Japanese bayonets followed the same trend of simplification as Arisaka rifles towards the end of World War Two, culminating in what is today called the “pole bayonet”. Abandoning even the fittings to mount to a rifle, these bayonets were intended to be lashed to a pole to create a spear. The Japanese government did not have the military forces to pulse an American invasion of the home islands, and was actively planning to sacrifice millions of Japanese civilians in a hopeless defense, literally having them charge American machine guns with spears. Some of this was done on outer island battles, like Saipan and Okinawa but the scale in Japan itself would have been unimaginable. It was the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to a Japanese surrender and prevented this from becoming a reality.
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Looking at the timing, it was not the atomic bombs that convinced the Japanese Government to surrender, it was the rapid advance of Soviet troops across Korea, with the possibility of a Russian invasion from the west. Most major Japanese cities had already been destroyed by conventional bombing and the fire-bombing of Tokyo was more devastating than the atom bombs, yet this did not appear to phase the Japanese Government. In the end, they decided that it was preferable to surrender to the US forces, rather than be overrun by Russian troops.
Certainly the timing is suggestive, but it also works the other way around: Stalin knew from his spies the A-bomb was coming, and took this opportunity to declare war on Japan. Thus dual motives for Hirohito to “face the impossible.” Also, it was a deep dark secret that the US only had built two nukes. If the Japanese expected all their islands to be obliterated off the face of the earth by more superweapons, preserving the nation would be preferable.
As to Allied impetus to unleash the A-bomb, the Okinawan campaign was significant. Japanese troops made charges with pikes, but also Japanese, Okinawan and Korean civilians were impressed into the fight, not the least as decoys, bait for booby traps, and expendable cannon fodder in lieu of actual soldiers. The defense of Okinawa was not only fanatical but wantonly cruel.
A word about karma here. Japan’s depredations on its victims were on a scale with Nazi Germany’s, from the rape of Nanking to forcing slave labor and prostitution onto Chinese and Korean civilians, to the treachery of Pearl Harbor through the routine torture and murder of POWs. No defeat in history was as well-deserved as that of the Axis powers, never mind the cause of any one nation’s surrender.
Nah. While the Soviet invasion of Manchuria had an impact, it was part of a larger process. Way beyond the scope of this website
But if you want to see a great video on the end of the Pacific War, “Unauthorized History of the Pacific War” is the go to for it. Here’s some links that might prove insightful (as they can explain it far better than anyone on an internet forum)
Alternatives to the Bomb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCrdwerjSMg&list=PLvwPt9MhP599qIpTF0WCuRsNtye6hGb2j&index=44
Japanese Decision to Surrender
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLAX8LtoVg&list=PLvwPt9MhP599qIpTF0WCuRsNtye6hGb2j&index=46
@timshatz:
I will view your recommendations as soon as I have spare time; the interviewee, John Parshall, is a superlative historian and a wonderful speaker. Thanks for this. I exhort everyone here to go watch too.
Amazing spin,Ian. So the object of the quarter million innocent civilians killed by nuking them in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to prevent the American Army from shooting brave Japannese soldiers charging them with spears?
Over half of the “brave Japanese soldiers” you mock would have been civilians forming a Home Guard. They would not be proper soldiers in uniform and would therefore be classified as either partisans or terrorists. They were expected to ambush American servicemen and BUTCHER THEM ALIVE. As for the “innocents” nuked in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had chosen to ignore the message that America had supposedly given through diplomatic channels: Evacuate or get bombed into oblivion. The civilians obeyed their own authorities, who claimed that the “impending oblivion” was mere Yankee propaganda designed to make everyone cowards. Who gets more blame for the nuclear bombings being so horrible, the one who dropped the bomb or the ones who REFUSED TO BELIEVE THAT THE BOMB WAS REAL!?
Or they did belive the bomb was real, and thought spears might still work. If I was American person in charge then; I think I might have thought, er… They are still going to come at us with spears; can we make more of these “new” bomb things? Is that viable? Bit, unsually, crazy this lot.
On display here, for your delectation, is a prime example of the “indoctrination, not education” that has been passing itself off as “higher education” here in the West.
Even a casual perusal of source documents would inform you that, short of the sort of shock that could only be delivered by the atomic bomb or basically starving 90% of Imperial Japan to death via sinking all their shipping and destroying their rail network, the Japanese Imperial Army had every intent of weaponizing the civilian population.
There’s a monograph out there that I found by going through the bibliography of one of the big books about Operation Olympic. In it, the author discusses what they’d found in original Imperial Japanese Army and Navy source documents about the efforts in Okinawa and what they’d need to do in defending the home islands. It made for chilling reading, because the IJA at the time regarded Okinawa as a wasted opportunity, and they thought that they’d made insufficient use of the civilian population as a weapon against the American forces.
So, what they did, using “lessons learned”, was promulgate a set of orders and plans that meant to use the Japanese people as screens and weapons, intending to hurl schoolchildren armed with suicide bombs and wooden/bamboo spears against Allied forces, until the country ran red with blood. Their ideas were that they’d horrify the Allies with all the slaughter, and then they’d withdraw after having to kill hundreds of thousands of civilian women and children, whose death would also free up food for the IJA.
Post-war projections by the US military were probably delusional with optimism about the whole thing; odds were, the psychological casualties alone were going to be in the hundreds of thousands among US troops, who would likely leave the first invasion, whether it succeeded or failed, resolved to simply exterminate the Japanese. And, with the way the media trends were going, odds are that the political pressure to starve the Japanese into submission while continuing the firebombing campaign was going to be the way things shook out. Couple that with the historical tropical storm that would have been hitting about the time the invasion was going on, and… Yeah. The whole situation would have militated towards “Kill them all”, and it would have been done.
Using the nukes to shock the Japanese leadership to their senses was quite the most merciful thing that could have happened, and likely saved Japan from utter annihilation. I think that the way things were trending after Okinawa, if Olympic had gone the way it probably would have, then the rest of the invasion campaign would have been written off. With the effect of basically leading to blockade and bombing campaigns that would have effectively turned Japan into a depopulated desert wasteland.
So… Yeah; let’s not nuke Japan. Let’s just kill them all with conventional means. That’s ever so much kinder, isn’t it?
Assholes like our Mr. Andries here never, ever consider the historical facts and milieu: They just wish really, really hard that bad things didn’t happen, and make believe that the hard choices made could have magically been easier. The reality? Absent nuking two Japanese cities, WWII would have almost certainly ended with the utter and final extirpation of Japan as a culture and nation. No matter what anyone wanted or did; the initial casualties of a real-world Operation Olympic would have ensured that, and arming civilians with makeshift spears was a huge part of “why” that would have been so.
I weep for the dumbf*cks like our Mr. Andries, here, who apparently never learned how to use a library card and do basic reading. The data is out there; you just have to read it, and do some basic requests out of the system.
Of course, odds are that our Mr. Andries is functionally illiterate, and unable to find his local library. I blame the NEA and his teachers.
The odds are pretty high that Mr. Andries is not an American. We rarely use the term “the American Army” instead of “US Army”. This just reflects the global anti-Americanism that explodes whenever America goes on one of its spectacular streaks of abuse of power, like the Vietnam War. If only Americans knew back then how hated that war made the US on several continents.
I remember how they revered Muhammad Ali when I was in the Philippines & he came to fight Frazier in Manila. That was their safe way to raise a middle finger at us over Vietnam.
The Americans expected to suffer grievously high casualties while inviting Japan. That was one rationale behind using the A-bomb. One would think this were obvious. Apparently not.
‘Invading,’ not ‘inviting.’ My phone tyrannizes my spelling
Estimates for casualties expected in Operation Downfall were roughly one to one and a quarter million Allied KIAs, vs about four to five million Japanese casualties, mostly civilians.
You have to consider the culture. It was an honor to die for the Emperor, the Son of Heaven. Islam is far from the only culture which has venerated martyrdom for its godhead, historically speaking. In Shinto, such a sacrifice grants the martyr immediate entry to Heaven no matter what they may have done in their life previously.
Also note that the B-29 “fire raids” killed more civilians than the two A-bombs did. It just took longer, so lacked the “shock” effect of it happening all at once with only one bomber needed to do it.
So yes, killing a quarter-million civilians in two major seaport/industrial cities, to avoid having to kill about sixteen to twenty times that number to convince the people that “Yamato Damashii”, the “spirit of Japan” was not going to bring them victory at the last moment, and potentially losing over a million Allied soldiers’, sailors’, and airmen’s live in the process, was a reasonable tradeoff.
“Shock treatment” is never gentle or pretty. Sometimes it’s just the only realistic option.
clear ether
eon
Was the (supposed) need for USA to invade Japan so pressing, or it is yet another winners myth?
Seems like without navy and airforce, they could have been isolated and blockaded on their low in resources (coal, minerals, oil) islands, so its not like they were gonna rebuild their war machine in few months and push GIs back across the Pacific.
WW2 was imo, although endlessy fascinating, also one of the most sad episodes of modern history, as when it all boils down regarding the civilian casualties, there were simply no good guys – ALL sides were just varying degrees of evil, from insanely evil to “mildly” evil ones.
Do you have any idea at all about what you’re suggesting? Do you think that a long, lingering death by starvation is “better” than being nuked? Is there some moral calculus that prefers that outcome, which I’m unaware of?
I presume that Mr. Storm is a European, a group of jackasses famed worldwide for preferring long-term cruelty towards people like the Iraqis. Rather than the quick-and-dirty route of invasion and destruction of the Iraqi government, they all counseled “sanctions”, which they immediately set about profitably suborning while simultaneously crying crocodile tears at the “cruel US sanctions” that were killing all the Iraqi children…
The illogic of all that is, frankly, mind-boggling. The same sort of mentality is on display here: Why didn’t Truman blockade and bomb Japan into submission, while ignoring that the mechanism by which that would have “succeeded” would have done immeasurably more damage, and likely would have ended in the total starvation and destruction of Japan as a nation. Ever see the Studio Ghibli anime Grave of the Fireflies? As history goes, that’s probably about your speed; do note the effect that the relatively limited blockade and bombing had on Japan in historical fact, and what suffering was inflicted. Your arguments that the nukes were “unnecessary” basically imply that you’re OK with inflicting the same “Fireflies” sort of deaths on millions more Japanese.
Frankly, I think assholes like you are worse monsters even than Hitler. He, at least, had the courage of his convictions to actually say what he meant to do, which was exterminate Jewry. You, on the other hand, piously pronounce upon morality while effectively advocating for far more cruelty and death, probably masturbating while thinking about those starving children grubbing through rubble, looking for food.
Sick f*cks, all of your ilk. I hope you suffer something akin to that, just so you actually learn the realities of this BS you so glibly criticize and argue against.
Nuking Japan wasn’t a good thing, but in terms of “what could have been”, it was quite the kindest and fastest thing that could have been done. I suspect that Japan’s victims in China would have envied the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to boot: It was likely quicker and less painful than standing in a queue to be raped and decapitated by the IJA.
Mr. Kirk, youre everyday storytelling here is impressive, passionate and always a good read, however sometimes negative emotional outbursts get the best of you, which is a shame, as you are a treasure chest of interactivity, history and life knowledge here in the comments section – but the positives by far overreach these sporadic negatives, so its not some grudge material.
Anyways, in whole unfortunate, mythical subject I’m surprised nobody ever mentioned the good ol’ Soviets, like they do not exist, yet it is they who made Japan their proclaimed war enemy in ’45, what were their plans?
Surely, I don’t think Soviets would just stand by seeing US attacking Japan home islands in such grueling struggle; they would either attack it both at the same time in some coordinated D-Day fashion, or if US acted alone but started having too much casualties, would call in them to help the struggle and return the favor – just like they helped USSR on beaches in Normandy year prior, because ofc war in the eastern front has bled commies dry and they needed the western relief.
Maybe in the end you would get akin to electricity 50/60hz difference in Japan, a divide between Soviet and US occupied part.
So, again imo, there are many facets of this whole potential story that often go unnoticed once the usual narrative of pseudohistorical-propaganda rabid fist thumping takes in.
Russia always wanted Manchuria. They would have taken as much of Japan as was profitable, but the profits were higher in Manchuria. Russia is also not noted for amphibious operations.
However, in exchange for having shed blood doing that, Stalin would have demanded one of Japan’s home islands to also be occupied and pillaged by his army after the surrender. Because that army still had grudges against Japan for previous wars.
It never ceases to amaze me what people who’ve never bothered to actually dig through original source documents insist on believing, just because they don’t want to accept ugly realities.
Having been through a lot of the source documents to satisfy my own curiosity and because I felt like the majority of the “accepted historical facts” are mostly delusional, it is my considered opinion that the nukes were by far the least inhumane course of action. Sad, but true. If you go through the post-WWII intel translations of Japanese planning and operations orders, it is difficult to comprehend that they really meant to do what they said they were going to do.
Like that fact or not, the documents are out there. Go look at them; if you can come back with anything other than your own ill-informed opinion, I’ll be happy to look at the evidence.
What I’ve seen, and I did go back through it all because I was incredulous that the Japanese IJA and IJN were planning that crap? It supports everything I say. Hell, I think it actually supports a far darker take on it all, in that I think that many in the IJA/IJN actively wanted the Gotterdammerung to happen, thinking to expiate their failure to the Emperor by taking out as many Allied troops as possible. The mindset is breathtakingly at odds with the usual run of “scholarship” typified by all these dumbf*cks saying that the nukes were “unnecessary”.
I guarantee you this, however: Were you able to actually run a realistic counterfactual somehow, and got the historical milieu right? The average person of today would be shocked at just how little the American public would have cared about the utter destruction of Japan. After Olympic, regardless of success or failure, the casualty lists would have led to either a demand for total blockade/starvation of Japan or another form of what would have turned into outright genocide. Nobody would have blinked; nobody would have cared. Today’s generation in that would might look back in horror, but the raw fact is that it still would have happened, just like the nukes did.
Japan lucked out with regards to that whole scenario. Anyone trying to rewrite history to say otherwise is either ignorant of the facts or delusional.
I spent much of my childhood going through a hoarder’s cache of 1930s-1940s mass media material, a good deal of which came out of a family whose exposure to the issues was a lot higher than average due to all the missionary work that members performed in both China and Japan during the early 20th Century. You can watch the arc of US public opinion in all that material, going from general ambivalence about Japan to outright anti-Japanese by the late 1930s due to all the abuse of the Chinese, and by Pearl Harbor and the rest of the war? It was sobering reading. My opinion is that all the people writing for those publications that advocated for the total destruction of Japan would have been listened to, and it would have happened. The full hospitals and lists of the dead would have mandated it after Olympic; none of the politicians who went for half-measures would have survived politically in that world, and if the atomic bombs hadn’t proved practical, then blockade and bombing campaigns of mind-boggling scope and depth would have. Japan would have starved to death by about late 1946, and most of the Japanese population would have been abandoned to their fate by 1947. Nobody would have cared; it would have been a chain of ghost islands peopled by the dead.
That was where public sentiment was. Anyone advocating for anything else would have been shouted down and probably lynched for daring to open their mouths. God alone knows what the fate of the Japanese in the internment camps would have been, because I just don’t know what would have happened to them.
You really have to go through the original source material to even begin to understand it. Do you grasp that they were publishing pictures in Life Magazine of Japanese skulls sent back as momentoes, and doing so approvingly? Nobody said a word about that, nobody thought it was inhumane or even slightly questionable; the young lady pictured looking pensively at the skull of that Japanese soldier was not held up as some monster; she was considered a lucky girl to have a boyfriend who’d take the time to send that to her…
It was a different time and place; you do not start out by understanding that, you’re going to fail to understand where things were going and what would have happened.
Well said. My mother-in-law was in her 20’s during the war, living in Hebei in north-central China. She had rather unpleasant memories of the unwanted Japanese guests. Civilized warfare and ‘reasonable solutions’ are both genres of fiction.
My relatives who were involved in the missionary work going on in China were not exemplary moral people by the standards of today, but… They were universally horrified by what the Japanese were doing, and did everything they could to bring what was going on to world attention.
It’s one thing to decry the “moral degeneracy” of the missionaries, who weren’t exactly paragons of “modern thinking”, but at least they tried to be better people than the Japanese or even the Chinese upper classes.
You actually examine the details of the histories during that time period, and it’s an utter shitshow and horror. Anything ameliorating the suffering, no matter how poorly it matched up with Chinese culture? It was an improvement.
You really don’t get it, until you start digging into the first-person accounts. I’ve seen a bunch of that stuff that was just horrifying, when you realize the implications of it all.
I wish I had the ability to digitize everything that I’ve gone over, from that era. It’d be nice to be able to show people what was reported by actual first-person eye-witness types. Japan does not come out looking good, at all…
Most of the former missionaries to China who witnessed the Japanese depredations were of the opinion that leaving anything of Japan still standing or alive was a mistake. There was an exchange between some of my relatives, in correspondence, where one is bringing fire on the other by way of “What the hell did you expect? I told you what they were like, back when…”
The Japanese are extremely fortunate that the various Methodist and other missionary types were not in charge during the latter phases of WWII; had they been? Those sainted missionary types would have brought nothing but fire and the sword to Japan, leveling the place back to the stone age. The palpable hatred and animosity I found in those letters was really hard to reconcile with the pleasant aunties and uncles I knew from childhood. They would have been joyously on-board with a genocide of Japan, I suspect.
Kirk, while its a fact that there were japanese atrocities in China, its hard to grasp how could civilians from Hiroshima and Nagasaki be responsible for it, or from any other major city that USAF firebombed into oblivion.
And again, even if we go into that old testament eye for and eye mindset, its not like chinese dropped the bombs (who could maybe somehow then be excused for it, or some other japanese direct victims),
but US, that had exactly something like 5-6 civilian casualties of japanese attacks on US soil during the whole war (the bizzare baloons accident on the beach), compared to, what?, how many hundreds of thousands, if not million, of japanese civilians killed.
Thats the evil component of the whole unfortunate situation I was talking about before, that cannot be erased from the history. But we could only as a civilisation stride for that nothing like that happens again – good guys got pushed or marched into situations that basically morally bankrupted them.
Y’know… There are reasons I’m so contemptuous of the “educated”. Mr. Storm, here? He’s “Exhibit A” for the moral myopia and outright degeneracy of the Western academy, these days.
Where, do you suppose, the rapists and murderers of Nanking and all the rest of that horror show came from? From what population were they conscripted? Was there some “other Japan” where these monsters came from?
Mr. Storm here would have it that there were nothing but innocents there in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who did not “deserve” to be “victims” of the atomic bombings.
Which then leads us to the question of just who would have been? Anyone? The Japanese public was entirely on-board with raping Nanking; there were newspaper stories published about Japanese officers having “head-cutting” competitions in that massacre, who were not censured in the least. They were, instead, celebrated. There were subscriptions set up to buy one of those officers a new, fancy, commemorative sword.
This was the same population that had been happy to invade Korea and Manchuria; they knew precisely what went on there, because it was their sons doing it. They were proud of those sons… They were entirely on-board with what the IJA did with regards to “comfort women”, and there are “letters to the editor” that I’ve seen wherein they were writing to complain that the fighting men of Japan were not being afforded their “comforts” in China and elsewhere…
Yeah, I’m not so sure the Japanese public was all that “innocent”. You’re going to look long and hard for any evidence that anyone in Japan thought that what their military did in Nanking or anywhere in China was in any sense “wrong”. There’s no expression of that, even today: The various politicians still make unabashed pilgrimage to the shrine at Yasukuni every election, despite there being at least a thousand war criminals memorialized there.
Where, pray tell, are Japanese memorials to the victims of those men? Are there any?
Same-same with German “victims”. I knew a German woman who was at least honest about it all, and who’d at least acknowledge her culpability in it all. She’d been one of those worshipful “madchen” in the crowds acclaiming Hitler and his actions. She didn’t start to change her mind until after the war, when she realized what she’d been supporting, after all her brothers and father were dead in the fighting, and she realized just exactly where all those nice hams had come from that her brothers had sent home from their duties in the “Occupied Territories”. Part of it was that she wound up having to live with it all, after the GI she married brought her to live with his family here in the US, and his brother had married a Dutch victim of the “Hunger Winter”. The two sisters-in-law made their peace, eventually, but the German one had to sit through multiple recitations of the Dutchwoman’s suffering malnutrition and watching her little sister starve to death because all the food had been confiscated for the Germans… She had a bit of a “Come to Jesus” moment, in all of that. I have always had to respect her for her openness and honesty about the whole thing, and I guarantee you that if you’d ever have had the ill manners and temerity to tell her that she was an “innocent victim” of the whole thing, she’d have slapped the snot out of you.
You’re part of a population making war on another? Unless you’re like Sophie Scholl, you’re culpable. I personally found it hard to believe that Japanese newspapers were actually publishing the truth about Nanking, and similar activities. I thought they’d be hidden, ashamedly, from the people of Japan. They were not. Just like the Germans boasted of many of their activities, so too did the Japanese. Hell, if you go looking at it all, the Japanese were even more up front and blatant about it all; had they been running the Holocaust, there’d have likely been contests between Japanese officers for how many Jews they’d killed, and the newspapers would have been full of their exploits…
“Innocent victims”, my ass. Where the hell do you think those monsters came from?
Moral degeneracy has many expressions; this is merely one, that Mr. Storm displays for us here.
Mr. Kirk, while some of your historical insights are spot on, along with the childish argumentum ad hominem attacks, the stuff like this, what you wrote above:
“Hell, if you go looking at it all, the Japanese were even more up front and blatant about it all; had they been running the Holocaust, there’d have likely been contests between Japanese officers for how many Jews they’d killed, and the newspapers would have been full of their exploits…”
is trivialising the whole debate and going into pure fantasy direction, by providing unnecessary “facts” that exists only as a figment of ones imagination – because ofc they never happened.
History is about what happened, not what could have been – for example, when we discuss and measure Alexander The Great, our starting point is not a premise that his exploits could have ended in Greece because his horse Bucephallus stepped and slipped on a banana peel and threw him to his neck-breaking death, so the whole conquest endeavour ended in the very first month,
but a man who lead its, it seems extraordinary people through many major battles from Greece far east to the India, and in the process changed the history of that part of the World for a long time.
So, while there is a theoretical possibility that maybe some descendant of some Hiroshima 1945. civilian would, for example, maybe invent an Earth destroying weapon in 100, 200 or more years in the future (or earth destroying virus, sorta like what chinese did, or who/what else sonofbitch was truly responsible for its creation, in 2019.)
this is still not a viable moral and practical reason, unless MAYBE, but maybe we posess the time machine that could peek into the future and trace it to the roots of the problem, to wipe out that whole city in 1945, imo.
Pinning something on some nations that they are, and every of their member, collectively evil, is a huge moral blunder that lead humanity into darkest years of its existence, as what happened in ww2, starting with german racial plans.
First and foremost, regular Joe, civilian during such war is also a victim of its government, because a vast majority of population does not know leadership plans and whats really happening in many segments, and all the atrocities someone is doing in its glorious national namesake.
So, the US population is also a victim of it, because, even opposed to these above stories that they were rabid on japanese (again, imo, unwarrantly, as it was not like every family in US had several of its women or children massacred by Japs),
I believe that if the public knew of the coming atomic bombings and its effects, probably a great deal, even the majority of it would strongly oppose it and opt for some different mean to end the whole conflict.
Hell, probably even many of the scientists and leaders directly involved would be opposed if they’ve seen the effects of it, though they could not be excused, as opposed to regular uneducated people, one from science could grasp what could have happen when you play with atoms.
But, not every part of the population is deaf and dumb and only an ignorant government tool; that was seen during the Vietnam war with all the protests, instead of rabidly advocating of killing of all of the people of both north and south ‘Nam, as “they are all the same and equally culpable”.
But that is only a lucky reminder that civilisation morally upgraded itself by the 60s – which sadly in this day and age, seems like all of that is eroding again to international barbarity.
Which is maybe not such a surprise, maybe cynically speaking, that is what we truly are as a species, and could never escape from our nature – if you wanna look at it from another standpoint.
Mr. Storm apparently believes that the Japanese did nothing wrong as a nation, and that killing any of them at all, to make them stop, was immoral.
Unfortunately, the sad fact is that history doesn’t work that way. The Japanese people, just like the Germans, were entirely pleased when they heard what was going on in China. You’ll look long and hard for any actual criticism of what the IJA did and publicized, just like you won’t find anybody in Germany who protested the looting and starvation of Europe to feed Germany’s war machine.
Making them stop required killing them, collectively. Collectively benefit? Collectively pay the price.
I’m not sure exactly what Mr. Storm wants, here… It’s a fact that had the US not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atomic weapons that it did historically, then there was going to be an invasion that killed millions of Japanese civilians along with a bunch of Allied troops, the majority of whom would have been American. This is somehow “more moral”?
I’m entirely unsure what this freak’s arguments really are, other than he is advocating for an historic course of action that almost certainly would have seen the total destruction of Japan as a nation-state and an ethnicity. Maybe he gets off on that, I don’t know…
In any event, the facts are what they are, and Hiroshima plus Nagasaki got bombed, which was by far not the worst things that happened to cities in WWII. Nanjing, for example? The stats are very interesting, comparatively: Combined Hiroshima/Nagasaki casualties were roughly 150,000-250,000, while Nanjing was reported by the Chinese to account for some 340,000 dead. What’s interesting there is that Mr. Storms vaunted “innocent Japanese” types did all that at the retail level, up close and personal. Individual actions, man by man, killing civilians with a brutality straight out of the Middle Ages. Said Japanese “soldiers”, if they can be dignified with the term, were recruited from those same “innocent Japanese” communities that were bombed, and I suppose that by extension, the Chinese who were killed at Nanjing were just being naughty, making those nice Japanese boys do what they did to them…
Mr. Storm displays the mentality and morals of a puerile schoolboy, who stamps his feet and insists that he’s right, and that everyone else is wrong. Unfortunately, the sad fact is that absent bombing the absolute snot out of the Japanese civilians, they weren’t going to stop building weapons for the “boys” they sent off to war in order to keep killing other people.
I guess the Chinese and Koreans deserved everything that they got at the hands of the Japanese Empire, just like every one of their other victims, and that we’re naughty, naughty people for doing whatever it took to stop them.
It’s a luxury set of beliefs, just like most of the ones promulgated in our schools these days. Sadly, those rules just aren’t rational or workable, but we’ll have to learn that all over again, the hard way. I think our Mr. Storm has forgotten, or never learned, somehow, who it was that started WWII. Sad.
Any credible numbers/ estimates on the [%] of combatants killed or wounded by bayonets in WW2 and WW1?
The stats on what killed whom and when are incredibly difficult to winkle out of history.
Several things contribute to this, not the least of which is that everyone goes by “Well, what sort of wounds were recorded in the field hospitals?”, which tends to leave out all the people who actually died on the battlefield, and since Graves Registration is more in the business of cleaning things up and making nice neat rows of dead rather than doing investigative forensics…? Yeah. Good luck with figuring all that out.
There’s also the minor issue of attribution; the bayonet is mostly a psychological weapon, yes? This means that when you see a bunch of hairy-legged kilted Scotsmen coming at you with a sharpened chunk of steel on the end of their rifles, you take counsel of your common sense and leg it for wherever they aren’t going to be… Which usually means that you’re now out in the open, ready for artillery, cavalry (in an earlier age…) machineguns, or something else to kill you. All of which you’d have been safe from, if only you hadn’t run from those crazed Scots…
So, when you tot up “Bayonet Casualties”, are you to include all the ones that died because they had their wills to fight broken by those shiny steel blades, winkling in the sun as they crossed the space between your lines and theirs?
You try to go back and work this crap out, even with archaeology, I really don’t think you can get to anywhere near an accurate number on “How many died due to bayonets?” It may be more; it may be less than in the textbooks. Myself, having done a whoooooole lot of reading on the issue? I’m ambivalent, and about all I’d pronounce on is that I’m entirely dissatisfied with any of the numbers out there. I don’t think that the methodologies of a lot of the scholarly studies I’ve read were at all realistic; as a serving soldier, and aware of how things actually worked, it’s my heartfelt belief that the records are just entirely inadequate to answer the question.
My gut feeling is that there are a whole lot of casualties attributed to “other causes” that were actually due to the bayonet and the men behind said bayonets. How the hell you’d shake that out, and get an accurate appraisal? No earthly idea; I’m of a mind that it’s effectively impossible at this point.
Hell, having talked to guys who did bayonet charges in real life? I’m not sure that they themselves are really all that good of witnesses and reporters; much of what was related to me as “fact” was entirely impossible to corroborate on the ground, and since we’ve got decent imagery for some of these things, I kinda suspect that the mere act of talking yourself into doing a bayonet charge is mind-warping enough to serve as prima facie evidence that your words during the after-action review ought to be taken with a lot of salt… You have to put yourself into a state of mind where your desperation and necessity itself force you to do something that is actively against your own best interest, and it has been my experience that such things are very often “situational insanity”, something that should affect both sides of the engagement. Half of the effect of the bayonet charge is basically convincing sane men that they’re dealing with the insane, and when that happens? Smartest thing to do is “be somewhere else”.
A set of facts that militates ever getting rational and accurate numbers on the actual events…
Chairman Mao’s Little Grey Book of Guerilla Warfare advocated giving women and children pikes and spears to attack and distract in an effort to hide true numbers and demoralize the foe.
Of course its always good to remember that often political pamphlets of such day and age are written more close to the fiction side, than real world reality and knowledge, sorta like some insane Tolkien,
but also can be an anti-communist (or anti x-whatever political idea) propaganda, sometimes both if translation was mistakenly or deliberately botched. One horrible thing remains though, if in practice someone forces these bookish ideology ideas, which seemingly happened more often then not
Ian’s friend Prof. Clower at Type 56: The Story of the Chinese Army Youtube channel has covered both the PLA’s devotion to bayonets and the willingness to commit a mass militia far larger than the # of guns available. The lack of ammo was the overriding reason for this devotion. But unlike the Japanese whom the PLA had fought bayonet to bayonet, the PLA put a lot of thought into efficient usage. It wasn’t just suicide attacks.
Somewhere in the Tank Museum’s vids, there’s one about Percy Hobart, the man behind the various ‘funny’ specialty tanks of the Normandy campaign.
When called to the task of developing these tanks, Hobart had been relegated to some backwater…where he was training to resist a German invasion with a pike.
Makes little sense if these were primarily made in Manchuria and Korea, with only few examples in Japan, how is there a (fabricated) story logic that they would be used in defending the Japanese home islands ?
Speaking of which, is there some actual official data (if its not also fabricated and post-truthed) what did Japanese had in home islands, what was found and confiscated during the occupation?
Were there heaps of military material (for which I suspect someone has an “atomic charity” angle to immediately inflate it), or the actual situation was closer to bamboo poles.
The data is out there. I would recommend using the bibliographies in the various works about Operation Olympic and the post-WWII disarmament process, and then requesting source documents like I did from your local library system.
There was a lot of crap that I similarly found incredible; going through the actual source documents is illuminating. If anything, I think that the majority of the people writing about this are unable to process what the IJA and the Japanese government was planning to do, and because of that they actually understate the situation by a good deal.
Do remember that the US military spent several years dumping weapons at sea, after the war. Friend of mine used to do scuba dives in Japan searching out those sites, and the ones he was even able to reach using conventional scuba were immense. There was a lot more that was dumped deep, per the records.
Make no mistake about it, hard that it may be to believe: Imperial Japan intended to expend whatever it needed to in order to drive off the invasion. The nukes basically had the effect of slapping them back to reality, and made them realize that should they continue down the path of what they were planning, it would all have been irrelevant, because once the US saw how many casualties they were going to take, it’d just be a case of the US Navy blockading and then either conventionally bombing everything in Japan that moved, or nuking every population center until the entire island chain was a desert.
It’s my belief that the deaths of Japanese civilians and US servicemen during the opening phases of Operation Olympic would have led to a total change of tactics, and the hardening of US attitudes such that what would amount to a genocide of the Japanese people would have taken place in the aftermath. Even if the US had just refused to deliver aid to Japan, the way it did after the historical surrender? It was a very near-run thing; Japan came within literal days of irrecoverably running out of food such that there would have been no way of effectively relieving them. The after-action reports on that subject alone are illuminating; once past a certain tipping-point, there was nothing that anyone, even with the best will in the world, could have done. Surrender came just in time, and because the Japanese followed the guidance of the Emperor with the same fervor they’d fought the war, we didn’t have the hardening of attitudes that would have led to an aid cut-off.
You have to read the numbers in the reports, and have a familiarity with the American mass media of the time; most Americans circa 1945 would have been A-OK with letting Japan starve to death, given things like Bataan and all the rest. Hell, if the US military had let the “good news” about all the murdered pilots and other POWs, plus Unit 731 get out? Yeesh.
The whole thing was a mess; second-guessing Truman et al is a fool’s game.
American History leaves out the importance of The Russian Red ARMY invading mainland Japan between the 1st and 2nd nuke we dropped on them. The presence of the Russians pressed Japan into a dilemma. They had to make a choice: do they surrender to the Russians and risk having their culture completely obliterated, or to the Americans?
Aside from anything else, the idea of the soviets launching an amphibious assault on the Home Islands is so absurd as to be comedic, given their total fucking lack of the necessary ships, not even to mention the nonexistance of experience
The Russian Army, like the Wehrmacht, not only had no, that is exactly zero, experience in amphibious warfare, they also made the same mistake the Wehrmacht did in planning Operation Sealion, the projected invasion of Britain.
In both cases, their technology, training and doctrines were based on river crossings. Something which both armies were in fact very good at.
The simply did not understand that crossing the Sea of Japan, or the English Channel, to put a credible force on the beaches of Hokkaido or into the Thames Estuary and the Wash was a fundamentally different sort of thing than crossing a river.
My old boss, Marine, Gunnery Sergeant, Guadalcanal Class of 1942, was involved in most of the island landings due to being Recon. He told me about the huge amount of “makee-learnee” the United States Navy, Marine Corps and Army were forced to do starting at “the Canal” and going right up to Okinawa.
Things like “Do not put all the Seabees’ heavy equipment on just one transport”; at Guadalcanal guess which transport got sunk?
Or “If you’re going to use shore bombardment, use enough”. At the start of the war, Army Ordnance allocated enough money to the 4.5in bombardment rocket project for R&D and to buy 50,000 finished rockets. That, they estimated, would be enough for the entire war.
On 1 April 1945, the first day of the invasion of Okinawa, the United States Navy spent seven hours “softening up” the heavy shore defenses with naval bombardment. Included in that were 4.5in rockets fired from special Landing Craft, Mechanized (Rocket) (LCM [R]), about fifty of them IIRC. In that seven hours, they fired just under one million 4.5s in a single sustained fire mission. One of my uncles was there, and told me later that after that he understood why the 4.5’s nickname was the “Screaming Mimi”.
That would have been unimaginable to our Ordnance people, or anybody else, just four years earlier.
By 1945, the United States armed forces were the world’s leading experts on amphibious warfare.
And even they weren’t sure that Operation Olympic could succeed. With everything they could bring to bear.
The Russians, like the Wehrmacht trying to invade Britain, would not have had a hope in Hell of pulling it off.
Oh, and BTW; in 1941, the preeminent experts in amphibious warfare were the Imperial Japanese forces.
We learned a lot from them. Especially by being careful not to repeat their mistakes.
clear ether
eon
As with Lend-lease scheme, they would have got what they needed from US for attacking Japan, they just would need to provide free manpower,
to help the GIs who have too much trouble from human wave/swarm bayonet attacks.
Also, there are now in the end of ’45 plethora of countries forming UN (UK, France etc. dozens of them), who could chime with their troops and effort for securing japanese freedom, or at least containing them on the home islands for some time.
It seems like people completely forgot the Realpolitik
The realpolitik was that in the end, the Japanese government got exactly what they wanted.
The Emperor was left as the spiritual head of Japan. The War Party leaders like Tojo were tried, convicted and hanged, in a word “sacrificed”.
And the Zaibatsu, the well-connected corporates who were the leadership of Japan’s version of Mussolini-style syndicalist socialism remained, just changing their names. Nakajima became Fuji, for instance. (Mitsubishi didn’t even bother changing their name.)
The fix was in from the start, thanks to Herbert Hoover (FDR and Truman’s special envoy), Joseph Grew (U.S. Ambassador), and Douglas MacArthur (who wanted to be an “American shogun” so bad he could taste it).
(My uncle knew MacArthur personally; knowing him was not conducive to liking or respecting him. Compare and contrast Gen. Curtis LeMay; few who knew him liked him but nobody who knew him did not respect him.)
Japan changed very little politically after 1945. Social changes were mostly the Westernization of popular culture.
(What didn’t change was the modal diatonic music scale as opposed to the Western chromatic scale; now you know why the lounge singers in Japanese postwar film noir sound odd to Western ears, even without bad dubbing.)
For a good summary of what actually happened, and why, see The Yamato Dynasty; The Secret History of Japan’s Imperial Family by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave (1999).
clear ether
eon
(funny) idea for a new forgotten weapon review (I apologise if it has been already);
There is a training version of one japanese MG (cant recall the name now) that had blowback bolt as it fired blank cartridges.
This could be also effectively story-ised into an propaganda ploy how it is a desperate last ditch ’45 weapon in which jap government completely disregarded security of its operators by redesigning the gun to fired without any locking, thus “atomics” saved them from that, also.
Well it actually sorta did, Guns magazine (from 60s iirc) did a story how they were baffled how a regular full sized cartridge MG could function with “simple blowback”.
Another of my uncles, Marine Recon, ran into those in Korea in 1950. Being used by North Korean troops also armed with Arisaka 6.5 x 50SRmm bolt-action rifles using the same cartridge.
The Arisaka, which is one of the strongest Mauser-type bolt actions ever made, stood up to the cartridges’ pressure much better than the “training” machine guns did.
He noted that when the Chinese “volunteers” showed up, they were mostly armed with Chinese Type 24 Mauser rifles in 7.9 x 57mm plus Chinese-made Type 50 SMGs (PPSh 41 copy) in 7.62 x 25mm. Ironically, their support machine guns were mostly Inglis-made Brens in 7.9 x 57mm, captured from the Nationalists in the Civil War.
cheers
eon
Another interesting fact is that every Purple Heart earned since then, was struck for the initial landings of Operation Olympic. Every Purple heart earned in Korea, Vietnan and everything else and they still have over 100.000 left
General Sir Percy Hobart (of “Hobarts Funnies” and the British 7th Division and 79th Division) was issued a pike, when he was sacked and became a Lance Corporal in the Home Guard!! It is in The Tank Museum.