This is part one of a series of two posts on this topic.
Click here for part two.
One of the most common invocations made in the service of “the atomic bombs weren’t necessary” argument is that the Japanese offered to surrender well before Hiroshima, and that this was ignored by the United States because they wanted to drop the bombs anyway (for various other asserted reasons). It’s one of those things that has a grain of truth to it, but without a heaping of context and interpretation is misleading by itself.
The Suzuki Cabinet, who held the fate of Japan in their hands in the summer of 1945. Photograph is from June 9, 1945. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki is front and center. Of note, second to Suzuki’s left, looking downward and glum, is Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, one of the only members of the “peace party” actually on the cabinet. Contrast his expression with that of War Minister Korechika Anami (back row, two behind Yonai), who was, until very close to the end, one of the most die-hard supporters of a continued war. Photograph from Wikimedia Commons, somewhat touched up. A captioned overlay is here.
That there were “peace feelers” put out by some highly-placed Japanese in mid-1945 is well-known and well-documented. Specifically, there were several attempts to see whether the (then still-neutral) Soviet Union would be willing to serve as a mediator for a negotiated peace between the US and Japan. This story is the heart of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s justly influential Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (2005), and he goes over, in great detail, how these approaches worked (one in Japan, with the Soviet ambassador there, another in Moscow, with the Japanese ambassador there). Hasegawa’s argument isn’t about Japan being ready to surrender, though; he uses this account to show how dependent Japan’s ideas about the war’s possible ends were on a neutral Soviet Union.1
The distance between these “peace feelers” and an “offer” or even “readiness” to surrender is quite large. Japan was being governed at this point by a Supreme War Council, which was dominated by militarists who had no interest in peace. The “peace party” behind these feelers was a small minority of officials who were keeping their efforts secret from the rest of the Council, because they clearly feared they would be squashed otherwise. The “peace party” did appear to have the interest — and sometimes even the favor — of the Emperor, which is important and interesting, though the Emperor, as Hasegawa outlines in detail, was not as powerful as is sometimes assumed. The overall feeling that one takes away from Hasegawa’s book is that all of these “feelers” were very much “off the books,” as in they were exploratory gestures made by a group that was waiting for an opportunity that might tilt the balance of power their way, and certainly not some kind of formal, official, or binding plan made by the Japanese government.
Furthermore, the surrender that the “peace party” was contemplating was still miles away from the “unconditional surrender” demanded by the United States. There were conditions involved: mainly the preservation of the status and safety of the Emperor and the Imperial House, which they regarded as identical to the preservation of the Japanese nation. But as Hasegawa points out, they were so unclear on what they were looking for, that there was contemplation of other things they might ask for as well, liking getting to keep some of their conquered territories. Again, this was not a real plan so much as the feelers necessary for forming a possible future plan, and so we should not be surprised that it was pretty vague.
General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito at Allied General Headquarters — a picture deliberately mean to contrast the 5’5″ Emperor with the six-foot American general. Photograph by Gaetano Faillace, via Wikimedia Commons.
One can argue, and people who argue against the necessity of the bombings do, that since the United States ultimately agreed to preserve the Emperor and Imperial House, that the US could have accepted such a condition earlier on if it had wanted to shorten the war. But this is not very compelling: it is a different thing to decide, after a war, that you are willing to cut your former enemy a break, versus cutting them that break while they are still your sworn enemy. The counter-argument, which even as someone who is not a die-hard “unconditional surrender was necessary” person I find somewhat compelling, is that if the US had modified its already-stated demands at that point, that it might have ultimately led to the Japanese making more demands, as part of the classic “give them an inch and they’ll ask for a foot” scenario. In any event, I doubt the Japanese would have been willing to accept the specific condition that the US ultimately ended up imposing during the occupation: that the Emperor had to publicly renounce his divinity. That’s a big “ask” to contemplate prior to surrender.
Anyway, whatever one thinks about the requirement of unconditional surrender and whether it prolonged the war — and it has been argued over since the 1940s — we can all agree, I think, that what the Japanese were unofficially “offering” was not what the US was demanding. And it is important to note that this was never actually offered to the US anyway: the Japanese were probing Soviet willingness to support them as a neutral party for a negotiated peace. So it was all a prelude to a negotiation of an offer. As it was, the Soviets weren’t interested (they were eager to declare war against Japan and seize promised territory as a consequence), and just strung them along. So the entire thing never got off the ground.
Cover sheet for a “MAGIC” intercept summary of cracked Japanese communications, classified ULTRA TOP SECRET, which was looked at during the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. From the National Security Archive.
The US was aware of these efforts by the Japanese, because it had cracked the Japanese diplomatic codes (the MAGIC intercepts), but it was never a formal “offer” for them to accept or reject. The general interpretation of the intercepts at the time was that Japan might be on the road to surrender, and they perceived there was a sympathetic “peace party” in their high command, but that Japan was ultimately not yet ready to accept unconditional surrender. Which I don’t think is really wrong, though of course one could debate about what one could do with that information.
At this point, I feel I should emphasize, that I don’t think the use of the atomic bombs the way they were used (two bombs on two cities in three days) was the only possible way to achieve the aims of the United States in World War II, or even that the goal of “unconditional surrender” was unambiguously the best thing to pursue. (See my article on the possible alternatives, for example, as to other possibilities that were on the table at the time.) I am saying, rather, that I think the argument offered up by those who would use the MAGIC intercept situation as an argument that the Japanese were “ready to surrender” prior to Hiroshima is not very compelling. It wasn’t an offer, it wasn’t unconditional surrender, and it wasn’t something the majority ruling the Japanese government had even approved or would support. It’s an important historical event that is crucial to understanding the end of the war (as Hasegawa makes quite clear), and one that complicates the “they all fanatics willing to fight to the death” argument that is used to justify using the atomic bombs, but it wasn’t anything like a surrender offer. I don’t have any problem with people making sound arguments either for or against the use of the atomic bombs — there are strong arguments on both sides — but they shouldn’t be based on myths. Unfortunately, many arguments in the popular sphere are.2
OK, but what if the above wasn’t the whole story? What if the Japanese did offer up a full, binding terms of surrender to the US directly, and those terms were exactly what the US ended up settling on with Japan after the war? I’m not sure that would change all of my analysis above (you would still have the issue of whether the US ought to have accepted the postwar terms before it was the postwar), but it would certainly complicate the situation! There has been an account of Japan doing just that, which has circulated for over 70 years. In part 2 of this series, I’ll be exploring that — the case of the enigmatic “Trohan memoranda.” The ultimate conclusion spoilers! — is that it is likely bunk, but there’s a story in the telling…
Click here for part two of this series.
- At some point in the future, I would still like to write a longer post about Hasegawa’s book and arguments in general, because it is one of most frequent questions I get online. One of these days I will get around to it — the summary version is that I find much of his argumentation persuasive, though I think the ultimate question of “how much weight should we give the atomic bombs, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, internal Japanese pressures, or other factors in accounting for their unconditional surrender agreement?” is ultimately unanswerable in any satisfying way. [↩]
- The most pernicious myth in the “for” category remains, in my mind, the idea that the Japanese people were warned about the atomic bombings before their use — which to my mind is clearly not true, but gets a lot of traction on Internet forums and the like. [↩]
Thank you for another clearly thought through post.
In Lesley Blume’s book “Fallout” on page 146, Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey provides a comment:
“Why reveal a weapon like that to the world when it wasn’t necessary?” he said. “[The U.S.] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before.”
See additional link that I located:
https://civilianmilitaryintelligencegroup.com/admiral-bull-halsey-thought-atomic-bomb-mistake/
Yeah, it’s another entry in the “conventional military brass doubts necessity of the atomic bomb in the immediate postwar (in part because he felt it was getting too much credit for ending the war, and didn’t want cuts to the military on account of it).” Interesting but always should be taken with a grain of salt…
NICE!! And thanks for digging into this. The full text of MAGIC – from the link above – is interesting. What was the US thinking of the USSR discussions with Japan? And what does this mean: “Stalin himself is the most moderate element in Russia… very ambitious men are grouped around him…” ??
The US was interested in the discussions both in what it told them about Japan’s position and the Soviet position — the USSR did tell the US about them, eventually. Stimson saw it as confirming what he had suspected would be the case, that the issue of the Emperor was going to be a major sticking point in the quest for unconditional surrender. But generally speaking they concluded that it showed that Japan was perhaps on a path towards accepting surrender, but wasn’t there yet. Which I think is a fair interpretation.
At Potsdam they were really trying to figure out Stalin. It was the first time most of them had met him (Stimson and Truman both had audiences with him). A lot of what they wrote at the time is pretty amusingly bad in retrospect. Truman wrote on July 7, after meeting Stalin the first time: “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest but smart as hell.” Well, it’s a first impression…
Over the course of the conference, Stimson came back extremely depressed about the idea of “working with” Stalin, entirely believing that the Soviets were paranoid and somewhat vicious, something he didn’t fully appreciate before he saw them face to face.
Regarding footnote #2, my impression was that the argument was more commonly that the Japanese had been warned about gigantic bombing efforts, not specifically that there’d be new weapons involved. And that is true, of course. (Your link’s description of the LeMay leaflets covers this neatly)
So basically, this boils down to how much warning is “enough”. Is a warning of the destruction of the cities sufficient? Does it need to say that the process would be unusual? Does it need to actively mention the fact that there’s a super-weapon at play?
(And this is even without considering the moral aspects – the myth is about what they were warned of, not about whether the bombs were right per se.)
There are two versions of the “warning” argument, one is about generic bombing efforts (often extended to claim, erroneously, that Hiroshima or Nagasaki were included in things like the LeMay leaflets), and the other is that Hiroshima was explicitly warned about the impending attack.
The second one is plainly false and should be obviously false to anyone who has studied the Manhattan Project (the secrecy was intentional!). The first one is where you have discussions of what “warning” really means (I don’t consider warnings that cannot be acted upon meaningfully to be true warnings; they are just a form of psychological warfare/terrorism if you do it that way).
Separately, I would note that even with the mass destruction possible from firebombings, other than the very early bombings which came as a surprise to the Japanese, the death count from firebombing was much lower than the atomic bombs. See here for data and analysis. Which is just to say that even if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were warned about imminent bombing of any sort (which they weren’t), an atomic bombing is a pretty different (and worse) qualitative and quantitative phenomena than even a firebombing (which is bad enough).