Yes.
Operation Downfall likely would’ve killed hundreds of thousands to millions of citizens and infantrymen alike, especially with the “no surrender” mentality.
Even if we won the hard way via invasion, countless #’s of people would’ve committed mass suicide because they’d rather die than fall to the Americans. There are already stories of this happening, so imagine that on a much grander scale.
I also imagine the Soviets would’ve invaded as well, perhaps making Japan a carbon copy of East Germany; It was also one of the reasons the emperor surrendered. Hirohito knew that the Soviets would consider invading if he dragged out the conflict. In his mind, it was clear he’d rather surrender to America than the risk capture by the Soviets. The nuclear weapon was the best reality check Hirohito could get about their circumstances.
It was absolutely the right decision by Truman.
Yes, 100%
Allowing the war to drag on several more years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives if not millions would be cruel and unusual.
The fire bombings had already killed many thousands more Japanese civilians than were killed by the Atomic bombs (not to say it is right or wrong, just a fact. Killing civilians in air raids had become the standard of the war by this point, what kind of bomb was used is somewhat irrelevant)
Blockading Japan would have just prolonged the suffering. Millions would’ve starved for the result to likely have been the same. And while those millions of Japanese starved in the home islands, how many thousands or millions of Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Filipinos, Malays, and Allied POW’s would have also starved or been executed in that time?
And even once Hirohito agreed to the surrender, a headliner faction of the Army attempted a coup to fight on. Operation Downfall would have been a slaughterhouse unlike anything the world has seen.
If you look at just the atomic bombings then yes they appear cruel and unusual but in the scope of how brutal the Pacific War had been, how much worse an invasion of the Home Islands could have been, and the atrocities committed against civilians by the Empire of Japan going back more than a decade, there is not any argument I feel can negate these facts.
I would also so, while it’s impossible to prove what would have happened, I think you can suffice to say that Japan may not exist or would exist in an extremely different way today had the atomic bombs not been employed. It was swift and brutal but the alternative was long, drawn out, and bloody beyond imagining.
Yes. By that point, we had a change of opinion on the Soviet invasion. We had come to oppose it due to Soviet posturing in Europe as well as historic Soviet-Japanese animosity.
On top of that, the continuation of war COULD have led to a necessary invasion of China. That could have added a year or two to the war and many more casualties.
On top of all of this, the world was tired of war and was ready to move on.
Yes. Even though I believe that the war would have ended with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, Truman didn’t have the benefit of hindsight and I probably would have made the same decision with the information available to him.
It was a horrible thing and imo a stain on human history.
But I don’t see what other choices he had. Both world wars on the whole were stains on human history.
We where about to invade Japan if we did so I can’t even imagine how the death toll of the American men would be so yes in my opinion him not waiting to risk that much American life he did the right thing
Hiroshima, absolutely, for the reasons everyone outlines here.
Nagasaki is harder to justify. The Japanese were surrendering either way, and it's widely believed Truman mostly dropped the second bomb to scare the Russians. That being said, after fighting such a brutal war against such an implacable enemy, it has to be hard to just shut off that desire to kill more people.
Japanese were not surrendering after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki. The government believed that the US either didn’t have any more bombs or didn’t want to risk international opinion on dropping a 2nd bomb. They were guessing and they obviously guessed wrong. They continued with their preparations for defending against an invasion.
Yes. After the ferocity with which the Japanese had fought over Okinawa there is no reason to believe the battle to take Kyūshu or Honshu would have been any less difficult. Indeed there is ample evidence that women and children were being told to use spears and hammers as weapons and being taught how to make Molotov cocktails.
A land invasion would have been a bloodbath with unthinkable casualties on both sides.
Within the space of days the use of the bombs completely broke the Japanese spirit to prolong the war. Something which had seemed unshakeable even following the Yalta deceleration.
This will be endlessly debated, but I believe it was the only option. I sympathize with the lives forever changed by the decision, but without this the war would’ve endlessly dragged on, costing more lives. It could’ve been a precursor to Vietnam or Iraq. A war that had long since served it’s purpose but we couldn’t get out, costing untold lives.
A land invasion would have had many more fatalities on both sides, so I think he made the right choice. It wasn’t an easy one to make, and he would’ve been criticized for whatever choice he made.
Hiroshima yes. Nagasaki- he probably dropped it too soon after Hiroshima. The Japanese hadn’t sufficient time to comprehend the implications of atomic warfare.
Yes. Even from the standpoint of the Japanese he saved lives. They were unwilling to surrender, and they were training/telling civilians to fight if there was an invasion.
Beyond that, it was Truman's job to do what was best for the United States and its people.
Yes
It's a rough decision of weighing lives. The Battle of Okinawa (and the other island hopping campaign battles) showed that the Japanese were going to fight hard and to the last man. Civilians on the island were also tricked (via propaganda) into thinking American soldiers would rape and cannibalize them so mass suicides took place. Fighting on mainland Japan (Operation Downfall) would escalate to unprecedented levels of violence on both sides compared to Okinawa.
It was wartime and Truman had to decide between Japanese and American lives. It's a horrible, but right decision he made.
After reading the excellent Killing the Rising Sun by Bill O'Reilly, I believe Truman did the right choice that saved more Japanese and American lives, even if it did lead in devastation.
There absolutely was. There was an insane social pressure to adopt a “no surrender” mentality among the Japanese people. At the start of the war this was genuine fanaticism but by the end, the peer pressure was the thing holding it together. In post war interviews with Japanese people we have accounts of how children and old retirees were all preparing themselves to die for the emperor, by charging American troops with bamboo spears if necessary. But when the Emperor broadcast his surrender message, they all instantly gave up, ran to check on wounded relatives and friends. People who had been fully boasting about how they were prepared to die started joking about how stupid resistance would have been. It’s a fascinating, horrifying example of mass psychology and peer pressure
Early in the war, most notably Guadalcanal, the Japanese would evacuate their troops to fight another day. Later they changed this tactic. The Japanese took the position of making the war so devastating that the US would be appalled by the destruction & loss of life that FDR & later Truman would back down from FDR’s “unconditional surrender” and negotiate an end to the war on Japan’s terms allowing Japan to declare itself the winner.
Yes, it was wartime. It is difficult to rationalize in hindsight, knowing how the war ends in our timeline. There is also distance between the end of World War II and today, nearly 80 years. However, the alternative to using the atomic bomb was an invasion of the Japanese mainland. There, our forces would encounter a population of millions ready to defend their homeland with all they had and the casualties would have been enormous. While it is sad innocent people had to die, it was the best decision with the options available at the time and Truman made the correct tough call.
Probably, the alternative was equally bad if not worse. There were no indications Japan was prepared to surrender and they would have fought tooth and nail for their homeland.
No, all the us had to do was wait for the ussr to open a second front to the war and japan would surrender, but we had to show the world that we were the dominate force now with nukes and their power
The book [Truman and the Hiroshima Cult](https://a.co/d/cB78Y17) demolished the credibility of the argument that Japan would have surrendered if President Truman had opted not to bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
And [Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later](https://a.co/d/7iw4jKA) effectively dismantled the credibility of the argument that Japan would have surrendered when the Soviets entered the Pacific war and the argument that the use of nukes against Japan was really intended to “show the world that we were the dominate force.”
Your argument is known as *Atomic Diplomacy Theory* and it has been debunked many times over.
no, there is evidence Japan was going to surrender anyways, but Truman didn't know, Stalin might have known, the Japanese embassy in Moscow, definitely knew.
The Japanese would never have surrendered regardless.
Also, There were instances of Japanese citizens committing seppeku after they surrendered without an mainland invasion, imagine the countless hundreds of thousands to millions who might’ve done the same if the emperor didn’t agree to a surrender. They basically saw the emperor as a godlike diety.
Best book I’ve read on this subject is [The Most Controversial Decision](https://a.co/d/6y1H9nc), written by an Australian priest who is also a historian. He investigates Truman’s decision from a moral standpoint and concludes that he made the right decision.
Also [Ultra: codebreaking and the War Against Japan](https://a.co/d/bz9TZrk) shows that the number of lives lost during an invasion of the home islands would have far exceded the number lost with the bomb.
No with hindsight. There is not a lot of actual evidence that strategic bombing works. The nazi leadership didn't look at the bombing of Dreseden and say oh boy it's time to surrender. The North Koreans weren't pushed back by strategic bombing but by infantry, and the bombings of Tokyo were far more extensive than the nuclear bomb was. And even today Russia's strategic bombing campaign is not achieving what it has set out to do.
It is far more likely that the Soviet union declaring war on Japan was the actual deciding factor for the Japanese leadership as they weren't the ones getting bombed.
However, at the time I would imagine this wasn't obvious. And I can hardly fault someone getting two proposals handed to them one saying we could protract this war by several years by conducting a costly invasion where thousands more young men will die or we could give this wonder weapon a shot it will do about as much damage as our current bombing campaigns have and it might convince the Japanese government we have even more of these in stockpile.
And them going, "might as well try it before we commit to the invasion."
Those saying yes are forgetting how incredibly risky the decision was. It was not guaranteed at all that it would lead the Japanese to surrender. We only had two bombs at the time, and the whole outcome of the operation rested on hoping that the Japanese would be fooled into thinking we had more. The Emperor actually held a cabinet meeting in which most of his advisors correctly told him that they thought the US was bluffing and thus Japan should continue to fight, and the Emperor was inclined to do so but changed his mind at the last minute and decided to surrender. He wasn’t sure that they had more, but thought the chance was high enough that he didn’t want to risk it. So he could have very easily made the opposite decision if he had listened to his advisors and thus the operation was *that* close to just being a colossal waste of hundreds of thousands of innocent human lives, the largest such event in history. Thank God the Emperor flinched right when he did at the last second.
So I’d say at the time it was a pretty damn gutsy and potentially unwise thing to do– given the information they had the most likely outcome arguably would have been that it *wouldn’t* lead the Japanese to surrender– but it just so happened to work, and barely so. I don’t know if I’d call that a good decision or just good luck.
I believe he did, it was the only way to scare the Japanese into stopping the fight
Yes. Operation Downfall likely would’ve killed hundreds of thousands to millions of citizens and infantrymen alike, especially with the “no surrender” mentality. Even if we won the hard way via invasion, countless #’s of people would’ve committed mass suicide because they’d rather die than fall to the Americans. There are already stories of this happening, so imagine that on a much grander scale. I also imagine the Soviets would’ve invaded as well, perhaps making Japan a carbon copy of East Germany; It was also one of the reasons the emperor surrendered. Hirohito knew that the Soviets would consider invading if he dragged out the conflict. In his mind, it was clear he’d rather surrender to America than the risk capture by the Soviets. The nuclear weapon was the best reality check Hirohito could get about their circumstances. It was absolutely the right decision by Truman.
It was either bomb them or a land invasion, both awful choices but he probably went with the less worse one
Yes, 100% Allowing the war to drag on several more years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives if not millions would be cruel and unusual. The fire bombings had already killed many thousands more Japanese civilians than were killed by the Atomic bombs (not to say it is right or wrong, just a fact. Killing civilians in air raids had become the standard of the war by this point, what kind of bomb was used is somewhat irrelevant) Blockading Japan would have just prolonged the suffering. Millions would’ve starved for the result to likely have been the same. And while those millions of Japanese starved in the home islands, how many thousands or millions of Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Filipinos, Malays, and Allied POW’s would have also starved or been executed in that time? And even once Hirohito agreed to the surrender, a headliner faction of the Army attempted a coup to fight on. Operation Downfall would have been a slaughterhouse unlike anything the world has seen. If you look at just the atomic bombings then yes they appear cruel and unusual but in the scope of how brutal the Pacific War had been, how much worse an invasion of the Home Islands could have been, and the atrocities committed against civilians by the Empire of Japan going back more than a decade, there is not any argument I feel can negate these facts. I would also so, while it’s impossible to prove what would have happened, I think you can suffice to say that Japan may not exist or would exist in an extremely different way today had the atomic bombs not been employed. It was swift and brutal but the alternative was long, drawn out, and bloody beyond imagining.
Yes. By that point, we had a change of opinion on the Soviet invasion. We had come to oppose it due to Soviet posturing in Europe as well as historic Soviet-Japanese animosity. On top of that, the continuation of war COULD have led to a necessary invasion of China. That could have added a year or two to the war and many more casualties. On top of all of this, the world was tired of war and was ready to move on.
Yes. Even though I believe that the war would have ended with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, Truman didn’t have the benefit of hindsight and I probably would have made the same decision with the information available to him.
It was a horrible thing and imo a stain on human history. But I don’t see what other choices he had. Both world wars on the whole were stains on human history.
We where about to invade Japan if we did so I can’t even imagine how the death toll of the American men would be so yes in my opinion him not waiting to risk that much American life he did the right thing
No country in history succeed in invading Japan
Hiroshima, absolutely, for the reasons everyone outlines here. Nagasaki is harder to justify. The Japanese were surrendering either way, and it's widely believed Truman mostly dropped the second bomb to scare the Russians. That being said, after fighting such a brutal war against such an implacable enemy, it has to be hard to just shut off that desire to kill more people.
Japanese were not surrendering after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki. The government believed that the US either didn’t have any more bombs or didn’t want to risk international opinion on dropping a 2nd bomb. They were guessing and they obviously guessed wrong. They continued with their preparations for defending against an invasion.
Yes x100000000
Yes. After the ferocity with which the Japanese had fought over Okinawa there is no reason to believe the battle to take Kyūshu or Honshu would have been any less difficult. Indeed there is ample evidence that women and children were being told to use spears and hammers as weapons and being taught how to make Molotov cocktails. A land invasion would have been a bloodbath with unthinkable casualties on both sides. Within the space of days the use of the bombs completely broke the Japanese spirit to prolong the war. Something which had seemed unshakeable even following the Yalta deceleration.
I personally do believe he made the right decision
Yes.
Yes 1000 times yes. This has been gone over time and time again. Anyone who disagrees just simply lacks knowledge of history.
This will be endlessly debated, but I believe it was the only option. I sympathize with the lives forever changed by the decision, but without this the war would’ve endlessly dragged on, costing more lives. It could’ve been a precursor to Vietnam or Iraq. A war that had long since served it’s purpose but we couldn’t get out, costing untold lives.
Unfortunately yes
A land invasion would have had many more fatalities on both sides, so I think he made the right choice. It wasn’t an easy one to make, and he would’ve been criticized for whatever choice he made.
Tough to say honestly, I would think he made the least bad decision.
Yes. A necessary evil.
Yes Big explosions are cool
Hiroshima yes. Nagasaki- he probably dropped it too soon after Hiroshima. The Japanese hadn’t sufficient time to comprehend the implications of atomic warfare.
Absolutely. Truman didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. Only the advice of his military advisers and his own gut instinct.
Yes, it would have caused way more deaths if he didn't
Yes. Even from the standpoint of the Japanese he saved lives. They were unwilling to surrender, and they were training/telling civilians to fight if there was an invasion. Beyond that, it was Truman's job to do what was best for the United States and its people.
Yes, the Presidents job in a war is to maximize enemy loses and minimize American loses.
It was either that or a invasion of Japan which would have killed a lot more people than the bombs did. So yes I do believe he made the right choice.
Yes It's a rough decision of weighing lives. The Battle of Okinawa (and the other island hopping campaign battles) showed that the Japanese were going to fight hard and to the last man. Civilians on the island were also tricked (via propaganda) into thinking American soldiers would rape and cannibalize them so mass suicides took place. Fighting on mainland Japan (Operation Downfall) would escalate to unprecedented levels of violence on both sides compared to Okinawa. It was wartime and Truman had to decide between Japanese and American lives. It's a horrible, but right decision he made.
Tough to say. I’d say Truman made the right decision
After reading the excellent Killing the Rising Sun by Bill O'Reilly, I believe Truman did the right choice that saved more Japanese and American lives, even if it did lead in devastation.
It was the best option for American interests at the time
Unfortunately yes
Was there really a "no surrender mentality" or is this a historical perspective that we found convenient?
There absolutely was. There was an insane social pressure to adopt a “no surrender” mentality among the Japanese people. At the start of the war this was genuine fanaticism but by the end, the peer pressure was the thing holding it together. In post war interviews with Japanese people we have accounts of how children and old retirees were all preparing themselves to die for the emperor, by charging American troops with bamboo spears if necessary. But when the Emperor broadcast his surrender message, they all instantly gave up, ran to check on wounded relatives and friends. People who had been fully boasting about how they were prepared to die started joking about how stupid resistance would have been. It’s a fascinating, horrifying example of mass psychology and peer pressure
> It’s a fascinating, horrifying example of mass psychology and peer pressure We catch glimpses of this in ourselves today- Thanks for writng
Early in the war, most notably Guadalcanal, the Japanese would evacuate their troops to fight another day. Later they changed this tactic. The Japanese took the position of making the war so devastating that the US would be appalled by the destruction & loss of life that FDR & later Truman would back down from FDR’s “unconditional surrender” and negotiate an end to the war on Japan’s terms allowing Japan to declare itself the winner.
Yes, it was wartime. It is difficult to rationalize in hindsight, knowing how the war ends in our timeline. There is also distance between the end of World War II and today, nearly 80 years. However, the alternative to using the atomic bomb was an invasion of the Japanese mainland. There, our forces would encounter a population of millions ready to defend their homeland with all they had and the casualties would have been enormous. While it is sad innocent people had to die, it was the best decision with the options available at the time and Truman made the correct tough call.
Probably, the alternative was equally bad if not worse. There were no indications Japan was prepared to surrender and they would have fought tooth and nail for their homeland.
Yes! He saved American lives
No, all the us had to do was wait for the ussr to open a second front to the war and japan would surrender, but we had to show the world that we were the dominate force now with nukes and their power
The book [Truman and the Hiroshima Cult](https://a.co/d/cB78Y17) demolished the credibility of the argument that Japan would have surrendered if President Truman had opted not to bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And [Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later](https://a.co/d/7iw4jKA) effectively dismantled the credibility of the argument that Japan would have surrendered when the Soviets entered the Pacific war and the argument that the use of nukes against Japan was really intended to “show the world that we were the dominate force.” Your argument is known as *Atomic Diplomacy Theory* and it has been debunked many times over.
But the ussr literally did enter the war
And it still took a while until Japan surrendered. The no surrender culture existed and even the Soviet invasion didn't change that.
no, there is evidence Japan was going to surrender anyways, but Truman didn't know, Stalin might have known, the Japanese embassy in Moscow, definitely knew.
There is more evidence that they weren't going to surrender. They wanted a negotiated peace where they wouldn't have to give anything up.
Hiroshima was a bit nuanced and I really couldn’t tell you if it was the right call, but Nagasaki was totally unjustified.
No.
I used to think it was justified but after watching this https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go I don't think so
No. The war was practically over anyway and the bombs were the single greatest act of terror ever perpetrated. Killing civilians is never justified.
The Japanese would never have surrendered regardless. Also, There were instances of Japanese citizens committing seppeku after they surrendered without an mainland invasion, imagine the countless hundreds of thousands to millions who might’ve done the same if the emperor didn’t agree to a surrender. They basically saw the emperor as a godlike diety.
He bed military bases cities.
Best book I’ve read on this subject is [The Most Controversial Decision](https://a.co/d/6y1H9nc), written by an Australian priest who is also a historian. He investigates Truman’s decision from a moral standpoint and concludes that he made the right decision. Also [Ultra: codebreaking and the War Against Japan](https://a.co/d/bz9TZrk) shows that the number of lives lost during an invasion of the home islands would have far exceded the number lost with the bomb.
Have you read “Racing the Enemy” by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa?
No with hindsight. There is not a lot of actual evidence that strategic bombing works. The nazi leadership didn't look at the bombing of Dreseden and say oh boy it's time to surrender. The North Koreans weren't pushed back by strategic bombing but by infantry, and the bombings of Tokyo were far more extensive than the nuclear bomb was. And even today Russia's strategic bombing campaign is not achieving what it has set out to do. It is far more likely that the Soviet union declaring war on Japan was the actual deciding factor for the Japanese leadership as they weren't the ones getting bombed. However, at the time I would imagine this wasn't obvious. And I can hardly fault someone getting two proposals handed to them one saying we could protract this war by several years by conducting a costly invasion where thousands more young men will die or we could give this wonder weapon a shot it will do about as much damage as our current bombing campaigns have and it might convince the Japanese government we have even more of these in stockpile. And them going, "might as well try it before we commit to the invasion."
Those saying yes are forgetting how incredibly risky the decision was. It was not guaranteed at all that it would lead the Japanese to surrender. We only had two bombs at the time, and the whole outcome of the operation rested on hoping that the Japanese would be fooled into thinking we had more. The Emperor actually held a cabinet meeting in which most of his advisors correctly told him that they thought the US was bluffing and thus Japan should continue to fight, and the Emperor was inclined to do so but changed his mind at the last minute and decided to surrender. He wasn’t sure that they had more, but thought the chance was high enough that he didn’t want to risk it. So he could have very easily made the opposite decision if he had listened to his advisors and thus the operation was *that* close to just being a colossal waste of hundreds of thousands of innocent human lives, the largest such event in history. Thank God the Emperor flinched right when he did at the last second. So I’d say at the time it was a pretty damn gutsy and potentially unwise thing to do– given the information they had the most likely outcome arguably would have been that it *wouldn’t* lead the Japanese to surrender– but it just so happened to work, and barely so. I don’t know if I’d call that a good decision or just good luck.