The dropping of the bombs had really nothing to do with getting Japan to surrender and everything to do with intimidating the Soviets who were already invading Manchuria. Multiple admirals held beliefs that the use of atomic weaponry was not necessary and that Japan was already on their way to surrendering.

You’re right, that argument is bullshit. People only believe it was necessary to drop the atomic bombs because of chauvinism, US propaganda, and racism. I’ve had these arguments before, and the other side always falls back on national myths about Japan’s unwillingness to surrender that we were taught in school or by the media, or just absorbing the commonly held “wisdom” about how the war ended. There’s a lot that we aren’t taught about the bombings, so I’ll try to show the receipts to convince your friend that you’re right.

What is most telling, I think, is that the Pacific Front’s admirals and other general-level officers throughout US high command opposed Truman’s decision to use the bombs. These admirals and generals are on record stating that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of no strategic value, were immoral/unethical, and did nothing to hasten Japan’s surrender (which was inevitable by that point). The bombings were even condemned by Truman’s Chief of Staff Leahy. Dropping the atomic bombs was a political move, not a military one, and it was opposed by some of the highest officers of the US military.

Seven of the United States’ eight five-star Army and Navy officers in 1945 agreed with the Navy’s vitriolic assessment. Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Henry “Hap” Arnold and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, Ernest King, and William Halsey are on record stating that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-anniversary-japan-atomic-bombs

You can ask your friend whether they know the strategic situation of the Pacific in 1945 better than Nimitz, Halsey, or MacArthur. We can look at the situation materially and find some answers there. Japan had lost its occupied territories, meaning it was starved of oil and steel. You need massive and continuous inputs of energy and raw materials to wage a conventional war, and Japan was being strangled. The USSR liberated Manchuria, and Japan was surrounded. Japan’s air forces were depleted, so the US controlled the skies. It was only a matter of time until Japan surrendered.

That’s not to say Japan didn’t still have enough men or materiel to inflict massive casualties but chauvinists want to act like grandmas and babies were getting ready to throw grenades at US troops. This is the racism I’m talking about, assuming that Japanese civilians were this mass of fanatical bushido blades that could not be reasoned with. The idea is that Japanese people, not just the imperial soldiers, were part of a death cult that was fully committed to fighting to the last man, woman, and child for the emperor. Civilians fought back in many different countries in the war, including Germany, but people don’t make sweeping statements about how they all think alike or you can’t trust them, so we better kill an entire city.

There are interviews online with US bomber crew members who bailed out over Germany, which I think help to underscore how there’s a racist double standard. In one instance, the crewman was grabbed by German villagers who were very pissed off, because he had just got done dropping bombs on them. The villagers had a noose and they were getting ready to lynch him, but were actually stopped by a German officer. In another instance, the crewman fell partway down a slope after cutting off his parachute. One of his buddies who survived bailing out had landed at the base of the slope, in a farm. A German farmer was there, liming the soil. The crewman giving the interview described how the German farmer, a civilian, (CW violence and murder)

spoiler

grabbed a pitchfork, walked over to the other crewman, and proceeded to stab him in the gut until he died.

The interviews are fairly recent, but I’d probably have to do some digging to find the video again, it’s on YouTube. Germany also forced children and old men to fight when the situation was hopeless and Germany was being invaded. Clearly at least some German civilians were willing to kill enemy combatants, viciously and brutally, and they mobilized civilians who were barely fit for combat, but no one uses that to justify the firebombing of Dresden or generally the strategic bombing of highly populated areas in Germany. If civilians in Allied countries fought back, they’re called partisans or Resistance fighters. There’s a double standard. I think it’s akin to the US/Israel claiming that the civilians they kill are enemy combatants, which is only possible if you dehumanize the victim. Racism is what allows people to believe that Japan was a hive-mind that would fight to the death and never surrender.

People also point to the Japanese soldier who kept fighting after the war ended because he refused to believe the emperor would ever surrender. Well, what did the rest of the Japanese military do? Did they keep fighting too? To be clear, was he a soldier or a civilian? 1.6 million soldiers surrendered when they were told to, and peace talks were already being considered by both sides. Also, Imperial Japanese Army training was absolutely brutal, with absolute obedience being imposed through beatings. You can’t base your appraisal of the entire civilian population of Japan on the behavior of one brainwormed Japanese soldier. The civilians that were mass murdered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were innocent, and they did not pose any threat.

Peace talks were already on the table, but the US wanted the emperor to abdicate. As I understand it, American Anthropologist Ruth Benedict convinced the Truman administration to drop the abdication demand, because the psychological/cultural damage of deposing the emperor would be so severe that it would likely cause problems for the US, which wanted to maintain a hegemonic peace. Well, they kept the emperor and today there are still US military bases in Japan.

Hopefully that’s enough to get your friend to budge. I think the myth of the good war is what makes this hard, it’s a main part of the American Civil Religion. But if the roles were reversed and the Axis won, the Nazis today would still be saying the decision to drop the atomic bomb was a necessary way to save hundreds of thousands of lives. It should be remembered as a war crime.

aimixin’s answer:

The argument people use to justify the mass murder of Japanese civilians in WWII goes like this:

1. Japanese civilians were all so crazy they’d fight to the last man.

2. The nukes pushed them into surrender and thus ended the war

3. Ending the war early saved lives.

However, this is just historical revisionism with not a shred of evidence to back it. In fact, the exact opposite is true. The US extended the war, possibly leading to the unnecessary deaths of many many Chinese and Japanese.

At the time the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, Japan was already willing to surrender and everyone knew it at the time.

“The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

—Adm. William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff

"I told him I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

—President Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe during World War II

“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. [The Japanese] put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before [the bomb was used].”

—Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, commander of the U.S. Third Fleet

"[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

—Admiral William Leahy, White House chief of staff

“[The Japanese] had lost the ability to defend themselves. [American planes] met little, and then virtually no resistanc. It is well-known [now] that the Japanese were seeking to make a peace agreement well before Hiroshima."

—Doug Dowd, Pacific-theater rescue pilot

“I regret to say that defeat is inevitable”

—Prince Konoe, the former prime minister of Japan

An independent investigation into the matter after the fact based on a mountain of evidence of interviews with Japanese officials concluded the same thing.

“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

—U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey

Everyone was aware Japan already wanted to surrender.

The first and second argument people make are also self-contradictory. If Japanese were so crazy they’d “fight to the last man”, then why did the nukes work at all? The US killed more people firebombing Japan than they did with the nukes. They obviously did not care about civilian lives.

The truth is, they were already willing to surrender.

Why did the USA refuse to accept their surrender when everyone was aware of it? Primarily because the US insisted on unconditional surrender without negotiations, which the Japanese feared would cause them to lose their emperor.

“We have noted a series of Japanese peace feelers in Switzerland which OSS Chief William Donovan reported to Truman in May and June [1945]. These suggested, even at this point, that the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender might well be the only serious obstacle to peace. At the center of the explorations, as we also saw, was Allen Dulles, chief of OSS [Office of Strategic Services] operations in Switzerland (and subsequently Director of the CIA). In his 1966 book The Secret Surrender, Dulles recalled that ‘On July 20, 1945, under instructions from Washington, I went to the Potsdam Conference and reported there to Secretary [of War] Stimson on what I had learned from Tokyo — they desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and their constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people.’”

—Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Bomb,

Okay, so you might respond to this answer and say, “the mass murder of Japanese civilians is still justified because Japan’s emperor was bad and dropping the nukes let us get rid of the emperor!”

Right?

Nope.

The US allowed Japan to keep their emperor anyways.

Meaning the US extended the war for absolutely no reason and is responsible for every death because of it.

Despite the US letting Japan keep their emperor anyways, why did Japan accept unconditional surrender initially? Was it because the nukes?

Nope. It was because Japan had an ambassador in the USSR at the time named Naotake Satō. The reason the Japanese did not initially accept unconditional surrender despite being willing to surrender and despite believing their loss was inevitable, is because they had an agreement with the Soviet Union called the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact which would make the Soviet Union a neutral player in the war, and thus the Japanese believed they could convince Stalin to leverage that position to negotiate an equal peace settlement, they wanted the USSR to broker the peace with the US rather than doing it on the US’s terms, because they thought they could get a better deal.

The Japanese were writing to him frantically throughout the war begging him to convince Stalin to broker peace. The reason the Japanese surrendered was because the Japanese were not aware that Stalin had made a secret deal with Franklin D Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference to invade Japan, something the Japanese had no awareness of.

When the USSR invaded Japan, Japan had no cards left but to accept the unconditional surrender.

Ultimately, this means not only does the overwhelming mountain of evidence show the nuking of Japan provided no material assistance to the US war in Japan, but that the US had intentionally extended the war with its absurd insistence on unconditional surrender which it would back down on anyways after the war was over, the US possibly extended the war by 2–3 months.

The historical revisionist claims about the Japanese apparently having no intention of surrendering and nuking them was necessary to prevent a land invasion is a post-hoc justification with no actual evidence supporting it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go

This video essay about the subject is really good.

The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan, Stalin Did | Foreign Policy Magazine

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Hiroshima is a Lie | CounterPunch

Weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan had sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan’s codes and read the telegram. Truman referred in his diary to “the telegram from removed Emperor asking for peace.” President Truman had been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs fell, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor. So, the desire to drop the bombs may have lengthened the war. The bombs did not shorten the war.

there’s a pretty reasonable moral angle here about the utilitarianism behind that argument if they’re not going to budge on the ‘nukes saved lives’ thing which is already a contentious assertion, if you want to think about that.

i’m not sure exactly how one is meant to quantify ‘lives saved’ or even be able to conclude that the nukes were a net ‘save’ in lives, and obviously part of that calculus is making a value judgement on the lives of american soldiers vs japanese civilians that should be pretty problematic if you examine that.

a lot of other people have stressed the historical reasons why the nukes were bad which are in my view closer to the truth, but again, if they won’t budge on that, then yea.

if they decide to push back on revisionist historical arguments they’re likely going to have a few of these arguments, since this subject has been covered at length:

1. The USSR wasn’t a credible threat to the Home Islands and didn’t have the capabilities to launch any major amphibious assaults. The RKKA occupied the Kurils, but they weren’t anywhere near capable of invading more well defended areas.

2. Alternatives to forcing a surrender with the bomb would have caused more deaths

3. Domestic pressure to end the War ASAP rather than intimidating the USSR was the main goal

4. The IJA was so dead-set on fighting only the nukes could have forced a conditional surrender without mass casualties in an invasion

note that 2. and 4. are speculative. relying on predicted consequences to vindicate an atrocity in the present feels like a form of moral escapism. you’re avoiding reckoning with the concrete reality and human toll of one’s actions by appealing to abstract hypotheticals, it’s very dubious morally and we have empirical evidence that the US armed forces didn’t fully buy point 4 either.

you can chalk it up to usual military dissent or whatever, but i think it’s worth noting that it’s the air force officers who were most in favour.

Nimitz, USN: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

MacArthur, US Army: “My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender.”

Eisenhower, SHAEF: “I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

Leahy, USN: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Curtis LeMay, USAAF: “I think it was a wise decision, and I’d do it again under similar circumstances.” and “There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.”

big proponents of the bombings other than LeMay were Marshall, who was pretty much the architect of western allied strategy and was certainly thinking of post-war soviet containment, manhattan project director leslie groves who needed to justify the whole venture, and generally the political/institutional side of this decision-making process. the air force had a vested interest in demonstrating the power of a-bombs, that would justify more funding to their end. obviously you can argue the opposite, that nimitz and leahy obviously would want to play up the effects of naval blockade and their absolute shattering of the IJN in 1944, but army staff holding that they were also liable to surrender is kind of the tiebreaker here, especially given a lot of the narrative around the atomic bombings is based on the speculation of how costly a home islands amphibious invasion would be.

i would personally speculate that either the comments from various officers saying they privately disliked the bombings were either covering their asses post-war or more damningly an example of groupthink in the american decision making process where they all assumed everybody else supported the a-bomb and therefore kept their dissent down. eisenhower was the only one other than leahy from this group that actually expressed their opposition, but this is kind of all a detour from the main point that: a) the military side of the decision making process probably understood better the likelihood of japanese capitulation b) the military side did not push nearly as hard for the a-bomb as the civilian side

it’s also not particularly important that the RKKA wasn’t capable of threatening amphibious operations since the significance of the USSR to Imperial Japan was as a neutral party to negotiate peace. you could also argue that the kwantung army was mostly underequipped, understaffed and undertrained at this point in the war but it’s excessively revisionist to claim that august storm wasn’t a significant degradation in the IJA’s ability to sustain and prosecute a land war.

i think the problematic moral implications of point 3 are clear enough.

I have to admit that I don’t see much difference between annihilating cities with nuclear bombs and annihilating cities with conventional firebombing.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey was a comprehensive investigation of all the effects of the allies bombing missions during WWII, both in terms of physical damage and whether they achieved their strategic goals, conducted in the immediate aftermath of the war. With regards to the Pacific theatre it concluded that;

“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Pretty sure the actual reality of the situation was that they didn’t built the bombs to not use them. If they hadn’t dropped them on japan they would have found some other target later.