Given Japan's military position would they have surrendered without the atomic bombings?

Answer 1

Would the Japanese Have Surrendered AnywayWould Japan surrendered sooner or later without the A-Bomb? Yes. There is no doubt that the Japanese would have finally surrendered. BUT you must understand their thinking, which is not too different in thinking from the terrorists in Iraq. They felt if they killed enough Americans WE would quit before them. With that attitude the Japanese were willing to fight on and on, despite the losses on their side. They feared that if they surrendered their civilization would be destroyed. So they had every reason to fight on. Add to that the attitude they had concerning the Emperor. How could they explain to "god" they were not willing to make every sacrifice to protect the Emperor.

Proof of this can be seen by studying the actions of the Japanese Army AFTER we dropped two bombs. They insisted the war continued, in fact they tried to kill anyone that would relay the Emperor's surrender message. (Which was on a record.)

Why were they unimpressed by the A-Bombs? The fire bombing of Tokyo destroyed more homes, and killed more people than the A-Bomb. So the A-Bomb did not impress the Army. For some reason it did impress the Emperor.

In HindsightUsing information collected after the war, and with extensive post-war surveys and interviews by the US occupying forces in Japan, modern historians no longer believe that the Japanese military would have been able to force the entire country to fight to the death. That is, while there was ample evidence (and huge preparation) for an exsanguinary defense against the anticipated U.S. amphibious landings on Japan proper, neither the Japanese military nor the civilian leadership, nor the U.S. leadership, appears to have really appreciated what historians now see as the almost certain cause of a Japanese surrender: starvation.

Japan in the summer of 1945 suffered from three major problems in terms of food and war material production:

1. The US submarine force had all but annihilated the Japanese merchant marine, with almost all ocean-capable ships sunk, and very few of the coastal shipping vessels still surviving. Japan had no way to ship via sea any amounts of food or raw materials from their production/growing sites to where they would be consumed.
2. Japan had very little in the way of railroad infrastructure, mostly due to the extremely mountainous terrain of much of the Home Islands. The modest amounts of railroads that had been built were in very limited areas. This made it rather simple for the US Strategic Bombing campaign to destroy it all. By mid-1945, the Japanese railroad infrastructure was in the same shape as the shipping industry - rapidly approaching complete destruction.
3. A rice blight was raging throughout the islands, which, combined with the loss of much of the existing agricultural workforce to bombing and war death, meant that a very serious lack of rice was in the offering. Japan was looking at at rice famine in the winter of 1945.

The three factors above combined to mean that very little rice was going to be harvested, and what rice there was could not be distributed to where it was needed (primarily the cities). This meant that a massive famine was rapidly approaching. In fact, even after the August surrender and the occupation of Japan by the Allies (and, massive importation of food, primarily from the US), Japan suffered one of its more severe famines during the winter of 1945-46.

It's not unreasonable to assume that 80-90% of the total Japanese population would have gone hungry during the winter of 1945-46 if they had not surrendered. A 20-25% death toll from starvation was well within possibilities. Japanese culture was built on the implied social contract that had the nobility and ruling classes exchange protection and social niceties for the guaranty that everyone would be at least minimally fed. Once this social compact was broken, an almost certain internal uprising would have occurred, resulting in a likely Civil War.

Thus, the Japanese would almost certainly have surrendered sometime in very late 1945, or, more likely early/mid-1946. However, the country would have been in anarchy, and, even more than in August 1945, completely (materially and culturally) destroyed. The human costs of such a scenario make the atomic bombings look like drops in a bucket. Estimations of starvation deaths for a Japan determined to hold out into 1946 are in the 10s of millions - thus, there's a strong possibility that Japan would have had more deaths than even the 26 million of the USSR, from a country with less than one-third the population. That is, over two orders of magnitude more deaths than the atomic bombings.

Answer 2

The Americans were ready to invade Japan when the bomb was used, and it was used to "save American lives."