Insufferable, I think is the word I am seeking. I never knew that Galbraith was this versatile. Not only could he screw up economics (he was an advocate of price controls and headed up a price control board during WWII), but apparently in his spare time he was able to make hash of American military planning.

I wonder if he ever was interested in planning educational policy, since that would explain alot.

He was right about Japan and about conventional bombing.

Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

Sure it was possible.

Although they probably wouldn't have got to that point until conventional bombing had reduced their population to a few millions.

As for Galbraith, he's an elegant writer but knows zilch about economics. My copy of Economics and the Public Purpose had WTFs and exclamation marks scrawled all over it by the time I was through.

"Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated"

OJ

If no invasion had been planned or comtemplated, it would seem to indicate that Japan could just declare victory and go safely home only to continue the War at a time of their choosing.

How were they going to get their guys home and import the materials they require?

By ship, Orrin. Although we had sunk 90% of their oceanic merchant marine by mid-1945, the Japanese had built hundreds, maybe thousands, of small (around 500 tons) cargo vessels.

These were, among other tasks, going to be used to bring the entire Korean rice crop of late summer '45 to Japan.

Whether or not Japan would have surrendered without invasion, by spring '46, there would not have been a Korean left alive. Nor, according to Daws in 'Prisoners of Japan,' would any of the American prisoners have lasted that much longer.

I was vacationing in Ontario years ago, at a bed-and-breakfast on a pig farm. The farmer and I were hanging over the fence, talking farm economics, something I knew quite a bit about but that farmers typically did not.

This farmer, though, talked a great deal of sense. I finally told him it was a new experience for me, talking to farmers and hearing something other than the Granger nonsense that was current in Iowa in the 1970s as in the 1870s.

He said, 'I'm associate professor of agricultural economics at Western Ontario University.'

Oh.

As it happened, that night as part of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival we attended a lecture by local boy Galbraith. He was, as always, witty and quite scornful of the backwardness of Western Ontario Agricultural College, whence he had escaped to Harvard.

There have not been a lot of witty economists, but the ones I can think of were political idiots, right enough.

Harry:

How get past our Navy?

"Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

They would still be holding out. There was, and still is a large "Last Samurai" faction in Japan. They would not need international commerce. They would not have surrendered without an invasion and the cost of that invasion in both American and Japanesse lives would have been astronomical.

Given Galbraith's track record on everything else, I am not going to bet on his analysis of strategic bombing.

Those ships were getting past our Navy anyway.

As long as there were kamikazes, the Navy wasn't going to spend any time in the Yellow Sea.

During the Okinawa campaign, the Navy lost a fleet carrier almost every week. The closer it got to Japan, the worse that was going to get.

The Japanese were beaten long before, but they wouldn't quit fighting.

In numbers big enough to feed and fuel a nation? ?Don't be silly.

If they wouldn't quit fighting, what does it mean to say they were beaten?

Full disclosure: I'm pretty happy that Truman decided to go ahead, because I assume I owe my existence to the fact. My dad served in France and Germany, and he figured he'd have taken part in any invasion of the Japanese homeland. Maybe Galbraith knew something he didn't, but I know Dad didn't think he would have survived that.

I've known a couple WWII vets who served in the Pacific during the war. Each one believes that w/o the bomb, the war against Japan would probably have continued for a couple more years and cost over 100,000 additional American lives. Absent the bomb, only the reduction of major Japanese cities to rubble, the infliction of heavy troop losses upon the Japanese army, and the deaths of Hirohito and Tojo would bring about their surrender.

"In numbers big enough to feed and fuel a nation?"

OJ: You miss the point. The premise is no A-Bomb, no Soviet Union, No invasion. At that point all the US could do is blockade and use the arieal bombardment of the era.

The Japanese would have enured the resulting seige for as many years as you care to stipulate. They were not of a mind to surrender and would have fought on like Monty Python's limbless Knight.

There would have been hardship and privation and probably destruction of the cities and the industies of the country. But, the Japanese would happily have reverted to a pre-industrial civilization. In 1945, they were only 90 years after Commodore Perry, 70 years after the Mejii restoration. Most of the population had been born in rural areas and could revert to them.

Remember this a people who had almost completely banned foreign trade and contact for centuries before Perry. Faced with a blockade and seige by Perry's sucessors they could easily have reverted to old habits and waited it out.

Galbraith is but the first leftist fool to have underestimated the impact of the A-Bomb on the situation. On the sands of this castle, later leftists constructed the thesis that the US only dropped the Bomb on Japan because we are racists and they are brown and because we wanted to show Satlin that we had it.

Twaddle, but in academia you can dine out on it for years.

Empty, silly nonsense as well.

Dave:

You assumed they'd say we killed too many Japs?

Robert:

No, they wouldn't have. That's just one of those racial deals where we were taught they'd all have been willing to die.

OJ: There is nothing racial about it.

It was not a democratic society. If the elite groups did not want to surrender, they had good enough control over the population that they would not have surrendered.

The population had sufficently rural roots so that if the cities and industries were destroyed, they could disperse back into the countryside and maintain a pre-industrial, yet highly civilized lifestyle as they had less than a century earlier.

The transition costs and the ongoing damage from areial bombing and ship bombardment would have ment sever privation and hardship in the first few years. Most peoples, in most seige situations, from Troy to Vietnam, have responded to seiges with increased social cohesion and surprising stoicism. It is hard to imagine the Japanese deviating from that historic precedent.

Seiges are lost by defenders when starvation and disease overwhelm them or the enemy destroys their defenses and storms the city. The advantage is always with the defenders. In 1453, Byzantium had shrunk into a pocket state and there were a mere 7000 able bodied men in Constantinople when Mehmet besiged the city. Despite his vast superiority in numbers and firepower, it took him a month to breach the walls and takte the city.

Japan is too large, its climate too temparate and its population too knowledgeble and too industrious to have starved. If the US had not invaded, there was no route to victory.

I don't want play this what if history, but I tend to agree with Schwartz on this. OJ, regarding the "myth" of stoic resistance by this race, I would like to direct your attention to Iwo Jima which was 600 miles from Japan. Out of a defense force of 20,000 only 1800 survived and there is still dispute as to whether even they surrendered. (marines lost 6800 dead)

A siege would have been a walk in the park for the Japanese.

Speaking of "what if" history, Eisenhower"s Normandy invasion would have flopped miserably if instead of Germans there had been Japanese defending Europe with the same resources that the Germans had.

That was soldiers--they're paid to die.

OJ:

Wrong. Why don't you go to a few history books and see how many civilians jumped to their deaths.

At Iwo Jima?

I think Jeff may be referring to Okinawa, which was also a difficult invasion. Siege would have only meant a few more vegetable gardens.

Where werre all the jumpers on the main island?

h-man:

Correct. I meant Okinawa.

How many women and children killed themselves on Okinawa when we had it surrounded?

OJ: Civilian deaths at Okinawa are besides the point when analyzing potential blockade/seige alternatives. What civilians are called upon to do is endure, and the historic recor is that they do. There is no reason to belive that the Japanese would not have.

Given the size of Japan and the industry and resourcefulness of its citizens (which we can all agree they have demonstrated in war and peace), it is impossible to imagine that they would have starved or sucumbed to plague.

In that posture, the only way that the United States could have obtained a formal surrender from or peace treaty with Japan would have been invasion. This was ruled out by the initial hypothesis.

Japan's overseas empire would have been disbanded and the land war would have ended, but WWII would have draged on for years, with unguessable consequenses for ability to deal with the Soviets.

The best known mass suicides were on Saipan in 1944. Women threw their children off cliffs then jumped after them. Some of the suicides were filmed and the footage turns up ocassionally in documentaries on the Pacific War. The cliffs from the air:

http://www.mpwarner.com/in-depth/image-1000.html

There probably were a fair number of suicides on Okinawa but not as spectacular as those on Saipan. I'm sure there weren't any civilians on Iwo Jima.

"Banzai Cliff and Suicide Cliffs are the two sites where hundreds of island civilian and Japanese military forces jumped to their death rather than be captured by the invading Americans."

The question here is not whether Japan would have surrended, but whether OJ will?

I worked with a man who, at age 18, watched the Saipan suicides from a destroyer. He showed me the diary he'd kept at the time.

It seems that on Saipan, the civilians were terrorized by the military into thinking that the US soldiers would rape before they killed. Easy to believe, since that's how Japanese soldiers did it.

To call it voluntary stretches the word's meaning.

On Okinawa, it appears more direct coercion was used to get the civilians to die. The Okinawans did not have much use for the Mainland Japanese and were somewhat resistant.

I've read an account of a teenage Okinawan girl who was herded into a cave with all her classmates and grenaded by Japanese soldiers. There were 2 survivors out of about 50.

No point in arguing counterfactuals, perhaps, but it seems unlikely that people who could behave that way in April were going to behave very differently in September.

The argument that the A-bomb was used against the Japanese because they were not white is not something that can be debated. The contemporary records are available. The bomb was built to use against Germans. No if ands or buts.

People, like Orrin, who think the Japanese would have cracked without invasion should ask themselves, does it look as if the Germans would have cracked if the Allied armies had held up outside the German borders?

Not to me.

Of course they would have. They did in WWI also.

OJ, Whilhelm II was no Adolph Hitler. Neither would Germany have made the mistake of surrendering again unless it was the absolute only plausable option to choose.

Again, absent the bomb, the war against Japan would have dragged on until at least early 1947 or until Tojo and Hirohito were confirmed dead. Following this alternate history, I imagine that Dewey (or Taft or Stassen) would have indeed defeated Truman in '48.

It was the only plausible option and they'd have surrendered to us long before but for FDR's foolish Unconditional Surrender demand. Or, better yet, we could have refused their surrender and held off while they fought the Soviets tooth and claw.

OJ won't surrender. Japan would not have surrended either.

Hitler was an evil mad man. Whilhem II was not. Hitler plotted and ignited WWII. Whilhelm II chose allies poorly and a sort of peer pressure drew him into WWI. These are key differences. Only Hitler's death or arrest by Russian troops was going to bring about the end of the Third Reich. Only the death and or arrest of Tojo was going to bring about the end of WWII in the Pacific. Read the headlines...

February, 1947: TOJO DEAD! HIROHITO ANNOUNCES SURRENDER!

November, 1948: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN!

May 1952: NEW HAMPSHIRE BOY SHOCKS FAMILY

Dave:

Neither happened.