Belated Revelations
The U.S. government has never published MacArthur's communiqué detailing Japan's willingness to end the war, even though its existence first came to light in an article by Chicago Tribune journalist Walter Trohan and published on August 19, 1945 in both the Tribune and the Washington Times Herald. A military intelligence officer with access to classified information had given Trohan a copy of this peace proposal with the stipulation that he keep it confidential until the war ended. Trohan honored his end of the agreement, and then wrote his article immediately after Japan's August 14th surrender had been announced.
Trohan's sensational revelations occasioned no response from the White House and State Department. Nor did it attract the kind of attention from the mass media it surely deserved. Historian Harry Elmer Barnes, writing in the May 10, 1958 issue of National Review, supplied additional credence to the Trohan report:
After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.
But the January 1945 attempt to end the war wasn't Japan's only move. Robert Morris wrote in No Wonder We Are Losing:
... the Japanese made other overtures through the Soviet Union which were not transmitted to us. But on June 1, Tokyo wired its Ambassador in Moscow that the Emperor wished to make peace and told him to request Soviet mediation. This information was decoded by the United States -- two months before the atomic bomb dropped and the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan.
In his 1963 book How the Far East Was Lost, Professor Anthony Kubek told of a July 6, 1945 message sent to the State Department by American diplomats in Sweden which claimed "that Prince Carl Bernodotte, nephew of King Gustov, had been told by the Japanese military attaché in Sweden that Japan had lost the war and wanted to enter surrender negotiations through the King of Sweden."
Kubek further reported on July 12th, "Prince Konoye was received by the Emperor and ordered to Moscow as a peace plenipotentiary to 'secure peace at any price.'" Despite the strong efforts of the Japanese ambassador in Moscow to arrange for Prince Konoye's visit, however, the Russian government rejected the proposal.
In his 1966 work The Death of James Forrestal, Cornell Simpson wrote that Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy at the time, "had originated a plan to end the war with Japan five and a half months before V-J Day [August 14, 1945] finally dawned." Simpson pointed out that, had this plan been implemented, the atomic bombs would never have been used and "the Russians would not have had a chance to muscle into the Pacific war for the last six of its 1,347 days." Simpson added:
The last point, of course, is why the fellow travellers hurriedly persuaded FDR to reject Forrestal's plan, and why they saw to it that the American people heard nothing about this chance to save untold numbers of American lives .... In May, another move to end the Pacific war was similarly scuttled. The very same month that Germany surrendered, Truman approved a peace ultimatum to Japan, subject to endorsement by the military. But on May 29, General Marshall rejected it as "premature."
General MacArthur's January 1945 communiqué containing Japan's detailed peace proposal reached President Roosevelt two days before he departed for his meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. With his mind already made up about the need to continue the war, he completely discounted the entire proposal and flippantly remarked to an aide, "MacArthur is our greatest general and poorest politician."
At the conference in Yalta, with secret Communist agent Alger Hiss at his side, Franklin Roosevelt agreed to everything Josef Stalin wanted -- and more. Plans previously discussed at a November 1943 Big Three conference held in Teheran were finalized at Yalta.
The Soviets were to be welcomed into the Pacific war after Germany surrendered. They were to be given rights to the port of Dairen, Port Arthur's naval base, several Japanese island possessions, and both Outer Mongolia and Manchuria, where huge stores of Japanese arms were stockpiled. These munitions were later transferred to Mao Tse-tung's Communist forces, enabling them to carry on the war with the Nationalist Chinese forces and eventually seize control of mainland China.
Decisions reached at Yalta also gave the Soviet Union a green light to take huge chunks of Poland, as well as Prague and Berlin.
http://files.meetup.com/1015021/Dropping the Bomb The New American.htm
Hitskin.com
