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There are many things about World War II that have been debated, and I have firm opinions on some of these. This is my attempt to answer certain questions, of greater and lesser importance.
It depends on what you want an admiral to do, I guess. I figure that a minimum qualification for being a great one is to command a battle well. Halsey was good in commanding the raids on Japanese-held islands early in the war. He took over the South Pacific theater in 1942, and ran it well. None of these involved real naval battles.
His only battle was at Leyte Gulf, where he concentrated his forces on the Japanese suicide decoy force, and allowed the ships he was supposed to be covering to be attacked by Japanese battleships. Although he had earlier informed the invasion force that he was covering the northern approaches, and although he had tracked the Japanese battleships heading for the invasion force until late at night, he sailed north to deal with the decoys and failed to inform the invasion force, although two of his immediate subordinates urged that the Japanese battleships should be engaged. In other words, in his only naval battle, he was faked out of his underwear and deliberately let Japanese battleships close with American ships totally unsuited to fight such battleships. Halsey was, therefore, an incompetent admiral.
The business of running Third Fleet through typhoons twice, within the space of a few months, pales by comparison.
Did Roosevelt force the Japanese into war?
It has sometimes been argued that Roosevelt forced the Japanese into war with economic sanctions that were applied to the extent of strangling the Japanese military.
It is true that the sanctions were sufficient to cripple Japan's army and navy, and that they were intended to be. However, they could not force Japan into war for the simple reason that Japan was already at war. Since 1936, Japan had been conducting an aggressive war against China, after annexing Manchuria (then and now a part of China) in 1931. The continued shipment of oil and steel and other resources enabled the Japanese to continue a very brutal conquest. To continue such exports indefinitely was to not only acquiesce, but encourage such conquest.
The sanctions did not force the Japanese into war, but made the distinction between peace and war more critical. If the Japanese government wanted access to American resources, it could choose peace. If the government wanted to continue the war, it would have to do so without economic support from the U.S. It decided to continue and expand the war, to its ultimate destruction.
And what about the atomic bomb?
Probably more nonsense has been written about this than any other American activity of the war. After careful consideration, I firmly believe that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan was the morally correct thing to do.
As the summer of 1945 drew to a close, Japan was in a very bad position, strategically. The Japanese Navy had been mostly destroyed. The Allies had established a tight blockade around the Japanese home islands, which were not self-supporting, but badly needed imports. The Allied air forces were bombing the country, and were also planning invasions.
Any reasonable regime would have sued for peace, either then or before, and tried to arrange terms. Although the United States had declared that the only terms would be unconditional surrender, the other Allies were not so determined, and in the end only Germany suffered that fate. In fact, there were some politicians in Japan who wanted peace, and the United States monitored some communications between them and the Soviet Union. (The Japanese considered the Soviet Union a friendly neutral throughout most of the war, and were dismayed when it finally turned against them.) These feelers, if they may be called, were notable in not suggesting reasonable terms. The most extreme that I've seen involved giving up earlier Japanese conquests, possibly meaning a return to the status quo before the Japanese invasion of China. Of course, the doves dared not work openly or be too clear, since doing so would have resulted in execution for treason.
The Japanese government was determined to fight to the end for several reasons. First, the Japanese religion taught that Japan was favored of the gods, and therefore that Japan could not be defeated if its people stood firm. This was reinforced by stories of the hurricane ("kamikaze", or "divine wind") that had defeated a Chinese invasion in historical times. Second, the Japanese grand strategy had always been to make the Allies pay dearly for each advance and wait for the racially inferior Americans and British to weaken in their resolve, and it was still conceivable that it could happen, that they would prefer to offer terms rather than to invade. Third, Japanese culture was very militaristic, and glorified dying for the Emperor far more than surrendering.
At the same time, hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, and other were languishing under brutal Japanese occupation. While something of a military lull had come after the bloody battle for Okinawa, there was no respite for the suffering masses, either the Japanese civilians or the Japanese victims. I've not seen much evidence that this was considered, and there is reason to think that the suffering of these Orientals would not weigh much in American decisions, but in my opinion it is a crucial factor: the earlier Japan was defeated, the earlier an immense number of people would be freed from the horrors of war or of Japanese rule.
Various ways have been proposed in which we could have forced Japanese surrender, and indeed we were following all of them. Some people have speculated that the Japanese would have surrendered sooner had we offered to let them keep the Emperor, which we eventually did, but I do not know if that would have worked. The American authorities, in particular, had no good way of knowing whether that would bring down the Japanese Empire or would stiffen the military to even greater resistance.
The decision to use the atomic bomb was not made lightly or unanimously. Many prominent Americans opposed its use on Japan. It had been developed as a weapon against Germany, from the fear that the Nazis would develop it. (One British commando raid was to impede German nuclear research. However, deliberately or in error, the leading German physicist overestimated the minimum size of an atomic bomb by a factor of one hundred, and the Germans made no further progress.) Many Americans, at the time, viewed it as an abnormal weapon, foreshadowing the later attitudes; many also regarded it as a usable weapon with a very, very big bang. The prompt and delayed effects of radiation were not understood for many years after the war, and the other effects would not necessarily be worse than what we were already doing. Indeed, B-29s with incendiary bombs started more firestorms than B-29s with atomic bombs.
The course of events is instructive. With Japan prostrate before American might, with bombers burning entire cities and battleships shelling coastal factories, Japan did not surrender. When the first atomic bomb was dropped, Japan did not surrender. When the Soviet Union, a mighty power mistakenly thought friendly, attacked Japan, Japan did not surrender. Finally, the second atomic bomb was dropped, and the Emperor expressed a desire to make peace. This was carried out, although the Japanese hard-liners attempted to overthrow the government to continue the war. With this intransigence in the face of overwhelming odds, I do not consider it clear when Japan would have surrendered if they had not been under nuclear bombardment.
The end of the war brought Allied occupation forces into Japan, and removed Japanese occupation forces from their Asian conquests. The winter of 1945 was harsh, and there would have certainly been great civilian suffering if the war had continued. While I do not want to understate the suffering of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and this suffering was greater than had been predicted), neither do I want to understate the suffering of the citizens of Hanoi and Batavia and Tokyo and Shanghai and every other city, village, and rural area suffering from the war.
The details are certainly debatable, and I've seen good arguments that Nagasaki was a particularly bad target for the second bomb. This does not alter my opinion.
In short, Japan did not surrender until its navy was destroyed, its economic lifelines cut, opposing most of the world's remaining military force, and having suffered both atomic and incendiary bombing of extremely destructive nature, and then under the assurance that the Emperor could retain his office. It is arguable that they would have surrendered shortly if one of those factors was missing, but it is uncertain when they would have. The United States acted to end the war as quickly and decisively as possible, and it is difficult to fault us for that.
All contents of these pages Copyright 1997, 1998 by David H. Thornley.