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Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce
Will? The army that would rather commit suicide than surrender? You don't have a clue about the Jap culture of the era.
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Japanese culture has very little to do with this. The Japanese leadership knew they could not beat the United States from the beginning and after Okinawa, many saw the war as a lost cause. The general population would have kept on fighting, but the leadership, while making some really stupid decisions, for the most part did not believe they could hold off the United States and Soviet Union without any oil.
It is shown that the Japanese went to Soviet Union many times looking for peace and were extremely divided themselves on the issue. The point is that the Japanese would seem to accept conditional surrender but not unconditional.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_War_Council_(Japan)
At the ending of the war, three wanted to surrender and three wanted to keep on fighting. Guess which ones were on which side.
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You reaffirmed my first statement, the military was the country. There were no views other than the military.
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To the general public, yes, the military had complete control but not in the government. Japanese leadership was extremely divided on the issue and many in the military did not want surrender even after the emperor changed his stance, hence the attempted coup.
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C'mon, with what? We were running a two front war because we had a chance to build an unbeatable war machine while the Russians were getting beat the fuck up. They had all they could handle just getting to Berlin, plus a lot of new territory they desperately wanted to hang on to. Their ability to stage a major attack on Japan was severely limited.
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Besides the million men they could have contributed to the front....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchur...ration#Soviets