Replying to a message of Jeff Shultz to Bob.Ackley:

 JS> From: Jeff Shultz 

 JS> On 5 Jan 2003 07:18:50 GMT, Bob.Ackley{at}harborwebs.com wrote:

 >> Replying to a message of Jeff Shultz to Geo.:
 >> 
 JS>>> From: Jeff Shultz 
 >> 
 JS>>> It worked too. If anything could be considered evil, it would have
 JS>>> been the going ahead with Operation Olympic instead of just sitting
 JS>>> back and letting the Navy starve them out.
 >> 
 >> That wasn't necessary.  In point of fact, the Japanese government had
 >> told their ambassador in Moscow (Japan and Russia were not at war, and
 >> in fact shipping between the U.S. west coast and Vladivostok went
 >> unmolested
 JS> throughout
 >> the war despite Japanese ownership of the Kurile islands) to contact
 >> the
 JS> allies
 >> in order to open negotiations to end the war.  This occurred *before*
 >> the
 JS> nukes
 >> were dropped.
 >> Our people intercepted the diplomatic messages, but the traffic was not
 >> decrypted and translated until about nine *months* after the fighting
 >> ended (due to the huge backlog of intercepted traffic and the
 >> relatively low
 JS> priority
 >> accorded diplomatic traffic).  See David Kahn's "The
Codebreakers". 

 JS> Hmmm. Did the Russians ever pass that word on?

They did not.   Note that Stalin declared war on Japan immediately after
the nukes were dropped, grabbed the Kurile Islands as spoils of war (which
we did with Okinawa, BTW; we gave it back in 1973) and moved the ethnic
Japanese residents to Japan's main islands, replacing them with ethnic
Russians (something we did not do on Okinawa).

Incidentally, FWIW Okinawa was an independent nation conquered by Japan
late in the 1800s IIRC.  The ruins of the capital were still at Shuri when
I was stationed there (1965-71) and presumably still are.

 JS>  And, as noted in
 JS> Panmunjon and Paris in later years, diplomatic talk is just talk. We
 JS> were pissed and we wanted unconditional surrender - or nothing.

I think we'd've settled for a surrender that left the emperor on the throne
- and we left him there without the precondition.

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