Talk:Operation PX

Cancellation date

I have redirected Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night here, because they are the same operation (and Operation PX seems to have been the official name for this plan).

There is a lot of discussion on the talk page of the other article about whether the plan was cancelled after/by the atomic bombings and end of the war. The serious sources I have consulted (the same ones, more or less, cited in this article) all suggest it was cancelled in March 1945. As does this page as it stands.

If there are sources that suggest that a) they were seriously putting it into consideration again in August 1945 (which seems very unlikely given how few I-400 subs they had, and the fact that they were tied up in other (highly dangerous and unlikely to succeed) missions, b) have actual citations/evidence for this (not just an assertion — I want at least a solid footnote that goes to something serious), c) that the end of the war decisively stopped such plans, then it would be great to add them here.

But from what I can tell in my investigations so far, such sources do not exist, probably because this did not happen. (It is, of course, an entirely separate thing as to whether one attributes the end of the war to the atomic bombs — scholars argue about that quite a bit.) I suspect that this is a bit of a myth that been built up over the years as yet another justification for the use of the atomic bombs. I do not have a problem with people coming up with justifications or arguments for the atomic bombings, but I do take issue with ones based on myths. So if anyone is tempted to add a line back in about the atomic bombs... please make sure it is very well-sourced. --NuclearSecrets (talk) 03:51, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

I'm not keen on defining sentence referring to page title as a linguistic entity

Wikipedia is not a dictionary, hence the following is problematic:

Operation PX was a codename for a planned Japanese attack ...

Changed to:

Operation PX was a planned Japanese attack ... , [as codenamed for a specific consideration].

This is slightly more awkward on one level, but it crucially averts the distancing effect of taking the codename as primary.

Critics of use of the term "collateral damage" see it as a euphemism that dehumanizes non-combatants killed or injured during combat, used to reduce the perceived culpability of military leadership in failing to prevent non-combatant casualties.

This was not a codename. It was a planned attack on civilians of an especially vicious nature.

• Bombing of Tokyo (10 March 1945)

On the night of 9/10 March 1945, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) conducted a devastating firebombing raid on Tokyo, the Japanese capital city.

This attack was code-named Operation Meetinghouse by the USAAF and is known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid in Japan.

If that page were titled Operation Meetinghouse, should the article begin:

Operation Meetinghouse was a codename for a devastating firebombing raid on Tokyo conducted by the USAAF in March 1945.

No, it should not. Just my opinion, I suppose, but a strongly held opinion all the same. — MaxEnt 17:02, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

That is fine by me, though on reflection I would change "planned" to "proposed." I think the core difference between something like Operation PX and Operation Meetinghouse is that one of them actually took place. That's a pretty big distinction, and I think that is what the "codename" approach was trying to emphasize, however awkwardly. NuclearSecrets (talk) 17:55, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

I rearranged the intro a bit. I don't think we need to explain the codename in the first sentence; it's explained early in the article and feels redundant. I tried to balance the planned/proposed/cancelled aspects to give a clear sense of what happened in a very concise way (it was proposed, planned out, cancelled), which I think is important for this particular topic (because a lot of the emphasis in the popular understanding is on what it could have been, not what actually happened, and both are important). NuclearSecrets (talk) 17:59, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Cancellation date (again)

User:JuggernautAstronaut wrote in an edit summary:

Despite NuclearSecrets' assertions that it is a myth that the operation was ended by the surrender of Japan, Samuel J. Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command clearly states that the plan was indeed originally vetoed, however it was later revived by Umezu in August 1945. Samuel J. Cox and therefore this source are extremely reputable, and I hope can finally settle the debate once and for all.

And suggested the following change to the lede:

Following the detailed proposal for the operation, the plan was initially vetoed by General Yoshijirō Umezu, Chief of the Army General Staff, due in part to logistical challenges. Despite this early veto, the operation saw a revival of interest from Umezu by August 1945, with the possibility that more submarines might be completed by the proposed September attack date. However, the surrender of Japan on 15 August 1945 ultimately nullified the operation's execution, leading to the destruction of sensitive equipment and the abandonment of plans for the attack on the U.S. West Coast.

I assume the website link is meant to be this.

The above source is a newsletter entry that asserts:

When first presented, the plan was vetoed by Chief of the Army General Staff Yoshijiro Umezu, partly because the Navy didn’t have five I-400 submarines yet. Although Umezu would ultimately be the one ordered by Emperor Hirohito to sign the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri (BB-63) on 2 September, in the last months of the war he was in the die-hard “fight-to-the-last Japanese” camp, and developed a renewed interest in the plan in August 1945 with the possibility that more I-400s might be completed by the proposed September attack date. Although the number of submarines available to carry out the plan was questionable, it was probably technically feasible and might have been executed had the war not ended when it did.

It then goes on to discuss an entirely different operation. At the end, he discusses the relative lack of feasibility of Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night (something which makes no specific reference to any plans or interest), and then concludes that "The U.S. use of the two atomic bombs made the whole discussion moot," by which he clearly means that the end of the war made it moot (whether the atomic bombs were the major cause for the end of the war is a separate discussion).

For sources, he cites Geoghegan's Operation Storm, Gold's Japan’s Infamous Unit 731, and Polmar's "Japan’s Deadliest Weapons."

As I have noted on the old talk page for the pre-merged article, both Geoghegan and Gold clearly state that the plan was cancelled in March 1945 on and say nothing of it being revitalized. Polmar's article (here) says nothing of the operation at all.

So we have, as before, a number of serious works of study that do not support the claim. We have one "newsletter" that makes the claim but provides no evidence for it. Without any disrespect meant to Mr. Cox, his article is not enough, in my view, to warrant making such a large claim. I think it is highly possible that his article was influenced by other less-careful sources — including possibly earlier incarnations of this article — that did not actually try to substantiate the claim seriously.

As I wrote on the other talk page: I also fear that since the Wikipedia article itself had very strong-but-unsourced sentiments about this topic for many years, it is possible that this unsupported assertion has adopted the status of "truth" in many, many web pages on the Internet, an example of what Randall Munroe called Cytogenesis many years back. So I think we need to be very vigilant in making sure we are citing things that are being rigorous about their claims and citations. I do not the above article really does that; even the text of it is vague ("developed a renewed interest" — how so? in what way? how serious? how evidenced?).

If there is a serious work of scholarship that attempts to substantiate this claim, I would be more than happy to include its claims in the article. As it is, I have not found any such works of scholarship, and I suspect this is something of a historical urban legend or myth, perpetuated for the obvious reason (which is what it seems to be doing for Mr. Cox) that it appears to (further?) justify the atomic bombings. Whatever one thinks about the atomic bombings, supporting them with loose claims, much less possibly myths, is not helpful. NuclearSecrets (talk) 22:22, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Have you actually read all of Geoghegan's Operation Storm as well as Gold's Japan’s Infamous Unit 731 in their entirety? Do you know what sources they cite for their information on the matter?

And it seems to be bold to simply assume that the director of the naval history and heritage command is simply making things up or that he is making baseless speculative claims. I do agree that we need to know where he got this information from but my first instinct is not to jump to dismissing him entirely. JuggernautAstronaut (talk) 23:19, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

I searched electronic copies Geoghegan's and Gold's books carefully for any discussion of these matters. I quoted the relevant sections on the other page. If you have actual reason to believe they say differently, let me know. But I checked, and am quite capable of searching for claims and their evidence. I am not at all assuming that Mr. Cox is making anything up; I suspect, at most, he is repeating something he thinks is uncontroversial without realizing it is in error. It is an easy-enough thing to do when wading into unfamiliar territory. It is an extremely common and easy thing to do. Even PhD-holding, full-time academic historians do it all the time without realizing it; it takes a lot of care to look over claims that are frequently repeated and to ask whether the sources actually back them up or not.

Ultimately, the quality of sources matters. A newsletter article that does not cite sources to back up its claim rates less than the actual sources it cites, which contradict it on this claim. If I seem "bold", it is because I have taken the time to dig into this a bit, and as a practicing, PhD-holding, tenured professor of history, I believe I am qualified to evaluate the quality of these kinds of sources and claims. Again, if there are better sources out there, I would be eager to know of them myself; I cannot claim to have looked at every possible scholarly source on this particular topic, and it is somewhat peripheral to what I myself study more deeply. I am just trying to get this right, but I suspect this is one of many, many myths that get repeated uncritically as a justification for the atomic bombing (the list of such myths is long — e.g., "the Japanese were close to having their own atomic bomb," "the US warned the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with leaflets ahead of time," "the US only chose to drop two bombs because it knew that the Japanese would wonder if they had more than one," etc.). NuclearSecrets (talk) 04:16, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

References