Replying to a message of Phil Payne to Tony Ingenoso:

 PP> From: Phil Payne 

  PP> Goebels' famous "Wollen Sie den totalen Krieg?" was
after the bombing
 PP> of Dresden and Hamburg - they supported Hitler until they were
 PP> physically incapacitated.  Fear of the same thing in Japan - with
 PP> extra fanaticism as a side dish - was what caused the bomb to be
 PP> used.  The Japanese would not have surrendered - you'd have had to
 PP> kill the last one right in front of his emporer.

Not true.  In fact the Japanese government tried to make peace overtures to
the Allies *before* we dropped the A-bomb.  The Japanese government
instructed its ambassador in Moscow (Russia and Japan were *not* at war at
the time, Stalin declared war on Japan *after* the bombs fell) to ask the
Russians to tell the Allies that they wanted to talk.  Stalin did not pass
the message on, with the predictable result.  Our intelligence backlog was
so big that even though we had intercepted the relevant Japanese diplomatic
messages, they were not decrypted and translated until long after the war
had ended.
Source:  "The Codebreakers", David Kahn, MacMillan, 1966.

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