~~~ELLIS ZACHARIAS

(Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence)

Based on a series of intelligence reports received in late 1944, Zacharias, long a student of Japan's people and culture, believed the Japan would soon be ripe for surrender if the proper approach were taken. For him, that approach was not as simple as bludgeoning Japanese cities:

"...while Allied leaders were immediately inclined to support all innovations however bold and novel in the strictly military sphere, they frowned upon similar innovations in the sphere of diplomatic and psychological warfare."

Ellis Zacharias, The A-Bomb Was Not Needed, United Nations World, Aug. 1949, pg. 29.

Zacharias saw that there were diplomatic and religious (the status of the Emperor) elements that blocked the doves in Japan's government from making their move:

"What prevented them from suing for peace or from bringing their plot into the open was their uncertainty on two scores. First, they wanted to know the meaning of unconditional surrender and the fate we planned for Japan after defeat. Second, they tried to obtain from us assurances that the Emperor could remain on the throne after surrender."

Ellis Zacharias, Eighteen Words That Bagged Japan, Saturday Evening Post, 11/17/45, pg. 17.

To resolve these issues, Zacharias developed several plans for secret negotiations with Japanese representatives; all were rejected by the U.S. government. Instead, a series of psychological warfare radio broadcasts by Zacharias was later approved. In the July 21, 1945 broadcast, Zacharias made an offer to Japan that stirred controversy in the U.S.: a surrender based on the Atlantic Charter. On July 25th, the U.S. intercepted a secret transmission from Japan's Foreign Minister (Togo) to their Ambassador to Moscow (Sato), who was trying to set up a meeting with the Soviets to negotiate an end to the war. The message referred to the Zacharias broadcast and stated:

"...special attention should be paid to the fact that at this time the United States referred to the Atlantic Charter. As for Japan, it is impossible to accept unconditional surrender under any circumstances, but we should like to communicate to the other party through appropriate channels that we have no objection to a peace based on the Atlantic Charter."

U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, vol. 2, pg. 1260-1261.

But on July 26th, the U.S., Great Britain, and China publicly issued the Potsdam Proclamation demanding "unconditional surrender" from Japan. Zacharias later commented on the favorable Japanese response to his broadcast:

"But though we gained a victory, it was soon to be canceled out by the Potsdam Declaration and the way it was handled.

"Instead of being a diplomatic instrument, transmitted through regular diplomatic channels and giving the Japanese a chance to answer, it was put on the radio as a propaganda instrument pure and simple. The whole maneuver, in fact, completely disregarded all essential psychological factors dealing with Japan."

Zacharias continued, "The Potsdam Declaration, in short, wrecked everything we had been working for to prevent further bloodshed...

"Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern Asia.

"Washington decided that Japan had been given its chance and now it was time to use the A-bomb.

"I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds."

Ellis Zacharias, How We Bungled the Japanese Surrender, Look, 6/6/50, pg. 19-21.

~~~GENERAL CARL "TOOEY" SPAATZ

(In charge of Air Force operations in the Pacific)

General Spaatz was the person who received the order for the Air Force to "deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945..."(Leslie Groves, Now It Can Be Told, pg. 308). In a 1964 interview, Spaatz explained:

"The dropping of the atomic bomb was done by a military man under military orders. We're supposed to carry out orders and not question them."

In the same interview, Spaatz referred to the Japanese military's plan to get better peace terms, and he gave an alternative to the atomic bombings:

"If we were to go ahead with the plans for a conventional invasion with ground and naval forces, I believe the Japanese thought that they could inflict very heavy casualties on us and possibly as a result get better surrender terms. On the other hand if they knew or were told that no invasion would take place [and] that bombing would continue until the surrender, why I think the surrender would have taken place just about the same time." (Herbert Feis Papers, Box 103, N.B.C. Interviews, Carl Spaatz interview by Len Giovannitti, Library of Congress).

~~~BRIGADIER GENERAL CARTER CLARKE

(The military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables - the MAGIC summaries - for Truman and his advisors)

"...when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs."

Quoted in Gar Alperovitz, The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 359.

Outside of Japan - these occurred when the Japanese captured a city or region. When the bombs were dropped, there was no chance of the Japanese being able to successfully go on the offensive, thus the number of non-Japanese civilians saved by the dropping of nuclear bombs is negligible compared to the number killed by them

As for the killing of Japanese civilians, this is something I have never heard of. If you have a source that refers to this, I would be interested to see this. I tried googling and found nothing.

Mass killings

R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, states that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered from nearly 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most likely 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. "This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture."^[29] According to Rummel, in China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations and 10.2 millions in the course of the war.^[30] The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 300,000 civilians and prisoners of war, although the accepted figure is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.^[31] A similar crime was the Changjiao massacre. In Southeast Asia, the Manila massacre, resulted in the deaths of 100,000 civilians in the Philippines. It is estimated that at least one out of every 20 Filipinos died at the hand of the Japanese during the occupation.^[32][33] In the Sook Ching massacre, between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore were taken to beaches and massacred. There were numerous other massacres of civilians e.g. the Kalagong massacre.

Historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta reports that a "Three Alls Policy" (Sankō Sakusen) was implemented in China from 1942 to 1945 and was in itself responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians. This scorched earth strategy, sanctioned by Hirohito himself, directed Japanese forces to "Kill All, Burn All, and Loot All."

Additionally, captured allied service personnel were massacred in various incidents, including:

• Laha massacre
• Banka Island massacre
• Parit Sulong
• Palawan massacre
• SS Tjisalak massacre perpetrated by Japanese submarine I-8
• Wake Island massacre-see Battle of Wake Island
• Bataan Death March
• Manila Massacre

[edit] Human experimentation and biological warfare

Shiro Ishii, commander of Unit 731.

Special Japanese military units conducted experiments on civilians and POWs in China. One of the most infamous was Unit 731 under Shirō Ishii. Victims were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia, amputations, and were used to test biological weapons, among other experiments. Anesthesia was not used because it was believed to affect results.^[34]

According to GlobalSecurity.org, the experiments carried out by Unit 731 alone caused 3,000 deaths.^[36] Furthermore, according to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare, the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments is around 580,000.^[37] According to other sources, "tens of thousands, and perhaps as many as 400,000, Chinese died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases...", resulting from the use of biological warfare.^[38]

One case of human experimentation occurred in Japan itself. At least nine out of 12 crew members survived the crash of a U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 bomber on Kyūshū, on May 5, 1945. (This plane was Lt. Marvin Watkins' crew of the 29th Bomb Group of the 6th Bomb Squadron.^[39]) The bomber's commander was sent to Tokyo for interrogation, while the other survivors were taken to the anatomy department of Kyushu University, at Fukuoka, where they were subjected to vivisection or killed.^[40] On March 11, 1948, 30 people including several doctors were brought to trial by the Allied war crimes tribunal. Charges of cannibalism were dropped, but 23 people were found guilty of vivisection or wrongful removal of body parts. Five were sentenced to death, four to life imprisonment, and the rest to shorter terms. In 1950, the military governor of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, commuted all of the death sentences and significantly reduced most of the prison terms. All of those convicted in relation to the university vivisection were free by 1958.^{[citation needed]}

In 2006, former IJN medical officer Akira Makino stated that he was ordered—as part of his training—to carry out vivisection on about 30 civilian prisoners in the Philippines between December 1944 and February 1945.^[41] The surgery included amputations.^[42] Ken Yuasa, a former military doctor in China, has also admitted to similar incidents in which he was compelled to participate.^[43]

[edit] Use of chemical weapons

According to historians Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Kentaro Awaya, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, gas weapons, such as tear gas, were used only sporadically in 1937 but in the spring of 1938, however the Imperial Japanese Army began full-scale use of phosgene, chlorine Lewisite and nausea gas (red), and from summer 1939, mustard gas (yellow) was used against both Kuomintang and Communists Chinese troops.^[44]

According to Yoshimi and Seiya Matsuno, Emperor Hirohito signed orders specifying the use of chemical weapons in China.^[45] For example, during the Battle of Wuhan from August to October 1938, the Emperor authorized the use of toxic gas on 375 separate occasions, despite Article 23 of the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907)^[13] and article V of the Treaty in Relation to the Use of Submarines and Noxious Gases in Warfare^[46] A resolution adopted by the League of Nations on May 14 condemned the use of poison gas by Japan.

Another example is the Battle of Yichang in October 1941, during which the 19th Artillery Regiment helped the 13th Brigade of the IJA 11th Army by launching 1,000 yellow gas shells and 1,500 red gas shells at the Chinese forces. The area was crowded with Chinese civilians unable to evacuate. Some 3,000 Chinese soldiers were in the area and 1,600 were affected. The Japanese report say that "the effect of gas seems considerable".^[47]

In 2004, Yoshimi and Yuki Tanaka discovered in the Australian National Archives documents showing that cyanide gas was tested on Australian and Dutch prisoners in November 1944 on Kai Islands (Indonesia).^[48]

[edit] Preventable famine

Deaths caused by the diversion of resources to the Japanese military in occupied countries are also regarded as war crimes by many people. Millions of civilians in Southeast Asia—especially Vietnam and the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), both of which were major rice-growing countries—died during a preventable famine in 1944–45.^[49] (See, for example, the articles on the Vietnamese Famine of 1945 and Japanese occupation of Indonesia.)

An estimated 2 million Vietnamese, or 10% of the population then, died during the famine of 1944–45.^[50] A later UN report stated that 4 million people died in Indonesia as a result of famine and forced labour during the Japanese occupation.^[51]

The sheer volume of murdered civilians posed a formidable logistical challenge when it came to disposing of the bodies. Many Chinese were conscripted into "burial teams", an experience they would later recall as horrifically traumatic.^[52]

^ I'm assuming that's a response to me?

I did not deny that the Japanese killed many non Japanese civilians before the dropping of the bombs (that would be a stupid thing to deny)

I stated that the Japanese were not in a position to capture more cities when the bombs were dropped, and thus the number of civilian deaths preented by the bombing was very low

I also asked for a citation for your claim of killing of Japanese civilians by the Japanese Emporer, Government or Army

I can't believe what I'm hearing from some people! US went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq to "combat terrorism". With your logic, them nuking Los Angeles would have been a great resolve to end the war...

Seriously, nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be considered nothing less than terrorism and crimes of war, there's no spinning that.

You assume that people should be able to see through it, but history shows us that even good people don't much of the time.  History will always look on these acts differently then they looked at the time, and many of the fools on their high horse here would have done exactly the same thing had they been in the situation.  

Furthermore, there's the thing called the draft and mandatory military duty. 

oh bad usa bad

I'm japan was so Innocent

Do you know history? 

Not sure, what you mean by long-term effects. Chronic radiation syndrome due to prolonged exposure of radioactive dust that often result in cancer many years later etc.? The issue is likely was expected, though could be widely underestimated since wasn't studied properly. But most victims of bombing that survived explosion died within few weeks or couple of months due to acute radiation syndrome, which is definitely expected effect of bombing. And those are absolute majority of post-bombing victims, so the fact that chronic radiation syndrome was underestimated wasn't important.