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The program of psychological warfare included the dropping of thousands of leaflets on Japanese cities after the bombing of Hiroshima. Leaders of the American government hoped the Japanese people would evacuate their cities, which not only would save many lives but also disrupt war production - factories were concentrated in cities. They hoped that popular revulsion against continuing the war would prompt Tokyo officials including the emperor to sue for peace according to requirements of the Rotsdam Declaration. Unfortunately this effort at psychological warfare failed. Time was too short for it to succeed. Moreover, Japanese military authorities controlled the government, and only another nuclear bombing, that of Nagasaki, enabled the emperor to prevail against them. View Translations of two leaflets dropped on Japanese cities shortly after the first atomic bomb was dropped, ca. August 6, 1945
NOTES 1. By comparing the power of the Hiroshima bomb to the bomb loads of 2,000 B29s, the leaflet was saying that the new bomb equaled 20,000 tons of TNT. (The capacity of a B29 was ~0 tons.) This, however, was a rough measurement. American military authorities did not know the TNT equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb and guessed it to equal that of the plutonium test device at Alamogordo. The uranium bomb later was adjudged to equal ~3,000 tons of TNT. Moreover, the leaflets implicitly were comparing the Hiroshima bomb to the napalm used over Tokyo and other Japanese cities, which created fire storms and the depletion of oxygen rather than a blast effect. Earlier in the war, on the night of March 9-10, 1945, 279 B-29s dropped 500-pound,clusters of small napalm bombs over Tokyo, burning out 10 square miles of the city, killing 80,000 people, injuring 41,000, and leaving 1 million homeless. By early August,B-29s had destroyed 105 square miles in the six major Japanese urban areas comprising 257 square miles. By that time 240,000 Japanese had been killed, and 300,000 injured.
2. The USSR entered the war on August 8. |
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