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| quote: | Originally posted by Sunsnail
I think I saw on the History Channel or something that the Japanese were in the process of surrendering while the bombs were dropped.  |
What I'm about to post is a third party summary of the book, Nihon no Ichiban Nagai Hi by the Pacific War Research Society. The society consisted of 14 Japanese historians who spent years interviewing every Japanese survivor involved in any way with the decision to surrender, except for Hirohito. It was published in 1965, and it was later translated into English with the title Japan's Longest Day.
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Japan in the summer of 1945 was governed, in the name of the emperor, by the Supreme War Council or Big Six. The SWC consisted of representives of the Army, the Navy and the civilian government. This body ruled by consensus. That is the six would debate amoung themselves until they all agreed on a course of action which could be presented to Hirohito. The most powerful person on the SWC was the Army Minister. It had become a rule of Japanese politics that the Army Minister was chosen by the Army and no cabinet could exist without an Army Minister. This meant that the Army could veto any decision by having its Minister resign.
The issue on the table in late summer of 1945 was the surrender of Japan. The SWC could not, did not achieve consensus.
It is a remarkable fact about the crisis which overtook the SWC in August 1945 that no one changed their opinion. The SWC members who advocated immediate acceptance of the Potsdam declaration stayed pro-peace throughout. More amazingly, the SWC members who opposed surrender before Hiroshima, continued to oppose it right up till August 14.
SWC DOVES:
Foreign Minister Togo (the leader of the doves)
Prime Minister Admiral Suzuki (77 and very flaky)
Navy Minister Admiral Yonai
SWC HAWKS
Army Minister General Anami (the leader of the hawks)
Army Chief of Staff General Umezu
Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Toyoda
It is a curious fact that the Navy was so important, even though it only had a few destroyers left.
Since these six people were unable to agree to end the war, there were two other sources of authority which could possibly break the deadlock, although, since Japan was already at war, the hawks had no desire to break the deadlock.
THE ARMY
The Army was in physical control of the country and Tokyo. The Army had a tradition of murdering political opponents. Many middle level officers in the Army believed that the Army should murder all the doves and take control of the country. This would mean, in effect, kidnapping Hirohito. Many officers viewed this as preferable to surrender. Everyone believed that a surrender order would be followed by an immediate coup attempt and assasination spree.
THE EMPEROR
Hirohito strongly wanted peace. In principle, he could have ordered the Army to surrender at any time. Under the Meiji Constitution he was explicitly Commander and Chief. However, it was not clear that the Army would obey him. If he ordered the Army to surrender, a successful coup would leave him a prisoner. He knew he only had one shot. He would have to stake his position and the lives of his fellow doves on one attempt to bulldoze the Army. The question was, when to try it. Hirohito was not isolated, he had the help of many senior politicians. He had friends in the Army. It just wasn't clear that he had enough to ride out a coup.
DOVE arguments:
Everyone agreed on the importance of protecting the 'national polity'. Doves emphasized the importance of the Monarchy. They argued that immediate surrender to the US was the best way to preserve the Monarchy. Peace feelers to the US from doves had been broken off at hawks insistence, but not before the US had communicated to the doves that Japan could surrender and keep an emperor. The doves also didn't like the Russians and would have preferred ending the war before they occupied any of Japan. (Even though Japan was still at peace with Russia, indeed trying desperately to negotiate with Stalin, Japan could see the Russians deploying massive forces on the border. The Russian attack was not a big surprise.)
HAWK arguments:
The hawks accepted that the war, and empire, were gone. They believed that the US would allow Japan to retain its government structure and independence if it were clear that the price of insisting on occupation was too high. They advocated a guerilla war. They believed that even if the emperor were hiding in the mountains with a few soldiers, that was preferable to having the public humiliation of the emperor subordinated to foreigners.
However, the hawks didn't think it would come to that. After all, all they wanted was a little area around Tokyo where the emperor and his soldiers could wave the flag unmolested. Was this too much to ask in exchange for thousands of US lives? The hawks thought US diplomatic concessions would be coming.
The hawks also thought the Soviets would help. They could pressure the US directly, although that was unlikely. More usefully, the Soviets could overrun Manchuria and Korea, scaring the US into coming to terms.
However, the hawks main hope was for a US invasion. Until the US invaded, Japan had no good way to kill Americans. However, if the US fought Japan's 2 million man home army in Japan's rugged terrain, Japan would kill plenty of Americans.
POTSDAM PROCLAMATION:
The July 26 PP explicitly called for the "unconditional surrender of the Japanese Armed Forces". The cabinet correctly interpreted this as saying that the monarchy would not be eliminated. The foreign office pressed for immediate acceptance. The Army was unmoved. The SWC reached a consensus to do and say nothing. (This was there most common approach to all problems). Unfortunately, PM Suzuki said to reporters that the cabinet would 'mokusatsu' the PP. This harsh language, which was a slip from a well-meaning but senile dove, infuriated Togo because he knew it would get a bad reaction from the US. How bad, he couldn't imagine.
HIROSHIMA
Hiroshima was bombed on Aug 6. Nothing happened in Tokyo on the 6th or 7th. On Aug 8, Hirohito informed PM Suzuki that the war must be ended immediately. Suzuki was instructed to call an immediate SWC meeting for that purpose, "but the meeting had to be postponed because one of the members was unavoidably detained by 'more pressing business' elsewhere." [I, also, find this incredible, so I just quoted what JLD says]
RUSSIA
Russia declared war the afternoon of the 8th.
AUGUST 9
The doves woke up early this Thursday. Furious about the meeting that had been blown off, leading to Russian entry, Togo et al. managed to get an SWC meeting going by 10:30 AM. Immediately, the SWC split into its two familiar factions and started going over the familiar arguments. Halfway through the meeting a message arrived saying that Nagasaki had been bombed at 11:00 that morning. This changed no opinions. The SWC meeting broke up at 1:00 PM with no decision having been made.
That afternoon the arguments were repeated in a full cabinet meeting lasting from 2:30 to 10:00 PM. The Home Minister explicitly predicted that a coup would likely happen if the government ordered surrender. The meeting had no result.
Suzuki then, after consultation with Hirohito, called a SWC meeting for 11:50 PM, to be held in the presence of the emperor, an unprecedented, although perfectly legal, procedure.
AUGUST 10
For two hours the SWC went over the same arguments it had been arguing non-stop since mid-morning the day before. At 2:00 AM Suzuki turned to Hirohito, saying "your decision is requested". Hirohito said he supported Togo. He then left the room.
Suzuki then convened a cabinet meeting to prepare the formal note of surrender. By 4:00 AM the note had been approved by the cabinet and sent to the Foreign Office for translation and transmission. The FO had one last trick. The cabinet had demanded that the US respect "the powers of His Majesty". The FO translated that to English reading "the prerogatives of His Majesty." Since few hawks spoke English, they got away with it.
Anami returned to the Army Ministry where he addressed senior personnel and explained the developments. A young officer demanded, "Is the Army Minister actually considering surrender?" Anami silenced the officer by smashing the table with his swagger stick. However, the young officers could still hope that the Allies would reject the note and a coup would be unnecessary.
The US delivered a massive bombing raid on Tokyo.
AUGUST 11
In Tokyo the leaders waited for the US reply. Anami made a belligerent public proclamation. Young officers began drawing up lists of doves to be killed.
AUGUST 12
The Byrnes reply came at 00:45. The FO diplomatically mistranslated it as well, substituting "controlled by" for Byrnes' "subject to" in the crucial phrase describing the Hirohito's relation with MacArthur.
This was the signal to start the same arguments all over again. There was now the added edge that the coup planning was in full process. Anami hoped to use the threat of the coup to prevent acceptance of the Byrnes note, but he also wanted to make sure there was no actual coup.
AUGUST 14
The Allies dropped leaflets describing the exchange of notes. This terrified the government. They were sure this would lead to a coup. So by 10:00 AM the SWC and cabinet were assembled for an Imperial Conference down in Hirohito's bunker. Hirohito announced his decision to accept the Byrnes note. He asked the cabinet to prepare an appropriate rescript for him to read to the nation.
That afternoon Hirohito recorded the rescript
Anami forced the top Army officers to sign a statement of loyalty. Anami was still consorting with the coup planners but Umezu definitely decided he was against a coup.
That night Anami went to his house and committed sepukku.
The coup began with junior officers seizing the Imperial Guards Division and the Imperial Palace. General Mori, commander of the Guards, was murdered. Meanwhile, a series of assasinations was attempted. PM Suzuki barely got out of his house alive before soldiers came, searched it, and burned it in frustration. He went into hiding at a friend's house.
AUGUST 15
Although the rebels had held the palace all night, the coup ran out of steam in the morning. General Tanaka of the Eastern District Army showed up at the palace. Hirohito and his hosehold were safe. Most of the plotters killed themselves.
At 12 noon, Hirohitos voice read the rescript ending the war on NHK.
Although sporadic mutinies contined for a few days, the situation was stable when the US arrived. General Umezu signed on the Missouri.
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As can be seen, final decision to surrender didn't come until August 10th. It is interesting to note that despite the Emperor's desire to end the war, the hawks defied the emperor and attempted a coup to prevent the surrender broadcast from going out:
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Generals foiled Aug. 15 palace coup
Pair's actions credited with ensuring Hirohito surrender decree
By MUTSUO FUKUSHIMA
Kyodo News
Hours before Emperor Hirohito decreed Japan's World War II surrender 60 years ago, two Imperial army generals foiled a coup attempt by a dozen officers to block the historic broadcast.
On Aug. 15, 1945, nearly 1,000 soldiers occupied the Imperial Palace grounds for six hours from 2 a.m., aiming to seize two 25-cm records of the reading of the surrender decree and blocking its noon broadcast that day.
The actions of Lt. Gen. Takeshi Mori, commander of the First Imperial Guards Division, and Gen. Shizuichi Tanaka, commander of the Eastern Defense Command, enabled the monarch, known posthumously as Emperor Showa, to announce over the radio to the Japanese people and armed forces the nation's unconditional surrender.
The broadcast paved the way for the Allied Powers to occupy Japan without serious turmoil.
Emperor Hirohito made the recording at around 11:30 p.m. on Aug. 14, and Chamberlain Yoshihiro Tokugawa put the two records in a small safe in the first-floor office of the monarch's retinue, hidden from sight with piles of papers.
At around 1:40 a.m. on Aug. 15, Mori, 52, was shot by Maj. Kenji Hatanaka and then hacked to death by Capt. Shigetaro Uehara at his headquarters after rejecting their demand to order his 4,000-man division to revolt against the government and seize the palace.
"Mori rejected the officers' demands to order his Guards Division to rise up in revolt, because he had recognized the importance of establishing peace with the Allied Powers to prevent the Japanese people from being destroyed by a continued war," historian Kazutoshi Hando said in a recent interview.
"Had the broadcast of the surrender rescript been blocked, the Japanese military would have kept up its fighting spirit, and the armed forces would have carried on on many battlefields," he said.
On Aug. 14, the government of then Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki decided to accept the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. The decision was made at a meeting of the six-member Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, including Suzuki and War Minister Korechika Anami, in the presence of Emperor Hirohito.
At around 2 a.m. the next morning, Maj. Hidemasa Koga, Guards Division staff officer and son-in-law of Gen. Hideki Tojo, the prime minister at the time of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, issued a bogus order for the 1,000 soldiers to occupy the palace, seize all gates and cut all telephone lines except one linking the palace to the Guards headquarters.
The order was aimed at isolating the Emperor from the outside, preventing him from asking the government or any forces inclined toward peace, including the Eastern Defense Command, for help, and toppling the Suzuki administration to form a new government led by War Minister Anami.
The Eastern Command, led by Gen. Tanaka, was in charge of defending the capital.
The coup leaders affixed the official seal of murdered Division Commander Mori to copies of the order, tricking the division's field and company officers into believing it was authentic.
In addition, a 60-man company of the Guards Division's First Regiment occupied NHK, then based in Tokyo's Uchisaiwaicho, and prohibited all broadcasts. NHK was then 1.5 km away from the Imperial Household Ministry, the predecessor of the Imperial Household Agency.
"I heard three bangs when I was on sentry duty in an air-raid shelter outside the room of Division Commander Mori," said Ikuo Okazawa, who was a 24-year-old lance corporal in the division's Second Regiment at the time of the assassination.
Okazawa, now 84, claimed he initially thought the three bangs might have come from a motorcycle being started nearby.
Shortly after the shots, 2nd Lt. Tamiharu Sasaki came to the shelter and ordered Okazawa and three other soldiers to make "a pair of wooden boxes large enough for a person," as well as lids.
"We went to a nearby First Regiment barracks, and tore up the floorboards to make the boxes," Okazawa, a former legislator of the town assembly of Kamigori, Hyogo Prefecture, said in a recent interview.
An hour later, Okazawa and the others took the rough-planed coffins to the commander's room.
Then, "2nd Lt. Sasaki, loosening his sword, told us he would hack us to death if we said anything to anybody about what we were going to see upon entering the room," he said.
"When I entered the room, I found the bodies of Mori and his brother-in-law, Lt. Col. (Michinori) Shiraishi," he said. It was only at that moment that he realized the boxes he had made were coffins, he reckoned.
Shiraishi, staff officer of the Hiroshima-based Second General Army, had come to Tokyo the previous day and called on Mori, his wife's older brother, before he was to fly back to Hiroshima.
"My estimate is that the number of soldiers who entered the palace premises was more than 1,000. . . . Those who invaded the Imperial Household Ministry building to seize the recordings of the rescript numbered between 40 and 50," Masahisa Enai, a former corporal in the Imperial Guards Division's Second Regiment and a coup participant, said in a telephone interview.
Enai, 88, became an Asahi Shimbun journalist after the war.
At the Aug. 14 supreme council meeting, Hirohito asked the councilors to prepare the capitulation decree.
"If we continue the war, Japan will be totally annihilated. If even a small number of Japanese people's seed is allowed to remain . . . there is a glimmer of hope of an eventual Japanese recovery. . . . I am willing to go before the microphone," he said.
In the subsequently recorded announcement, he said: "I have ordered the government to communicate to the governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that our empire accepts the provisions of their joint declaration" issued from Potsdam near Berlin on July 26.
However, despite a series of military defeats in the Pacific, including in the Philippines and Okinawa, the Aug. 6 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Aug. 9 bombing of Nagasaki, and even Japan's dispatch of a cablegram on Aug. 10 accepting the Potsdam declaration, there were still plenty of military fanatics who refused to surrender.
Masataka Ida, a coup leader, said in a 380-page memoir that he tried to persuade Mori to order his Guards Division to occupy the palace at a meeting that began at around 12:40 a.m. on Aug. 15.
"Your excellency, if we obey the Emperor's order, the emperor system could be abolished. . . . A plan has been devised to kill you, though it depends on your response," Ida told Mori.
The lieutenant colonel quoted Mori as responding: "I am prepared for the worst. I am risking my life to defend the palace."
Just after Ida left Mori's room, Maj. Hatanaka and Capt. Uehara entered and learned Mori had rejected their demand that he order the coup. Then they killed him.
Capt. Nobuo Kitabatake, commander of one of the three Guards Division battalions that took over the palace, wrote in his memoir: "If the Imperial Guards Division became the first to rise in revolt, it would embolden the entire military to rise, thus leading Japan to continue the war."
After the forged order to gain control of the palace was issued at around 2 a.m., Koga and Hatanaka entered the palace, tricking Col. Toyojiro Haga, commander of the 1,000 Imperial Guards on the grounds, into believing the war minister would soon call on the Emperor to persuade him to scrap his decision to surrender.
The soldiers started searching for the surrender records. Capt. Kiichiro Aiura, a leader of a machinegun company with the Imperial Guards Second Regiment, was one of the officers ordered to join the search.
"I was ordered by Maj. Koga to go to the Imperial Household Ministry building and search for the records of the (surrender decree) along with Capt. Shinichi Kitamura, who had already been looking," he said.
The rebels searched for the recording for 90 minutes, but to no avail.
The plotters suffered a setback when Col. Kazuo Mizutani, chief of staff of the Guards Division, escaped to the Eastern Defense Command and alerted Gen. Tanaka.
At 4 a.m., Tanaka arrived at the barracks of the Imperial Guards Division and persuaded Col. Taro Watanabe, commander of its First Regiment, who was on the brink of sending 1,000 reinforcements to the palace, to disperse his soldiers.
Tanaka then summoned Haga, informed him that Mori had been murdered and that the occupation order was a sham, and persuaded him to order his troops to stand down.
After a furious Haga confronted Koga and Hatanaka, they left the palace and killed themselves. Haga had all of the troops pulled out of the palace at around 8 a.m.
At noon, the surrender recording was broadcast, and the nation heard the Emperor's voice announcing Japan's capitulation.
Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, an adviser to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, wrote in 1947 of the broadcast, "This historically unprecedented surrender unquestionably shortened the war by many months and prevented an estimated 450,000 American battle casualties."
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin...n20050812f2.htm
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It is impossible to say what kind of effect the dropping of the bombs had on the SWC cabinet meetings and the emperor's decision to terminate the war, however, given the steadfast refusal of the hawks to terminate the war even after hiroshima and nagasaki, one can hardly criticize Truman for knowing that Japan was going to surrender when in fact the surrender decision was frought with uncertainty, and in such a precarious position knowing what we know 60 years after the fact. Would Hirohito have had the support of the army without the events of the atomic bombs? Would Mori have made the same decision to not support the coup as well? These are questions and uncertainties revisionists fail to answer or address.
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Retro ...
Last edited by occrider on Aug-13-2005 at 20:37
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