The Unconditional Surrender Policy was a unilateral US decision at the Casablanca Conference. The idea is often stated that the USA made its strict demands against Japan on the grounds of racism, but if we look at how the Allies (mis)managed the attempt by the Italians to switch sides in the middle of the war, we see that the Allies strictly insisted on a rigid definition of unconditional surrender and so mismanaged the negotiations that it made it possible for the Germans to funnel in soldiers to bleed our armies in Italy for years.
In the case of Germany its leaders kept having a delusion that ours were interested in a replay of the 'Well we didn't lose, it was the November Criminals' shenanigans from the 1920s and would further this by declaring war on the USSR, explaining their approaches for a 'separate peace' with us. In reality they, too, were forced to surrender unconditionally to the UK, USA, and USSR. Like Italy Germany was fought over in a horrendous fashion in the Rhineland/Ruhr region in the West and in the East.
Japan, OTOH, was 'merely' bombed, shelled, starved by blockades, and seen its armies driven over the brink of defeat everywhere except China (and thanks to August Storm there as well). It tried the flip side to what the Nazis had been trying to get the USSR to negotiate a peace favorable to itself, only for the Soviets to reject the idea for their own reasons. Japan was not defeated due to the atomic bombings except insofar as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fit into the broader overall total destruction of Japan's war-waging capability. What made Japan different is that after the nukings its political leadership was the only Axis Power to quit before a major ground campaign occurred on its home soil.
The two atomic bombs' destructive power is also exaggerated, as is their lethality. Even in 2013 the Firebombing of Tokyo alone (not counting the firebombings of everywhere else in Japan) have a death toll that exceeds that of both Fat Man and Little Boy combined, including postwar genetic damage. Nagasaki was not as totally destroyed as Hiroshima, either. The defeat of Japan raises a number of troubling issues, but the atomic bombings has overshadowed all the others, including the gross US hypocrisy in a skillful USW campaign of the type that had driven us to break our neutrality in WWI. The idea that the bombings broke Japan had more to do with the politics of nuclear strategy in the Cold War than the reality of the defeat of the Axis in Asia. Japan also was again the only Axis power smart enough to avoid a complete catastrophe instead of an almost-complete one.
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In the case of Germany its leaders kept having a delusion that ours were interested in a replay of the 'Well we didn't lose, it was the November Criminals' shenanigans from the 1920s and would further this by declaring war on the USSR, explaining their approaches for a 'separate peace' with us. In reality they, too, were forced to surrender unconditionally to the UK, USA, and USSR. Like Italy Germany was fought over in a horrendous fashion in the Rhineland/Ruhr region in the West and in the East.
Japan, OTOH, was 'merely' bombed, shelled, starved by blockades, and seen its armies driven over the brink of defeat everywhere except China (and thanks to August Storm there as well). It tried the flip side to what the Nazis had been trying to get the USSR to negotiate a peace favorable to itself, only for the Soviets to reject the idea for their own reasons. Japan was not defeated due to the atomic bombings except insofar as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fit into the broader overall total destruction of Japan's war-waging capability. What made Japan different is that after the nukings its political leadership was the only Axis Power to quit before a major ground campaign occurred on its home soil.
The two atomic bombs' destructive power is also exaggerated, as is their lethality. Even in 2013 the Firebombing of Tokyo alone (not counting the firebombings of everywhere else in Japan) have a death toll that exceeds that of both Fat Man and Little Boy combined, including postwar genetic damage. Nagasaki was not as totally destroyed as Hiroshima, either. The defeat of Japan raises a number of troubling issues, but the atomic bombings has overshadowed all the others, including the gross US hypocrisy in a skillful USW campaign of the type that had driven us to break our neutrality in WWI. The idea that the bombings broke Japan had more to do with the politics of nuclear strategy in the Cold War than the reality of the defeat of the Axis in Asia. Japan also was again the only Axis power smart enough to avoid a complete catastrophe instead of an almost-complete one.
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