Comments by "Arthur Mosel" (@arthurmosel808) on "Third Atomic Bomb Attack - Japan 1945" video.

  1. Error send to Japan and trade with her. In one little known incident, a US SUV sank a Russia freighter engaged in that trade thinking it was Japanese. US aircraft and crews that were forced to land in Russia after bombing Japan were interned and held. So Japan wasn't currying favor; but counting on someone who they helped by not attacking when it was down and who had continued to aid it against their own Allies. I agree that it was a shock to be betrayed by someone that they had treated fairly; but as you agree, someone who did not and could not directly threaten the home islands. It was the realization that they were alone, not Russian successes against the hollowed out troops in Manchuria (Japan had been using troops from there to reinforce the troops in other areas) that made the choice. The idea that somehow Russian intervention was anything more than a point in the decision, not the cause of it is a fallacy.
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  2. There was an established list of 16 Japanese cities on the target list. These were largely undamaged, because they were less militarily pertinent and we wanted to assess the damage caused by the A Bomb. Another point that was the Japanese public losses by the other choices would have been worse. Continued siege of Japan and destruction of it infrastructure by conventional munitions which would have resulted in millions of civilian deaths due to starvation and disease (endemic diseases were widespread spread both nutritional and bacterial/virus. Invasion would have resulted in massive civilian and military casualties among the Japanese, and 1,000,000 casualties to Allied invaders (casualties in this sense is dead, wounded and missing. The why for these comments is the training Of the general population with both actual and improvised weapons; Japanese propaganda had told the public that the Allied troops would kill the men and rape and impregnate the women to destroy the Japanese culture, and this was believed. Upper class Japanese women were given poison pills to take to avoid this. In other words mass genocide was the alternative to the bomb. I think that would be even more widely condemned than the bomb now. As to Russian invasion, they lacked the shipping and landing craft for an effective invasion of even Hokkaido. The islands off Hokkaido were sparsely populated with little defenses. Sakhalin was already half occupied by the Soviets with Japan having only taken back the southern half after the 1904/05 Russo-Japanese War. Why half was taken then was due to the fact it had been Japanese until 1875 when it was given up to preserve Hokkaido and the off shore islands that Russia wanted. In other words a concession by force. In fact Japanese maps before the Russian appearance in East Asia showed scattered Japanese holdings throughout the coastal areas of Siberia, all of Sakhalin, and all island up to Kamchatka. Imperial Russian slowly took all of them. It was up to the Daimyo who owned Hokkaido to defend them and the Han there couldn't, being one of the poorest in Japan. Do some reading on Japan that isn't biased by WWII and you will find many things that you weren't taught.
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  3. 12from121. The Russians claim their attack was the real cause of the end of the war. There were fears of invasion and the Russians would have loved to obtain at least Hokkaido, something they had already desired since at least the 19th Century. Why the last half of Sakhalin was ceded to them in 1875 as part of a deal to leave Hokkaido and the last few islands north of it alone. Russia did take those islands in 1945 and has refused to return them. A. Good indicator of their desires.
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  4.  @12from121  Actually Russia was far from neutral in the Pacific War, and the bias wasn't toward the Allies. Russia continued to send raw materials hto Jzpan and trade with her.
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  5. While I don't know if everything I the book "Japan's Imperial Conspiracy" is true, one claim was that from 1943 on the goal was to preserve the Emperor since they knew that they had lost. Remember they went into the war with only enough oil for six months fighting. While they took the Indonesian oil field our unrestricted submarine warfare had reduced that flow by this point. By the way, German U- Boat warfare was a war crime at Nuremberg Trials and a glorious action by the US. Further pointing out the winners write the hstories.
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