Why Did Japan Delay Surrender to the Allies?

Japan's leaders delayed surrender in 1945 for a variety of reasons. With the exception of Prince Konoe, the rest of the Japanese decision makers believed in the power of the Japanese fighting spirit, overlooking the dire situation facing the war-damaged nation. To Emperor Hirohito, his people were capable of "superhuman efforts and sacrifice".¹ The final war aim of the Japanese, if all hope was lost for victory, was to negotiate a conditional surrender where the emperor retained his throne and the kokutai remained intact. This would be remotely possible if the surrender was discussed with the United States, despite American proclamations of unconditional surrender, and next to impossible if the Soviet Union was the primary power involved in surrender talks.

The more militant voices urging Hirohito to continue the war initially won out over Konoe, and with the emperor's blessing, Japan continued the war. They increased their resistance with heightened kamikaze attacks against American troops and forced the advancing Americans to fight foxhole by foxhole in taking Iwo Jima and Okinawa. While the Americans were sustaining significant casualties sailing towards Japan, they pressured the Soviets to join the war. By spring 1945, the Soviets "announced they would not renew their neutrality pact with Japan".² Remembering the beating the Japanese took by Soviet hands in Mongolia, Emperor Hirohito was more wary of a Soviet declaration of war than any other infortuitous event befalling Japan in the future. Despite the fall of Nazi Germany, leaving Japan "completely alone"³, Hirohito continued the war. At the behest of Shidehara Kijuro, a retired foreign minister, Japan was to remain patient and avoid surrender at all costs.⁴

Japan knew by April 1945 they would suffer defeat, but to many officials in the Japanese government like Army Secretary Tojo Hideki, and Premier Suzuki Kantaro, defeat did not necessarily mean surrender. These leaders and others in power came to this insane conclusion:

"The only course left is for Japan's one hundred million people to sacrifice their lives by charging the enemy to make them lose their will to fight."⁵

By June 1945, more divisions arose in the Japanese hierarchy. Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo and Koichi Kido drafted a proposal eerily similar to Prince Konoe's a few months earlier, except that the Soviet Union would be involved as a "go-between so that Japan could obtain more leverage in negotiating with its enemies."⁶ Hirohito, a fervent anti-Communist, balked initially at the idea of even opening negotiations with the Soviet Union, but by the end of June, he started passively seeking an honorable surrender.

On July 13, the Americans intercepted a Japanese message between Togo and Naotake Sato, the Japanese envoy to Moscow. In the communiqué, the Japanese asked the Soviets to act as an intermediate between themselves and the United States.⁷ The resulting Hirota-Malik talks resulted in a Soviet rejection of the Japanese plan and led to the Potsdam Declaration. Signed by the United States and Great Britain, it declared that the war would only end if Japan accepted terms of unconditional surrender placed upon it by the victorious Allies. Instead of "hastening Japanese surrender",⁸ Potsdam was deemed as a "rehash of the Cairo Declaration".⁹ Prime Minister Suzuki, at the behest of Hirohito, chose to ignore the declaration, which led the Americans to accelerate their plans of dropping the atomic bomb.

Meanwhile, the Soviets amassed thousands of troops along the Manchurian border. Stalin saw the power vacuum forming in China and the Far East and desperately desired to consume a piece of the pie. In early July Soviet ambassador Jacob Malik broke off negotiations with Japan to act as a mediator in surrender talks. By August 2, Naotake Sato believed the Soviets were dead set on acting as an aggressor towards Japan, not as a peace broker. Togo received this message and two days later felt that "by backdoor channels, we must negotiate with the United States, Britain and China".¹⁰

At 8:15 AM local time on August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb deployed in active warfare on Hiroshima, Japan. The very next day, "Stalin immediately ordered Soviet troops to attack Manchuria".¹¹ The Soviets initially planned to declare war against Japan on August 15, but the Americans disrupted Stalin's well laid plans and the Red Army poured into Manchuria one week earlier than expected. Despite the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, Japan did not immediately surrender to the United States. Further discussions ensued in Tokyo over what course of action the Japanese should take and "even in the face of these blows, it took nearly a week to reach the point of surrender".¹² Hirohito initially gave the order to surrender on August 12, but some Japanese army officers still held out. It took two more days for the emperor to formally declare surrender, after two coup attempts were thwarted.

From the American perspective, the dropping of two atomic bombs acted as the primary impetus to force the Japanese surrender. The Japanese capitulated not only because of the bombs, and many argue the Soviet entry into the war played a greater factor. Hirohito feared Soviet influence more than the victorious American forces and knew the Soviets would execute him and his entire government if they captured him. Kido "regarded both the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry as "useful" "elements for making things go smoothly"".¹³ On August 15, the Japanese people heard the high-pitched voice of their leader, the man they believed as divine, for the first time conceding defeat.

A major question after the war's conclusion was if it was necessary for the United States to use atomic weapons against Japan. Historian Gar Alperovitz proposed that the conclusion of the war without the use of atomic weaponry "not only seems likely in retrospect, but seemed so at the time". Alperovitz argued that the Japanese were ready to capitulate as early as June 1945, when the emperor opened his mind to surrender and that faint peace feelers appeared as early as September 1944.¹⁴ In correspondence with Herbert Feis, it was later agreed "that a Russian declaration was considered useful psychologically-as the shock which itself was likely to produce surrender".¹⁵ Due to the severe decay in Japanese morale, even Eisenhower, the future architect of the military-industrial complex, argued against dropping the bomb. Eisenhower later told Feis that "it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing".¹⁶ Even the War Department advised Truman that a Soviet declaration of war combined with an imminent threat to invade Kyushu would surely force surrender.

Truman dropped the bomb not using the information obtained from Henry Stimson's War Department, but at the behest of Secretary of State Byrnes. Evidence from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey goes even further and states that the Japanese were ready to concede more readily than anyone in Washington anticipated. The Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that:

"Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."¹⁷

There was no question in the War Department that by the end of 1945 Japan would have given up the fight without any of these major shocks to its system stated above. Stimson's survey concluded that aerial supremacy and the intense firebombing conducted by B-29 superfortresses actually destroyed Japanese morale and their will to fight, all the way up the chain of command.

A lack of credible information in the highest American circles and a reticence on the part of the Japanese to surrender on the Allies' terms contributed to the long delay in surrender. A communication gap existed between the governments of the United States, Japan and the Soviet Union. The result was a long, convoluted process where the three governments did not save lives, but lost hundreds of thousands needlessly.

Endnotes:

1.Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, (New York, Harper Collins, 2000), p. 490.
2.Andrew Gordon, p. 223.
3.Bix, p. 493.
4.ibid, p. 492.
5.J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, (University of North Carolina Free Press, Chapel Hill), p. 30.
6.Bix, p. 493.
7.Walker, p. 47.
8.Bix, p. 499.
9.ibid, p. 501.
10.ibid, p. 508.
11.Walker, p. 82.
12.Andrew Gordon, p. 224.
13.Bix, p. 510.
14.Gar Alperovitz, Cold War Essays, (Garden City, New York, Anchor Books, Doubleday & Co., 1970), p. 58.
15.ibid, p. 59.
16.ibid, p. 63.
17.Edwin Fogelman, Hiroshima: The Decision to Use the A-Bomb, (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), p. 87.