Alex WellersteinVerified account

I don't have time to spend hrs replying to your comments (some of which I like, some not so much). I might come back to it on the weekend. But I have to cut in with a few points worth adding that often get skipped in this line of argument... /1

(And 1.5, for the record, I think healthy debate on this issue is always welcome, even when I'm disagreeing with the context given...)

/2 Yes, the Japanese military was in rough shape *in Japan,* but there's been much historiography lately demonstrating that it was rearming rapidly, and was ready to provide formidable if unsophisticated resistance to any landing...

/3 ...but your comment on dodging the Kyushu landing by months skips the part almost all modern critics of the decision skip idly past. and that's the other 75% of the war that was still underway. Japan was isolated; the Japanese Army was not.

/4 My grandfather and 400k+ other allied troops were in active contact with the enemy on the Burmese border, while US Eighth Army was still fighting Japanese troops in Mindanao and Luzon. And lest we forget, in China...

/5 ...*the protection of which was, after all, the cause of the US embargo in '41* - you have millions of troops still locked in battle as well, which were very much on the US govt's mind. And then you have the civilians in occupied areas, + POWs -

/6 ...the former literally numbering hundreds of millions, the latter over 100k IIRC, who were known to be facing starvation or mistreatment to varying degrees depending exposure to disrupted food supplies, occupation & war crimes, or both.

If what you're getting at is, "war is hell and ending war is better than continuing it" — I mean, I agree, in principle. The question is always the means.

Am curious, although not being well read on the matter (given that historians believe that the A-bomb did not factor strongly in the Japanese surrender) whether there was an element of theatre involved in the use of these weapons to disuade soviet invasion?

I suppose I think two things about this. The first is that what you wrote puts it a bit too strongly in my judgment. It is not that historians think that it did not factor, even sometimes strongly.... 1/

But that it was not the *only* thing that mattered. It was not even something that you could separate out from the blockade, the "conventional" firebombing, backchannel negotiations, and Soviet entry into the war. It's just impossible to separate all the streams. 2/

The second point is about dissuading Soviet invasion. There was no way anyone was going to dissuade that, atomic bomb or no. The Soviets pulled out of the neutrality treaty with Japan in May; they promised they would join the conflict in 3 months (= August). 3/

Mobilization on that kind of scale — it was a huge front, with troops brought from the other end of Eurasia — doesn't just get dissuaded. There might be another debate about whether Truman and the others thought it might affect Soviet complicance in the postwar... 4/

Or another argument that maybe Japan would surrender before the Soviets managed to pull the trigger. But dissuasion was not in the cards. Sorry for going on a bit. 5/fin

Agree — if anything, it was about maybe speeding things up, and maybe influencing long-term, but not dissuading invasion. I would say, there was a lot of theatre involved, towards many ends, but not this particular end.

@threadreaderapp unroll please

Thanks for that. I would add that another consideration was that the war for the US was coming up on four solid years of men dying, and there had to be concerns about just how much longer the US public could support that, even if you cut invasion casualty estimates in half.