To the question "What caused Japan's surrender?" there are two popular answers. Option A - the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Option B - Red Army's Manchurian operation.
Then the discussion begins: what turned out to be more important - the dropped atomic bombs or the defeat of the Kwantung Army.
Both proposed options are incorrect: neither the atomic bombings, nor the defeat of the Kwantung Army were decisive - these were only the final chords of the Second World War.
A more balanced answer assumes that the fate of Japan was determined by four years of hostilities in the Pacific. Oddly enough, but this answer is also a "double bottom" truth. Behind the landing operations on tropical islands, the actions of aircraft and submarines, hot artillery duels and torpedo attacks by surface ships, there is a simple and obvious conclusion:
The war in the Pacific was planned by the United States, initiated by the United States, and fought in the interests of the United States.
The fate of Japan was predetermined in the early spring of 1941 - as soon as the Japanese leadership succumbed to American provocations and began to seriously discuss plans to prepare for the coming war. To a war in which Japan had no chance of winning.
The Roosevelt administration calculated everything in advance.
The inhabitants of the White House knew perfectly well that the industrial potential and resource base of the United States was many times greater than the indicators of the Japanese Empire, and in the field of scientific and technological progress, the United States was at least a decade ahead of its future adversary. The war with Japan will bring huge benefits to the United States - if successful (the probability of which was considered equal to 100%), the United States will crush its only rival in the Asia-Pacific region and become absolute hegemon in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. The risk of the enterprise was reduced to zero - the continental part of the United States was completely invulnerable to the Imperial army and navy.
The main thing is to make the Japs play by American rules and get involved in a losing game. America shouldn't start first - it should be a "war of the people, a holy war", in which the good Yankees crush the evil and vile enemy who risked attacking America.
Fortunately for the Yankees, the Tokyo government and the General Staff turned out to be too arrogant and arrogant: the intoxication of easy victories in China and Indochina caused an unjustified feeling of euphoria and the illusion of their own strength.
Japan successfully spoiled relations with the United States - back in December 1937, the Imperial Air Force planes sank the American gunboat Panai on the Yangtze River. Confident in its own power, Japan did not seek compromises and defiantly went into conflict. The war was inevitable.
The Americans accelerated the process, teased the enemy with deliberately impossible diplomatic notes and stifled economic sanctions, forcing Japan to make the only decision that seemed acceptable to it - to go to war with the United States.
Roosevelt did his best and achieved his goal.
"How we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves"
"… how can we get Japan to fire the first shot without putting ourselves in significant danger"
- entry in the diary of US Secretary of War Henry Stimson of 1941-25-11, dedicated to the conversation with Roosevelt about the expected Japanese attack
Yes, it all started with Pearl Harbor.
Whether it was a "ritual sacrifice" of American foreign policy, or the Yankees became victims of their own sloppiness - we can only speculate. At least, the events of the next 6 months of the war clearly indicate that Pearl Harbor could have happened without any intervention of "dark forces" - the American army and navy at the beginning of the war demonstrated their complete incapacity.
Nevertheless, the "Great Defeat at Pearl Harbor" is an artificially inflated myth with the aim of provoking a wave of popular anger and creating the image of a "formidable enemy" for rallying the American nation. In fact, the losses were minimal.
Japanese pilots managed to sink 5 ancient battleships (out of 17 available at that time in the US Navy), three of which were returned to service in the period from 1942 to 1944.
In total, as a result of the raid, 18 of the 90 US Navy ships that were anchored in Pearl Harbor that day received various damage. Irrecoverable losses among the personnel amounted to 2402 people - less than the number of victims of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The base infrastructure remained intact. - Everything is according to the American plan.
It is often said that the main failure of the Japanese is related to the absence of American aircraft carriers in the base. Alas, even if the Japanese managed to burn the Enterprise and Lexington, together with the entire Pearl Harbor naval base, the outcome of the war would remain the same.
As time has shown, America could DAILY launch two or three warships of the main classes (aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and submarines - minesweepers, hunters and torpedo boats do not count).
Roosevelt knew about it. The Japanese are not. Desperate attempts by Admiral Yamamoto to convince the Japanese leadership that the existing American fleet is just the visible tip of the iceberg and an attempt to solve the problem by military means would lead to disaster, did not lead to anything.
The capabilities of the American industry made it possible to instantly compensate for ANY losses, and the growing, by leaps and bounds, the US Armed Forces literally "crushed" the Japanese Empire like a powerful steam roller.
The turning point in the war in the Pacific came already in late 1942 - early 1943: after gaining a foothold in the Solomon Islands, the Americans accumulated enough strength and began to destroy the Japanese defensive perimeter with all their fury.
Dying Japanese cruiser "Mikuma"
Everything happened as the American leadership had hoped.
Subsequent events represent a pure "beating of babies" - in the conditions of absolute domination of the enemy at sea and in the air, the ships of the Japanese fleet perished en masse, not even having time to approach the American fleet.
After many days of assault on Japanese positions using aircraft and naval artillery, not a single whole tree remained on many tropical islands - the Yankees literally washed the enemy into powder.
Post-war research will show that the ratio of casualties of the armed forces of the United States and Japan is described by a ratio of 1: 9! By August 1945, Japan will have lost 1.9 million of its sons, the most experienced fighters and commanders will die, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto - the most sane of the Japanese commanders - will be out of the game (killed as a result of a special operation by the US Air Force in 1943, a rare case in history when the killers are sent to the commander).
In the fall of 1944, the Yankees kicked out the Japanese from the Philippines, leaving Japan with practically no oil, along the way, the last combat-ready formations of the Imperial Navy were defeated - from that moment even the most desperate optimists from the Japanese General Staff lost faith in any favorable outcome of the war. Ahead loomed the prospect of an American landing on the sacred Japanese land, with the subsequent destruction of the Land of the Rising Sun as an independent state.
Landing in Okinawa
By the spring of 1945, only the burnt ruins of cruisers who managed to avoid death on the high seas and were now slowly dying of wounds in the harbor of the Kure naval base remained of the once formidable Imperial Navy. The Americans and their allies almost completely exterminated the Japanese merchant fleet, putting island Japan on "starvation rations." Due to the lack of raw materials and fuel, Japanese industry practically ceased to exist. The major cities of the Tokyo metropolitan area, one after another, turned into ashes - the massive raids of B-29 bombers became a nightmare for the inhabitants of the cities of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe.
On the night of March 9-10, 1945, the most devastating conventional raid in history took place: three hundred Super Fortresses dropped 1,700 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo. Over 40 square meters were destroyed and burned. kilometers of the city, over 100,000 people died in the fire. The factories have stopped, from
Tokyo experienced a massive exodus of the population.
“Japanese cities, being made of wood and paper, will catch fire very easily. The army can engage in self-glorification as much as it wants, but if a war breaks out and there are large-scale air raids, it's scary to imagine what will happen then."
- prophecy of Admiral Yamamoto, 1939
In the summer of 1945, carrier aviation raids and massive shelling of the coast of Japan by battleships and cruisers of the US Navy began - the Yankees finished off the last pockets of resistance, destroyed airfields, once again "shook up" the Kure naval base, finally finishing off what the sailors did not manage to finish off during battles on the high seas …
This is how Japan of August 1945 appears before us.
Kwantung pogrom
There is an opinion that the crooked Yankees fought with Japan for 4 years, and the Red Army defeated the "Japs" in two weeks.
In this, at first glance, absurd statement, both truth and fiction are uncomplicatedly intertwined.
Indeed, the Manchurian operation of the Red Army is a masterpiece of military art: a classic blitzkrieg on an area equal in area to two Zap. Europe!
Breakthroughs of motorized columns through the mountains, daring landings on enemy airfields and monstrous cauldrons in which our grandfathers "boiled" the Kwantung Army alive in less than 1.5 weeks.
The Yuzhno-Sakhalin and Kuril operations went just as well. It took our paratroopers five days to capture Shumshi Island - for comparison, the Yankees stormed Iwo Jima for more than a month!
However, there is a logical explanation for each of the miracles. One simple fact speaks of what the "formidable" 850-thousandth Kwantung Army was in the summer of 1945: Japanese aviation, for a combination of many reasons (lack of fuel and experienced pilots, outdated materiel, etc.), did not even try to rise into the air - the offensive of the Red Army was carried out with the absolute supremacy of Soviet aviation in the air.
In the units and formations of the Kwantung Army, there were absolutely no machine guns, anti-tank guns, rocket artillery, there was little RGK and large-caliber artillery (in infantry divisions and brigades as part of artillery regiments and divisions, in most cases there were 75-mm guns).
- "History of the Great Patriotic War" (v. 5, p. 548-549)
Not surprisingly, the 1945 Red Army simply did not notice the presence of such a strange enemy. Irrecoverable losses in the operation amounted to "only" 12 thousand people. (of which half was carried away by illness and accidents). For comparison: during the storming of Berlin, the Red Army lost up to 15 thousand people. in one day.
A similar situation developed in the Kuril Islands and South Sakhalin - by that time the Japanese did not even have destroyers left, the offensive took place with complete domination at sea and in the air, and the fortifications on the islands of the Kuril ridge were not very similar to what the Yankees faced on Tarawa and Iwo Jima.
The Soviet offensive finally put Japan to a standstill - even the illusory hope for the continuation of the war disappeared. Further chronology of events is as follows:
- August 9, 1945, 00:00 Transbaikal time - the Soviet military machine was activated, the Manchurian operation began.
- August 9, late morning - the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki took place
- August 10 - Japan officially announced its readiness to accept the Potsdam terms of surrender with a reservation regarding the preservation of the structure of imperial power in the country.
- August 11 - The US rejected the Japanese amendment, insisting on the Potsdam formula.
- August 14 - Japan officially accepted the terms of unconditional surrender.
- September 2 - The Japanese surrender act was signed aboard the battleship USS Missuori in Tokyo Bay.
Obviously, the first nuclear bombing of Hiroshima (August 6) failed to change the Japanese leadership's decision to continue senseless resistance. The Japanese simply did not have time to realize the destructive power of the atomic bomb, as for the severe destruction and losses among the civilian population - the example of the March bombing of Tokyo proves that no less casualties and destruction did not affect the determination of the Japanese leadership to "stand to the last." The bombing of Hiroshima can be viewed as a military action aimed at destroying a strategically important enemy target, or as an act of intimidation towards the Soviet Union. But not as a key factor in Japan's surrender.
As for the ethical moment of the use of nuclear weapons, the bitterness during the Second World War reached such proportions that anyone who had such a weapon - Hitler, Churchill or Stalin, without batting an eye, would give an order to use it. Alas, at that time only the United States had nuclear bombs - America incinerated two Japanese cities, and now, for 70 years, it has been justifying its actions.
The most difficult question lies in the events of August 9-14, 1945 - what became the "cornerstone" in the war, which finally forced Japan to change its mind and accept the humiliating terms of surrender? Repetition of the nuclear nightmare or the loss of the last hope associated with the possibility of concluding a separate peace with the USSR?
I am afraid that we will never know the exact answer about what was going on in the minds of the Japanese leadership in those days.
Tokyo on fire
Victims of the barbaric bombing on the night of March 10, 1945
