It’s true that Japan was already willing to surrender, and perhaps this should have been a sufficient goal for the U.S. forces, but there was still a great degree of resistance to the prospect of unconditional surrender. For better or for worse, the U.S. was unsatisfied with the terms of surrender the Japanese were willing to accept prior to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, and were planning to pursue further measures until they achieved unconditional surrender.
Even if America did not resort to land invasion, months more of firebombing would most likely have resulted in a greater number of fatalities than the use of the atom bombs.
The terms are irrelevant, because the US did not get an unconditional surrender in your all-embracing sense. It got a capitulation with the understanding that the Emperor was not threatened (which was indeed subsequently the case), which makes sense once you understand that the ‘unconditional surrender’ in the Potsdam Declaration was only about the military forces:
“We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”
The question is why the Japanese government abandoned its previous insistence on a general admission of defeat with 4 conditions and settled for just 1 condition which was acceptable to the US since it was not a military condition. And the reason for the dropping seems to have in large part been the sudden shock of negotiations with Russia failing and it dropping neutrality and starting its invasion. Even despite its almost immediate surrender to the US, Japan still lost Sakhalin.
(I’d note that we might expect claims about the necessity of the bombings to be overblown for at least 2 reasons: first and most obviously, it is important so as to justify the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in those bombings and other ongoing campaigns despite US government awareness of Japan’s ongoing surrender overtures and that Russia would switch its attention to the Japanese front soon with what were probably at the time predictable consequences, and secondly, it is a useful claim in minimizing credit for the Russian contribution to WWII, a phenomenon already acknowledged about most US treatments of the European theater’s eastern front.)
It’s true that Japan was already willing to surrender, and perhaps this should have been a sufficient goal for the U.S. forces, but there was still a great degree of resistance to the prospect of unconditional surrender. For better or for worse, the U.S. was unsatisfied with the terms of surrender the Japanese were willing to accept prior to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, and were planning to pursue further measures until they achieved unconditional surrender.
Even if America did not resort to land invasion, months more of firebombing would most likely have resulted in a greater number of fatalities than the use of the atom bombs.
The terms are irrelevant, because the US did not get an unconditional surrender in your all-embracing sense. It got a capitulation with the understanding that the Emperor was not threatened (which was indeed subsequently the case), which makes sense once you understand that the ‘unconditional surrender’ in the Potsdam Declaration was only about the military forces:
The question is why the Japanese government abandoned its previous insistence on a general admission of defeat with 4 conditions and settled for just 1 condition which was acceptable to the US since it was not a military condition. And the reason for the dropping seems to have in large part been the sudden shock of negotiations with Russia failing and it dropping neutrality and starting its invasion. Even despite its almost immediate surrender to the US, Japan still lost Sakhalin.
(I’d note that we might expect claims about the necessity of the bombings to be overblown for at least 2 reasons: first and most obviously, it is important so as to justify the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in those bombings and other ongoing campaigns despite US government awareness of Japan’s ongoing surrender overtures and that Russia would switch its attention to the Japanese front soon with what were probably at the time predictable consequences, and secondly, it is a useful claim in minimizing credit for the Russian contribution to WWII, a phenomenon already acknowledged about most US treatments of the European theater’s eastern front.)