User:GumTreeKookabura/Potsdam Declaration

Intentions of the Allied Powers
Each of the Allies who signed the Declaration had their own intentions for doing so, and all parties desired to receive reparations for war damages from the Japanese.

Republic of China
The Republic of China - under the Nationalist rule of Chiang Kai-shek - desired immediate withdrawal of the Imperial Japanese Army and its subsidiary force the Kwantung Army from all Chinese territory, including Manchuria. Until the very end of the war the Japanese Army had been campaigning in China to assert the rule of the Japanese colonial state there, and the Chinese Nationalists and Communists had been fighting in tandem to expel them from the country. The Potsdam Declaration was issued in part to make clear the Chinese expectation of complete Japanese withdrawal from China.

Great Britain
Great Britain had lost control of its possessions in Southeast Asia and China to the Japanese advance in the late 1930s and early 1940s. These included Singapore, Malaya, North Borneo, Hong Kong, and others. A key motivation of the British government was a restoration of control in its prewar possessions, along with a prompt end to the Japanese war effort, especially on the Indian front in Burma.

United States
The United States desired to keep maximum strategic latitude for itself upon the defeat of Japan. The American government had demanded in the past the unconditional surrender of Japan as the precondition to peace, and the text of the Declaration reiterated this demand. In the remainder of Asia. the American government had the goals of total rollback of the Empire of Japan's overseas possessions, as well as the additional goal of preventing the communists - with the support and patronage of the Soviet Union - from expanding influence in East Asia and Southeast Asia.

All parties to the declaration stated a desire for war reparations from Japan.

Imperial Japanese Response
The Imperial Japanese Government, under the direction of prime minister Suzuki Kantarō, did not publicly entertain the possibility of surrender to the Allies. The greater historical controversy lies in whether or not the demand for an unconditional surrender by Japan stalled possible peace negotiations. If the demand for unconditional surrender had not been made, so the argument goes, there could be no argument for the necessity of the use firebombing and nuclear weapons against Japan. This is the flashpoint around which much of historiographical controversy surrounding the Declaration revolves.

According to historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, the Japanese Cabinet was not particularly inclined to surrender at all, and records of the events immediately after the dropping of the Hiroshima Bomb do not indicate an effect on the government towards surrender on the terms of the Potsdam Declaration immediately after the dropping of the bomb.

Hasegawa also notes that Stalin told Truman at the Potsdam Conference that the Soviet Union would begin war with Japan within the beginning of August, but that American estimates placed the estimated time at the end of the month.