No. of Recommendations: 14
Well, you could argue that Japan's surrender in 1945 was motivated entirely by bombing. The home islands were not invaded.
Pretty sure he meant “conventional bombing”. Also pretty sure you knew that.
But I would take issue with your use of the word “entirely”. Following Midway in 1942 the Japanese never had a significant victory against the Allies. Their Navy was destroyed, their Air Force so ineffective that they were reduced to using airplanes and barely trained recruits as guided missiles in suicide attacks.
Their defense of Okinawa and Iwo Jima were so costly that almost no Japanese survived. The Island campaigns decimated their conventional forces on Saipan and Guadalcanal. The Leyte Gulf was a debacle, and the Marianas became famous as “a turkey shoot.”
The Soviets abrogated their non-aggression pact in April 1945, which had allowed the Japanese to focus on the West, and later Manchuria was invaded and overrun.
The atomic bombs were used on August 6 and 9, and the Soviets invaded Manchuria on the 9th, before the Japanese cabinet had made as decision. So there was a lot of naval, airforce, and marine combat which got their attention well before Fat Man & Little Boy were deployed (*and even then the war council was evenly split, it took the unprecedented vote of the Emperor to agree to surrender.)
[sidebar] I have always marveled at our insistence on “complete and unconditional surrender” and then we turned around and agreed that the Emperor could stay. There were many in the Allies who thought he should be the first one hanged, but MacArthur made good use of him to subdue the population into accepting their fate. [/sidebar]
[sidebar2] It is known that Japan had made overtures to the US to surrender with conditions, routed through third parties - but the conditions were absurd, and included things like “No allied personnel in Japan” and “We will conduct our own war trials” and “We will disarm ourselves and decide what military industries will be allowed to continue” and so on. Obviously unacceptable. Laughable, even. [/sidebar2]
