Comment by hollerith
2 days ago
>It was this or invade which would have easily resulted in more casualties.
There was no need to invade: as long as the naval blockade continued, Japan wouldn't get enough fossil fuels and other resources to threaten anyone. They probably would've been lucky to avoid mass starvation.
--and Washington knew that when it decided to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it also knew that the Soviets wanted invade Northern Japan: Stalin had already "offered to help out" in this way.
There were still millions of Japanese troops outside of Japanese home islands all across Asia and the Pacific. The blockade would have had to be expanded and neither Japanese nor American leadership thought it was sustainable.
While there was a very optimistic view within the Navy that the Japanese would soon face starvation and surrender, it doesn't appear to match reality. The food situation wasn't so dire that Japan was in any danger of near-term mass starvation. Most of the shortages came from poor weather leading to a bad harvest - not something one can hope to continue - and there was ample evidence the Japanese would sacrifice millions rather than surrender. Indeed, nearly all of the high level Japanese officials questioned said they would have fought indefinitely.
I was guessing about the risk of mass starvation, which I hope my previous comment made clear.
I continue to tend to believe that letting a weakened Japan fight indefinitely would have been preferable to what actually happened (i.e., the nuclear strikes). The US lost a lot of prestige, esteem and trust that day that it has not fully recovered yet.
Most of the troops outside the home islands were in Manchuria, which Stalin was willing to sort out for us. Letting Stalin sort it out would have probably resulted in Stalin's ending up with Manchuria rather than what actually happened, which is that China got Manchuria back, but that supports my assertion that Washington chose to nuke Japan mainly to improve its competitive position against the USSR, not because nuking Japan was the only alternative to invading Japan (to paraphrase the assertion that drew me into this comment thread).
I could be wrong though. I'm just saying that I am not yet persuaded by the arguments I"ve seen that Washington had to either nuke Japanese cities or invade the home islands.
> letting a weakened Japan fight indefinitely
Again, that simply wasn't an option. The US did not believe it could sustain the blockade indefinitely. The American public was growing war weary and Japan was far from neutered - Japanese aircraft, submarines, suicide torpedoes and mines continued to inflict casualties.
The US would have been slowly bled without any end in sight for potentially years. Had the Japanese then sued for peace with extremely favorable terms that allowed them to keep the bulk of their expanded empire, the fear was that the American public demand the US accept it.
> Most of the troops outside the home islands were in Manchuria, which Stalin was willing to sort out for us
Japan had about 3.5 million military personnel outside the home islands in 1945. Only 665K of them were in Manchuria. They had 1.1 million in China, 190K in Taiwan, 127K in the Philippines, 107K in Thailand, 134K in Malaysia/Singapore, etc.
The Soviet Army couldn't fight them all.