You’d think it would, given Japan is an island nation importing near ninety percent of needed raw materials. But the cold, hard reality is that the US Navy had Japan under a near airtight blockade for at least a year prior to the bombings, and there was no sign of surrender. The US submariner force was infinitely more effective than the far better known German u-boats. We sunk the biggest aircraft carrier ever built by the Japanese in it’s own harbor. Small fishing boats trying to bring supplies in from Korea were routinely sunk by our submariners. Much as it was self evident that a demonstration blast would not have convinced the Japanese surrender (self evident because it took two real blasts, substantially wrecking two cities to eventually convince them), it is self evident that merely blockading the Japanese home islands would not have succeeded, since it had already been effectively done for arguably sixteen months minimum.

It takes a willing suspension of disbelief, to borrow a phrase, to argue that the blockade would have ended the war. Self delusion amongst those revisionists who can’t comprehend that most basic of realities is obviously far too common an affliction.

First, your comparison of the atom bomb attacks and Sep 11 is wildly wrong-headed and strained. Sep 11 was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor, an unprovoked and immoral sneak attack. The atom bombings of Japan were, by comparison, the necessary defensive reaction to such an unprovoked attack. We did not bomb Japan out of religious bigotry as Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, but to snuff out a racist tyranny that killed at least twenty million people.

Particularly obtuse are your assumptions that the US has military in Saudi Arabia against the will of the Saudis. In fact, we are there at the invitation of the Saudis, who America has placed in the lap of luxury with little effort of their own. By contrast, the Japanese invaded the countries where they installed their bases by force against the will of the people, impoverishing them.

Brian Boatman: “Even the people of Nagasaki (recipients of the second atom bomb) were sending money to the US embassy in Nagasaki for the USS Panay incident.”

Meanwhile, other citizens of Nagasaki were building the torpedoes dropped in Pearl Harbor.

Brian Boatman: “The reason Hiroshima was spared conventional bombing is because it did not have prime military installations; ….”

Brian Boatman: “… the Japanese government did want to surrender conditionally.”

No, they didn’t. They were indoctrinated to see surrender as unbearably shameful. The Japanese government made no effort to surrender until after the Bombs fell, refusing to even answer US demands they do so. The ruling military faction of the government did not change its position even after the atomic bombings, still believing they could get an armistice on their own terms if they bled the invasion force enough. Those terms included leaving the Japanese government intact. To implement their resistance to surrender, the Japanese had amassed the bulk of their military might in Kyushu to resist the coming invasion, including suicide vehicles of every kind and the militarization of the civilian population. When you are giving kindergartners bayonet drill with instructions to kill the invaders, that is not preparation to surrender in any form.

Brian Boatman: “What if President Truman, on the night before the atom bomb was dropped, dreamt of screaming Japanese children and babies being burned alive and dying in agony; do you think President Truman would have accepted the conditional surrender of the Japanese, instead of demanding unconditional surrender ?”

Even with the atom bombings, Truman allowed the Japanese to surrender conditionally, leaving Hirohito as emperor, rather than pay the price necessary for the unconditional surrender we demanded of Germany.

Addressing Mr Whittle’s points :

(1) Hiroshima was given adequate warning.

No matter how many warnings Hiroshima was supposedly given, the US government should have known, as in the case of Katrina, thousands of people might not be able to move due to illness, being handicapped and the poor and destitute would not have been able to evacuate or realize the seriousness of an atomic attack because no warnings were given about radiation poisoning.

NO warning would be adequate to get all the people out of the city. TRUE, But a warning is not necessary and I would point out that the Japanese leaflets that were due to be dropped on the Arizona must have been back ordered. Because they sure as Hell never arrived. And A warning would allow some people who took heed to escape, the warning were to try and reduce the amount of civilian casualties, not totally eliminate them.

(2) Hiroshima was of military value.

Hiroshima was of military value ? while Tokyo which planned the Pearl Harbor attack was not ?

The reason Hiroshima was spared conventional bombing is because it did not have prime military installations; and having the bomb explode above the city was to cause maximum damage to as much of the city as possible where school children were in school learning while the bomb was dropped and the Nagasaki bomb was dropped over a church: St. Mary’s Cathedral.

In April 1945, US General Groves was instructed to pick targets for the nuclear bombs. “To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids.” Four cities were chosen, including Hiroshima and Kyoto. War Secretary Stimson vetoed Kyoto, and Nagasaki was substituted. ( Leslie Groves, Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, 1962 : Page 267 )

TOKYO didn’t attack us. Evil men with no honor, launched a sneak attack killing over 2000 American citizens and plunging us into a WW. Nowhere does Bill or anyone claim that Tokyo as a city had no military value, and indeed bill points out that much of Tokyo which was worth bombing was already being bombed.

(3) Japanese resistance was not crumbling

Resistance to an invasion of Japan ? off course, the Japanese would resist an invasion on their homeland, just as Americans would resist if Japan invaded the US homeland.

One wonders why the Japanese did not surrender unconditionally after the fire bombing of Japanese cities.

Would the US government have surrendered if the Japanese fire bombed US cities ? off course not.

So by the same reasoning, fire bombing Japanese cities only made the Japanese government more determined to not surrender.

The US government makes it difficult for the enemy to negotiate because the US government is more interested in crushing the enemy than negotiating.

If the US government had accepted the conditional surrender of the Japanese instead of insisting on unconditional surrender, millions of lives could have been saved by the war coming to an end quickly.

As for those Japanese who committed war crimes, its very difficult to prosecute those when the US government deliberately fire bombed numerous Japanese cities knowing fully well that hundreds of thousands of civilians., children and babies would be burned alive.

Theres a difference between being attacked and being shown there is NO Way you can win. America thank God has never been placed in such a situation. By Gods grace may she NEVER find herself in that situation. THEY started the war . Unconditionally surrender was the only surrender that would have been allowed. Funny that you have no concern for the children and babies that the Japanese put to death daily. War is a terrible waste, and nothing will make it less so. Children die in wars. what’s your point here? the Japanese were not looking to negotiate at all. They had made no effort to make ANY kind of surrender. They were still talking about how they could win for GODS sake. Your an idiot or your being willing ignorant.

(4) Japan was not trying to surrender

Other than the fact that if the roles were reversed and Japan was fire bombing and atom bombing US cities, would the US government have surrendered ? off course not, due to the concept of pride and an honorable surrender if surrender was ever contemplated as in the case of Vietnam and even then it took over 50000 American lives for the US government to finally surrender in Vietnam.

But even with the humiliation of defeat and wanting an honorable end to the war, the Japanese government did want to surrender conditionally.

What if President Truman, on the night before the atom bomb was dropped, dreamt of screaming Japanese children and babies being burned alive and dying in agony; do you think President Truman would have accepted the conditional surrender of the Japanese, instead of demanding unconditional surrender ?

Again where do you get the idea that the Japanese wanted to surrender? Conditionally or not? OUTSIDE your diseased imaginary world you live in?
Give me ONE scrap of historical evidence that they wanted to conditionally surrender, but we refused. BTW when your LOSING the war as badly as the Japanese were you don’t get to dictate terms, when you STARTED the war.

Thank you for such an awesome retort.

Lets just assume what Mr Whittle is saying is true and that :

(1) Hiroshima was given adequate warning

(2) Hiroshima was of military value

(3) Japanese resistance was not crumbling

(4) Japan was not trying to surrender

And lets say Al-Qaeda had the same policy of the Truman Administration and Al-Qaeda did the following :

(1) Warned the Pentagon of a pending attack

(2) Only targeted the Pentagon

(3) US government’s resistance to withdrawing troops from Saudi Arabia was not crumbling

(4) the US government was not wanting to surrender its bases in Saudi Arabia

My Question is : Would the US government then say that Al-Qaeda was not a terrorist organization if all four points above took place ? off course not.

Background to the atom bombing :

Even though the US government forced Japan at the “point of a gun” to sign unequal treaties in the late 1800s, the Japanese people, even as late as 1937, were sympathetic to the plight of five American civilians who were wounded due to an unintentional attack by a Japanese naval aircraft on a US gunboat in China.

Numerous christian Japanese students sent christmas cards including letters, profusely apologizing for the unfortunate incident, on top of the millions ( in today’s dollars) sent by the Japanese government to compensate the US government. Other letters from Japanese individuals and organizations contained gifts of money along with expressions of regret.

Even the people of Nagasaki (recipients of the second atom bomb) were sending money to the US embassy in Nagasaki for the USS Panay incident.

It is apparent that radical elements within Japanese society who wanted to drive the US out of China, due to US gun boat diplomacy, were behind the attack on USS Panay and other incidents in order to draw the US into greater conflict with Japan.

Addressing Mr Whittle’s points :

(1) Hiroshima was given adequate warning.

No matter how many warnings Hiroshima was supposedly given, the US government should have known, as in the case of Katrina, thousands of people might not be able to move due to illness, being handicapped and the poor and destitute would not have been able to evacuate or realize the seriousness of an atomic attack because no warnings were given about radiation poisoning.

(2) Hiroshima was of military value.

Hiroshima was of military value ? while Tokyo which planned the Pearl Harbor attack was not ?

The reason Hiroshima was spared conventional bombing is because it did not have prime military installations; and having the bomb explode above the city was to cause maximum damage to as much of the city as possible where school children were in school learning while the bomb was dropped and the Nagasaki bomb was dropped over a church: St. Mary’s Cathedral.

In April 1945, US General Groves was instructed to pick targets for the nuclear bombs. “To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids.” Four cities were chosen, including Hiroshima and Kyoto. War Secretary Stimson vetoed Kyoto, and Nagasaki was substituted. ( Leslie Groves, Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, 1962 : Page 267 )

(3) Japanese resistance was not crumbling

Resistance to an invasion of Japan ? off course, the Japanese would resist an invasion on their homeland, just as Americans would resist if Japan invaded the US homeland.

One wonders why the Japanese did not surrender unconditionally after the fire bombing of Japanese cities.

Would the US government have surrendered if the Japanese fire bombed US cities ? off course not.

So by the same reasoning, fire bombing Japanese cities only made the Japanese government more determined to not surrender.

The US government makes it difficult for the enemy to negotiate because the US government is more interested in crushing the enemy than negotiating.

If the US government had accepted the conditional surrender of the Japanese instead of insisting on unconditional surrender, millions of lives could have been saved by the war coming to an end quickly.

As for those Japanese who committed war crimes, its very difficult to prosecute those when the US government deliberately fire bombed numerous Japanese cities knowing fully well that hundreds of thousands of civilians., children and babies would be burned alive.

(4) Japan was not trying to surrender

Other than the fact that if the roles were reversed and Japan was fire bombing and atom bombing US cities, would the US government have surrendered ? off course not, due to the concept of pride and an honorable surrender if surrender was ever contemplated as in the case of Vietnam and even then it took over 50000 American lives for the US government to finally surrender in Vietnam.

But even with the humiliation of defeat and wanting an honorable end to the war, the Japanese government did want to surrender conditionally.

What if President Truman, on the night before the atom bomb was dropped, dreamt of screaming Japanese children and babies being burned alive and dying in agony; do you think President Truman would have accepted the conditional surrender of the Japanese, instead of demanding unconditional surrender ?

The USSBS for Japan is much inferior to that for Germany. It went in with a preconceived conclusion, an inadequate number of interpreters, and neglected to interview most of the key Japanese players. The survey of Japan lacks the intellectual heft of the German survey and consequently makes an erroneous conclusion. It’s particularly noteworthy that the USSBS declared strategic bombing to be decisive in Germany but not so in Japan, which surrendered immediately after the atom bombs were dropped. Its conclusion is unsound and should be rejected.

http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2008/February%202008/0208bombing.aspx

We would need to invade even if we limited our assault on Japan to a naval blockade because such a blockade lacks the shock value of the atom bomb which broke the will of the Japanese to fight, the ultimate goal of the war. It’s just like the old saying that a frog stay put in a pot where the temperature is raised by degrees but will jump out if pitched straight into boiling water.

The naval blockade would have been more devastating than the atom bombs, though its effect more diffuse. Japan was a nation of 65 million people which could just about feed itself. However, the blockade would interfere with fishing, as you said, and with distribution of rice and foodstuffs within the islands. Japan is separated into compartments by mountains which were traversed by rail lines. The Allied command of the air would sever the railnet at critical spots, stopping the internal flow of supplies, just as Sherman’s March disrupted the Confederate railnet, wreaking havoc on the economy. Tokyo was backed by rice fields to the interior, so it would probably would have survived with difficulty. But the rest of Japan would have slowly starved, killing millions.

It’s not likely that would have forced the Japanese to surrender. For an equivalent example, North Korea endured a famine in the late 1990s which killed two million out of its twenty-five million without losing political control. In fact, the scarcity of food gave the government more life and death power over its people by controlling rations. If you apply the North Korean example to WWII Japan, it suggests that Japan could take over four million dead from famine without buckling.

Of course, all that time you spend waiting for the naval blockade to work would allow the Japanese to expend every weapon they had against the Allied forces at their convenience. Historians say that Japan was killing 400,000 people in Asia and Oceania outside of combat in their occupied territories. If you waited a year for the naval blockade to work, that’s five million dead.

As Sherman said, war is cruelty and you can not refine it. Bringing a war to a swift and authoritative conclusion is the best result you can wish and the most economical in lives. Seeking to moderate it in hopes of sparing bloodshed only draws the conflict out and chews up more lives.

I only wish that those who think and beleive the kind of stupid, ignorant, evil, arrogant crap that Stewart consistently spews could ever be convinced by facts. But they won’t.

Keep up the good work, and help us remember the facts and the truth.