Reprinted with permission of World War II Magazine
On August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing an estimated 140,000 civilians. Three days later, the B-29 bomber Bock’s Car dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, killing about 80,000 civilians.
The United States remains the only nation ever to have launched an attack with nuclear weapons. For this reason, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have always been controversial. Was either attack really necessary? Perhaps a demonstration of the bomb’s immense power would have sufficed. Or perhaps if the United States not insisted on “unconditional surrender” — if it had offered assurances that Japan could retain the kokutai (the institution of the emperor) — the Japanese government would have conceded defeat by mid-summer 1945.
The usual response to these and other objections is that the pro-war faction of the Japanese government was so well entrenched that the only alternatives to the use of the atomic bomb were either an invasion of the Home Islands, which might have cost as many as a million U.S. casualties; or else a protracted naval blockade that would have killed a million or more Japanese civilians through starvation and disease.
Counterfactuals concerning the atomic bomb invariably assume that the United States possessed this weapon in the summer of 1945 but refrained from using it. As most historians have recognized, however, this “what if” has an air of artificiality about it. Having already killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in a series of incendiary raids — the fire bombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, alone killed over 90,000 civilians — the U.S. government had no hesitation about using the atomic bomb. But suppose instead that the United States simply lacked the nuclear option, that the $2 billion Manhattan Project had failed to solve the numerous problems in physics and engineering required to produce a nuclear weapon?
Such a failure is not hard to imagine….
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4 Comments
An interesting counterfactual question. I was particularly pleased to see you quote Richard B. Frank, a surprisingly neglected historian whose major works (Guadalcanal and Downfall) will surely stand the test of time.
On the technical side there was some risk of failure, but I think it was pretty small. The scientific and engineering brainpower brought to bear, the immense financial resources, and the leadership of Gen. Groves all but assured success, in my view. But in the spirit of the counterfactual, I believe that what Frank outlined in Downfall — a Japanese systemic collapse — probably represents the most likely scenario. How far into this collapse would the Emperor assert his authority and bring the war to a halt? 1 November is a good guess, perhaps slightly optimistic; seems doubtful that the war would have persisted very far into 1946.
Worth considering is that every day during the war, Allied service personnel and Allied civilians were being killed and wounded.
The sinking of the USS Indianapolis is well-known, of course, but realize that during and even after Okinawa, the US was fighting an active and bloody campaign in the Philippines, with US Army and newly-recruited Philippine Army troops; the British, Indians, and Africans were fighting in Burma and gearing up for Malaya, and the Australians were fighting in what was then the Netherlands East Indies.
Much of China and all of Korea, of course, remained occupied and at the mercy of the Imperial Japanese Army, and there were 100,000s of Allied POWs and civilian internees in IJA hands as well.
As Paul Fussell wrote, “thank God for the atom bomb.”
More than a few Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Malayans, Thais, Indochinese, etc. presumably felt the same way.
I know that, were it not for the Manhattan Project (including the successes at the Y-12 complex in my current hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee), I would not be here today.
Both of my paternal grandparents (Grandpa *and* Grandma) were Marines in the Pacific theater during World War II. Had Operation OLYMPIC been executed, I have no doubt Grandpa would have been redeployed to the Fleet Marine Force (malaria notwithstanding) — possibly never to have returned. And even if he had, the disruption on my family’s history would have changed the course of events in those short years after VJ Day.
Thank God for General Leslie Groves, Prof. E.O. Lawrence, the CalUTrons from Berkeley, Y-12, Los Alamos, and the Enola Gay.
IMHO:
a) the Home Islands were under increasingly effective air, surface, mine (including air-dropped) and submarine blockade.
b) Japan was not in a good position under such a blockade, even if much of its manpower wasn’t in China.
c) The US Army Air Corps and naval aviation was pounding Japanese cities on a daily basis, with little resistance, and had the logistics to keep it up (or increase the pounding) for quite some time.
d) The aerial pounding was at a level which was was frequently equivalent to an atomic attack. IIRC, the Hiroshima bomb was estimated to have inflicted damage equivalent to a 220 plane B-29 raid.
e) Food shortages were a major problem by the summer of 1945 (and I keep thinking that controlling the population was becoming a problem).
The conlusion is that Japan would have been totally trashed by the end of good flying weather in 1945, and would have still been hit very hard during the winter (i.e., B-29 raids which could be done in all weathers, using radar and area incendiary bombing).
By spring, there probably would have been little organized resistance, and a population in famine.
The casualties, of course, would have been horrific.