[Regina]

The USS Indianapolis is sunk shortly after midnight on July 30th by a Japanese submarine..............no one told the Navy either?

[Lemmy]

Regina Regina:

If the cemeteteries aren't empty then the war was still on.

Of course it was still on because the Americans chose it to be still on. That's the whole point. They continued the hostilities, including the nuking, long after the Japanese had any desire to continue fighting.

Regina Regina:

The USS Indianapolis is sunk shortly after midnight on July 30th by a Japanese submarine..............no one told the Navy either?

Of course not. You don't quit fighting, even when you've surrendered, until the person you're surrendering to accepts it, do you?

[Regina]

Lemmy Lemmy:

Regina Regina:

If the cemeteteries aren't empty then the war was still on.

Of course it was still on because the Americans chose it to be still on. That's the whole point. They continued the hostilities, including the nuking, long after the Japanese had any desire to continue fighting.

Regina Regina:

The USS Indianapolis is sunk shortly after midnight on July 30th by a Japanese submarine..............no one told the Navy either?

Of course not. You don't quit fighting, even when you've surrendered, until the person you're surrendering to accepts it, do you?

Unfortunately you fail to understand that the Japanese military had no desire to quit, even after it was decided to surrender by the Emperor. Hence the coup attempt. Could you not apply your defeated logic on the European theatre as well?

[Regina]

Lemmy Lemmy:

Of course not. You don't quit fighting, even when you've surrendered, until the person you're surrendering to accepts it, do you?

Exactly.........which would make it August 14-15 1945 or when Emperor Hirohito issues a radio broadcast announcing Japan's surrender.

[Lemmy]

Regina Regina:

Unfortunately you fail to understand that the Japanese military had no desire to quit, even after it was decided to surrender by the Emperor.

There's an element of that, sure. But it was much more the Americans than the Japanese that prolonged things beyond the point of "Uncle", which was in June.

Regina Regina:

Hence the coup attempt. Could you not apply your defeated logic on the European theatre as well?

I suppose you could speculated along those lines. But the White House documents that were declassified don't speak about whether the Nazis agreed to surrender before the official announcement. They do tell us that the Japanese wanted an end to fighting in June.

[ShepherdsDog]

$1:

Could you not apply your defeated logic on the European theatre as well?

Using the same logic couldn't we say that the Germans were finished in 1944....or when his generals started trying to off him? Japan's military ran the show, not their civilian government

[Regina]

They wanted to end fighting on their terms and not the terms of the Potsdam........which was unconditional surrender. There's a difference between "being defeated" and "defeated." War is never over till the enemy is defeated or surrenders to the terms of the victor. There were also more Allied countries besides the US, therefore Whitehouse notes really don't speak for the rest of the world.

[andyt]

Lemmy's info does seem to raise the question tho whether the bombings were necessary to prevent having to invade Japan. How much was Japan still a threat at that point, could the US have just waited them out?

[Regina]

andyt andyt:

Lemmy's info does seem to raise the question tho whether the bombings were necessary to prevent having to invade Japan. How much was Japan still a threat at that point, could the US have just waited them out?

Not an option. You never give the enemy time to regroup, rearm and dig in and you always attack the weakest point.

[commanderkai]

andyt andyt:

Lemmy's info does seem to raise the question tho whether the bombings were necessary to prevent having to invade Japan. How much was Japan still a threat at that point, could the US have just waited them out?

Yeah this wasn't really an option. Certainly some elements of the US military (I think it was the US Army, the US Navy favored invasion. Imagine that ) thought it would be better to conduct a massive blockade of Japan and starve them to unconditional surrender, but the resources necessary to conduct such an operation, especially with Japanese willingness to conduct suicide attacks on US ships, would still make it a very bloody situation.

Plus, putting a blockade on Japan would have been exceptionally costly to the Japanese population as well.

[Regina]

Lemmy Lemmy:

Proportionality should be a guideline in war.

I prefer to use the "Economy of Effort" which leads to defeat. In other words why would anyone risk 1,000 bomber crews and aircraft when 1 will do a better job? Or 1 aircraft rather than 100,000 troops.

[andyt]

Here's Eisenhower etc:

$1:

When he was informed in mid-July 1945 by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the decision to use the atomic bomb, General Dwight Eisenhower was deeply troubled. He disclosed his strong reservations about using the new weapon in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313):

During his [Stimson's] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face."

"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing ... I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon," Eisenhower said in 1963.

Shortly after "V-J Day," the end of the Pacific war, Brig. General Bonnie Fellers summed up in a memo for General MacArthur: "Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan's unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either these events took place."

Similarly, Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, later commented:

It is my opinion that the use of the 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 because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

[Regina]

...........and the opinion of the rest of the Allies was?

[Thanos]

None of the alleged talk of the Japanese being willing to surrender apparently got through to the planners of Operation Downfall because they were expecting Allied dead in a direct invasion of the home islands to range from 250,000 to over 800,000 servicemen killed. And they had every reason to believe this after the fanaticism the Japanese had displayed with the kamikaze attacks than had been going on for the entire year prior to the atomic bombings.

$1:

Because the U.S. military planners assumed "that operations in this area will be opposed not only by the available organized military forces of the Empire, but also by a fanatically hostile population",[11] high casualties were thought to be inevitable, but nobody knew with certainty how high. Several people made estimates, but they varied widely in numbers, assumptions, and purposes, which included advocating for and against the invasion. Afterwards, they were reused in the debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Casualty estimates were based on the experience of the preceding campaigns, drawing different lessons:

In a letter sent to Gen. Curtis LeMay from Gen. Lauris Norstad, when LeMay assumed command of the B-29 force on Guam, Norstad told LeMay that if an invasion took place, it would cost the US "half a million" dead.[43]
In a study done by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April, the figures of 7.45 casualties/1,000 man-days and 1.78 fatalities/1,000 man-days were developed. This implied that a 90-day Olympic campaign would cost 456,000 casualties, including 109,000 dead or missing. If Coronet took another 90 days, the combined cost would be 1,200,000 casualties, with 267,000 fatalities.[44]

A study done by Adm. Nimitz's staff in May estimated 49,000 U.S casualties in the first 30 days, including 5,000 at sea.[45] A study done by General MacArthur's staff in June estimated 23,000 US casualties in the first 30 days and 125,000 after 120 days.[46] When these figures were questioned by General Marshall, MacArthur submitted a revised estimate of 105,000, in part by deducting wounded men able to return to duty.[47]

In a conference with President Truman on June 18, Marshall, taking the Battle of Luzon as the best model for Olympic, thought the Americans would suffer 31,000 casualties in the first 30 days (and ultimately 20% of Japanese casualties, which implied a total of 70,000 casualties).[48] Adm. Leahy, more impressed by the Battle of Okinawa, thought the American forces would suffer a 35% casualty rate (implying an ultimate toll of 268,000).[49] Admiral King thought that casualties in the first 30 days would fall between Luzon and Okinawa, i.e., between 31,000 and 41,000.[49] Of these estimates, only Nimitz's included losses of the forces at sea, though kamikazes had inflicted 1.78 fatalities per kamikaze pilot in the Battle of Okinawa,[50] and troop transports off Kyūshū would have been much more exposed.

A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson's staff by William Shockley estimated that conquering Japan would cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000–800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities. The key assumption was large-scale participation by civilians in the defense of Japan.[1]

Outside the government, well-informed civilians were also making guesses. Kyle Palmer, war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, said half a million to a million Americans would die by the end of the war. Herbert Hoover, in a memorandums submitted to Truman and Stimson, also estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 fatalities, and those were believed to be conservative estimates; but it is not known if Hoover discussed these specific figures in his meetings with Truman. The chief of the Army Operations division thought them "entirely too high" under "our present plan of campaign."[51]

The Battle of Okinawa ran up 72,000 US casualties in 82 days, of whom 12,510 were killed or missing. (This is conservative, because it excludes several thousand US soldiers who died after the battle indirectly, from their wounds.) The entire island of Okinawa is 464 sq mi (1,200 km2). If the US casualty rate during the invasion of Japan had been only 5% as high per unit area as it was at Okinawa, the US would still have lost 297,000 soldiers (killed or missing).

Nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the casualties resulting from the invasion of Japan. To the present date, all the American military casualties of the 60 years following the end of World War II, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars, have not exceeded that number. In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock.[52] There are so many in surplus that combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan are able to keep Purple Hearts on-hand for immediate award to soldiers wounded on the field.[52]

The atomic bombings saved more lives, both Allied and Japanese, than would have been lost if a conventional bombing campaign and an amphibious invasion had been undertaken. And, with practically 100% of American combat strength committed to attacking Japan, Western Europe would have been left wide open to Soviet invasion in the absence of those troops, unless someone is actually willing to state that Stalin was a trustworthy ally and would never have done anything naughty like that.

As far as I'm concerned the worth of the atomic bombings was indisputably proven a long time ago, and no amount of revisionist history from the tin-hatted likes of Gar Alperovitz is worth discussing by anyone even slightly informed of the reality of the situation. This type of mendacity deserves about as much respect as the 9/11 Truthers do, which is to say absolutely none.

[Lemmy]

Captain Hyperbole. Alperovitz is controversial , sure, but he's not a kook. He's a professor of history at the University of Maryland, not some crazy, pseudo-academic institution. His work is peer reviewd. Revisionist history isn't a bad thing when new evidence dispels long-held inaccuracies. And I seriously doubt you've ever even heard of Gar Alperovitz before you Googled his name today.