Nuking Japan

This broadcast aired on Monday, August 12, 2024, between 8 and 9PM Eastern Time, WBCQ Radio in Monticello, Maine, 7490kHz. Below you can find a slightly edited transcript of this radio show. Download an mp3 file of this show here (right-click, and pick “Save Link As…” from context menu).
All broadcasts and podcasts by Hadding Scott’s “Devil’s Advocate Radio” are also accessible on X/Twitter @UnapprovedRadio.

Welcome to The Devil’s Advocate. I am your host, Hadding Scott. This program is sponsored by ARMREG Ltd. That’s A-R-M-R-E-G Ltd., a seller of historical revisionist books. There will be information about ARMREG Ltd. at the end of this broadcast. Please do listen to that.

I intend today to continue what I started last week, discussing the circumstances around the use of the atomic bomb in 1945, and the Japanese surrender, and related matters. First, a summary of some important points from last week’s show. Tucker Carlson has criticized the use of the atomic bomb, along with deliberate bombing of civilians in general, as evil, and also said that the atomic bomb should never have been developed. In response to the proposition that it was necessary to beat Hitler to the atomic bomb, Tucker Carlson was dismissive, but he was unable to explain coherently to Joe Rogan why he was dismissive. Tucker Carlson’s rejection of the imperative to compete with Hitler for the first atomic bomb, combined with his admonition to stay out of “big things whose outcome you can’t predict with certainty,” implies that Tucker Carlson may have adopted the position of the original America First movement that the Second World War really was not a good war, and that the USA should not have gotten involved in it.

The United States did not need to race to get the atomic bomb before Adolf Hitler, because Hitler’s Germany was not even trying to develop an atomic bomb. Ben Shapiro claims that the USA needed to beat the Soviet Union to the atomic bomb too, but this is false also, because without stealing the findings of the Manhattan Project, the Soviet Union most likely would never have developed an atomic bomb. It was a delusion that motivated the USA from 1941 to 1945 to develop a nuclear weapon as fast as possible.

Tucker Carlson’s moral condemnation of the atomic bomb is entirely consistent with what used to be the mainstream view of the Western world. Since the end of the 30 Years War, the consensus of the Western world has been that deliberately killing civilians is a war crime, and something that armies of civilized nations must never do. Tucker Carlson could have pointed out, moreover, that the use of the atomic bomb served no purpose insofar as eminent military authorities, shortly after the Second World War, said that it contributed nothing toward ending that war.

Tucker Carlson’s statements imply that the prevalent view of the Second World War as the Good War is wrong. At the very least, the actions of the United States of America in that war have been whitewashed, and the menace of Hitler’s Germany was exaggerated, and very likely other features of the prevailing image of that war are also false, just as Tucker Carlson has discovered in the case of Iraq.

Now I’m going to talk about Japan’s long quest for peace.

The use of atomic bombs in 1945 is defended as a necessity for ending the war. Ben Shapiro says this, but it is patently false. If the United States’ goal had been merely to end the war, Japan would have been happy to accept a negotiated peace as early as 1942. What the defenders of atomic bombing really mean to say is that the use of atomic bombs forced Japan to accept unconditional surrender. But that isn’t true either. The Japanese government would have ended the war at least several weeks, perhaps years earlier, if a negotiated peace on terms other than the unconditional surrender demanded by Franklin Roosevelt had been possible. Ultimately, Franklin Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, did grant slightly modified terms.

Before trying to end the war, Japan had tried to avoid having a war with the United States. Japan’s hands were already full in China. The attack on Pearl Harbor was thus not part of some master plan, as American propaganda alleged, but a response to an ultimatum, the Hull Note, named after Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor as an attempt at a knockout punch, after being made to believe with the Hull Note that war with the USA was inevitable.

The manipulations used by the Roosevelt administration to cause war between the USA and Japan were exposed during a congressional investigation already in late 1945, but have not been well remembered by the general public. An important piece of evidence in that investigation was the diary of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Perhaps to put a more positive face on what had been revealed, Stimson then very quickly wrote a political autobiography that was published in 1947, in which he admits that he and others in the Roosevelt administration had wanted the USA to go to war for several years, contrary to the will of four-fifths of Americans. Stimson was glad about the attack on Pearl Harbor when it happened. He wrote in his diary:

“When the news first came that Japan had attacked us, my first feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.”

That’s in Henry Stimson’s diary, entry of the 7th of December 1941. Stimson’s choice of the word indecision, by the way, is peculiar because there was no indecision. Four-fifths of Americans had decided that they definitely did not want to be involved in another war. The Roosevelt administration just didn’t like that decision, and so Stimson calls it indecision.

The fact that the Roosevelt administration had been trying to involve the USA in the European war was evident from diplomatic communications exposed by a cipher clerk in the American embassy in London named Tyler Kent. Tyler Kent was a kind of Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning of the Second World War. He was a potentially highly consequential whistleblower who became a target. While Franklin Roosevelt was conspiring with Winston Churchill to violate the USA’s Neutrality Act and to drag the USA into the war between Britain and Germany against the will of the American people already in early 1940, Tyler Kent was saving evidence of Roosevelt’s crime.

Like Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, Tyler Kent committed the crime of espionage in order to expose a much larger crime. There was no way that the United States government could prosecute Tyler Kent without incurring massive embarrassment for the Roosevelt administration. Therefore, instead, his diplomatic immunity was waived, and it was left to the British to prosecute Tyler Kent, which they did secretly. Consequently, most Americans never heard about Tyler Kent.

These clips are from a BBC Channel 4 documentary perversely titled, “Churchill and the Fascist Plot,” which aired in 2012. I say that the title is perverse because emotional words like “fascist” and “anti-Semitic” are used in the documentary to focus disapproval and scorn upon Tyler Kent and a British Member of Parliament named Archibald Ramsay, who were trying to stop an enormous crime of dragging the British and American people into a war where tens of millions would die. The lack of proportion is glaring.

“The American Congress had passed a neutrality act which forced America, by law, to stay out of the war in Europe.”

“Isolationism prevailed in the United States. Most of the newspapers were wholly opposed to America getting engaged in the folly of another European war.”

“The United States was, by an act of Congress, a neutral country and publicly, President Franklin Roosevelt championed that neutrality.”

“My every act and thought has been directed to the end of preserving the peace of the world and more particularly, the peace of the United States.”

“But privately, following the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt had been exchanging messages with Churchill that were, in tone, anything but neutral.”

“Tyler Kent started taking copies of correspondence which he considered interesting.”

“The information that Kent was putting on offer effectively was the written proof that there was a major conspiracy, that Churchill and the other warmongers were secretly engaged in a deliberate campaign to bring in the United States and create the circumstances for a new world war.”

Somebody will say that Franklin Roosevelt was justified in trying to drag the USA to war against the will of the American people in order to “stop the Holocaust.” Well, excuse me, but Tyler Kent was arrested and prevented from exposing Franklin Roosevelt’s warmongering in May of 1940. Nobody claims that anybody was being gassed in May of 1940. Germany’s policy up till then had been to promote Jewish emigration. Therefore, you cannot justify what Franklin Roosevelt was doing in 1940 by invoking the Holocaust.

At first, the Roosevelt administration tried to provoke war with Germany by attacking German submarines. The provocations against Germany failed to achieve their purpose. In late 1941, the effort was to get the USA into a war with Japan. It was a period of rising tensions, culminating in a document known as the Hull Note, already mentioned. This was a declaration to Japan issued on the 26th of November 1941, telling the Japanese, among other things, that they must withdraw their troops from China and Indochina. The United Press reported on the same day, the 26th of November 1941, that this note, “virtually ended all chances of an agreement between the two countries on the explosive Far Eastern issues.” In other words, it practically guaranteed war between the USA and Japan. That’s quoted in a book by the famous historian Charles Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941.

The Hull Note amounted to an ultimatum. In response to it came the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was an attempt at a knockout punch, after which Japan hoped to negotiate peace. Japan had never been economically prepared for war with the United States, and found herself unable to rise to the challenge. Japan furthermore depended on overseas supply lines that were highly vulnerable. Consequently, the Japanese Emperor was advised as early as 1942 that the war would be less likely to work out in Japan’s favor, the longer it lasted. And the Emperor in turn advised the Prime Minister of the time, General Hideki Tojo, to negotiate peace at the earliest opportunity.

A publication of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey identifies July 1944 as the moment when Japan took a clear turn toward peace:

“The first definitive break in the political coalition which began the war occurred following the USA’s success at Saipan. Ten days thereafter, on the 18th of July 1944, the cabinet headed by General Hideki Tojo fell after being continuously in office since the 20th of October 1941. This marked a significant turn in the course of Japan’s wartime politics, the importance of which, in retrospect, is difficult to overstress.”

That is from page one of a publication of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey called Japan’s Struggle to End the War. The same publication indicates on page three that, in September 1944, the government that succeeded Tojo’s government began discussing how to end the war. They concluded that ending the war without a Japanese victory would require a rare intervention in public affairs by the Japanese emperor himself. Without the emperor’s command, some units would have refused to lay down arms, and scattered fighting would likely have continued for years.

Now, the emperor had dismissed Tojo because he wanted the war to end, but the successor cabinet and prime minister also had not ended the war. After the loss of Okinawa, Hirohito was becoming impatient. Kantaro Suzuki became the new prime minister on the 8th of April 1945. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey records about Suzuki:

“Suzuki informed the survey that when he assumed office, ‘It was the emperor’s desire to make every effort to bring the war to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and that was my purpose.’ This created a position Suzuki described as difficult. On the one hand, he had instructions from the emperor to arrange an end to the war. On the other hand, any of those opposing this policy who learned of such peace moves would be apt to attack or even assassinate him.”

So you see there, this was the difficulty that the Japanese government faced. It wasn’t, it was not the top leaders like Tojo and Hirohito. Those were not the real fanatics. The real fanatics were in the army officer corps. 11 months after the removal of Tojo, steps toward ending the war still had not been taken because of the lingering hope of establishing a stronger position for negotiation through some victory of some sort. But the emperor seems to have had no faith in that. By the 20th of June 1945, the emperor was becoming very impatient. This is from Japan’s Decision to Surrender, written by a professor of Japanese history, Robert J.C. Butow, B-U-T-O-W:

“The emperor told his foreign minister that the reports he had received had convinced him that the military’s preparations in both China and Japan were so extremely inadequate as to make it necessary to end the war without delay.”

So, in the middle of June 1945, Emperor Hirohito is saying that it was necessary to end the war without delay. On the 22nd of June 1945, the Supreme War Council, that’s certain select members of the cabinet, was called before the emperor who let the council know that efforts to negotiate peace must begin immediately. Thus, in mid-July, Prince Fumimaro Konoye was sent to Moscow as a special envoy seeking Soviet mediation for peace.

The prince, says Butow, was given carte blanche, “to get Japan out of the war on any basis whatsoever, short of unconditional surrender.” Logically, this would include precisely the terms that were ultimately granted. In other words, guarantee that the emperor would remain on his throne and nothing else, because that would be less than unconditional surrender.

Japanese efforts to end the war became known in the USA, and some Americans urged a positive response. On the 23rd of July 1945, Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry said that a high military official had shared with him a letter that described Japanese attempts to negotiate peace and recommended announcing that the emperor would be allowed to remain on the throne. In subsequent days, other prominent Republican senators also urged a negotiated peace.

Professor Mark Gallicchio observes in his book about the Japanese surrender:

“By Potsdam, there were plenty of experts who believed that the time was fast approaching when the USA’s vast power would need to be tempered by statesmanship, and that meant a negotiated surrender.”

It was very well known before the atomic bombs were dropped that Japan was interested in making peace. If only there could be some compromise on the demand for unconditional surrender. That was what kept the war going: Franklin Roosevelt’s demand for unconditional surrender, even though Franklin Roosevelt was dead. That demand for unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan, and Italy had been proclaimed by President Franklin Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference on the 24th of January 1943, apparently without consulting Winston Churchill.

Those fateful words did not appear in the communique announcing Anglo-American decisions at Casablanca, but were spoken by Roosevelt supposedly extemporaneously. It was by no means self-evident during the war, as many today might assume, that demanding unconditional surrender was the proper course. In fact, the destructiveness of Roosevelt’s demand for unconditional surrender became more obvious as words were translated into action.

Celebrity journalist Dorothy Thompson observed in August 1943 that unconditional surrender discouraged any growth of peace movements among the Axis powers. In November 1943, she wrote:

“No people who still have some military power, and the Germans obviously have, will lay down their arms without any notion of what that gesture will mean for the nation.”

Criticism of unconditional surrender did not go away when the war ended. The most prominent American to criticize the demand for unconditional surrender was Dwight David Eisenhower. In an interview with the Washington Post in December 1964, the former president and five-star general explained:

“Germany was defeated after the Battle of the Bulge. By January 16, 1945, it was all over and anyone with any sense knew it was over. But then there was this statement that President Roosevelt made about unconditional surrender in 1943. This certainly had some influence. Hitler used something from the mouth of our own leader and persuaded the Germans to fight longer than they might have. I have always believed that the war should have ended 60 or 90 days before it did.”

That was reported by the Associated Press on the 21st of December 1964.

Eisenhower might also have mentioned, as a factor causing Germans to fight harder and longer, the Morgenthau plan, which was quite scandalous when it became public knowledge. The Morgenthau plan, however, was merely an articulation of what unconditional surrender might mean in practice. It would mean the dismemberment of Germany and the death by starvation of a large part of the German population. The Germans had been given a  reason to fear national extermination as a consequence of Allied victory. And, of course, that fear strengthened their will to fight.

Since Ben Shapiro has emphasized the lives supposedly saved through the use of atomic bombs, let it be noted that the number of casualties in the U.S. Army and Army Air Force that would have been avoided with an armistice after the Battle of the Bulge, which Eisenhower mentioned, is 222,360. Eisenhower, in effect, blamed Franklin Roosevelt and his demand for unconditional surrender as the cause of those 222,360 American dead and wounded.

Eisenhower’s 60 or 90 days, however, is surely a gross underestimate of how much unconditional surrender lengthened the war. The number of American casualties that could have been averted through willingness to negotiate was much greater than a quarter million. The famous military author Major General J. F. C. Fuller, writing in 1948, proposed that the Western Allies should have seized the opportunity in the spring of 1943 after the German defeat at Stalingrad and loss of North Africa, when Italy was on the verge of collapse, to negotiate an advantageous peace. Fuller says:

“Instead, what did they do at the Casablanca Conference of January 1943? They made public that the war aim of the Allied powers was the unconditional surrender of their enemies. Henceforth, these two words were to hang like a putrefying albatross around the necks of America and Britain.”

That’s page 258 in J. F. C. Fuller’s book The Second World War.

The number of casualties in the United States Army and Army Air Force that would have been avoided with a European armistice in 1943 is 740,295. 740,295.

It is also true that conditions in Germany’s concentration camps would have been much less terrible at the end of the war if the war had ended much sooner. The accusations that the Germans had deliberately created such conditions diverts attention from the fact that the Allies themselves had created those conditions with the combination of unreasonable peace terms lengthening the war and pervasive bombing.

Now, the German generals initially thought that the words unconditional surrender might be simply political rhetoric that didn’t mean anything. But after they saw what this meant in Italy, they were shocked. Even though the treatment of Italy was relatively mild, they were shocked. If they had any doubts about whether or not to continue supporting Hitler, this declaration of unconditional surrender and the fact that it actually meant something convinced them that they had no alternative except to continue supporting Hitler. And if they were shocked at the treatment of Italy, then the even harsher actuality of unconditional surrender in Germany during May, June, and July of 1945 must have made quite an impression upon the Japanese.

How can a nation be expected to lay down its arms to accept a peace that might be even deadlier than the war? In that light, there was nothing at all hard to understand about Japan’s tenacious resistance to unconditional surrender. There was nothing abnormally fanatical about that.

Anyone wanting to reduce American and other casualties in the Second World War should have begun by trying to get rid of Roosevelt’s demand for unconditional surrender. After Roosevelt’s death and some changes in the personnel around the new president, that was in effect what happened. As the Second World War progressed, the Japanese became increasingly interested in making peace. The government of the United States, by contrast, was committed to rejecting negotiation.

Any anti-Hitler faction in Germany that attempted to negotiate with the Western allies came away disappointed. And before the use of the atomic bombs, the Japanese government’s known attempts at negotiation were ignored. Obviously, the side that refuses negotiation is the side that is keeping the war going.

How does a government, how can that guilt be displaced? Well, by portraying the other side as unwilling to negotiate, or as too untrustworthy for negotiation.

This program is sponsored by Armreg Ltd, a seller of historical revisionist books. Listen at the end of this program for details about our sponsor.

Now we’re going to talk about Ben Shapiro a little bit. To portray the Japanese leaders as bloodthirsty maniacs who forced the government of the United States into an unfortunate dilemma, Ben Shapiro relies on a rather bad opinion essay by journalist Evan Thomas that appeared in the Washington Post of the 24th of April, 2023. The name of that essay was, “The bomb saved countless lives in World War II, but we must never use it again.” Just look at that title. “How convenient that the United States of America happened to use the bomb exactly the right number of times. It was justified to use it two times, but it won’t be justified if it’s used again.” We just did it exactly right. And how peculiar that there were just two occasions in 1945 when using the atomic bomb was appropriate. “No such occasion will ever occur again,” according to Evan Thomas. One is tempted to ask Mr. Thomas if he also believes that the good guys won every war. I suspect he would say that, yes, the good guys won every war for sure. That’s what it says in my history book.

Shapiro quotes Thomas:

“Evan Thomas wrote in the Washington Post fairly recently, the commanders of the Japanese armed forces were fanatics. On August 9th, after Washington dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki, Japan’s war minister, General Koichika Anami, asked his fellow members of the Supreme War Council, would not it be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower? The rulers were fatalistic about taking the rest of the nation with them. The one million will die for the emperor was a common headline in the state-controlled press. Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed, and after the Russians had even invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria, six members of the Supreme War Council deadlocked three to three on whether to surrender.”

Comparison of the text shows that up to this point Shapiro follows almost verbatim what Evan Thomas wrote.

The next part, however, is entirely paraphrased:

“After the dropping of the second bomb, when Emperor Hirohito decided that he wanted to end the debate and surrender, he had to run away from members of his own military who were threatening to kidnap him. We’re trying to find the recording of him surrendering before it can be broadcast on radio to destroy the recording.”

Now, there is a certain amount of truth in the statement, “the commanders of the Japanese armed forces were fanatics.” But those so-called fanatics did not wield ultimate power. The ultimate commander of the armed forces, Emperor Hirohito, as Shapiro calls him, was no fanatic. Hirohito wanted to end the war. And ultimately, the armed forces would obey him. Not all of the commanders were fanatics either. The top officers of the Navy in general seem to have been relatively moderate and more eager for peace than the generals of the army. The foreign minister, Admiral Togo, was perhaps the strongest proponent of peace.

By 1945, the hope for Japanese victory was gone and nobody in the Supreme War Council was opposed to making peace. Nobody, however, considered unconditional surrender to be acceptable. The only questions were about terms for peace and about the prospect of resisting temporarily to gain better terms for peace. All of the talk about continuing the war was really about getting a better peace.

P-E-A-C-E.

Thomas and Shapiro make much of a failed conspiracy of general staff officers that had tried to stop the surrender on the 15th of August 1945. Now, the date when Japan ultimately did surrender was the 15th of August, 1945.

That’s six days after the bombing of Nagasaki. On that day, there was a failed conspiracy of general staff officers that tried to stop the surrender. And Evan Thomas and Ben Shapiro make a big fuss over this. They do this in an attempt to create an appearance that the Japanese military leadership was unreasonable. But they omit to mention the conspiracy’s motivation. They wanted better peace terms.

Professor Butow says:

“Their reasoning was that it would be useless for the people of Japan to survive the war if the structure of the state itself were to be destroyed.”

Their intention was to take over the government, says Butow, “then continue the peace negotiations.” The conspiracy was not, as Ben Shapiro and Evan Thomas described it, fatalistic. It was not fatalistic. It was an attempt to survive, in fact. Shapiro implicitly exaggerates the importance of this conspiracy by mentioning it in the same context with General Anami and the Supreme War Council, conflating them in the mind of his audience without warning that they’re not the same thing. The distinction is crucially important because the conspiracy failed to recruit the highest officers. Especially important was the fact that General Anami himself refused to participate.

It must be conceded that some members of the Supreme War Council did object to the final terms of the surrender, but Ben Shapiro does not identify them or say what they did. Army Chief of Staff Umezu and Navy Chief Toyota did not attempt a coup, but did petition the emperor to reject the surrender terms because, as they saw it, Japan would be reduced to slavery. Like Germany. Their petition, however, had no effect.

By painting a picture of fatalistic fanatics utterly dominating the Japanese government, by failing to indicate that what they wanted was not really more war, but better peace terms, Ben Shapiro portrays the Japanese leaders as crazy men with whom negotiation would have been utterly pointless. Which is quite convenient since the USA had committed to not negotiating anyway. Shapiro, however, has overshot his mark because none of what he has said supports his thesis that the atomic bomb ended the war. He’s lost sight of what he was trying to prove.

For that argument, Shapiro needs the Japanese leaders to come to their senses after the atomic bombs are dropped. But his narrative shows instead the general failure of atomic bombs to accomplish this.

The one Japanese leader that Shapiro does not portray as a maniac who would refuse to surrender under any circumstance is the Emperor Hirohito, or Hirohoto, he says. Hirohoto, according to Ben Shapiro. In order to represent the emperor as having been atom bombed into surrendering, Shapiro misinterprets his source, Evan Thomas.

Now, Emperor Hirohito did make a decision to surrender, but he did not make that decision after the atomic bombs. He had made that decision sometime earlier. But in order to represent the emperor as having been induced by the atom bomb into surrendering, Ben Shapiro misrepresents his source, Evan Thomas. Shapiro’s paraphrase, and remember I told you the first section was a quote, the second section was a paraphrase. And the paraphrase section has Shapiro saying that the Emperor Hirohoto decided to surrender, quote, after the dropping of the second bomb, close quote. You will think that this means that Emperor Hirohoto decided to surrender because of the second atomic bomb. Now, Evan Thomas did not say that in his essay for the Washington Post. He said that the emperor feared the ubiquitous American B-29s. But that’s not the same as saying that the emperor’s thinking was changed as a result of atomic bombs.

It’s a big hole in Evan Thomas’s argument. And understandably, Ben Shapiro wants to plug that hole. So, apparently he assumes that, when Evan Thomas refers to the ubiquitous American B-29s, he means that the atom bombs frightened the emperor into wanting to surrender. And that did not happen. That did not happen. Evan Thomas tried to hide the gap in his argument, and Ben Shapiro, with his wonderfully powerful critical thinking, somehow didn’t notice that. Evan Thomas does not say that Hirohito made any decision because of atomic bombs. He says that the atomic bombs forced Japan to give up, but he does not trace that process. He doesn’t say how that happened. He does not say that anyone’s thinking was changed by atomic bombs.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc seems to be Evan Thomas’s entire argument. In fact, the emperor decided to surrender at least as early as the appearance of the Potsdam Declaration on the 26th of July, 11 days before the bombing of Hiroshima. And Prince Konoye’s mid-July attempt at negotiation already included the possibility of some degree of conditional surrender.

The real reason for the USA’s resort to terror bombing, which culminated in atom bombing, was not the supposed insanity of Japan’s leaders. It was not because Japan’s leaders were fanatics who needed to be atom bombed to make them obey. The real reason for the USA’s resort to terror bombing was the fact that the USA would encounter difficulties if the war lasted much longer.

There were at least three considerations in this. First, Americans were tired of the war. Republican legislators had begun advocating a negotiated peace. Second, there was a dire need for US military personnel to return to their civilian jobs. In particular, there was a need for coal miners to begin supplying coal for the upcoming winter. Finally, and certainly this was the most important consideration for some, hastening Japanese surrender was a way to limit expansion of Soviet power in East Asia, such as had already happened in Europe.

This sense of urgency about ending the war had two ramifications. First, there was the resort to terror bombing. Then, after terror bombing had failed for more than four months to induce an otherwise already beaten Japan to surrender, there was finally, after all, a relaxation of surrender terms, which very clearly precipitated the desired result. It is certainly understandable that some Japanese leaders, chief among them General Anami, General Umezu, and Admiral Toyota, believed that deferring surrender might induce a further relaxation of surrender terms. They were not crazy. They understood the American eagerness to end the war soon.

The Potsdam Declaration of the 26th of July 1945 appeared as an instruction on how Japan could escape the fate that had befallen Germany. The Cairo Declaration under President Roosevelt in November 1943 and the Potsdam Declaration under President Truman on the 26th of July 1945 differed in one respect that was subtle but crucially important. While the Cairo Declaration had demanded, “unconditional surrender of Japan,” the Potsdam Declaration demanded, “unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces.” It gave a greater impression that surrender just might be survivable for the Japanese nation.

On the very day when the Potsdam Declaration was published, Japan responded with a broadcast in English beamed at North America, stating that she might be willing to surrender with a clarification of terms. The United Press reported:

“Japan acknowledged her critical military plight Thursday with a frank hint that she might sue for peace if American demands for unconditional surrender were modified. Japan’s startlingly frank new peace feeler was sent out by Tokyo in an English-language broadcast beamed to the United States and recorded by the Federal Communications Commission.

‘Should America show any sincerity of putting into practice what she preaches, as for instance in the Atlantic Charter, the Japanese nation, in fact the Japanese military, would automatically, if not willingly, follow in the stopping of the conflict. While official American quarters maintain relative silence about the exact meaning of unconditional surrender,’ Tokyo said, ‘official publicists declare that Japan should be stripped of this or that. In short,’ it said, ‘they intend to mete out such a harsh retribution that the Japanese people are more determined than ever to unite and resist as the united mass of 100 million should, and will so continue as long as American minds remain dictatorial and oppressive.’”

And that’s reported by the United Press. It appeared in the Telegraph Herald of Dubuque, Iowa on the 26th of July 1945. Briefly stated, Japan would consider surrendering only if the meaning of surrender were clarified. This exactly reflects the criticism of unconditional surrender that Dorothy Thompson wrote in 1943. She said that no nation still capable of fighting would surrender without knowing exactly what surrender would mean.

The initial American reaction, of course, was rigid refusal:

“Official quarters here have warned repeatedly that such Japanese peace bids are attempts to make the American people waver in the demand for unconditional surrender, and to negotiate a peace without destroying the roots of Japanese militarism.”

And that’s also in the same report from the United Press. It was a little late, actually, to quash demands for negotiated peace since Republican senators like Kenneth Wherry were already saying that in the United States Senate.

The Potsdam Declaration in its original draft by Henry L. Simpson had explicitly guaranteed that the institution of the emperor would be preserved. But this guarantee had been stricken from the final version. This lack of explicitness caused an unfortunate doubt and hesitation among the Japanese leaders. During the debate on whether to accept the Potsdam Declaration, Professor Galicchio specifically states, “no member of the inner cabinet had any objections to ending the war.” Three out of six wished to accept the Potsdam Declaration as written. The other three wanted a clearer and less humiliating statement of the terms for surrender. Specifically, they wanted no military occupation of Japan. They wanted to withdraw their own Japanese forces from occupied lands and disarm those forces themselves. And they wanted to prosecute their own war criminals instead of handing them over to a victor’s tribunal. In other words, they wanted to be treated as a civilized nation that had lost the war and not as a conquered province.

Ultimately, the emperor was consulted. After this, the cabinet resolved to accept the Potsdam Declaration upon clarification that it would not alter the emperor’s prerogatives, since the emperor as an institution was considered essential for Japan’s survival. This request for clarification was sent at 7 a.m. on the 10th of August, 1945, and it was reported in American newspapers this way:

“Japan offered to surrender today, Tokyo and Moscow reported, provided her god emperor can continue to rule his sacred islands. But the war went on without a break.”

That was in the Spokane Daily Chronicle on the 10th of August, 1945. Secretary of State James Burns may have been influenced by fear of seeming soft on the enemy since war propaganda had induced most Americans to feel that Hirohito should be executed or otherwise punished, and even certain individuals in the Truman administration were also of this mind that Hirohito should be executed. Dean Acheson thought that Hirohito should be executed. Therefore, the response from Secretary of State James Burns was very carefully worded. It used circumlocution to state that the emperor would be allowed to retain his position:

“The authority of the emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the supreme commander of the Allied Powers.”

So indirectly, this note from James Burns is saying that the emperor will continue to hold his position. For public consumption, the term unconditional surrender continued to be used, even though this is, as Evan Thomas mockingly calls it, a conditional unconditional surrender. It’s no longer really an unconditional surrender.

Not all the Japanese leaders were satisfied with this condition. They did not want to have to endure the imposition of democracy in Japan. But the emperor made his decision, and all others had to reconcile themselves to it.

We may note that the Japanese surrender on the 15th of August followed this guarantee on the 12th of August more closely than it followed the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima on the 9th and the 6th of August. Moreover, there is a clear chain of cause and effect from alteration of surrender terms to actual surrender, while it is not at all clear what the causal chain is from atom bombing to surrender. It’s not evident that atom bombing really changed anything. Most likely, it did not.

This small retreat from Franklin Roosevelt’s insane demand for unconditional surrender was the sine qua non for Japanese surrender. This allowed the surrender to happen. Of course, this subtle diplomatic concession attracted much less public attention than the spectacles of the atomic bombs a few days earlier, but without it, there certainly would have been no surrender on the 15th of August 1945.

Flattening cities as a form of warfare was a gigantic atrocity that was not even compensated by the anticipated benefit of forcing a rapid end to war. During the Second World War, the unscientific speculation that bombing urban populations would force a collapse and speedy surrender failed, not only in the case of the atomic bombs, but also in the case of the terror bombings of cities with conventional explosives and incendiaries, which Britain had started against Germany in 1940.

I’m going to give you some pithy quotes now that you can use whenever you may hear some public figure, some announcer somewhere say that the atomic bomb ended the war.

Ian W. Toll wrote in August 2020 for the National World War II Museum in New Orleans:

“With 75 years of hindsight, one is struck by the pervasiveness of anti-atomic bomb sentiments across the top echelon of the military. In 1945, eight Americans, four generals, four admirals, held five-star rank. Seven later stated that the bombings were either unnecessary to end the war, morally indefensible, or both. That fact is all the more arresting when you consider that their professional code discouraged second-guessing the decisions of superiors, and that they were discussing an event that had already happened and thus could not be reversed.”

General Dwight David Eisenhower had urged against the use of the atomic bomb. He said:

“I disliked seeing the United States take the lead in introducing into war something as horrible and destructive as this new weapon was described to be.”

General Curtis LeMay, who later became the chief of the USA’s Strategic Air Command, and quite notoriously had no moral qualms about using nuclear weapons per se, declared in September 1945:

“The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

General Douglas MacArthur generally avoided stating publicly that the use of the atomic bomb had been unnecessary, although his personal pilot recorded that he was “definitely appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster.” In 1960, however, after former President Harry Truman, who’d had some conflicts with MacArthur, after former President Harry Truman had told an interviewer that MacArthur had proposed using atomic bombs during the Korean War, MacArthur issued a statement that included the following:

“Any statement such as that attributed to Mr. Truman that I advocated the use of atomic bombs in the Korean War is completely false. We did not need the atom bomb here any more than we did in the war against Japan.”

That’s got to hurt. In this public response, General MacArthur called Harry Truman a liar for alleging that he had ever wanted to use atomic bombs, and also accused Truman himself of using the atomic bomb unnecessarily.

The way that Truman responded to this made him look very weak and dishonest. He said that it was not a documented fact that General MacArthur wanted to use atomic bombs, but only his personal opinion that General MacArthur wanted to use atomic bombs. In other words, he made it up. He’s admitting that he made it up. What a charming way to say that he lied.

Admiral Ernest King said that the blockade of Japan would have sufficed to force Japanese surrender. General Hap Arnold also said that the use of the atomic bomb was unnecessary. In 1950, Admiral William D. Leahy, the top military advisor to both President Roosevelt and President Truman, wrote in his memoir:

“I was taught not to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

In September 1946, Admiral Leahy said to reporters:

“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. The atomic scientists 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.”

He was right about that. Admiral Leahy was referring to the Japanese attempt to negotiate peace with the United States through the Soviet Union as a mediator, which had happened in July 1945.

To me, the most important observations in all of this are not about Japan, but about us, about us Americans, and our relationship to our government, and about how we and our government are affected by propaganda. Sometimes the government may control mass media and control the message that mass media promote, but other times mass media control the government.

We saw this fear among American officials during the Second World War of having their manhood questioned by being accused of appeasement. In effect, they were afraid of being compared to Neville Chamberlain, who had made the horrible mistake in 1938 of trying to keep Britain out of a war that the British people did not want and could not afford. Officials of the Truman administration were trapped in war propaganda that they had inherited, and the difficulty that these officials had in navigating around the unreasonableness that this propaganda had generated was not entirely unlike the fanaticism that old American war propaganda, and Ben Shapiro and Rabbi Dennis Prager now, have attributed to the Japanese.

We see this kind of rhetoric and the stoking of unreasonableness again and again whenever somebody wants to drag us into another war, which is never to our benefit. It is easy to call people on the other side of the world unreasonable fanatics. We need to look more closely at what is happening here.

Are you someone who is seeking to truly understand the profound lessons of our past? Look no further. At ARMREG, we are dedicated to empowering all who seek to know the truth and shame the devil. Through meticulously researched books about World War II and the Holocaust, each title offers crucial and often neglected insights and perspectives that help the honest reader to honor those who have gone before us and to enlighten future generations.

Visit us at ARMREG.co.uk. That’s A-R-M-R-E-G dot C-O dot U-K, to explore our collection and to join us in preserving and promoting real history. Remember, truth in history matters, and ARMREG is committed to sharing it with the world. Please do visit my sponsor ARMREG.

That’s A-R-M-R-E-G. A-R-M-R-E-G dot C-O dot U-K.

You can find me on Twitter/X: @UnapprovedRadio. @UnapprovedRadio on Twitter, and I’m also at this moment on live voice-chat on Paltalk. You can find me, username H-A-D-D-I-N-G on Paltalk right at this moment.