Surrender with Honor

Sixty-four years ago today on August 9, 1945 a second nuclear bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.  This bomb killed 80,000 people and like the one dropped three days earlier at Hiroshima, which killed 140,000 people was a devastating blow to the Japanese nation.  By the summer of 1945, the US most certainly had the upper hand in WWII’s Pacific Theatre.  The fight was not easy, it was a grinding, brutal blood bath, but the momentum was leaning strongly towards the United States.

 There was no way out for Japan, and now the US was poised to launch a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland.  The only thing standing in the way between this US invasion and what would surely be the total destruction of this culture was the agreement by the Japanese War Council to throw in the towel.  The civilian representatives wanted to raise the white flag, but the military was resolute in its desire to maintain its Samurai honor and they refused to quit.  The War Council was at a stalemate when the US bombed Hiroshima.

It is so easy to look at this devastating event and say oh yeah if I was in that position I would hold up my hands and shout as loudly as possible, “I am out.”  A destructive force never known before was just unleashed on your country and you have no way of fighting back against it.  Oh heck yeah, I am throwing in the towel.  But that is not what happened on August 7^th, 8^th or 9^th. The United States anxiously waited for the message of the Japanese surrender to filter its way through diplomatic channels, but the message never came.

So the question is what on earth was going through the heads of the Japanese War Council that prevented them from surrendering? Did they think they could fight their way back? Did they think this was just the motivational tool that they could leverage to call the Japanese civilians to retaliate against the Americans? Did they think the US was a one-shot wonder and did not have the resources to fire off another nuclear bomb? Were they banking on the Soviets entering the fight and helping to broker a better deal?

Historians have argued both sides of this case and both make compelling arguments. One camp notes the dropping of the bombs saved lives. Revisionist historians argue that the use of the atomic bombs came as an early Cold War show of force for the Soviets and an attempt to end the war early in order keep Stalin out of the fight.  Japanese American Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa argues that the Japanese leaders knew the war was over and they were losing.  But in Japanese culture these two issues—defeat and surrender do not necessarily co-exist as they do in the west.  Surrendering is a political act and the Japanese did not have a history of surrendering. 

The military wanted to maintain their honor and the honor of the Emperor and the civilians wanted to make a deal.  The War Council needed a unanimous decision in order to act—and in early August they were at a stalemate.  They needed something huge to happen in order to save their honor.  The dropping of the two nuclear bombs and the Stalin’s declaration of war on August 8^th provided just the right political cover.  Recently declassified documents in Japan support this notion. Mitsumasa Yonai, a War Council Member and Japanese Naval Minister described the bombs as a “gift from heaven.”  Without the bombs the Japanese military was preparing for the US invasion of mainland Japan in the fall of 1945.

Fortunately that invasion did not have to happen. The Japanese did surrender following the August 9^th bombing of Nagasaki, Stalin was kept out of the fight, and the US companies were allowed to profit from the rebuilding of the Japanese economy

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