[quote=“bigduke6”]Hot air. No fact.
Check out the Potsdam Declaration. The Japanese were given am ultimatum to surrender. Did not take it.[/quote]
Ok, let’s ask Leahy (Chief of Staff to Roosevelt and Truman),[1] Eisenhower,[2] Hoover,[3] McArthur,[4] McCloy (Assistant to the Secretary of War),[5] Nitze,[6] Spaatz (in charge of air operations),[7] and Clarke.[8] Source (extensive primary source materials, in which these quotations can be found, here and here).
You were saying?
What about them? No one is arguing that they weren’t made, I’m simply pointing out they weren’t even necessary.
[1] Leah, ‘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 because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.’
[2] Eisenhower, ‘During his 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’.’
[3] Hoover, ‘I told MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.’
[4] Norman Cousins (consultant to MacArthur), ‘MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.’
[5] McCloy, ‘When the war was over I arrived at this conclusion after talking with a number of Japanese officials who had been closely associated with the decision of the then Japanese government, to reject the ultimatum, as it was presented. I believe we missed the opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender, completely satisfactory to us, without the necessity of dropping the bombs.’
[6] Nitze, ‘While I was working on the new plan of air attack… {I} concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945.’, ‘Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese government, that a US invasion of the islands would have been necessary.’
[7] Spaatz, ‘If we were to go ahead with the plans for a conventional invasion with ground and naval forces, I believe the Japanese thought that they could inflict very heavy casualties on us and possibly as a result get better surrender terms. On the other hand if they knew or were told that no invasion would take place [and] that bombing would continue until the surrender, why I think the surrender would have taken place just about the same time.’
[8] Clarke, ‘when we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.’
