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simonmee's review against another edition
4.0
It is good that we confront the decisions of the past, it is good that we account for voices of dissent. However we cannot strip decisions and the dissents from the context they inhabited.
Downfall was explicitly written as a counter the “revisionist” view that the bombing of Japan was militarily unnecessarily and perhaps even a war crime. I’m not going to make a call on that, but there has been a preponderance towards the revisionist view in articles.
There are major discussion points around whether the Japanese were willing to surrender from June 1945 (Frank says they weren’t and were pretty keen on decisive battle) and that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria would have been sufficient (Frank says that’s overstated and would you have liked the Soviets in Hokkaido, knowing that 300,000 Japanese died as prisoners of the Soviet Union?). Despite this, I will focus on the war crime part.
Agents of Mass Death
When you open a book on atomic weapons with the conventional fire-bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, perhaps the most single devastating event of the war, it’s clear you want to make a point:
…central to understanding this period is the basic fact that atomic bombs were not the sole agents of mass death.
In World War Two, the Western Allies propped up the Soviets (morally troubling to Frank) and launched bombing raids over Axis cities:
If Bomber Command could not hit what it would, it would hit what it could. That meant an “exterminating” rain of high explosives and incendiaries on urban centres to destroy civilian “morale” – “a cosmetic word for massacre,” observed John Terraine.
Frank notes that the British, with some squeamishness from the Americans, intended to bomb the civilian areas of Germany to force surrender, i.e. terrorism. The point I take from Frank is that the atomic bombing was not a tremendous leap morally from what the Allied powers had committed themselves to doing anyway.
There has been commentary that 7 of the 8 five-star generals opposed the atomic bombings. That is not covered directly, but Frank pushes back on the contemporaneousness of Eisenhower’s comments. Further, MacArthur was slated to lead the most brutal invasion of the war, knowing from Saipan, Luzon and Okinawa that civilians would be involved as combatants or victims.
A Plethora of Unattractive Options
“I don’t get the problem,” you say. “They are all war crimes.”
…and look, yeah, probably… Frank points out the Allied populations imbibed those beliefs in mass bombardment, but it kind of helps they were on the winning side. Germans imbibed Anti-Semitism in one form or another, and it hardly stands as a criminal defence. At best it is evidence of political will.
Frank alludes to the escalation by the Axis powers at Guernica, Chungking, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry. However, he does ignore the British bombing of villages during the 1920s revolt in Iraq, a pretty notable precursor. As Frank himself acknowledges, Allied leaders often placed a patina of legality over the mass bombardments, suggesting an underlying admission of the wrongness of their actions.
His better point, and the one he emphasises, is that there was a race against time. Death rates among European and Asian (particularly Asian) prisoners and slave labourers were astoundingly high, estimated by Frank as 100,000-250,000 a month:
Any moral assessment of how the Pacific war did or could have ended must consider the fate of these Asian noncombatants and the POWs.
Frank states was fundamental for political purposes to maintain political support and this was enshrined in the goal to end the war against Japan within a year of Germany’s surrender. The prospect of massive casualties on both sides by way of invasion, or starvation of millions via blockade hardly appears more attractive than going to the atomic bomb.
Bombs Away?
I feel Frank:
(a) makes a good point in making the atomic bombings a lot less exceptional from a war crime perspective in the context of the war; but
(b) doesn’t undermine the basic contention that it was a particularly war crimey time, going instead with the position that were clear trade-offs.
The book never really tries with the second point from a legal perspective, and that does hurt it. The trade-offs come down to which number is bigger, and Frank places the blame on Japan’s refusal to surrender being the prime cause of those numbers:
It might appear obvious in hindsight that Japan's leaders should have recognized the impossibility of continuing a modern war of attrition and the clear course was to surrender. The reality, however, is that they chose a different path.
Despite weaknesses, that Frank works within the context of the time, even if imperfectly, should be acknowledged. Atomic bombing another country is never a great choice. The issue is, were there any better ones?
socraticgadfly's review against another edition
5.0
Richard Frank conclusively shatters a number of myths about the end of the Pacific side of World War II.
First, Japan was NOT ready to accept unconditional surrender, even with the caveat of the preservation of the Japanese throne, until after both bombs were dropped. Frank uses extensive declassified transcripts of Ultra (military) and Magic (diplomatic) U.S. codebreaking to get members of the Japanese war cabinet's own words, or lack thereof, on this issue. Within that is the fact that Japan's attempt to use Russia as an intermediary-ally in negotiations was totally out of tune with reality, so much out of tune that Tokyo actually expected Moscow to honor the full one year's "down time" after abrogating the two countries' neutrality agreement.
Second, the Japanese Army was ramping UP the plans for Keisu-Go, the all-out defense of the Japanese homeland, after the spring firebombings of Tokyo and elsewhere. Top Army brass considered that the U.S. might well try blockade, and thought it had enough kamikazes, midget submarines, etc., to make the U.S pay enough a price for even the blockade that it would settle for a negotiated peace. Again, Frank looks in-depth at Magic and Ultra transcripts to show how much support there was for this.
Third, Frank demonstrates that U.S. casualty fears of an invasion of Kyushu were well-warranted and may even have been understated in some cases.
The determination of the Japanese Empire to resist was well-known by American troops in the Pacific who had seen the Japanese, on average, take 97 percent casualties in many of their defensive actions. A militaristic government was ready to exploit this to the death.
The atomic bomb was therefore used for reasons of the highest seriousness. It was NOT dropped on Hiroshima as a demonstration for Stalin. And, speaking of demonstrations, the fact that it took two atomic bombs on Japan to get it to surrender puts the lie to the idea that a "demonstration" bomb would have been enough to get the Japanese to a non-negotiated surrender with them attempting to hold on to territory.
==
I re-read this 12 years later, and it's as pertinent as ever. Here's additional notes.
Downfall
As for the “let blockade work” folks? Per Chapter 10 (149ff) a formal blockade started in early June, not too long after Okinawa was done. And, we’d been dropping aerial-placed sea mines on Japan’s Inland Sea, and selected spots elsewhere, already in March.
Rather than “unconditional surrender,” the Potsdam Guarantee not only (roundaboutly) guaranteed the Imperial House, it made other Atlantic Charter-based guarantees that were never offered to Germany, enough of them to appal the Aussie prime minister.
But, as of Aug. 9, that wasn’t good enough for many Japanese leaders, who also knew they were running ever lower on military goods and that the morale of many citizens was weakening.
On Aug. 9, in light of Hiroshima and hearing the first word about Soviet war entry, the Imperial War Cabinet met. The Kwantung Army did not know immediately how badly outnumbered it was, especially on armor, but they knew that this part of their self-deception had now vanished. Then, in the middle of the meeting, came first word of Nagasaki.
And YET, half the War Cabinet kept a “four-condition” stance.
The “one condition” stance was surrender based on the Potsdam Declaration, with the assumption its wording meant that, in some way, shape or form, the Emperor stayed.
The “four condition” stance was, well, in light of reality, intransigent. The other three conditions were that Japanese troops would disarm themselves, that Japan would itself oversee any war crimes trials, and that Japan would not be occupied.
(Up to the time of Okinawa, at least, many Japanese military leaders had been “five-condition” persons, though Frank doesn’t talk about this in detail. That fifth condition was that Japan keep at least part of the territory it had gained in the 1895-1914 period. And, Hirohito himself held to this, as well as holding at that time to a refusal to negotiate until Japan won once more. To overview that?
In the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, Japan crushed China. China ceded the Liaotong Peninsula and Taiwan to Japan. But Russia, in part fronting for other European powers, forced Japan to surrender it and the strategic Port Arthur to Russia in exchange for a bigger Chinese indemnity, with Russia also working to supplant Japanese influence in Korea. That set the stage for the Russo-Japanese War. Japan got Korean influence, Port Arthur, and southern half of Sakhalin Island. But Teddy Roosevelt, in reaty negotiations, backed Nicholas II in refusing to pay an indemnity. That was the first incident to raise Japanese suspicions of US plans for Asia.
Japan then, working off its 1902 alliance with Britain, entered World War 1 with the Allies. Its goal, met successfully, was to take German holdings in China and the Pacific. That was the Mariana, Caroline and Marshall Islands, important in World War II. The not quite totally nutters among the Japanese military believed America would be OK with those surrendered to them but Japan keeping everything else up to 1905.
At the end of the book, Frank refutes a number of misconceptions, starting with the “bombs vs invasion” one. Yes, the two bombs did save as many as 500,000 casualties and 100,000 US deaths just for the invasion of Kyushu, and yes, that was mentioned soon after the war, but that wasn’t the primary concern at the time, or at least not the sole primary concern.
Rather, and especially before Trinity and it being known we had a working plutonium bomb, the issue was “blockade and bombardment alone” vs “that plus invasion” on getting Japan to surrender and even more, getting Japan to surrender IN AN ORDERLY FASHION.
Caps-lock is needed on this.
Even after the two bombs AND Hirohito’s rescript, Truman and the brass weren’t 100 percent sure all Japanese troops in Japan would surrender in an orderly fashion and they were VERY unsure about troops in outlying areas of Japanese occupation. In fact, Japanese military leaders were also unsure.
Now, those casualties.
There was no final, formal assessment by US planners after the war was done about what Olympic would have cost. But we know that casualty estimates were going up and Nimitz had already soured on it because of this. The numbers above are reasonable estimates.
And, that’s just US military casualities.
From the start of the war in non-Manchuria parts of China in the last 1930s, Frank shows that Japanese occupation had been killing a million Chinese a year. From 1941 on, it had been killing half a million residents in other occupied countries.
So, every month the war continued was a month, even with the loss of parts of the Empire, for 100,000 or more civilians to die.
Then there is the issue of how many more Japanese would have died.
Frank does a good job of showing how, if we had continued the full blockade, and then intensified disruption of Japanese transportation as planned, a million or more Japanese might have died of malnutrition and starvation.
And, for moralizers? He points out that blockades are wars against civilians, women and children just like either atomic bombs or napalm incendiaries. Period.
Related to that, he notes that within early military moralizers, many, like Ike, have faulty memories. In other cases, like Leahy, their memories might not be faulty, but they might have been guilty of turf wars. Plenty of Army and Navy people “found” a conscience. Army Air Force / Air Force brass, not so much; per Bomber Harris, after all, the ultimate bomb had gotten through.
First, Japan was NOT ready to accept unconditional surrender, even with the caveat of the preservation of the Japanese throne, until after both bombs were dropped. Frank uses extensive declassified transcripts of Ultra (military) and Magic (diplomatic) U.S. codebreaking to get members of the Japanese war cabinet's own words, or lack thereof, on this issue. Within that is the fact that Japan's attempt to use Russia as an intermediary-ally in negotiations was totally out of tune with reality, so much out of tune that Tokyo actually expected Moscow to honor the full one year's "down time" after abrogating the two countries' neutrality agreement.
Second, the Japanese Army was ramping UP the plans for Keisu-Go, the all-out defense of the Japanese homeland, after the spring firebombings of Tokyo and elsewhere. Top Army brass considered that the U.S. might well try blockade, and thought it had enough kamikazes, midget submarines, etc., to make the U.S pay enough a price for even the blockade that it would settle for a negotiated peace. Again, Frank looks in-depth at Magic and Ultra transcripts to show how much support there was for this.
Third, Frank demonstrates that U.S. casualty fears of an invasion of Kyushu were well-warranted and may even have been understated in some cases.
The determination of the Japanese Empire to resist was well-known by American troops in the Pacific who had seen the Japanese, on average, take 97 percent casualties in many of their defensive actions. A militaristic government was ready to exploit this to the death.
The atomic bomb was therefore used for reasons of the highest seriousness. It was NOT dropped on Hiroshima as a demonstration for Stalin. And, speaking of demonstrations, the fact that it took two atomic bombs on Japan to get it to surrender puts the lie to the idea that a "demonstration" bomb would have been enough to get the Japanese to a non-negotiated surrender with them attempting to hold on to territory.
==
I re-read this 12 years later, and it's as pertinent as ever. Here's additional notes.
Downfall
As for the “let blockade work” folks? Per Chapter 10 (149ff) a formal blockade started in early June, not too long after Okinawa was done. And, we’d been dropping aerial-placed sea mines on Japan’s Inland Sea, and selected spots elsewhere, already in March.
Rather than “unconditional surrender,” the Potsdam Guarantee not only (roundaboutly) guaranteed the Imperial House, it made other Atlantic Charter-based guarantees that were never offered to Germany, enough of them to appal the Aussie prime minister.
But, as of Aug. 9, that wasn’t good enough for many Japanese leaders, who also knew they were running ever lower on military goods and that the morale of many citizens was weakening.
On Aug. 9, in light of Hiroshima and hearing the first word about Soviet war entry, the Imperial War Cabinet met. The Kwantung Army did not know immediately how badly outnumbered it was, especially on armor, but they knew that this part of their self-deception had now vanished. Then, in the middle of the meeting, came first word of Nagasaki.
And YET, half the War Cabinet kept a “four-condition” stance.
The “one condition” stance was surrender based on the Potsdam Declaration, with the assumption its wording meant that, in some way, shape or form, the Emperor stayed.
The “four condition” stance was, well, in light of reality, intransigent. The other three conditions were that Japanese troops would disarm themselves, that Japan would itself oversee any war crimes trials, and that Japan would not be occupied.
(Up to the time of Okinawa, at least, many Japanese military leaders had been “five-condition” persons, though Frank doesn’t talk about this in detail. That fifth condition was that Japan keep at least part of the territory it had gained in the 1895-1914 period. And, Hirohito himself held to this, as well as holding at that time to a refusal to negotiate until Japan won once more. To overview that?
In the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, Japan crushed China. China ceded the Liaotong Peninsula and Taiwan to Japan. But Russia, in part fronting for other European powers, forced Japan to surrender it and the strategic Port Arthur to Russia in exchange for a bigger Chinese indemnity, with Russia also working to supplant Japanese influence in Korea. That set the stage for the Russo-Japanese War. Japan got Korean influence, Port Arthur, and southern half of Sakhalin Island. But Teddy Roosevelt, in reaty negotiations, backed Nicholas II in refusing to pay an indemnity. That was the first incident to raise Japanese suspicions of US plans for Asia.
Japan then, working off its 1902 alliance with Britain, entered World War 1 with the Allies. Its goal, met successfully, was to take German holdings in China and the Pacific. That was the Mariana, Caroline and Marshall Islands, important in World War II. The not quite totally nutters among the Japanese military believed America would be OK with those surrendered to them but Japan keeping everything else up to 1905.
At the end of the book, Frank refutes a number of misconceptions, starting with the “bombs vs invasion” one. Yes, the two bombs did save as many as 500,000 casualties and 100,000 US deaths just for the invasion of Kyushu, and yes, that was mentioned soon after the war, but that wasn’t the primary concern at the time, or at least not the sole primary concern.
Rather, and especially before Trinity and it being known we had a working plutonium bomb, the issue was “blockade and bombardment alone” vs “that plus invasion” on getting Japan to surrender and even more, getting Japan to surrender IN AN ORDERLY FASHION.
Caps-lock is needed on this.
Even after the two bombs AND Hirohito’s rescript, Truman and the brass weren’t 100 percent sure all Japanese troops in Japan would surrender in an orderly fashion and they were VERY unsure about troops in outlying areas of Japanese occupation. In fact, Japanese military leaders were also unsure.
Now, those casualties.
There was no final, formal assessment by US planners after the war was done about what Olympic would have cost. But we know that casualty estimates were going up and Nimitz had already soured on it because of this. The numbers above are reasonable estimates.
And, that’s just US military casualities.
From the start of the war in non-Manchuria parts of China in the last 1930s, Frank shows that Japanese occupation had been killing a million Chinese a year. From 1941 on, it had been killing half a million residents in other occupied countries.
So, every month the war continued was a month, even with the loss of parts of the Empire, for 100,000 or more civilians to die.
Then there is the issue of how many more Japanese would have died.
Frank does a good job of showing how, if we had continued the full blockade, and then intensified disruption of Japanese transportation as planned, a million or more Japanese might have died of malnutrition and starvation.
And, for moralizers? He points out that blockades are wars against civilians, women and children just like either atomic bombs or napalm incendiaries. Period.
Related to that, he notes that within early military moralizers, many, like Ike, have faulty memories. In other cases, like Leahy, their memories might not be faulty, but they might have been guilty of turf wars. Plenty of Army and Navy people “found” a conscience. Army Air Force / Air Force brass, not so much; per Bomber Harris, after all, the ultimate bomb had gotten through.
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