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Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

boston.com

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Re: Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

#41

Post by hackuser »

yourapostasy wrote: post #38
hackuser wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If killing large numbers of civilians does not have a military impact, then what, Wilson asks, is the purpose of keeping nuclear weapons?" I just was reading about this [1]. Unguided weapons miss their targets, almost always. As a result you need to mass together and fire large numbers of them to hit even one target with any reliability. Also, because of the large numbers needed and the need to fire them near the…

I hypothesize that the ongoing refinement of modern guidance will have a far greater future impact upon warfare than is generally currently recognized. The logical direction to take this refinement is not just enhancing the metre-level precision today to centimetre-grade precision, but also high-precision remote ID. When you possess the capability to real-time ID and track a single individual human target from tens,…

You would find the the linked report in my prior comment very worthwhile, I think (and FWIW, I understand it is well respected in the defense community). In it I learned that sensor (and communication) networks to detect and ID targets have been viewed as integral to guided munitions for decades -- the networks and munitions are depicted as one system.

Re: Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

#42

Post by saryant »

rhino369 wrote: post #33
jihokoo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article also poses the idea that its unlikely that the U.S. would surrender a war after a city was destroyed. Article also gives the example of UK not giving up after German bombing in WW2.

Would America surrender if SF or NYC was nuked? No. Would America surrender if we were essentially defeated, blockaded, and the enemy were bombing our cities with impunity? Of course we would. It isn't like America just snuck two nukes into Japan. It had totally defeated the Imperial Navy and was essentially bombing Japan without any resistance. The comparison between Japan in August 45 and UK during the Blitz is jus…

The Imperial Navy was so utterly defeated and out of resources that they were sending pilots on kamikaze missions to save fuel. Virtually all training had been suspended in the final months of the war because the Japanese had no access to oil. This is why their initial thrust in the war was south to the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies (the history of the Royal Dutch Shell facilities in the region is an incredible but largely untold story in WWII).

Depriving the Japanese of oil was an early and effective tactic of the American Navy in the Pacific. The Japanese made a faulty assumption that they could defend supply lines from the Southern Zone to the Japan. In many ways, this was the downfall of Japanese naval forces in WWII. The Japanese also didn't realize that the US and Britain had long since cracked their codes, both military and diplomatic, and even when the Germans told the Japanese their codes had been compromised, they refused to believe it!

Quoting from Daniel Yergin's The Prize:

> Of Japan's total wartime steel merchant shipping, some 86 percent was sunk during the conflict and another 9 percent so seriously damaged as to be out of action by the time the war ended.

The Allies were sinking Japanese oil tankers faster than the Japanese could build new ones!

Japanese defeat in WWII can't be assigned to any single cause, but the vastly superior supply chain of the US Navy in the Pacific and the enormous petroleum production capabilities of America is surely up there.

Re: Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

#43

Post by comeonnow42 »

The comparisons made in this article and comments below seem to all but forget one major fact that completely changes everything. That is, Atomic bombs are NOT the same as carpet bombing say Tokyo. Why? RADIATION. If the major cities and sites of Japan suffered a disaster due conventional bombing The thinking would be – afterward we rebuild. You don't think that when your left with a radiation zone. So the theory that atomic bombs would have carried the same level of concern due to simply looking at leveled cities and that carpet bombing does the same as nukes is short sighted to say the least.

Re: Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

#44

Post by cmdkeen »

rdl wrote: post #17

"Why/how did WW1 end" is an interesting question, too. Aside from cursory school classes and then some reading, I've never really looked into it in great detail. The elementary school version is "tanks broke the stalemate, and the US/UK rolled through to victory", but it was a lot more nuanced than that, with internal revolutions in multiple countries. WW1 clearly could have kept going for some extended period longer…

Quite the opposite. Tanks were a decidedly underwhelming weapon due to the initial use being squandered by the British - though it was part of the push to relieve pressure on Verdun and thus keep France in the war.

The real lesson from tanks is the impression on the German psyche which led to Manstein, Guderian and Rommel, the concept of Blitzkreig and the fall of France in 1940. Post war tank warfare on the allied side was (generally) very staid comapred to German thinking. Though there were some good thinkers, included Liddell-Hart who showed you could take tanks through the Ardennes...

WW1 ended because Germany exhausted herself utterly in the failed Spring offensive of 1918. The UK's blockade of Germany was having horrific consequences on the home front. Meanwhile the advances that were made in Spring 1918 by Germans led to them capturing lots of supplies from the newly entered USA, thus undermining their morale further.

Re: Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

#45

Post by [deleted] »

walshemj wrote: post #20
Someone wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trinity test was in july 1945, two months after the surrender of Germany. We don't know whether atomic bombs would have been used on, say, Berlin or the Ruhr area (maybe even tactically, to speed up the allied advance in the west), but I think the USA would have used one, if only to send a message to the soviets.

That's what they where designed for and if d day had stalled they would have been used in the rhur. There is also strong evidence that Stalin wanted to get to berlin first to grab some of the German nuclear materiel in Berlin

[deleted]

Re: Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

#46

Post by PythonicAlpha »

mc32 wrote: post #39
rhino369 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I think there is a big open issue about the difference between the US policy on strategic bombing in Japan and against Germany. US bombing in Germany was designed to specifically attack industry. They flew during daytime, despite that leading to much higher causalities among their crews, and used bomb targets. It was the UK that firebombed Dresden during night without bothering to aim at specific targets. T…

I don't think there was a racial aspect in the sense that Germans were seen as more 'us'. We demonized both Germans and Japanese pretty similarly. There were Americans of German ancestry who changed their surnames to avoid discrimination and unpleasantness from other non German whites. I think we started firebombing Japan when it became difficult to tell industry apart from the general pop as they moved factories int…

Still, I think, that Japan directly attacked the US at Pearl Harbor made a big difference. Germany was also seen as having a bad regime with war criminals, but they started the war with the US not with such a carnage. So, I think politicians and parts of the US people in this time saw Japan as the worse "beast".

Re: Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

#47

Post by cmdkeen »

rhino369 wrote: post #36
mc32 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were used on Japan and not Germany because they barely were okayed for use a few weeks prior to their detonation over enemy territory. The Germans had no compunction about dropping them on us had they had a working one so I don't think we would have had any issue deploying one over Germany --just like we had little issue firebombing Dresden. At the time saw both Japan and Germany as mortal enemies and would have…

Actually, I think there is a big open issue about the difference between the US policy on strategic bombing in Japan and against Germany. US bombing in Germany was designed to specifically attack industry. They flew during daytime, despite that leading to much higher causalities among their crews, and used bomb targets. It was the UK that firebombed Dresden during night without bothering to aim at specific targets. T…

That's just rubbish. US bombing missions were not in any way targetted strikes compared to the UK's night raids. Have a look at what was achieved by the British pathfinder system guiding first Mosquitos then specialist heavy bombers to target mark the main raids.

The USAAF conducted firebombing of German cities, notably Hamburg.

Re: Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

#48

Post by the_watcher »

Interesting. Perhaps I need to actually read Hasegawa's work, but this piece skips over a pretty important possibility (to me): that while the atomic bombs did not, on their own, convince the Japanese to surrender, they may have been major factors in the Soviets deciding to enter the war on the side of the Allies.

Re: Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

#49

Post by alricb »

cmdkeen wrote: post #44
rdl wrote: post #17

"Why/how did WW1 end" is an interesting question, too. Aside from cursory school classes and then some reading, I've never really looked into it in great detail. The elementary school version is "tanks broke the stalemate, and the US/UK rolled through to victory", but it was a lot more nuanced than that, with internal revolutions in multiple countries. WW1 clearly could have kept going for some extended period longer…

Quite the opposite. Tanks were a decidedly underwhelming weapon due to the initial use being squandered by the British - though it was part of the push to relieve pressure on Verdun and thus keep France in the war. The real lesson from tanks is the impression on the German psyche which led to Manstein, Guderian and Rommel, the concept of Blitzkreig and the fall of France in 1940. Post war tank warfare on the allied s…

Obligatory anti-Lidell-Hart comment:

He was an idiot. There is no such thing as "Blitzkrieg", just dumb luck and huge mistakes on the French's part.

Re: Why did Japan surrender? (2011)

#50

Post by iand »

the_watcher wrote: post #48

Interesting. Perhaps I need to actually read Hasegawa's work, but this piece skips over a pretty important possibility (to me): that while the atomic bombs did not, on their own, convince the Japanese to surrender, they may have been major factors in the Soviets deciding to enter the war on the side of the Allies.

You mean enter the war against Japan? USSR were already on the Allies side fighting the Nazis in Europe.
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