"...from April to August 1945 the Japanese made a number of official
attempts to secure a
negotiated peace settlement and an end to the war. The major sticking
point was the fate
of Emperor Hirohito =96 would the man many Japanese considered to be
divine be tried and
hanged as a war criminal? In light of this concern, Truman was urged
by many of his aides
to alter the surrender formula to provide for the preservation of the
Emperor as a
constitutional monarch. Presented with op****tunity after op****tunity
to craft a
compromise, Truman refused to bend. Indeed, the most significant
statement of Allied
surrender terms prior to the bombings =96 the Potsdam Declaration issued
July 26, 1945 =96
maintained the rhetoric of "unconditional surrender" while not even
mentioning the fate of
the Emperor. President Truman then most certainly acted without
exhausting all other
options =96 a gross violation of the jus in bello principles enunciated
by the Christian
Church for centuries."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/lawrence1.html
Consider newly declassified information.
The Japanese weren't permitted to surrender
when they were ready to do so.
That was in order to intimidate the Soviets
via the gratuitous use of the bomb.
It helps to understand the real situation, including that
of Pearl Harbor.
The US goaded Japan into attacking, and then let the attack
occur despite warnings of it, indeed even made itself more
vulnerable to that attack than it should have. The US
government at that time wanted to gain public sup****t for war,
and 'improve trade' in the east. They accomplished that, but
threw in the added threat to everybody else by escalating to
the use of nuclear bombs on civilians, when many who knew
a great deal about the situation considered that excessive.
"The duty officer at U.S. Asiatic Fleet headquarters in Manila first
received
word of the Pearl Harbor attack at 0230 on 8 December 1941, but a full
hour
passed before Brig. Gen. Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur's chief of
staff,
heard the news from commercial broadcasts. He immediately notified
MacArthur and
all commanders that a state of war now existed with Japan. MacArthur
ordered his
troops to battle stations.
Despite this warning, when the Japanese pilots of the 11th Air Fleet
attacked
Clark Field nine hours later, they caught two squadrons of B-17s lined
up on the
field and a number of American fighters just preparing to take off.
The first
wave of twenty-seven Japanese twin-engine bombers achieved complete
tactical
surprise and destroyed most of the American heavy bombers. A second
bomber
strike followed while Zero fighters strafed the field. Only three
P-40s managed
to take off. A simultaneous attack on Iba Field in northwest Luzon was
also
successful: all but two of the 3d Squadron's P-40s were destroyed. The
Far East
Air Force lost fully half its planes the first day of the war. ..."
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/brochures/pi/pi.htm
Were you unaware that Japan was *provoked* into that attack? The
US froze Japanese assets (treaty violation) and embargoed their oil.
Roosevelt was tired of supplying only materials to the war, and he
saw Japan as the easiest way in, via an attack on US soil.
Why did Roosevelt order the pacific fleet to relocate from the
west coast to Hawaii in the summer of 1940? Why was the
commander, Admiral Richardson, removed after complaining
that Pearl Harbor didn't offer sufficient air or topedo defense?
Didn't Roosevelt receive a memo in the fall of 1940, from a
Navy analyst, describing eight ways to force Japan to attack
the US (one of them an oil embargo), and all of them eventually
implemented? Didn't Roosevelt's advisor Ickes tell him that an
oil embargo would be an "easy" way to get into the war, the
day after Hitler attacked Russia in the summer of 1941?
"President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to enter the war in Europe,
especially
after the fall of France (June 1940). In this desire he was sup****ted
by the old
elite ... After meeting FDR at the Atlantic Conference (August 14,
1941)
Churchill noted the "astoni****ng depth of Roosevelt's intense desire
for war."
But there was a problem: the President could not overcome the
resistance to
"Europe's war" felt by most Americans and their elected
representatives.
The mood of the country was a problem, and Roosevelt therefore
resorted to
subterfuge. He systematically and deliberately provoked the Japanese
into
attacking the United States. His real target was Hitler: Roosevelt
expected the
German dictator to abide by the Tripartite Pact and declare war on
America, and
hoped that Hitler's decision would be facilitated by a display of
America's
apparent vulnerability. Accordingly, even though Roosevelt was well
aware of the
impending attack on Pearl Harbor ..."
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a3522a943db.html
The US Army Signal Intelligence Service had cracked the Japanese
codes before December of 1941. Although a British obsession with
secrecy allowed the US to claim it had first deciphered JN25, it was
actually done first by the British and Australians.
"The "true heroes" of the Allied codebreaking effort, Smith says, were
Eric
Nave, an Australian officer attached to the Royal Navy, and John
Tiltman, a
British cryptographer. Although the Americans claimed that they broke
JN25, the
Japanese navy's operational code which contributed to the destruction
of the
Japanese carrier fleet at Midway, it was the work of Tiltman -- only a
few weeks
after it came into use in 1939."
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/00/09/Codebreaking2.html
"In 1979 the NSA released 2,413 JN-25 orders of the 26,581 intercepted
by US
between Sept 1 and Dec 4, 1941. The NSA says "We know now that they
contained
im****tant details concerning the existence, organization, objective,
and even
the whereabouts of the Pearl Harbor Strike Force." (Parker p 21) Of
the over
thousand radio messages sent by Tokyo to the attack fleet, only 20 are
in the
National Archives. All messages to the attack fleet were sent several
times, at
least one message was sent every odd hour of the day and each had a
special
serial number. Starting in early November 1941 when the attack fleet
assembled
and started receiving radio messages, OP-20-G stayed open 24 hours a
day and the
"First Team" of codebreakers worked on JN-25. In November and early
December
1941, OP-20-G spent 85 percent of its effort reading Japanese Navy
traffic, 12
percent on Japanese diplomatic traffic and 3 percent on German naval
codes. FDR
was personally briefed twice a day on JN-25 traffic by his aide,
Captain John
Beardell, and demanded to see the original raw messages in English.
The US
Government refuses to identify or declassify any pre-Dec 7, 1941
decrypts of
JN-25 on the basis of national security, a half-century after the
war."
http://home.earthlink.net/~nbrass1/3enigma.htm
Many people disagreed with the nuclear bombings of Japan:
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my
headquarters in
Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an
atomic bomb on
Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent
reasons to
question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me
the news of
the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it,
asked for
my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of
a feeling
of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the
basis of
my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb
was
completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our
country should
avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment
was, I
thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It
was my
belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to
surrender with a
minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my
attitude..."
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with
Stimson:
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to
hit them
with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
(Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman)
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiro****ma
and
Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The
Japanese
were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective
sea
blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are
frightening. My
own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an
ethical
standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught
to make war
in that fa****on, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and
children."
- William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.
On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiro****ma, Hoover wrote
to Army
and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, "The use of
the
atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children,
revolts my
soul."
quoted from Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg.
635.
MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's
reaction to
the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan:
"...the Potsdam
declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally
or face
'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that
the
Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an
orderly
transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people
would never
submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the
surrender
did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of
the
imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to
atomic
weapons at Hiro****ma and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary."
William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg.
512.
Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the
American
occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with
MacArthur,
"MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on
Hiro****ma and
Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public
supposed." He
continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop
the bomb,
I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I
asked, would
his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification
for the
dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said,
if the
United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of
the
institution of the emperor."
Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
A panel set up by President Truman to study the Pacific war issued a
re****t, the
United States Strategic Bombing Survey, in July 1946, which declared,
"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and sup****ted by
the
testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the
Survey's opinion
that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, Japan would have surrendered
even if
atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the
war, and
even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
www.doug-long.com
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j080801.html
By 1945, Japan's entire military and industrial
machine was grinding to a halt as the resources needed to wage
war were all but eradicated. The navy and air force had been
destroyed ****p by ****p, plane by plane, with no possibility of
replacement. When, in the spring of 1945, the island nation's
lifeline to oil was severed, the war was over except for the
fighting. By June, Gen. Curtis LeMay, in charge of the air
attacks, was complaining that after months of terrible
firebombing, there was nothing left of Japanese cities for his
bombers but "garbage can targets". By July, U.S. planes could
fly over Japan without resistance and bomb as much and as long as
they pleased. Japan could no longer defend itself.{6}
After the war, the world learned what U.S. leaders had known
by early 1945: Japan was militarily defeated long before
Hiro****ma. It had been trying for months, if not for years, to
surrender; and the U.S. had consistently rebuffed these
overtures. A May 5 cable, intercepted and decoded by the U.S.,
dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue
for peace. Sent to Berlin by the German ambassador in Tokyo,
after he talked to a ranking Japanese naval officer, it read:
Since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless,
large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not
regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation
even if the terms were hard...
As far as is known, Wa****ngton did nothing to pursue this
opening. Later that month, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
almost capriciously dismissed three separate high-level
recommendations from within the Roosevelt administration to
activate peace negotiations. The proposals advocated signaling
Japan that the U.S. was willing to consider the all-im****tant
retention of the emperor system; i.e., the U.S. would not insist
upon "unconditional surrender"...
According to Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard,
Secretary of State Byrnes had said that the bomb's biggest
benefit was not its effect on Japan but its power to "make Russia
more manageable in Europe"...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Slaughter_WBlum.html
http://www.socialistworker.org/377APages/377A_04_PearlHarbor.shtml
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