance such heavy losses. Japanese military planners knew these so-called “special weapons” were their greatest advantage against the Allies and said as much on the record. For instance, in a meeting of top brass during the defeat at Saipan in June 1944, the former chief of staff for the Imperial Japanese Navy Admiral Prince Hiroyasu Fushimi said the following:
The Japanese military took Fushimi up on his exhortation. Suicide assaults became increasingly common, with monthly kamikaze sorties rising from around 50 in October 1944 to almost 1,200 in April 1945. They only slowed after June of that year because the Japanese were marshaling their strength to repel the predicted large-scale American invasion. Various specialized systems were created to enhance the lethality and effectiveness of these tactics, both in air and at sea. In 1943, Japan’s naval engineers developed the Kaiten suicide craft, a piloted torpedo that was meant to explode upon impact with an enemy ship. In late 1944, the Japanese built rocket-propelled aircraft with explosive noses, flown by lightly-trained Japanese airmen – essentially making it a manned, guided missile. Existing aircraft could also be converted to become more effective suicide weapons, a process the Japanese were investing heavily in. The navy created larger submarines meant for suicide attack as well. They functioned separately from that express purpose, but they were intended for ramming enemy ships – hence the hundreds of kilograms of explosives in their bows. These tactics were deadly both before and after Okinawa. They killed, at minimum, 2,200 American personnel before that battle and continued apace thereafter, despite changes in defensive reactions. Overall, kamikaze assaults killed more than 3,300 American naval personnel between March and August of 1945, a ratio of 1.78 fatalities for each Japanese sortie – not to mention the heavy damage suffered by the American ships that would be necessary for whatever strategy was pursued to force Japan to capitulate. And Japan was nowhere near running out of the weapons needed to continue. Estimates vary, but Japan likely had about 10,000 serviceable aircraft, about half of which were already assigned to suicide squadrons. They were low on aviation gasoline, but had plenty to cover the minimal fuel needs of kamikaze attacks. And the training requirements for piloting these missions were low, expanding the potential pilot populations dramatically. At war’s end, the Japanese navy also had significant reserves of suicide weapons. Of the more sizable craft, there were 110 completed Koryu and 250 Kairyu submarines, the larger and smaller versions of the attack submarine, respectively. The navy also held about 1,000 Kaiten suicide torpedoes, along with several modified ships from which to launch them. Suffice it to say, the Japanese military had the men, materiel, and motivation to continue these destructive and self-annihilative tactics; it was still unknown if the Americans had the stomach to withstand them.
Strategic BombingAt the same time as this final push towards the Japanese homeland, the American strategic bombing campaign ramped up with calamitous consequences for Japan. Strategic bombing of cities and population centers was the norm in the Second World War, both in Europe and Asia. The Nazis used this strategy against Rotterdam, London, and various Soviet cities, while the Japanese focused their version on China. Of course, the Allies gave this back in spades, with the bombing over Germany and Japan reaching a fever pitch as the war continued into 1945. Urban centers were turned into smoldering ruins, transportation systems were crippled by the destruction of bridges and railway depots, and factories and other military infrastructure were targeted for annihilation. Total war was indeed total, and it had the impact to match. Germany was clobbered by such saturation bombing on its way to ultimate defeat by land, but Japan got it even worse, for a number of reasons. First, Allied armies could not make major progress toward occupying Japan by land given the nation’s archipelagic nature, necessitating a heavier reliance on airpower as compared to land armies. Next, Japanese building construction was far less solid than was German. Most German cities had buildings made of stone, steel, and other hardy materials, making them much harder to obliterate from the air and limiting the effectiveness of area tactics like firebombing. Japan was the opposite; it relied heavily on wood and paper construction for both residential and commercial areas. This allowed for widespread devastation from numerically smaller raids using incendiary munitions. Third, Japanese industrial production was often co-located within residential areas. Instead of large-scale factory districts separate from the urban core, Japanese cities used piecemeal production, home-based industry, and networked manufacturing, making even primarily residential areas into legitimate military targets. These factors led to some of the gravest destruction of the entire war, in any theater. On the extremely windy night of March 9 to the morning of March 10, 1945, Tokyo was subjected to the worst disaster in its long and storied history. American B-29 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary munitions on a target area measuring about ten square miles and including some major Japanese military production infrastructure. Within two minutes of the first bombs striking their targets, the fire began to spread uncontrollably. Fifteen minutes later, the firestorm began, torching anything in its path and reaching far beyond the zone in which the bombs made impact. People were burned alive in their homes, died from continuous smoke inhalation, and literally boiled in canals. The destruction was nearly total. More than fifteen square miles were entirely consumed by flames, including nearly 20 percent of the industrial area and more than 60 percent of the commercial area. Over 260,000 dwellings were burned, leaving 1.15 million homeless and wandering. In prior air raids on Tokyo, just over 1,000 people were killed. In this lone night of firebombing, approximately 100,000 Japanese died. And this was just the beginning. From the Tokyo raid on March 9 through March 25, the US strategic bombing command under Army Air Forces Major General Curtis LeMay ran a firebombing blitz on the Japanese. There were attacks on Nagoya, the nation’s third-largest city and the capital of aircraft manufacturing, on March 11 and March 18, burning out 2.05 and 2.95 square miles of the city, respectively. Osaka, Japan’s second city and home to key port and railway infrastructure, was hit on March 13, destroying over eight miles of the city center. Kobe, the naval capital, was struck on March 16, leveling three square miles of the urban core. Before the tactical change that resulted in the Tokyo carnage, American bombers had ineffectively dropped 7,000 tons of bombs, losing more than 100 aircraft in the process. During the firestorm blitz, they dropped a far more effective 9,000 tons, losing fewer than 25 bombers and causing profound damage. The raids only ended when LeMay’s crews ran out of incendiaries. From March through June 1945, Japan’s largest cities and manufacturing centers were practically obliterated. The raids on a mere six cities (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Kobe, and Kawasaki) killed over 125,000 people and wounded 315,000 more, totally destroyed nearly 1.5 million dwellings, and burned out 105 square miles of urban area – all using conventional munitions. Tokyo had half of its territory wiped out, while Kawasaki lost more than two-thirds. This campaign was only continuing as the summer of 1945, the decision point for the use of the atomic bombs, was reaching a peak. Urban centers were no longer the primary targets, as that shifted to transportation infrastructure and ports. LeMay’s bombers dropped aerial mines throughout the approaches to Japanese harbors, aiding American submarines in totally crippling Imperial Japan’s ability to import key resources, including food. Over the course of the war, Japanese merchant shipping fell from 6.38 million tons in 1941 to a mere 2.56 million tons by the end of 1944. The minelaying campaign ramped this destruction up significantly, killing ships and making many ports, including along the entirety of the critical Inland Sea, completely inaccessible. The mining of key straits and chokepoints removed Japan’s resource pipeline, essentially ending waterborne transport between key Japanese cities and imperial holdings. Given the fact that most intra-Japan transport was carried out by water, this was a severe blow to Japanese resource allocation and transfer. This put immense strain on the underdeveloped Japanese rail network, which was itself a major target of attacks. Japan already struggled to produce enough food for its population, but destruction of its transportation network made internal production nigh-on useless, as rural areas were unable to move food to the urban centers. All of this led to acute food shortages and looming starvation for an already-displaced civilian population.
Japan UnyieldingStill, these cataclysmic losses and severe military headwinds seemed not to impact Japanese leaders at all. Even after the repeat defeats of 1944, the loss of its navy, its significantly reduced airpower, and the Allies knocking on the door of the Home Islands, the outlook was positively rosy in the halls of power in Tokyo. The Japanese military hierarchy was the dominant political force in the empire, holding the whip hand both due to its unique legal status in the imperial constitution and its willingness to use extralegal means like terror and assassinations. They also controlled the information flow to civilian decisionmakers, including the deified Emperor. They painted a far more optimistic picture than reality, downplaying their own losses and enhancing those of their enemies. They massaged strategy discussions so as to ensure that their favored policies were presented in a favorable light. And they retained and reinforced an attitude of inevitable victory, no matter the cost. Anything less would dishonor the nation, humiliate the imperial line, and bring permanent disgrace to the Japanese warrior spirit. This attitude could not have been manifested into reality without some basis. In 1945, Japan retained sizable imperial possessions, both in the Pacific and on the Asian continent. It had a large army still in the field and was ramping up recruiting at home. It dominated the populations over which it had political control, forcing them into subservience to Tokyo’s whims. As we have seen, its military was incredibly hard to dislodge from its positions, fighting to the death for every inch of land. This spoke to a high willingness to sacrifice not only on the part of commanders, but rank-and-file as well. Its hierarchical and authoritarian political system allowed the government to enforce its will on the population to a great extent, bolstering the idea that Japan could outlast and bleed white its democratic enemies. All of this portended the ultimate survival of the Japanese regime, even if weakened, and a continuation of the martial ideology that dominated it – if they could play off these factors to create a favorable peace and avoid outright capitulation. Indeed, the Japanese government was simply uninterested in peace for the vast majority of the war, even through much of early 1945. The Emperor himself sought to delay any potential attempts at a negotiated settlement until after the Japanese had won at least one major victory, turning around the Allied momentum. Even a newly-formed government with less overt military control followed this same belligerent line, in spite of what revisionist historians claim. The new premier, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, swore an oath to fight to the bitter end, engaging in total mobilization of the Japanese populace to achieve victory. The remainder of the Cabinet thought similarly, ranging from militaristic in the extreme to open to a negotiated peace only after a martial reversal. The decisionmakers in Tokyo were not peaceniks by any stretch of the imagination. This was instantiated into official government policy with the creation of a planning document known as “The Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War.” That document laid out the future strategy for the war and how the new government would implement it successfully. It was highly at odds with objective reality, but showcased the inner mindset of the men in charge of choosing aggression or surrender. Dominated by the army, the most belligerent group within the military hierarchy, this report proclaimed that Japan must fight to the end and choose even total annihilation to a negotiated surrender. It put the lives of every Japanese civilian – man, woman, and child – in the way of the Allied advance. And it had the unanimous sanction of the Imperial Cabinet and the direct approval and religious imprimatur of the Emperor himself. After this fanatical extremism became official government policy, some diplomats and government officials began to have second thoughts. The months where these actors engaged in backchannel communications, freelance diplomacy, and persuasion campaigns aimed at Tokyo form the basis of the revisionist claim that peace was just around the corner, even had the Allies stopped short of the Home Islands. But this idea massively misstates the historical reality. Some Japanese officials did, in fact, begin the long process of discussing the possibility of peace. Yet there were no direct negotiations attempted, no official sanction to the process, and no agreement on when or how to start talks. Even when the most rational diplomats argued for a negotiated surrender, the terms they began with were out of touch with reality and would have been completely unacceptable to the Allies. This is the core of the issue: a minimally acceptable peace for the Japanese government was a total nonstarter for Washington. The peace caucus in the Japanese government – a minority of the whole in May and June 1945 – desired highly favorable terms and repeatedly stated as much. They sought a preservation of the national polity under the Emperor’s command, withdrawal from conquered territories on Japanese timetables and without direct surrender, retention of some military power and hardware, independence of conquered European colonies, and, crucially, no Allied occupation of Japanese territory. The terms they sought allowed Japan to present itself as not fully defeated, justified the origins of the war in its eviction of the Europeans from Asia, and retained the internal bulwarks of imperial control that characterized Japan under the Emperor. These were intended to mirror the terms granted to Germany at the end of the First World War under the Treaty of Versailles. That peace document was critical in allowing German rearmament and the launch of a redux of that conflict in Europe within two decades. Tokyo saw that success in defeat and wanted it for themselves. Unconditional surrender this was not. And unconditional surrender is exactly what the Allies sought – no more, no less. This was longstanding policy going back to the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, where President Roosevelt said to the assembled press that the British and Americans had made “the determination that peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power. … The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.” This striking demand was meant to forestall exactly what the Japanese were hoping for: a new version of the World War I settlement that allowed their leaders to promote the idea that Japan did not actually lose the conflict. The so-called ‘stab in the back’ myth was a potent force in postwar Germany, pushing Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to the forefront of politics as defenders of the supposedly righteous martial spirit of the German people. The idea of unconditional surrender sought to end this possibility for the Axis powers in defeat, forcing occupation, demilitarization, and a total reform of society and government to root out the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and militarism. To both the leadership and the populations of the Allied powers, unconditional surrender was paramount in importance to avoid another calamitous war. It was widely popular and became a political imperative for the British and American governments afterwards. Polling showed that the American public favored unconditional surrender over a compromise peace by a margin of nine to one and sought either the execution, imprisonment, or exile of the Japanese emperor by large margins. These terms were forced on Germany and Italy, laying the groundwork for them to be imposed on Japan. And for the Japanese, these terms were impossible to square with the culture of honor that drove the militaristic imperialism that launched the war in the first place. When the doves (a relative term in the Japanese government) began to send out general feelers for peace, they were sure to focus on the fact that the Allied demand of unconditional surrender was unacceptable. But beyond that, they were basically just stalling for time. Diplomats who reached out to the Soviet Union – technically neutral in the Pacific until the summer of 1945 – did so only to say they may want some early-stage talks. There was no plan beyond just talking about negotiating in the future. They did not come with concrete terms of surrender, nor did they shift on their attitude towards those of the Allies. In fact, in July 1945, Japan’s foreign minister Shigenori Togo said as much directly in a communiqué to his subordinate in Moscow. In a cable to the ambassador, Togo stated that:
Clearly, this was completely at odds with established Allied demands and made any sort of official peace talks meaningless. The political imperatives of both sides of the conflict – and the obstinacy of the Japanese military hierarchy – made any sort of negotiated peace before the atomic bombings improbable, if not impossible. Other diplomats, particularly some in Europe, decided to freelance peace offers on their own. They sought to avoid mediation by the Soviets and instead reach out to the Allies through European countries like Switzerland and the Vatican. Still, none countenanced unconditional surrender. These lone wolves are often promoted by the revisionists as representing genuine attempts at peace on the part of the official Japanese government. In reality, they were nothing of the sort. Each of these proposals was a complete shot in the dark with absolutely no backing from the leadership in Tokyo. When Cabinet officials found out about these unsanctioned missions, they were livid, either recalling the officials in question or demoting them from their posts. These peace entrepreneurs were shut down rapidly and their efforts came to naught. All of this was recognized clearly by American decisionmakers and they said as much to the American public. Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Grew put this as frankly as possible in a July 10, 1945 press conference, saying:
How did the Americans understand the internal deliberations and feelings of the Japanese government and its officials so well without the benefit of historical hindsight and Japanese sources? Well, it certainly helped that the US had broken both the Japanese military and diplomatic codes and had access to an enormous trove of information. With the ULTRA (military) and MAGIC (diplomatic) intercepts, American policymakers were able to follow the internal Japanese peace debates closely. The raw intelligence decrypted by these programs was analyzed by Japanese-speaking subject-matter experts and summarized for the civilian and military leadership, up to the president himself. They knew about the military’s dominance of political affairs, their unwillingness to even countenance unconditional surrender, and their reaction to peace entrepreneurs. They learned about the Emperor’s resolve that a major victory must occur before any surrender would be acceptable. They saw, in real time, the discussions of what Japan sought in a peace and how it fully repudiated the Allied terms. And they understood that even the meager Japanese efforts to engage the Soviets were little more than a time-buying ruse. Despite all that, the United States and her allies offered terms yet again in the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945. President Truman stated that this was America’s best and final offer to the Japanese government and laid out the terms in detail. Japan would be fully demilitarized with “convincing proof” shown, the “authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest” would be eliminated, the Home Islands would be occupied and Japanese sovereignty limited to these areas, and the full surrender of all Japanese armed forces would be effected, after which they could “return to their homes with the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives.” Truman promised that the Japanese would not be “enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation,” although “stern justice shall be meted out to war criminals.” In exchange for accepting these terms, Japan would be guaranteed the freedom of speech, conscience, and religion, protection of basic human rights, retention of its industries and the ability to pay reparations in kind, access to raw materials, provision of food and necessities, and future incorporation into world markets. The occupation of Japan would “be withdrawn as soon as these objectives have been accomplished and there has been established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people a peacefully inclined and responsible government.” These were far better terms than those imposed on Nazi Germany, so much so that they drew the ire of American allies like Australia. The term “unconditional surrender” was used only once in the Potsdam Declaration and the terms offered to Tokyo were quite lenient. And yet, the Japanese government decisively and insultingly rejected them. The Japanese media – a reflection of the state given the lack of press freedom in Japan – proclaimed the government’s rejection of the declaration, labeling it a “Laughable Matter” and a “thing of no great moment.” Prime Minister Suzuki, with the full backing of the Cabinet, publicly doubled down on this approach in a July 28 press conference, saying: “The government does not regard [the Potsdam Declaration] as a thing of any value; the government will just ignore it. We will press forward resolutely to carry the war to a successful conclusion.” The Japanese leadership even saw this relative softening of terms as an opportunity to take advantage of and a signal of American weakness and lack of resolve. Suzuki confidently declared that this was the accepted imperial understanding of Potsdam, saying to an underling that:
This conversation occurred on July 30, 1945. A week later, the first atomic bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima. The intervening seven days would not see any change in the Japanese position. The war simply was not going to end without the Allies forcing the Japanese to capitulate. The full weight of the MAGIC evidence, both at the time and in the light of hindsight, show that the Japanese government, contra the revisionists, was nowhere near surrendering on any terms that would be remotely acceptable to the Allies. Instead, they repeatedly repudiated these terms, privately and publicly. Yet they would not promulgate their own terms for ending the conflict, refused to engage the Allies directly, and continued savage fighting across Asia and the Pacific. They did not agree, either internally or otherwise, that unconditional surrender with the proviso that the imperial institution could remain intact would be acceptable. Instead, they firmly believed that they could bleed the Allies white and force a more favorable situation, despite the immense cost in Japanese lives. They calculated that their willingness to sacrifice was greater than that of the Americans, especially if the war dragged on through 1946. And they very well may have been right, with war weariness a highly concerning issue for American government officials, particularly as soldiers stationed in Europe were not to be demobilized, but shifted to the Pacific charnel house. The Japanese knew their own position and so did the Americans who had access to their encoded transmissions. What were the actual possibilities for forcing a Japanese surrender on acceptable terms to the Allies? What alternatives existed that could have avoided the atomic bombings? And would they have been more or less effective, costly, and deadly than what Truman ended up deciding? Click here for Part II of this essay, detailing the alternatives to atomic bombing. Click here for Part III of the series, explaining the atomic bomb decision process and aftermath. Rational Policy is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Rational Policy that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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Tuesday, 12 August 2025
The Only Correct Decision, Part I
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