Hiroshima and Nagasaki

You have 10 seconds to explain to me why Truman shouldn't have just accepted conditional surrender and end the war just as quickly and without having to commit the largest terrorist attack in human history.

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no

Because he had cool new toys and a reason to use them

>Conditional surrender

yeah sorry not going to happen, the japs reaped what they sew and the nukes were better than starving out or invading japan which would have resulted in more deaths

You do not fight wars to gain conditional surrender. You negotiate with your diplomats to gain conditional surrender.

Don't know
The Americans were so butthurt about that one base of them being bombed that they decided the war couldn't end until Japan had become 100% their bitch

Pretty dumb when you know that tons wars started with mich greater offenses ended with conditional surrender

Americans were just evil

Because glassing would be better to do than nuke

It was a hot meme.
Get dunked on bleeding heart and/or nip.

The japanese were too fanatical to ever surrender except in the face of divine annihilation.

It saved millions of lives being taken in an allied invasion of their homeland.

hiroshima + nagasaki were perfect examples of talk shit get hit

Because the Japanese weren't planning on surrendering

Conditional surrender would have saved all of those lives and more

Except they were. They would have surrendered on the condition that Hirohito be pardoned from any war crime charges and left, even ceremonously, as head of state. That was their only condition for surrender towards the end of the war and Truman rejected it and then left Hirohito alone anyway. The only difference is he got to murder thousands of people first.

Also, the actual decision to surrender came as a result of Russia declaring war, not the bombs.

>You have 10 seconds to explain to me why Truman shouldn't have just accepted conditional surrender


Because the conditions were not acceptable.

When you start a war, then get your ass handed to you after many bloody years , you don't get to whine about terms.

Came to say this. They started it.
Blow me rice boogies

>commit the largest terrorist attack in human history
Japan's warmongering was one of the the largest terrorist attack in human history, killing many times more civilians than the two bombs combined. Japan deserved 5-7 more A-bombs imo, preferably one in Tokyo

This. Everyone always says Japan was too fanatical to surrender but that is American revisionism. Obviously there were many crazy ultranationalists who wanted to fight to the last man but they were in the minority by that point and Japan knew they lost and were desperately seeking peace terms. They didn't even ask for much, just for their ruler to not be touched.

Truman knew what he was doing when he demanded unconditional surrender. He didn't even try to compromise because he didn't have to. America already won. They really just wanted to play with their new toy.

Truman humorously upped the number of expected casualties of a ground invasion multiple times thought his life when asked about his justification of the use of the bomb. Most estimates are extremely inflated to protect America's image. I'm not saying a ground invasion would've been ideal, hell maybe the bomb was a better choice. But the thing is had they negotiated they could've avoided both. The Russians moving in to invade themselves was what really put the Americans in a tough spot, and honestly things went pretty well for Japan after the war so the nukes we're probably better for them than being a part of the Soviet Union would've been.

shut up retard.

>ask for peace, have coup
>first nuke drops, still won't surrender

all they wanted was for japan to be great

>Except they were. They would have surrendered on the condition that Hirohito be pardoned from any war crime charges and left, even ceremonously, as head of state
That is incorrect. They also wanted to keep their own government intact, charge any war criminals in their own courts under their own auspices, and to retain the territorial gains outside of China, such as Korea and Formosa. As late as July 11th, they still wanted peace on terms that Japan would be a major guarantor of the peace and policing of east Asia. Even their own ambassador thought this was never going to happen, but that didn't stop the government from insisting these were non-negotiable points.

nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/correspondence/togo-sato/corr_togo-sato.htm

You aren't listening. Americans forced this scenario by demanding UNCONDITIONAL surrender. They KNEW Japan wouldn't accept those terms

If America wanted to end the war without a ground invasion or the bombs they could have. America didn't want to. All of Japan's proposals we're completely ignored by America because their mind had already been made up to use their new toy. Read the terms Japan asked for, they were reasonable. Read about how Japan was practically begging the Soviet Union to mediate an agreement.

The ultranationalist coup failed. Had it not maybe you could argue that Japan didn't want to surrender but that simply wasn't the case.

I'm an American, I don't hate America for what it did. Like I said, I think the bomb was better than letting Japan fall to the soviets. I just think things could've gone better with peace talks.

Maybe the fear of the bomb is what kept the cold war from turning hot. Maybe the atomic bomb being dropped saved the world. I don't fucking know. What I do know is there are documents proving Japan wanted to surrender, just under more reasonable terms.

>Read the terms Japan asked for, they were reasonable.
No they fucking weren't. Even their ambassador to the USSR thought they weren't reasonable.

>In the unreserved opinion of this envoy and on the basis of your telegram No. 885, I believe it no exaggeration to say that the possibility of getting the Soviet Union to join our side and go along with our reasoning is next to nothing. That would run directly counter to the foreign policy of this country as explained in my frequent telegrams to you. It goes without saying that the objectives cannot be successfully attained by sounding out the possibilities of using the Soviet Union to terminate the war on the above basis. This is clearly indicated in the progress of the conference as reported in my telegram No. 1379.
>Moreover, the manner of your explanation in your telegram No. 891 --"We consider the maintenance of peace in Asia as one aspect of maintaining world peace"-- is nothing but academic theory. For England and American are planning to take the right of maintaining peace in East Asia away from Japan, and the actual situation is now such that the mainland of Japan itself is in peril. Japan is no longer in a position to be responsible for the maintenance of peace in all of East Asia, no matter how you look at it.

> Like I said, I think the bomb was better than letting Japan fall to the soviets.
That could never have happened either. Do you know anything about WW2? Have you never heard of Project Hula? Did you not realize that the Kuril island campaign was a quagmire until the Japanese forces were ordered to stand down as per the surrender terms? And that you expect the Soviets to get anywhere in the much more heavily defended Hokkaido?

Isn't this a bit of a meme though? I thought the real turning point was the Soviet invasion. The Japs knew they were toast at that point and figured surrendering to the Americans was better than being completely annihilated. As I recall, the Emperor had to sneak the surrender order out of his palace because his military officers were so fanatical that they attempted a coup in the vain attempt to prevent surrender. They were actually mad men, wew lad.

Fuck America

>Isn't this a bit of a meme though? I thought the real turning point was the Soviet invasion.
There is no actual documentary evidence to support this. You get people (mostly anti-nuclear advocates) suggesting this, and that the Emperor's Gyokuon-hōsō was just domestic propaganda, but you never see any sources put forward for it, just "Well you don't REALLY believe the mainstream narrative, do you?"

The Soviets couldn't physically reach the home islands in force; their navy was vastly inferior to the US Navy.

DO IT AGAIN, HARRY

I want info about project hula

>Obviously there were many crazy ultranationalists who wanted to fight to the last man but they were in the minority by that point

They were always a minority. The problem here is that minority controlled the government and the military of Japan. If it had ever been put a vote across the Japanese population, yes, the war surely would have ended much sooner. Same applies to Germany, but the Germans were certainly never offered any opportunity for "conditional surrender." Why then was Japan entitled to such niceties?

Again, why are you implying that Japan was entitled to better treatment than Germany? Imagine if Hitler had come up with some peace deal where he would get to stay if power if he simply withdrew his armies back to Germany and promised to pay reparations or something like that? Would that have been acceptable to you? Because that's basically what Japan was demanding.

Hirohito was the guy who made the decision to surrender. There were plenty of other people who wanted to keep going, even if it meant total annihilation. It was him who made the decision, and he was logically the only person who could have the decision. Anybody else who could have tried to articulate a desire to surrender would have simply been shot. Hirohito was the only person with enough sway to make the Japanese military (most of it, at least) actually stand down and accept surrender. The decision was entirely his. Why am I making such a big deal about this? Because Hirohito always said that the bombs were the reason he did it. So either Hirohito was lying for some unknown reason, or Japan really did surrender because of the bombs.

The Soviet operations were still important for bringing the war to a close, for the simple reason that many of the units stationed outside of mainland Japan simply refused to believe that the surrender was real. The Soviets did a good job tying up loose ends.

I would recommend this book if you're interested on the subject.
books.google.com/books?id=Za_xPPsxhmwC

Of course the government wanted the government to stay in tact. And considering what a shitshow Korea ended up being after the war and to this day, maybe we should've let them have it.

Those sound reasonable enough to me. Especially considering they thought they had the leverage of the inevitable ground invasion that America would want to avoid. They didn't realize America could end them in a blink and they really had nothing to offer.

I just think America wanting unconditional surrender was unnecessarily frightening to them. For all they knew they'd all be executed including their precious divine leader. What are reasonable terms that you think both sides could've agreed on? Do you really think it couldn't possibly be done?

They could do that w/o messing with other countries

>Of course the government wanted the government to stay in tact. And considering what a shitshow Korea ended up being after the war and to this day, maybe we should've let them have it.
So, in other words, you were wrong about your claim that the only thing they wanted was to have the Emperor stay on his throne, "even in a ceremonial role", only you won't cop to it. I like how you also ignore the point about being the major power in East Asia.

>Those sound reasonable enough to me
Since when is your opinion meaningful in any sense whatsoever?

> Do you really think it couldn't possibly be done?
I think it could not possibly be done. Japan had 0 leverage outside of hoping that America would be unwilling to accept the cost involved in flattening them. Even if the nukes are taken off the table, there is no evidence of this whatsoever. Plans for Olympic really did go forward.

If the Japan had been left alone with the militarists still in power, unpunished, then modern Japan could very well be some kind of nuclear-armed military junta, like North Korea but with a much, much bigger budget.

First time I read about the emperor finally giving up only after the soviet declaration of war was on wikipedia, as mainstream as it gets.