The biggest lie of the history

The Japan wanted to surrender before the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

There are many lies that history makes us believe, but most are false. The history always tell ONLY a part of truth of ONLY one point of view, the POV more comfortable to the winners. Some examples? Like George Washington's wooden teeth. The French queen's phrase, "Let them eat cake." The horned helmets that the Vikings wore for ceremonies, not battles. Napoleon was short, though he was actually about 5'5" (1.69 m)—the men around him were taller than him; it's a matter of perspective. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Einstein was bad at school. But today I want to talk about the biggest lie in history about war: the one that, according to the Americans, Japan would never have surrendered if they hadn't dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. False.

The Japanese had asked for surrender a few months before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. David Payne of the National Interest reveals, or rather recalls, this horrific episode of World War II, digging up from the archives a forgotten and horrific part of history.

"One of the greatest popular myths of World War II," Payne writes, "is that Truman had no choice but to drop the atomic bombs on Japan because the Japanese were willing to fight to the last man, and that dropping the atomic bombs saved the lives of a million American soldiers who would have died in an invasion of the Japanese home islands."

In fact, the U.S. Army estimated at the time that a full-scale invasion of Japan would result in the deaths of 44,000 soldiers. But the harsh truth is that the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan did not save any American servicemen because Japan had attempted to surrender several months before the atomic bombings, after the U.S. conquest of the Mariana Islands and the start of the B-29 bombing campaign of Japan's major cities in July 1944.

The MacArthur Memorandum on Japan's Surrender Terms

General Douglas MacArthur had collected five separate high-level Japanese surrender demands, presenting surrender terms virtually identical to those we imposed on them seven months later, and sent them to FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ed.] in January 1945, shortly before the Yalta Conference, in the form of a forty-page memorandum. Unfortunately, FDR rejected them, noting that 'MacArthur is our greatest general, but a modest politician.'"

"It's unclear what FDR's exact rationale was," Payne adds, "since Japan's surrender in January 1945 would have been greeted with great relief by the war-weary American electorate, but some have speculated that the decision was driven by his desire to prolong the conflict so as to allow the Soviets to intervene in the Pacific War and share the territorial gains with them."

Motivations aside, which may or may not be true (as could be others, such as showing the world the Bomb that would have given the US global hegemony), the revelation of the great refusal remains and is so shocking that it might seem the product of the blunder of a reporter indulging in conspiracy theories. Instead, the sources Payne cites are more than solid.

"The existence of the MacArthur Memorandum," Payne writes, "was first revealed by journalist Walter Trohan on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald four days after the Japanese surrender on August 15."

[Trohan] "He had been forced to keep it hidden for seven months because of wartime censorship. It had been given to him confidentially by FDR's Chief of Staff, Admiral William Leahy, who feared it would be classified top secret for decades to come or even destroyed."

"Its authenticity was never questioned by the Truman administration. As former President Herbert Hoover writes in his memoir, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and its Aftermath, its veracity has been confirmed in every detail by General MacArthur himself. And it has also been confirmed in Anthony Kubek's book How the Far East Was Lost."

“Aside from a few other conservative sources of the time, his existence has been largely erased from the history books approved by the liberal establishment, which has sought to conceal such inconvenient truths about a conflict it has long portrayed, misrepresenting history, as ‘the good war.’”

Payne details the staggering number of deaths that the early surrender of the Japanese would have spared: not only the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not only the American and Japanese soldiers and Japanese civilians who fell from January to August 1945, but also all the countless victims—Chinese, Japanese, and Russian—inflicted by the war that was unfolding in China, where the Chinese had found Soviet support against the Japanese. And likely the subsequent victims, caused by the Chinese civil war between Communists and Nationalists and many others.

Not to mention the fact that the easing of the Pacific engagement would presumably have shortened the timeframe for the other front, the Western one, and perhaps even the ordeal of the Nazi extermination camps, which intensified their disastrous activity in the final months...

The other, forgotten war on the Asian front.

Payne follows this revelation with some considerations on the decisive influence of MacArthur's opinions on the subsequent fate of Japan, which was spared the fate of Germany, but above all, and more interestingly, on the role the Soviets played on the Asian front, often ignored in history books.

Payne's statement that the atomic bombs had little influence on Tokyo's decision to surrender (actually, to surrender for the sixth time, according to the cited documents) seems exaggerated; and that the Japanese "decided to surrender unconditionally to the United States on August 15 after the lightning-fast Soviet victory in the 'August Storm' in Manchuria," which also accelerated the surrender (the timing tells us so).

But it's also true that, despite being defeated by both powers, they decided to surrender to the United States, fearing that their country would end up dismembered like Germany. Thus, the dividends of that victory, which cost American, Chinese, and Russian casualties (and more Russian and Chinese than American ones), effectively accrued solely to the United States.

Perhaps this is a good thing, given the fate of the Soviet Union's satellite countries, but along with the bright spots, we must also consider the dark spots, which make Japan the only Asian country to share the fate of limited sovereignty that weighs on so many European states. But ifs don't make history.

It remains that, regardless of the "ifs and buts," this forgotten/erased page of the Second World War confirms Hegel's observations on the tragedy of history, which we quote: "Only by accurately assembling the calamities suffered by the most splendid of all that ever existed—peoples and states, private virtues and innocence—can we thus push our feelings to the point of the deepest and most inconsolable grief, which is not compensated by any conciliatory outcome, and against which we organize our defense or recover our freedom, only by thinking: 'It happened this way, it is fate; there is nothing we can do about it...'"

"But even when we consider history as such a slaughterhouse, in which the fortunes of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals have been sacrificed, our thoughts inevitably also ask for whose benefit, and for what ultimate purpose, such enormous sacrifices have been made."

And you, can you imagine if the war finished before, no atomic bombs, the Germany conquered before, Hiroshima and Nagasaki never destroyed (men, women and CHILDREN), if Anne Frank today could be still alive? (If so, she should have 96 years). With this I concluse my article, until next time, and remember, don't forget who is the real enemy.