AFAIK, their war lay primarily in the Pacific, and beyond supporting the Brits and Russians materially, I’m not really sure why the US would want to involve themselves physically in the European theatre. I do feel fear of Germans beating them to the bomb might have something to do with it, but that’s just conjecture.
The soviets but not to support them. Whoever gets there with an army has the most say in what happens next.
This, basically the whole war was a race to keep the Soviets from winning too much.
Which is why we dropped the bombs in Japan. Russia entered into a war with Japan after Germany fell, and their invasion of Japanese colonial territories was swift and decisive. Several historians have found evidence that it was this decisive victory by Russia that pushed Japan to accept surrender. There was a deal being brokered by the United States and Russia at the same time plans were being forged to drop the bombs. The deal would have left Japan split, with one side being under the jurisdiction of Russia while the other being under the jurisdiction of the US. The bombs ended up being the plan, and dropping them was effectively the same as having boots on the ground. The plan with Russia was dismissed, and all surrender terms were dictated by the US as a result.
That’s my understanding, anyway. I could have some of those facts wrong, so let me know if they are.
my understanding of the use of nuclear weapons on japan is more related to threatening the ussr. the japanese didn’t want to surrender to the soviets at all; they were concerned about being tried for crimes and saw the us as a more sympathetic power to surrender to. dropping the bombs showed the ussr what the us was able to do to a population without expending a single soldier. and the ussr did not have equal power to respond with.
Yes, I think we generally agree here. What seems clear from archived information from Japan is that its leaders were not concerned with another bomb (even if it was nuclear.) By that point, 68 cities in Japan had been bombed by US conventional air raids. The destruction was incredible, some of the most destructive bombing of individual cities history had seen up to that point. However, it wasn’t until the USSR broke their neutrality pact and invaded Manchuria that the leaders met and began discussing unconditional surrender. For some time, Japan had entertained the idea of having Stalin act as a moderator for negotiations between Japan and the US. Once the Soviets entered into war, that option was gone. Japan was also prepared to defend an invasion from the Allies from the south, but knew they could not defend from both the Soviets and the US on two fronts. This appears to be what caused Japans leaders to meet and discuss unconditional surrender.
Stalin apparently suggested to Truman that they would invade Manchuria on August 15th. This was known before the US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is some evidence that the US, on hearing this news, anticipated this would lead to Japans unconditional surrender. The US had a planned ground invasion (Operation Downfall) but it was slated for November. My understanding is they were having a hard time getting material support from the UK, France, etc. because of how much longer they had been in the war. From Truman’s perspective, conventional bombing was making zero progress towards ending the war with Japan, as its leaders seemed content to let it continue.
As it became more clear over time that Japans situation was deteriorating, it became more obvious that Russia entering into war with Japan was to cause them to surrender. There is evidence that over time, this changed the dialog internally from strategic and tactical use cases for the bomb to political use cases. They believed that use of the bomb would end the war before Russia made much headway in Manchuria. They believed that using the bomb would ensure they do not have to share victory over Japan with Russia. Furthermore, they thought the bomb was a way to strengthen America’s diplomatic hand not only in the Far East but in negotiations over the fate of Europe in general, and Eastern Europe in particular. James Byrnes’ view on the matter was that possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia “more manageable” in Europe.
The bomb was ultimately dropped on August 6th, The Soviets invaded Manchurian on midnight August 9th, and the second bomb hit Japan later that morning. It’s clear that the bomb dwarfed the significance of the Soviets invasion, at least in the public eye and the eye of American history, but it wasn’t lost on the leaders of Japan.
You’re definitely right about concerned surrounding war crimes. The trials were already underway regarding Germany when the bombs were dropped. I’m not sure if they saw the US as a more sympathetic power, however, it seems clear that Japanese leaders utilized the spectacular nature of the two atomic bombs as a cover for their failings. This cover worked twofold, it allowed them to save face with the Japanese public, who had very little information about the effectiveness of Japans war generally, while also stroking the Americans ego. If the specular shock and awe of this unforeseen weapon of mass destruction was the origins of unconditional surrender, then it wasn’t because of their poor handling of the war. The Japanese leadership utilized the horrors of these bombs to obscure the horrors they were guilty of. This ultimately strengthened the US’s position as having redefined the nature of war, giving them what they desired: More influence over post-war Japan, and influence across Europe as a whole.
yeah this seems like the fuller picture i’ve heard before. thanks for adding all the context.
lets get the timeline straight and the collusion of the allies clear: the atomic bomb was used august 6th. the soviets invaded august 8th. both events were essentially known to both parties; the US had alluded to a new weapon, the Soviets were obliged to enter within a 3 months deadline after VE. the US had specifically began a supply mission to assist Soviet operations in the theater (Project Hula). atomic weapons as a response to Soviet success is utterly unfounded. the bombs being a substitute for invasion is also unsupported, as far as the US warplanners knew they still might’ve had to invade, for which additional nukes were planned as beachhead weapons.
neither were the Soviets excluded from the peace. Soviet soldiers were not used to occupy the Home Islands (they liberated/accepted surrender north China/Korea) but participated in the allied occupation administration, securing left wing reforms and legality for the communists. these were reversed in '47, not exactly immediately.
I wasn’t aware of their involvement in the Allied occupation of Japan, that’s interesting. I’ll add it to my list of things to learn about
i am once again asking why the US would contribute supplies to a soviet campaign whose successful progress is supposedly the raison d’etre for US involvement
that’s a really cheap price for beating the nazis and weakening soviet manpower relative to the lives of amerikkkan soldiers. and then you just show up at the end and still get half or more of the bargaining power? why would the us not choose that particular path?
it’d be cheaper to simply not???
e: to expand, the choice was directly slow and starve the soviets, or to get a “bargain” where the Wallies only got to occupy only what they’d liberated themselves. the US would’ve gotten more if the USSR had moved slower, no?
well my point is that then either they’d have to make peace with the nazis or they’d have to fight the nazis themselves. and 80% of the nazi military was engaged on the eastern front. the ussr did 80% of the fighting, countless casualties, fighting back a genocide, and the us gets to have essentially equal say to them in what happens in europe afterwards, doesn’t have to actually fight through a nazi occupied eastern europe themselves? if the ussr moved slower then i agree that the us would have gotten more. but then the us would actually have to do more fighting. my suggestion is that the us had the strategic goal of the nazi defeat and was more than willing to let the soviets and them fight a pyrrhic war. why not? to the us, slavs were as pointless fodder then as they are currently.
but they did fight the nazis themselves anyway? this tunnel vision toward divisions on the ground and dead elides a colossal investment in naval and aerial material. less dudes are on cruisers, destroyers, and air wings than infantry divisions, but their expense and military contribution isn’t trivial. i mean we can even say strategic bombing wasn’t militarily useful, but it wasn’t cheap.
if you could imagine a ww2 where the US was a committed, not perfidious ally, how would they contribute in a way that they’d have comparable casualty figures to the USSR?
but they did fight the nazis themselves anyway?
i’m not saying they didn’t just that they had to fight way fewer than them. if the us were committed to anti-nazi action, they would have actually entered the war before being pressured into. i’m not trying to discount the amount or kind of support the us did give the soviets, i’m just saying that the us had a strategic interest in the soviet union military force being in a state at the end of the war that would be unable to combat the relatively undepleted us allied military force. the us wasn’t exactly proactive in combatting nazism…
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Basically the prevailing theory here and among left wing academics is that the US didn’t want the Soviets to dictate the terms of the peace with Germany. Most of the area taken from the Nazi’s by the USSR was left with socialist governments, while the areas occupied by the US and UK had the same system of government that existed prior (and sometimes during) the Nazi occupation restored post war.
A similar thing actually played out in the Pacific. Stalin had promised to invade Japan 3 months after the end of the war in Europe, which is precisely what he did - two days AFTER the US dropped the first nuke. It is theorized that one of the motivators of using the bomb was to draw the war to a close before the USSR launched a land invasion of Japan. In the end USSR occupied all of Manchuria, the North island of Japan and the Northern part of Korea. The partition of Korea was actually very hastily drawn up by the US, they were worried the Soviets would hold the entire peninsular before they had drawn up a proposal. The 38th parallel is actually far further North than the US believed they would have been capable of meeting the Soviets.
That sounds plausible but I’m not entirely convinced that the Soviets in the 40s could spook the US into mobilising at such scale.
Nazi Germany was the logical endpoint of US ideology. Hitler explicitly stated he was inspired by the US’s birth via genocide and expansionist colonialism, and the whole fascist project in general is a last-ditch effort to save capitalism from the threat of a socialist revolution. The US is evil but it’s not stupid, it knew enough to step in before it got to the point of explicit fascism on their own part.
don’t underestimate anticommunism
Is this a serious answer?
The whole reason they gave Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany and Poland was to give them a clear path towards invading the USSR.
Stalin’s diplomats engineered the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact at the last minute to drive a wedge between Germany and Poland, forcing the Nazi Germany invasion of Poland, and the Brits and the French to respond in kind.
The Brits already signed the Dusseldorf Agreement just a few months before Germany invaded Poland, which encompassed industrial cooperation between German and British industries. They fully expected Nazi Germany to take the USSR out, and the forging of close economic ties with Germany down the road.
The fact that Hilter turned against them was a genuine surprise (most of the Western imperialist powers refused Stalin’s plea to form a coalition against the rise of Nazism in Germany, and in fact most of them already signed military and economic cooperation pacts with Germany since).
The US definitely did not want Stalin to take over the whole of Europe.
You have to take into account that to industrial capitalism, communism is not just a threat, it is THE existential threat.
The first Red Scare had already taken place, the US was scared of labour organization, which was at an all time high inter-war. The depression had just ended, returned soldiers from WWI had marched on Washington, Russian immigrants expelled on espionage charges, anarchists bombed wall street and harsh laws were put in place during and immediately after WWI to curtail the protection of free speech when invoked by dissidents.
This is only in the US, in Europe, South America and Asia communism was getting widespread public support. El Salvador, China, Finland, Bulgaria and Spain had all had communist uprisings or civil wars by the start of WWII.
The Soviets had also resisted the onslaught of Nazi Germany, the combined weight of all of continental Europe’s industrial might pressed on them and they broke through, they had twice the number of men the US did. There would have been no illusion that the Soviets were not capable of taking all of Europe.
Both sides would have seen early that, if the Nazi’s were beaten, the division of their territory would set the stage for the conflict between the US and the USSR to follow.
the germans attacked the US, they were fighting & occupying US allies in europe. this impression of the nazis being benign or friendly toward US interests is completely false. britain and france still had outstanding debts from ww1, to say nothing of US capital investment threatened by nazi expansion.
so why did they engage? it was in their ruling class’ self-interest, just like the first war. they would have done this regardless of how well or poorly the soviets were performing, but Stalin was sticking a boot in their ass to expand the front in the west the whole war
The campaign in Sicily and Italy started 5 months after the conclusion of the battle of Stalingrad.
What would Europe have looked like at the end of the war if American troops hadn’t poured in?
Weren’t the Germans completely routed on the Eastern front post-Stalingrad?
Yes, and especially post-Kursk.
Why do you send in an army to win a war that your ally is already winning?
