there is a lot of controversy right now surrounding this view on the surrender.
did you know who came up with this view? oliver stone.
Quote:
Not in this writer?s lifetime has a book challenging the central accepted tenets of U.S. history received so much publicity as Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick?s The Untold History of the United States,....
One can hear a full exposition of that thesis in Showtime?s ?Episode 3: The Bomb.? Their central conclusion is that the real reason for the Japanese surrender is that, virtually simultaneous with the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union broke its neutrality treaty with Japan that had been observed by both parties throughout the war and began a massive attack on Japanese forces in Manchuria. At this point, the Japanese knew that the game was up. A subordinate argument is that the atomic bombs then didn?t even serve a military purpose and that their use was opposed by various key military and political leaders in the U.S. government at the time and later. The contemplated costly invasion of the Japanese mainland would not have been necessary. The main reason the bombs were dropped, per Stone and Kuznick, was as a signal from the militarists in our government to the Soviet Union that we would not hesitate to use this new terror weapon to achieve our military and political objectives. It was, in effect, our firing of the first shot in the Cold War. Still more subordinate is the authors? claim that if only Franklin Roosevelt?s hugely popular Vice President during his third term of office (1940-44), Henry Wallace, had not been replaced by Harry Truman, those unnecessary and reprehensible bombs would not have been dropped and, furthermore, there would have been no Cold War.
In support of their main conclusion, the authors point out that horrific bombing of Japanese cities, including Tokyo, had been going on for months causing massive civilian casualties. The fact that the Japanese government did not react in any way after the Hiroshima attack shows that they regarded it as simply more of the same, only a bit worse. Only the day after the second bomb was dropped?which also was the day after the Soviet entry into the war?did the Japanese send out a radio message suggesting that they were ready to surrender.
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as i pointed out above, the emperor DID react to the bomb, in fact, he said enough, we will sign the surrender