WW 2 question: If we're going to nuke Japan, why bother fighting on so many costly islands?

Question

I just saw a video and did some reading about Pelelui where the Marines failed in my view. Which opens a broader question: Did we (the US) trouble with too many useless targets and objectives? Why bother liberating the Philippines or anything else if atom bombs are going to end the war? Do I detect MacArthur's ego? Why not quarantine troublesome areas and push on to Japan with the bomb?

I know the bomb wasn't a sure thing in 1944 but the Japanese weren't going anywhere. They were dug into a lot of useless islands protecting airfields with no airplanes. 1944 should have been about securing suitable islands for B-29 raids against Japan. Nuke 'em and forget it.

Any thoughts out there?

Thank you.

Answer 1

What did you do, read "World War II for Dummies"? You haven't got one fact right. Go to your nearest VA hospital. Find some WWII Vets in the waiting area. They will tell you just how "useless" those island where.  

Answer 2

ya but i think the whole idea was that the marines failure is what led to the drasstic move of dropping the bombs you know...

Answer 3

what if the planes got shot down over the water it wasnt a sure shot.

in other words they wanted reinforcements.

after they took over islands,they just start sending bombs over 2 the islands on boats. then boom by-by japan. (good thing they didnt take japan,we woudent hav so many electronics)

Answer 4

generals want battles. and when they can't win them, they say, no more bloodletting, and lets end the war with the bomb.

Answer 5

The first test of an atomic device took place in July of 1945. One month earlier the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War in terms of U.S. and civilian casualties had ended on the island of Okinawa in the Ryukyus. Those Japanese who you say were standing still sunk more ships than they did at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Coupled with the Battle of Iwo Jima earlier that year, the two battles produced the highest American casualties of the Pacific War.

We liberated the Philippines because that nation was under U.S. control prior to Japanese occupation. If we had not liberated that nation we could have forgotten about any post-war influence in the Pacific because the Japanese propaganda of Americans not caring to liberate brown people, only white people, would have stuck.

The use of the two atomic bombs against Japan was an enormous gamble. Trinity in July at Alamogordo was a test. An explosion of a static atomic device hanging from a tower. The physics of the bomb was radically different.  

You are proceeding from a view point of knowing that atomic bombs work. Those involved in the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s did not have such confidence.  

Answer 6

The A-bomb was not a proven weapon so war went as normal.  

It took a while to learn the A bomb and determine if it could actually work.

Hiroshima was the first real test and results were shocking to scientists.

  

Answer 7

You are working backwards in a deterministic fashion.  No one knew what, if or when the A-bomb was going to work.  The islands were needed as ports and airbases to close the ring around Japan preparatory for a final invasion.  Japan couldn't be defeated unless her air and naval forces were destroyed.  As far as "too many" islands you need to read some academic histories on the island campaigns: it was MacArthur who came up with the idea of only seizing key islands-leaving the others to literally starve.  

AFA the B29 raids, those needed airbases as well; which had to be seized from the Japanese-thus countering your own argument.   It was obvious the raids themselves weren't going to force a surrender-only an invasion would do so.

The success of the A-bomb drops was frankly unexpected from the Allied side.

Answer 8

The island hopping campaign went on because the decision hadn't been made to drop the nukes because for one, they didn't know the bomb would even work until tested in July of 1945, and two, it wasn't until the horrific casualty rates at Iwo Jima and Okinawa cemented the resolve of the top brass and the President that Operation Olympic (the planned invasion of the home island of Japan) would be a bloodbath resulting in the deaths of up to 1 million American troops.

Answer 9

The efficacy of the nuclear bombs was not only uncertain, the entire Manhattan program was very highly secret.  Truman was not even told of it until after he had been sworn in as president.  I doubt MacArthur or Nimitz was told anything about the prospects until having functioning bombs became a certainty.

We DID do a lot of quarantining troublesome areas.  We by no means rooted out the enemy from all the islands they held.  We "leapfrogged" across the islands, taking only those we needed for land-based aircraft to establish air supremacy to the limit of their range, and then we took the next.

Of all the operations in the Pacific war Peleliu was probably the only one which was unnecessary.  It had been planned to secure Peleliu as a flank security measure for the invasion of the southern Philippines.  When Japanese weakness in the southern Philippines became apparent after Halsey's raids in the early autumn of 1944, the decision was taken to bypass the southern Philippines invasion and proceed directly with the invasion of Leyte, which would seem to render an operation intended as flank security for an invasion which we never mounted to be superfluous.  Nevertheless, it went ahead and was a real bloodbath.

Nimitz and the Navy had argued for an invasion of Formosa instead of the Philippines.  Roosevelt traveled to Hawaii and held meetings with MacArthur and Nimitz where each presented his arguments.   MacArthur had of course made his famous pledge to return to the Philippines, and Roosevelt was not a huge fan of MacArthur, but the argument he put forward, touched on by a previous answerer, was that postwar American prestige and respect in the western Pacific depended on liberating the Philippines.

The atomic missions were flown from the Marshall Islands, which we invaded in June 1944.  Major operations undertaken after this were Peleliu, the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.  Peleliu could probably have been dispensed with, the Philippines were necessary on other than military grounds, Iwo was undertaken to eliminate Japanese fighters based there and the early warning system it provided to the Japanese home islands which were harming our conventional bombing of Japan, undertaken from the Marshall Islands as soon as they were secured.  Iwo was also useful as an emergency landing base for aircraft damaged over Japan or with mechanical difficulties, and as a base for US fighters flying escort on the bombing missions.  Okinawa was taken as the springboard for the invasion which the bombs rendered unnecessary.

If youre going to fight a war, it behooves you to do something to try to harm the enemy, and cause him to expend his strength and resources.  I suppose we could have just sat back after Midway in June of 1942, waited three years, and then tried to infiltrate a carrier through the Japanese fleet to drop the bomb.  We could have told the people, "Relax, we're working on something that will end the war" and just done nothing.  Do you really think the public would have held still for that?  Keeping ten percent of the population in uniform to do nothing?  We only had three of the bombs available in August of 1945, and suppose these were not enough to convince the Japanese to give in?  We could wait some more until we had more uranium refined.  When we finally did get them to give up, then the Russians could have rushed in and seized the whole thing, since they live in the neighborhood.  Instead, we had massive forces in the area and Russian seizures were limited to Sakhalin Island.  Japan had been devastated with more than sixty cities largely destroyed by the fire raids mounted from the Marshalls.  They had an unbroken string of defeats, every time our land forces had come into combat after the Philippines were taken early in the war.  They had no fleet left, though they had plenty of aircraft, just no fuel to operate them.  It was the cumulative effect of ALL this, ON TOP OF WHICH came the nuclear bombings, with the certain threat of complete devastation, which finally caused them to capitulate.

Answer 10

you mean like bypass Truck,and large part of New Guinea,and Borneo, and all the other Islands that we bypassed and left the defending Japanese to wither on the vine? you mean take Islands like Guam,Saipan,Tinian, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and the Philippines,  to facilitate the Air War over Japan? in other words they did just as you suggested.

How do you consider that the Battle of Pelelui was a failure?