As I understand, there were overtures for conditional Japanese surrender prior to August 1945, but they were not deemed politically feasible. With 110,000 dead service members in the Pacific war, any US president who demanded less than total victory over Japan would be politically ruined. I’m curious of your views on the domestic politics of the decision making process.
You touch on this in the articles—one wonders how much hand-wringing that generation of US military war planners actually did over the firebombing and nuclear bombs on Japan.
It was only 5-6 years later when air strikes and bombing of North Korea were even more devastating than that of Japan: some 15% of their population, according to later remarks by LeMay, which works out to be 1-2 million people, died as a result and there was no pretext of an mass-casualty mainland invasion under consideration and most of the bombing happened after the war has settled into statement at the end of 1950. We bombed them into the Stone Age simply because we could, eventually running out of targets. If the morality of inflicting mass-death on the Japanese was something American leadership agonized over, they seemed to have gotten over those qualms in Korea.
Excellent write-up!
As I understand, there were overtures for conditional Japanese surrender prior to August 1945, but they were not deemed politically feasible. With 110,000 dead service members in the Pacific war, any US president who demanded less than total victory over Japan would be politically ruined. I’m curious of your views on the domestic politics of the decision making process.
You touch on this in the articles—one wonders how much hand-wringing that generation of US military war planners actually did over the firebombing and nuclear bombs on Japan.
It was only 5-6 years later when air strikes and bombing of North Korea were even more devastating than that of Japan: some 15% of their population, according to later remarks by LeMay, which works out to be 1-2 million people, died as a result and there was no pretext of an mass-casualty mainland invasion under consideration and most of the bombing happened after the war has settled into statement at the end of 1950. We bombed them into the Stone Age simply because we could, eventually running out of targets. If the morality of inflicting mass-death on the Japanese was something American leadership agonized over, they seemed to have gotten over those qualms in Korea.
Thanks - the next piece (which will go up shortly) will deal with the circumstances surrounding the surrender. And good point about Korea.