Ron Collins
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

Given the headlong chaos of German personnel deserting en masse from their eastern front as the Red Army closed on the German heartland, in order to surrender instead to the US, British or French forces; and given also the ongoing internal purging and mass arrests of communists inside both Germany and Japan since years before the war, it is absolutely reasonable to believe that the deeply anti-Red imperial regime in Tokyo was just as eager to surrender preventively to MacArthur, once Manchuria and its ace-in-the-hole, previously intact, Kwantung Army fell. In days.

It is so easy to miscalculate the net short-term effects of the two atom bombs themselves in hindsight. Japanese cities had been being decimated industrially for three years already by “conventional” bombing, some of the raids being as costly per night in human lives as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions were.

Without the benefit of decades of nuclear arms races and steady inundations of imagery of mushroom clouds and houses being blown away in seconds (which we all take as routine now, seventy-plus years later), the ordinary Japanese not immediately affected by the atomic attacks, and the cabinet ministers who were not mid-century atomic physicists but politicians, had no reason to see within those two weeks that the last two bombing raids of the war were dramatically different from the previous forty-odd months of them. Horrific, lethal, unimaginable, and by then, expected.

“We will brook no delay”, says the Truman communique. What the hell does “brook no delay” mean in Japanese, anyway? And look, they aren’t sending bombers any more. Hmmm. Let’s wait and see, and keep getting ready.

But a million and a half armed communists one amphibious landing away from Hokkaido? Now that, is another matter entirely.

    Ron Collins

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    Facts don’t care about your faction