The Atomic Bombings of Japan Did Not Cause its Surrender, the Soviet Declaration of War Did.

It was the immensely successful Soviet military occupation of Manchuria, North Korea, southern Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands which convinced Japanese leaders to surrender to the U.S.

Photo taken of the mushroom cloud generated by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945

(Author’s Note: This article was originally published in The National Interest on August 9, 2022.)

This week, we commemorate the 78th Anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which killed an estimated 140,000 civilians just before the end of the Second World War. Tragically, twelve courageous U.S. airmen being held as prisoners of war  in Hiroshima also perished in the bombings. President Joe Biden has condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal guilty of genocide for the deaths of over 5,000 civilians in his continuing illegal war of aggression in Ukraine. However, few have decried President Harry Truman as a war criminal for killing twenty-eight times more civilians in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention FDR’s and Truman’s fire bombings of sixty of Japan’s other largest cities which killed many times more.

One of the greatest popular myths of the Second World War is that President Harry Truman, had no choice but to drop the atomic bombs on Japan due to the fact they refused to surrender and were willing to fight to the last Japanese soldier and that dropping the atomic bombs saved the lives of one million U.S. soldiers who would have died in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. In fact, the U.S. Army estimated at the time that only 44,000 troops would die in a full-scale invasion of Japan. However, the stark truth is that the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan did not save the lives of any U.S. military service members as Japan had been attempting to surrender for several months prior to the atomic bombings. Following the U.S. capture of the Marianas Island and the commencement of the B-29 firebombing campaign against Japan’s largest cities in July 1944, Emperor Hirohito ordered the Japanese government to attempt to negotiate Japan’s surrender in the belief that if Japan did not the U.S. would not stop fighting until the last Japanese subject had been exterminated.

General Douglas MacArthur, whom I have long considered to be America’s greatest modern-day general, compiled five separate high-level Japanese surrender overtures offering virtually identical surrender terms as we imposed on them seven months later and sent them to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) in January 1945 just before the Yalta Conference in a forty page memorandum urging FDR to accept Japan’s surrender. Sadly, FDR refused, remarking, “MacArthur is our greatest general but a poor politician.” It is unclear what rationale FDR had for calling MacArthur “a poor politician,” given that an acceptance of Japan’s surrender in January 1945 would have been greeted with great relief by the war-weary U.S. electorate but some have speculated it may have been a reference to his desire to prolong the war sufficiently to allow the Soviets to intervene in the Pacific War so they could share in the territorial spoils.

The existence of the MacArthur Memorandum was first revealed by reporter Walter Trohan on the front pages of The Chicago Tribune and Washington Times-Herald four days after the Japanese surrendered on August 15th. He had been forced to withhold it for seven months due to wartime censorship. It was leaked to him by FDR’s Chief of Staff, Fleet Admiral William Leahy, who feared it would be classified top secret for decades or even destroyed. Its authenticity was never questioned by the Truman administration. According to former President Herbert Hoover in his memoir, “Freedom Betrayed—Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and its Aftermath,”  its veracity was confirmed in every detail by General MacArthur himself. It was also confirmed in the book “How the Far East Was Lost” by Dr. Anthony Kubek. Aside from a few other conservative sources at the time, its existence has largely been erased from this history books by the liberal establishment which sought to cover up such inconvenient truths about a conflict which it has long misrepresented as “the Good War.” This, despite the fact that the Second World War was the most terrible war and deadly war in human history, costing the lives of seventy million people, and that, rather than destroying tyranny, it served to greatly expand Communist tyranny to one-third of the world’s territory and people from 170 million in 1939 to 730 million a mere decade later.

Needless to say, had FDR accepted Japan’s surrender at that time, not only would he have saved the lives of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, airmen and sailors who died unnecessarily due to his decision to prolong the war for several more months, but Communist China and North Korea would not exist today due to the fact that Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army would not have had the sanctuary of Soviet-occupied Manchuria to fall back to rest, refit and rearm with captured Japanese weapons and Chiang Kai Shek’s National Revolutionary Army likely would likely have defeated them in 1946 bringing all of China under its control. This would have saved up to 100 million lives lost to Communist mass murder and wars, not including over half a billion Chinese forced abortions and infanticides. It also would have saved the lives of nearly 100,000 U.S. soldiers who lost their lives in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

General MacArthur was a visionary anti-Communist leader who supported the cause of international peace and freedom. The Japanese continue to revere General MacArthur, due to the fact that he had successfully argued against the postwar division of Japan into Soviet-occupied north, including the main Japanese island of Hokaiddo and part of Honshu which was Japan’s largest island and a U.S.-occupied south. He also convinced Truman not to prosecute Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal, arguing that he was like a deity to the Japanese, while also saving Japan from the dire and apocalyptic fate of postwar Germany.

MacArthur instead opted to immediately begin to administer humanitarian relief to the defeated Japanese and to restore their economic prosperity in accordance with U.S. plans for postwar Germany previous to the signing of the Soviet-inspired Morgenthau Plan which was adopted by both the U.S. and U.K. at the Quebec Conference in September 1944. While Germany was denied a peace treaty and was not granted full sovereignty over their nation until the Two Plus Four Agreement on German Reunification was signed in 1990, Japan had its full sovereignty restored in 1952 with the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco formally ending the war and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty aimed at defending Japan against Soviet aggression. MacArthur was later fired by President Truman in 1951 for wanting to win the Korean War and liberate not just all of Korea but mainland China from Communism as well at a time the U.S. enjoyed massive nuclear supremacy over the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China was over a decade away from developing its own atomic bombs.

While America’s school textbooks claim the atomic bombings ended the war in the Pacific, according to the plaque on its atomic bomb exhibit, the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria … changed their minds.” The Soviet Union had declared war on Imperial Japan on August 8th. Ultimately, Japanese leaders decided to surrender unconditionally to the U.S. on August 15th following the lightning fast Soviet “August Storm’ defeat of their Kwantung Army in Manchuria, out of fear that they would suffer the same fate as Germany, which had been carved up and dismembered with half of their country Sovietized, their citizens starved to death and millions of their women raped, fearing Emperor Hirohito would be deposed and executed by the Soviets.

On August 13th, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki explained that Japan had to surrender quickly because “the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto (southern Sakhalin Island), but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States.” Japanese leaders were wise to do so, as unbeknownst to them, Stalin had ordered the amphibious invasion of the northernmost main Japanese island of Hokkaido to begin on August 24th with two and a half Red Army divisions using amphibious assault landing ships that the U.S. had provided to them under Lend Lease military assistance.

Seven of the United States’ eight five-star Army and Navy officers in 1945 agreed with the Navy’s assessment. Including Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Henry “Hap” Arnold and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, Ernest King, and William Halsey believing them to be both barbaric and unnecessary. Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral Leahy was particularly outraged by the atomic bombings, writing in his memoir “that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender …. In being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

These top US military commanders, including General MacArthur and future President Dwight D. Eisenhower, stated their belief that Japan would have surrendered unconditionally in August but no later than November even if the US had never employed the atomic bombs against them and even if the U.S. had never invaded the Japanese home islands. Even if they had in fact compelled the Japanese surrender, the atomic bombings and fire bombings of Japanese cities, which killed an estimated one-million Japanese civilians, would have constituted egregious war crimes under draft rules of aerial warfare which the U.S. had supported before the war as well as current international law, which prohibit the deliberate mass killing of non-combatant civilians.

Tragically, nearly eight decades after the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. is now on the verge of nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine and with China over Taiwan. This is due to the fact that U.S. leaders refuse to view the threat of Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons seriously, in the mistaken belief that Russian and Chinese leaders share the Western viewpoint that nuclear wars cannot be fought and won despite the fact that the U.S. victory over Japan has proven that limited nuclear wars can be even if it was not their usage that actually compelled Japan to surrender. The Biden administration would do well to heed the lessons of the atomic bombings of Japan and limit its responses to Russian and Chinese aggressions to largescale trade and economic sanctions while focusing on diplomatic solutions to both conflicts in order to avert the outbreak of a Third World War with the Sino-Russian alliance, lest it be repeated upon U.S. cities.  

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and is a contributor to Dr. Peter Pry’s book “Blackout Warfare” as well as the upcoming book “Will America Be Protected?” which is due to be released later this year. He also serves as the host of the Defend America Radio Show on KTALK AM 1640 and as Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.