Indeed! In the army too. A Mutiny to refuse surrender was on the cards at the time as I recall.
Were the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings justified?
- Thread starter almoststew1990
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Indeed! In the army too. A Mutiny to refuse surrender was on the cards at the time as I recall.
Alternative histories have always been fascinating to me. Doing that could have ended communism in Russia it would be a very different country by now. And it could have meant we never travelled to the moon because we were under pressure from the russians in the space race.
Soldato
Thought Japan tried to surrender to Russia after the first bomb, but it was rejected?
Man of Honour
Those cards were played - there was an attempted coup d'etat by elements of the Japanese military who refused to surrender and wanted to take control of Japan by force in order to continue fighting. That was after the two nukes.
It would have been impossible for Japan to surrender to the USSR before the two countries were at war. The USSR broke the treaty it had with Japan in order to attack Japan and take as much land/power as possible. The window between the USSR declaring war on Japan and Japan surrendering to the USA was very small indeed. About 1 day IIRC. Surrendering to the USSR would have left Japan worse off, anyway - the USSR intended to conquer, occupy and rule at least part of the Japanese home islands and would probably have taken all of them if Stalin decided he could get away with it (and he probably would have got away with it).
Some elements in Japan did favour an earlier surrender and some of them thought that the USSR could be used as a mediator (Japan and the USSR were not at war at that time), but Japan didn't try to surrender to the USSR (and couldn't have done so until the USSR declared war on Japan, which didn't happen until about the same time as the second nuclear bomb).
I think it's also worth noting that the publically declared policy of Japan was to fight to the death, explicitly stating that meant the death of every Japanese person. Everyone, absolutely everyone. That's what the USA had to go on, along with proven examples of Japanese people doing exactly that.