Why anything short of the unconditional surrender of Japan was out of the question

In what will be VFR’s last post on the Bomb (maybe I mean that only wishfully, maybe not), Tom S. writes:

You make some good points in your response to M. Jose in your follow-up to “The Purloined Leaflets.” Actually, the case for dropping the bomb has gotten stronger in the last fifteen years, what with the declassification of our intercepted Japanese radio communications, and information coming out of China. Thanks to these, we can now answer the two questions that Jose implicitly asks:

1) Were the Japanese prepared to accept any sort of a negotiated peace that we and our Allies could have accepted prior to the bombing?

Answer: No. The Japanese insisted on keeping Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, trying all “war criminals” themselves, retaining the Militarist system of government, no disarmament, and not admitting to their people that they had lost. This was obviously totally unacceptable to all of our allies, as well as us. We offered to allow them to keep the Emperor prior to the bomb being dropped. This was refused.

2) Was the Imperial Japanese government so evil that we had to insist on unconditional surrender?

Answer: Yes. The Japanese military was responsible for the deaths of between eight and 12 million Chinese civilians, and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, Malays, Indonesians, Indians, Melanesians, and Vietnamese. Their death toll may actually exceed that of Hitler or Stalin. The Japanese conducted biowarfare research in China that was fully as horrible as anything done by the Nazis. Humans were dissected alive. The “Rape of Nanking” alone killed hundreds of thousands. The Japanese government was also working on its own atom bomb. They had to go, and thanks to Truman, they did.

It’s funny to think that what some people seem to see as the “moral” solution would have left these people in power.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 24, 2007 03:59 PM | Send