The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan

Did the Soviet Union make a serious strategic error in declaring war against Japan when it did?

Remember, we're taking it as a given that Japan surrendered to the Allies because of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it surrendered to the USA because it for very good reason preferred USA reconstruction to USSR reconstruction, in a way that mirrors whom German troops very strongly preferred to surrender to.

What if, instead, the USSR had simply decided to bide its time?

Some results:

1) Two rivals would continue to claw at each other for months, draining massive amounts of blood and treasure.

2) In the meantime, the Allies would be forced to have at least some number of fewer troops in Europe than they did in actuality. I don't find it plausible that the Soviet Union would see it in their interests to, say, invade France and Italy. But it would give the Soviet Union a much stronger negotiating position, and a United States devoting its resources to crushing Japan would be a United States not focused on rebuilding Europe. And a vacuum of power in the more developed parts of Europe would have been very tasty for Stalin.

3) On the con side, the USA would likely end up in a more powerful position in East Asia, if it won, decreasing Communist influence from China to Indonesia and Vietnam to India.

3.5) If the USA lost (let's define that as the cessation of hostilities while Japan managed to hold on to many of it's earlier imperial acquisitions), the USSR would have an embittered, genocidal, and highly authoritarian state with the capacity for total war on its border.

4) Also on the con side, Soviet influence would have been quite limited in Manchuria and northern Korea. The main base of operations for Mao in the Chinese Civil War would have been limited.

5) The USSR wouldn't have regained some positions in the Far East that it imagined were legitimately Russian. It also wouldn't have been able to uproot the large amount of industry that the Japanese had invested in Manchukuo.

6) Violating the Potsdam agreement that required the USSR to invade by August 9 would have decreased trust in the Soviet Union on the American side.

7) All those cons acknowledged, all of them except 6) could have been mitigated by the Soviet Union dragging its feet for six months or even a year more, drawing out and sabotaging back channel negotiations with Japan as much as possible, and then invading at the very end.

7.5) If it waited longer, Japan's willingness to surrender might have evaporated, leaving more time to get a full scale invasion of the whole of Korea, northern Japan, and a wider area of China going. That's on top of allowing for more preparation time, which may or may not have been useful.

Thoughts, HN? If anything, I think this indicates that the Soviet entering when it did wasn't the main factor that ended the war, because from the Soviet strategic perspective dragging the war out as much as possible seems very preferable to what ended up happening.

This kind of "history" starts with the assumption that all the sources, or at least huge majority of them, are manipulated or downright fiction. It then tells you that a) the sources were manipulated by X for Y and with support of Z (with names ofc); b) there were other sources, that were not manipulated. The latter are mostly unprovable, because there is no way to cross-check them and no way of tracking their history, yet they are believed in above all doubt. "Revisionists" then say that they can "learn" everything, "all the truth", from the manipulated, untrusted resources they previously dismissed and then they become silent for a year, during which they try to get access to those documents. Shortly after they have it, the fun starts - every other week there is some revisionist who presents a "proof" that such-and-such lied, murdered, stole and so on. That's only a beginning though, because they soon want to demolish statues and change the street names, fire people from work (from police, army, all the other public services). Then the elections come and suddenly they disappear.

Well, at least that's how revisionists looked like in my country. The article is not that bad for sure :)

Unless "unintentionally" can be fudged to morally sanction wiping out a city with a nuclear weapon today, I don't see the point. Maybe I slightly exaggerated the moral repugnance of society today towards civilian death. But the difference between moral attitudes toward civilian death today and civilian death in WW2 is so dramatic, a little bit of exaggeration does very little to weaken the point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731