Is the U.S. Crazy?

[KingCharlemagne]

82. It's been quite awhile since I studied the history of the period, so I'm relying on some

memories and scholarship that may by now be outdated. If so, apologies up front.

That said, my general sense is that Hirohito was surrounded by a bunch of gung-ho militarists who make Cheney and Wolfowitz look like choirboys by comparison. Hirohito may have encouraged (or not discouraged) private exploratory back channel peace negotiations but there was no way he was going to pursue publicly a course of negotiated peace and surrender of conquered territory and release of POWs (not just Americans but many other Asian countries). These Japanese militarists were quite prepared to see the home islands invaded and Japanese civilians sacrificed to preserve Japan's 'honor'. At the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few of those who surrounded Hirohito had lost their stomach for the fight.

This goes to the question of what 'defeat' means. At the risk of sounding like some hard-head myself, I would say that a crucial part of 'defeat' involves destroying an enemy's will to resist. As I wrote earlier, a conventional invasion would have resulted in the deaths of 1-2 million Japanese civilians (by our allied war planners' estimates). As horrific as Hiroshima\Nagasaki was, fewer civilians died as a result of it. "Mass murder" had already happened to the Japanese when the Allies fire-bombed Tokyo, killing over 100,000 in a single raid. So, with all due respect, that strikes me as a bit of a canard.