No one knows why anyone does anything.
Why did I choose these socks today?
Trinity +1: the Decision to Use the Bomb, 17 July-6 August, 1945
The truth of the matter was that it was a very complex issue, an easily misunderstood tapestry of circumstance and consequence. The major issue of course was that the Japanese would not surrender, and that there would be “fanatical resistance” once the invasion of the Japanese islands had begun. The battle of Okinawa had just been fought—it was a horrible confrontation taking 12,5000 American lives and more than 1000,000 Japanese , demonstrating that even in impossible circumstances that the Japanese simply would not surrender (unconditionally). This is just one instance—there are many others, not the least of which was t he recent firebombing of Tokyo, taking 150,000 lives. Air strikes in general seemed to not make a difference in the will of Japan to fight—as was demonstrated again and again in the British and American bombing of Germany—as was further demonstrated in General Curtis LeMay’s and General Hap Arnold’s 60-city attack in the May-August span. The thought was that if there was an invasion that it could well cost the U.S. 1000,000+ casualties and would be completely devastating to Japan.
Something odd (in a US-centric way) going on with the numbers — 12,5000 and 1000,000 correlate to 12,500 and 100,000, respectively, when I compare to other accounts of the battle of Okinawa.
via Physics Buzz
Hiroshima was payback for Pearl Harbor, Nagasaki was interest on the cumulative debt. The US had spent an obscenely huge amount to obtain two bombs. Unless somebody did something clever to justfy the expenditure, (1) a whole lot of folks were going to jail, and (2) there would be no private sector massive profits to be stolen from government spending.
WWII casualties as such were never a serious logistic concern. Most of the US was an agricultural backwater. Agricultural societies always have massive excesses of young males with no economic destinies. 1000 years of European history sum to massive lethality military set pieces with no change in national boundaries. The Middle East unpleasantness is 300+ million meat puppets living in desert suitable to sustain less than 1/3 their numbers. It’s way too late to introduce contraception.
I think Uncle Al’s assessment is pessimistic bordering on libel. Not only did pre- and post- war middle America possess a great potential for economic development, an incredible fraction of men from the entire socioeconomic cross-section of soceity were fighting. The Baby Boom happened for a reason. And obviously as political leaders and generals both were human beings, they wanted to minimize casualties. Good grief, even the Nazi generals tried to preserve the lives of their soldiers to the best of their abilities while following Hitler’s near-suicidal orders.
The problem with that quotation you provide is that it is not supported by facts. Specifically, Japan *was* ready to surrender; it just was not ready to surrender unconditionally. And, after we had used both of the weapons we had available without waiting another month or two, we quietly agreed to a *conditional* surrender. More importantly,there is no contemporary evidence that Truman ever was presented with a specific human cost for invasion, while there is evidence that the Army Air Force had tried to convince the Army that invasion was not needed. The numbers that were misquoted in that article were written by Truman many years later, in his memoirs.
And, furthermore, we knew it because we had been reading the Japanese diplomatic messages directing their ambassador to get the Soviets to act as an intermediary. One of the Rhodes books goes into this in a lot of detail.
There is good reason to believe that the first bomb was used to give political cover to keep the Emperor (because of Pearl Harbor, as Uncle Al noted) and that the second one was used to get the attention of the Soviets and keep them from partitioning Japan.
I disagree with Uncle Al on casualties. Although we would have needed to lose 10 times as many men to match what France experienced in WW I, don’t forget that the US has huge isolationist tendencies and simply did not want to get into WW II. (And still does. Remember how GW Bush ran on an isolationist platform, opposed to Kosovo and the intervention in Somalia against Al Qaeda, in 2000?) The pressure to end it was huge, particularly among men who were on ships leaving Europe for the Pacific after already serving overseas longer than any deployment in Iraq today.