I think if you win a battle suffering twelve thousand dead while killing seventy thousand plus of the enemy, that's an overwhelming victory going purely by the grim arithmetic of war.
Would Japan surrender conditionally without an invasion or atomic bombs?
- Thread starter LeX
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I've seen it argued that way. Also seen Buckner and several other leaders and other aspects criticized for not doing better. One ongoing debate revolves around not executing a plan to outflank the Shuri Line with a second amphibious attack.
My personal experience with the Japanese is nothing was official until it was a done deal. Until then senior leaders made opaque remarks and second tier staffers, drew on that to direct third or fourth level under secretaries of mangers to work on seeming disjointed details, until abruptly consensus was reached and the top man signed off on whatever it was they were putting together. Most of the Japanese army officers or civilian managers I worked with were equally baffled by American management methods. The one Japanese I was able to communicate with at a reasonable level was fairly open with me. He told me the Japanese regarded American management as insane, a PoV I've run across with others.
In any case, official or not, the concept, or proposals, or conditions for a peace contained in the Swiss and the Soviet initiatives were far from anything the Allies might have agreed to.
I agree, In some sectors of Asian business you see a similar thing. Each side enters a meeting and the senior person on each side says bas nothing, until the deal is more or less worked out or it implodes. Then the senior member says something that either concludes the deal or has everyone depart.
I have never figured out exactly why it often works like this as in my cultural background the senior members do the negotiations and the juniou members just provide support or details when called on.
I suspect it is a matter of face saving in that the senior members can be seen to kower themselves to negotiate and they don’t want to risk losing face if the negotiations don’t work out. So they lets lower level staff handle everything until it is more or less worked out.
So it is entirely possible that the negotiations was being handled by lower level staff but that does not necessarily mean that they were going against the wishes of those higher up. It is all a matter of plausi Deniability and saying face.
And WW2 was hell on earth in a way that is hard to comprehend today as was any major war before that. So while we today would be appalled at 12000 Kia in a war much less a single battle the reality is that in an all out war between peers you will get a lot higher casualties then we have seen in the past 80 years So yes in a battle that requires you to kill 70 + THOUSAND enemies, losing ”only” 12 thousand is a victory. Assuming you end up in control of the island or whatever you were fighting over afterwards. Yes the casualties are horrendous but… war is horrendous. It is just that we have not fought a major war in generations. And no even as significant as Vietnam and Korea were compared to major wars they were more of a side show. Horrible for those involved but not of a scale to compare with say the World wars, or the Civil war, or the Napoleonic wars or what have you.
I have never figured out exactly why it often works like this as in my cultural background the senior members do the negotiations and the juniou members just provide support or details when called on.
I suspect it is a matter of face saving in that the senior members can be seen to kower themselves to negotiate and they don’t want to risk losing face if the negotiations don’t work out. So they lets lower level staff handle everything until it is more or less worked out.
So it is entirely possible that the negotiations was being handled by lower level staff but that does not necessarily mean that they were going against the wishes of those higher up. It is all a matter of plausi Deniability and saying face.
And WW2 was hell on earth in a way that is hard to comprehend today as was any major war before that. So while we today would be appalled at 12000 Kia in a war much less a single battle the reality is that in an all out war between peers you will get a lot higher casualties then we have seen in the past 80 years So yes in a battle that requires you to kill 70 + THOUSAND enemies, losing ”only” 12 thousand is a victory. Assuming you end up in control of the island or whatever you were fighting over afterwards. Yes the casualties are horrendous but… war is horrendous. It is just that we have not fought a major war in generations. And no even as significant as Vietnam and Korea were compared to major wars they were more of a side show. Horrible for those involved but not of a scale to compare with say the World wars, or the Civil war, or the Napoleonic wars or what have you.
You know I always find scenarios about Japan surrendering before the atomic bombings or Operation Downfall. Without the destructive power of the atomic bombs being used on Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or Kokura for that matter as it was the original target), so you'd have more people alive from those two cities. Some of them may become prominent figures in post-war Japanese politics and government. On the other, the term "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki" will not invoke horrors of the atomic bomb.
But without the atomic bombs being used on Japan, it makes me think the U.S. would use it on the Red Army if the 1948 Berlin Crisis went hot or even in Korea in 1950-1951.
But without the atomic bombs being used on Japan, it makes me think the U.S. would use it on the Red Army if the 1948 Berlin Crisis went hot or even in Korea in 1950-1951.
Freshift
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We can see it wasn't about plausible deniability because Tōkyō was fully committed its diplomatic efforts to the Soviet Union mediation, ignoring oppositions from its ambassador to Moscow who wasn't delusional. With Switzerland, there was no such dedication or vocal dissent against the idea, because it simply wasn't an idea. These individuals who tried to negotiate through Switzerland were not only disconnected from each others but disconnected from Tōkyō, working on their own and out of their authority. It's the case of Gekokujō, thus it should be compared to the junior officers during the Invasion of Manchuria, not the working-level managers within the consensus-building decision-making process, which is indeed a thing, but totally unrelated
Exactly the Japanese have ZERO ways of making the Allies accept anything. They were still operating under the mindset that the 'weak and decadent' Westerners would quail at heavy casualties and go "Okay that's enough of that." The Japanese completely underestimated the will of the Allies on the whole and the US in particular and the whole idea of 'if we kill a fuckton of them they'll back down and leave us alone' is just a pipe dream. And now that the Soviets are in too, they care less about casualties than the Japanese do so killing a fuckton of Soviet soldiers just makes their general go "We have reserves."
Also don't forget that the original 'terms' such as they were for Japan were basically "We've won, we keep what we still have, no occupation." etc etc were insane, and not terms that anyone would ever accept.
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By that point the US had built a lot more atomic bomb, during the Korean war the US had a few hundred bombs while the USSR had something like 20.
Yeah. While America's ability to use atomics in '48 was pretty poor, had war broken out in 1948 they still probably would've done their best to fix those problems as quickly as they could and try to use them ASAP. American post-war military strategy documents were extremely explicit in it's reliance on atomic weaponry from 1947 onward and even extremely implicit in 1946...
You seemed to imply that the bombs used on Japan were the only ones the US had or one of the few it had.
The ones just got from the presses,mass production was coming, the bombs were Japan easy exit otl
I was told the reason why the U.S. did not want to use nukes in 1948 because everyone saw the devastating power of the bomb in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear radiation was understood. Remember in most Operation Downfall scenarios, many mentioned that the U.S. would have used nuclear weapons to clear beachhead while landing troops where the bomb was used. That would mean all those marines or soldiers would be fighting in a irradiated landscape without means for protection since there were not much NBC suits in 1945-46.
If the U.S. used bombs in 1948, that would leave Europe an uninhabited wasteland.
Cue by 1950-52, the USSR already had nukes so using one over the Yalu would have been provocative if MacArthur got his way. It would have provoked the Soviets into thundering into West Berlin and invading the rest of West Germany.
I also read that the early USAF only had a handful of nuclear-capable B-29s and B-36s in 1948. Of course, that would mean there will be modifications made into those existing B-29s and B-36s to start carrying nuclear weapons.