the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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Leftist discourse around Japan is also nonsense and contradictory too.
On the one hand, they were recruiting suicide bombers, arming school children with garden tools, and their military tried to coup their own god-emperor to stop him from broadcasting his surrender. On the other hand, if the Allies had just waited (sit down, Chinese and Korean people still suffering under brutal occupation, the adults in the room are talking), the Japanese government totes would have surrendered.
No one is claiming that Japan would've "just surrendered" if the US "did nothing". The piece your missing is the USSR had finally started attacking and was sweeping the Japanese out of Manchuria. The invasion began 1945-08-09 same day as the second bomb.
Theres a leftist conspiracy theory that the Japanese high command actually surrendered because of the soviet invasion, not the atom bombs. But surrendered to the US not the USSR, since the US would probably be more favorable. The logic is the US had completely destroyed entire Japanese cities before but that never stopped them. Doing it with just one bomb was new, but thats it. Soviet invasion was basically game over. Holdings in China were doomed. And now they were looking at a joint US-USSR invasion of the home islands. Any general could see that's game over.
Alas its all a conspiracy theory. It hinges on if a bunch of japanse generals in a closed room decided to lie or not. I think one is on record as saying it was the soviet invasion but others hold to it being the atom bomb.
I've had people tell me multiple times on Hexbear that the Japanese government were about to surrender anyway even if the A-bombs weren't dropped.
You raise a fair point about the Soviet liberation of Manchuria, but like you said we really just can't know for certain what effect either or both of those events had on the Japanese decision making process. Both were war-losing events but without transcripts or recordings we'll never know.
What really speaks to me about the military's fanatical desire to fight to the end is the fact that even after losing both Manchuria AND getting bombed, the military still launched an almost-successful coup against their own God-Emperor to keep fighting. The surrender address had to be smuggled out in dirty laundry, and it's entirely possible that Japan would have gone on fighting had that recording been prevented from leaving the Imperial Palace.