I use this example when discussing the context of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombing. While any bombing is tragic, the atomic bombs are not worse than other. This single air raid killed more people than Little Boy or Fat Man, and while hundreds of thousands of people died in the March-June strategic bombing of all major Japanese cities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raids_on_Japan#Firebombing..., the military dictators of Japan did not plan to surrender.
I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives.
> I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives.
You're not the only one, but most of the people who believe like you are Americans. Outside the US the prevalent view is pretty much against those atomic bombings; had the US lost the war, the people who ordered those bombings would have been found guilty of war crimes and hanged.
My own subjective opinion is that the US needs this narrative of "but we ended up saving lives", because anything else would run contrary to their own self image of "we are always the good guys".
Consequently, alternative considerations like that the bombings were a show of force with the Soviet Union as the target audience tend to get downplayed in the US, because it's harder to think of oneself as the good guy when you killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in one country in order to put fear into the leadership of another, unrelated country.
I'm not from the US, and I have studied WW2 a lot, and in my opinion, the Nuclear bomb US was very defensible at the time and they did very likely save life.
If you consider an alternative history where the US army invades main land Japan, you have been a massacre of epic proportions. City after city taken in battles with civilians in the middle and Japanese soldiers and civilians committing mass suicides.
And yes, bombing civilians can be considered a 'war crime', but that just means all WW2 nations did it. And Japan and Germany (and Soviets) also did mass crimes against civilians for even less military reasons.
> Consequently, alternative considerations like that the bombings were a show of force with the Soviet Union as the target audience tend to get downplayed in the US, because it's harder to think of oneself as the good guy when you killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in one country in order to put fear into the leadership of another, unrelated country.
Its downplayed because the historical evidence for it as a main reason is very small.
> If you consider an alternative history where the US army invades main land Japan, you have been a massacre of epic proportions.
Ground invasion vs. atomic bombings is a false dichotomy.
Quoting the US strategic bombing survey:
"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
> Ground invasion vs. atomic bombings is a false dichotomy.
I think you are right for a reason other than the one you are giving here. At the time, there were considerable and growing doubts that invasion was at all feasible at any cost.
The bombing survey was only, and could only have been, conducted after the surrender and during the subsequent occupation. The information available at the time, such as the all-out defense of Okinawa and Japan's preparations for doing the same throughout the main islands, was making invasion untenable. Earlier assumptions about the ability of the allies to bring to bear superior force no longer seemed realistic. [1]
What about a negotiations? Japan was showing no interest in negotiations, and intercepted diplomatic communications confirmed this. Equally importantly, the allies were opposed to anything less than unconditional surrender because the armistice of 1918 had set the stage for WWII. In addition, there were considerable and realistic doubts that the Japanese military, still occupying a wide swath of Asia, would accept the outcome of such negotiations.
There was a fourth option - a naval blockade, promoted by Admiral King - and that was apparently expected to kill far more Japanese than either an invasion (insofar as it was feasible at all) or a nuclear attack with the two bombs then available.
As for a demonstration of nuclear weapons: with only two available, if their use failed to bring about a surrender, it would be back to square one for several months. It was not beyond every ethical principle to think that, if these bombs were used, it should be done in a way that maximized their likelihood of ending the war. As it happens, even the bombing of Hiroshima did not seem to bring about meaningful change in the Japanese leadership's position.
As we are discussing the ethics of the decision, we should put aside ex post facto judgement such as that from the bombing survey, but also ask whether the cost in Japanese lives was given much consideration in Washington. I have not seen anything definitive either way, and I am sure Japanese lives did not count as equal to allied ones, but it seems clear that, out of what seemed to be the feasible alternatives available, the use of nuclear bombs did not stand out in terms of civilian casualties and human suffering.
[1] Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.
I wish I could link a great source, but I believe there was some credible talk of a sect of the Japanese military leaders wanting to overthrow the Emperor & keep fighting what would have been a very gruesome meatgrinder defeat/suicide pact
Yep - Wikipedia has a good summary of the attitude:
While Japan no longer had a realistic prospect of winning the war, Japan's leaders believed they could make the cost of invading and occupying the Home Islands too high for the Allies to accept, which would lead to some sort of armistice rather than total defeat. The Japanese plan for defeating the invasion was called Operation Ketsugō (決号作戦, ketsugō sakusen) ("Operation Codename Decisive"). The Japanese planned to commit the entire population of Japan to resisting the invasion, and from June 1945 onward, a propaganda campaign calling for "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" commenced.[48] The main message of "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" campaign was that it was "glorious to die for the holy emperor of Japan, and every Japanese man, woman, and child should die for the Emperor when the Allies arrived".[48] While this was not realistic, both American and Japanese officers at the time predicted a Japanese death toll in the millions.[48] From the Battle of Saipan onward, Japanese propaganda intensified the glory of patriotic death and depicted the Americans as merciless "white devils".[49] During the Battle of Okinawa, Japanese officers had ordered civilians unable to fight to commit suicide rather than fall into American hands, and all available evidence suggests the same orders would have been given in the home islands.[50] The Japanese were secretly constructing an underground headquarters in Matsushiro, Nagano Prefecture, to shelter the Emperor and the Imperial General Staff during an invasion. In planning for Operation Ketsugo, IGHQ overestimated the strength of the invading forces: while the Allied invasion plan called for fewer than 70 divisions, the Japanese expected up to 90.[51]
It took Hirohito to block this form happening, and even then, one of the junta groups in the army tried to force a coup.
Note that I'm not criticizing the choice to drop the nukes, I'm arguing against the belief (that many people still hold now, with the benefit of hindsight) that it was necessary and saved lifes.
> You said that it was possible to predict when Japan will surrender.
Could you maybe point out what exactly in my post makes you belief that?
What I said is that a survey by/for the US government itself came to the conclusion that the atomic bombs were not necessary to effect a surrender in 1945, NOR a ground invasion.
This matches the collection of ULTRA-decoded Japanese diplomatic traffic and notes from those close to the Japanese Supreme Council that I can't find online at the moment. [Notes mine.]
"[August 9] The news of the Soviet offensive sent the Supreme Council into urgent session, with Prime Minster Suzuki and Minster of Foreign Affairs Togo coming out in favor of opening a negotiating channel to the United States via Switzerland and Sweden, along with Navy Minister Yonai. Togo’s proposal to accept the Potsdam Declaration with the condition that the emperor’s position be preserved (something the declaration did not specifically address). The hardliners countered with a proposal that added additional conditions (which the Allies would certainly reject). [IIRC, these conditions were 1. No occupation of Japan, 2. The Japanese would handle the demobilization of their armies, and 3. The Japanese would perform their own war crimes investigations and trials.] As the discussion was going on, General Amani and General Umezu were secretly taking steps to implement martial law to prevent any such negotiations from happening at all. [I do not believe this was the same conspiracy as the attempted military coup several days later to prevent the emperor from broadcasting his surrender speech.] At 1030, Suzuki reported to the council that the emperor was in favor of ending the war quickly. Nevertheless, the council was still deadlocked 3–3 at 1100 when word of the Nagasaki bomb was received, and remained so even afterward.
"With the Supreme Council still deadlocked, the full cabinet met at 1430 on 9 August, again arriving at a 3–3 vote. Arguments raged in a series of meetings late into the night. Finally, Suzuki requested an impromptu imperial conference with the Supreme Council and the emperor, which commenced at midnight and continued until 0200. Finally, Suzuki informed the emperor that consensus was impossible and requested that Hirohito break the stalemate. The emperor sided with Togo’s proposal to make an offer to accept the Potsdam Declaration with the condition that the emperor’s position be preserved. Suzuki then implored the Supreme Council to accept the emperor’s will.
"On 10 August, the Japanese government sent a telegram via the Swiss, which was immediately intercepted by U.S. intelligence. As U.S. leaders evaluated the Japanese proposal, President Truman ordered a halt to the bombing of Japan and that the next use of an atomic bomb would require explicit presidential authorization (the second one didn’t). ...
"On 12 August, the United States responded to the Japanese offer, stating that “The ultimate form of government of Japan, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, to be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” The Japanese found the response to be ambiguous, which it was, provoking more heated discussion in the Supreme Council whether to hold out for an “explicit guarantee” of the emperor’s position. ...
"On 13 August, U.S. B-29s dropped leaflets all over Japan, making public the Japanese proposal and the U.S. counterproposal. A strong case can be made that it was actually the psychological impact of this huge leaflet drop that tipped the balance (making it one of the most effective psyops campaigns in history), although by this time the full magnitude of the collapse of Japanese defenses in Manchuria and Sakhalin Islands was also known to the Supreme Council, which finally agreed that the language in the U.S. counterproposal was good enough. [There were more bombings of Japan at this time, as the Japanese surrender message to the Allies was sent encoded and there was an increase in military radio traffic.]
"At 2300 on 14 August (Tokyo time) the emperor made a gramophone recording reading his statement to the Japanese people of his decision to surrender (without ever actually using that word), which was to be broadcast to the Japanese people over the radio at noon on 15 August."
The Japanese government at the time gave most of the power to the military (2/3 to 1/3 in the Supreme Council (and more given the pre-war tradition of assassination)) and that council was deadlocked up until Prime Minister Suzuki requested the Emperor to break the deadlock---the only time he cast a vote in the council, as far as I know.
Ground invasion (either by the US or more likely by both the US and USSR, leading to a split North and South Japan akin to Eastern and Western Europe) vs. atomic bombings is indeed a false dichotomy; the third option (favored by the US Navy) was to simply continue the blockade of Japan, leading to mass starvation. Oh, and this whole situation is made more touchy by the fact that the Japanese Army had 1,500,000 (?) men in armies on the Asian mainland. One concern was that if the Japanese government did collapse, there would be no one in a position to tell the military in Japan and in Asia to stop fighting.
Here's the deal about the USSBS: it's massive. The US let a big stack of social scientists and operations researchers loose and took everything they produced as part of it. And then wrote conclusions that accept parts of it and contradict others. If you want a conclusion, you can find it in there somewhere.
I do not know of any serious historians who accept the idea that Japan would have surrendered before the end of 1945 without any outside push. Certainly, they didn't seem to be in any particular rush even with the pushes.
Oh, and about just not using the atomic bombs? Truman addressed this later: what are you going to tell the parents of the soldiers who are killed after Aug 10? This particular war has been going on since 1937 (if not 1931); tens of millions of people have been killed. And you chose not to use a weapon that could have ended it?
But that is taking a hindsight view on things. The U.S. planners had no real access to the thoughts of these people, and from their perspective, one gained by the island-by-island battles like Saipan, both the Japanese military and civilian populations seemed to be determined to fight (or commit suicide) to the last man, woman, and child. There was no sign to the outside world that without something drastic changing that surrender was something they were approaching.
I do agree that after the firebombing talked about here that I don't see a huge change caused by atomic weapons (more efficient ways of dealing mass death than what we were already doing with more effort), but it seems that both sides felt that it did change things. So without having insight that we are not sure of even with the benefit of hindsight, I am not sure I can fault those in charge for thinking this might save lives (Japanese as well as American).
Note: I don't give credit for that sort of thinking to Curtis LeMay; he was just in it to kill the enemy faster (i.e.: a psychopath).
But what was clear to US command at the time was that the Imperial Japanese war machine had been thoroughly crushed by August 1945. They had been on a non-stop losing streak since Midway. What was the remaining risk to the US? What was the chance there was going to be another Pearl Harbor like event at that point? About as close to zero as possible. That's one of the main things that makes it feel hard to justify further mass killing of civilians.
What if Japan has just never surrendered? Would that have been justification to drop an atomic bomb on every civilian population center one after another?
Japan never posed serious risk to the US in the first place.
> That's one of the main things that makes it feel hard to justify further mass killing of civilians.
Japan had occupied much of East Asia including large parts of China and was conducting absolutely brutal campaigns of repression.
> What if Japan has just never surrendered? Would that have been justification to drop an atomic bomb on every civilian population center one after another?
The justification is that as soon as you stop containing them in their island. They would instantly start to go on the offensive again.
Long term containment was considered by the US Navy as an alternative, but it would hardly be less brutal then nukes.
What would you have the US do, simply say, well I guess you learn your lessen and go home. Leave Japan to reconquer East Asia again after a few years?
The nukes were worthwhile to try because they had the capability of totally shifting the political conversation inside of Japan, and they did.
Each attack and action had to be individually considered one after another. If nukes would not have shifted to strategic calculation, potentially another policy would have been attempted.
I think there's a couple of counter-examples to the "they need to surrender for peace" argument.
After World War 1 Germany surrendered. That did not result in a good outcome.
After Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein never invaded Kuwait again. Not that he didn't want to of course, but he was easily contained by a superior military coalition.
Even if they wanted to fight to the last man, the most hawkish Japanese military heads would have considered it infeasible to strike out again after WW2. Before Pearl Harbor they already knew the US was stronger than Japan, and that the gap would only widen as time went on. Japan's confidence was in large part due to the alliance with Germany and the belief that Germany would win the war in the European theater. That opportunity (if you want to call it that) was never going to happen again.
> After World War 1 Germany surrendered. That did not result in a good outcome.
Germany accepted a temporary cease fire and because of that and economic blockade their society collapse throwing them into social revolution. That forced the government to accept unconditional surrender.
> Even if they wanted to fight to the last man, the most hawkish Japanese military heads would have considered it infeasible to strike out again after WW2.
You would be surprised how fast countries can rebound. See Germany and Russia in WW2. Literally everybody in the free world believed that it would be insane to fight another war like that but just 10-15 years after WW1 both countries were hell bent on overthrowing the WW1 world.
And its almost 100% certain that a 'stab in the back' type legend would have developed in Japan too.
And having an enemy that is just waiting for the next opportunity to start a war again, isn't exactly a great strategy in foreign relations.
"With these totals I calculated (lines 412 and 413) the overall and annual democide rate (for the occupied population, at its greatest extent). As can be seen, nearly one out of every one-hundred people controlled by Japan was murdered, or almost three per thousand people per year." (https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM)
At the end of the war, Japan had over 1,000,000 soldiers in China alone.
I think in some way Afghanistan is an example of what could have happened if Japan never surrendered: years of insurgency, loss of life on both sides, and maybe after twenty years the USA, having had enough, would have left the country.
I think that in the end it worked better for Japanese than Afghans, although some the latter can boast to have beaten the American.
Afghanistan is low level conflict for a while. Japan was a modern army hell bent on taking attrition on the invaders.
In Japan its very unlikely to work out anything like Afghanistan. Once the Japan government was defeated, its unlikely you would have seen a popular insurgency in Japan.
And in Japan an island dominated by allied navies such efforts cold not be sustained anyway.
That actually was a serious concern, both to the US and to the Japanese government itself. If the Emperor and the military leaders had been killed, there was no one who could legitimately order the remaining military to surrender. And the Japanese Army was not small at the end of the war (https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/there-are-no-...). In addition to the military in Japan (900,000 on Kyushu to oppose US landings), there were something like 1,500,000 in China, Burma, and Southeast Asia.
The result could have been "warlord" led militaries seeking to establish their own territories and fighting with others. Not unlike Afghanistan or China in the 1920s and 1930s, or some other failed states around the world.
Newly free from the European theater, I think Stalin wanted to move in. I'm against the nuclear bombings, but I think if it was between reality as it is now and an alternate history where Japan was cut in half like Korea, I'd choose reality as it is now.
In my opinion Stalin had literally zero chance of invading Japan. They didn't have the ships to do it, and the US would certainty not transport them there.
I'm not criticizing the choice to drop the nukes, I'm disputing the opinion that the nukes were necessary/helpful to "save lives" (WITH the benefit of hindsight).
I can see how that belief is appealing, but from what I know the facts do not really support it and the truth is more inconvenient.
The alternate history is the Soviets do a ground invasion from the unfortified north. They had broken off their pact with Japan months early and invaded Manchuria just days after the first atomic bomb was dropped, ultimately gaining (and keeping after the Japanese surrender) control of the northern part of the Korean peninsula. Hirohito would have been captured by the Soviets and suffered a fate similar to Puyi's, while Japan itself would have been split up like Germany. This would have been anathema to the Japanese, which is one reason they were scrambling to find a channel to offer unconditional surrender to the US as soon as the Soviets invaded, after having more or less ignored the Hiroshima bombing, their previous channel via Stalin having been cut off.
The US was aware that the Soviets would not renew the nonaggression pact, having negotiated it with Stalin in Yalta in February 1945, and with the Soviet Union denouncing the pact in April. It's possible that the bombs allowed the US to mostly ignore Soviet interests in setting the terms of the surrender, which would have a positive effect, but otherwise, I'm not as sure as most Americans that the atomic bombings were necessary.
Atomic bombs insured that USSR doesn't cross the 38th. That was the most important goal of the bombings.
Japan was already done either way. USSR squashed the 1M+ strong Quandong army in a matter of days Several days more or less - that didn't matter. The bombings weren't the last shot of WWII. They were the first shot of the Cold War establishing its battle lines in that region.
If Japan was not caught napping, I believe 100% that this operation would fail. If 100s of suicide attacks those ships would sink with troupes and all. Even if they land, an land invasion supported by sea based logistic is incredibly difficult.
And the troupes in Japan were not at all like the army left on the continent.
Japan was caught napping. They were preparing for an allied invasion from the South. The troops in Japan had been cut off from supply of raw materials from the continent.
I think you could have got a comparable death toll just in Japanese POW camps if negociations for the surrender had dragged on a couple of months more, wouldn't need an invasion.
None of this makes sense. If US didn’t use nuclear bombs, nothing would be different. Japan at that point was already devastated. They no longer had any ability of defense or attack. US and Allies were already winner and dictated rules of new world. Japan would have just slide into a poor nation like North Korea or Iran. The point is, there was no need for bombing of any kind. Japan wasn’t a threat at that point.
can someone explain why the alternative to atomic bombs was invading the islands and thus millions of deaths? how about just embargoing them and waiting for them to surrender?
This was actually considered by the Navy. It was the leading plan advocated by the Navy as an alternative to invasion.
The problem is that Japan is not self sufficient in food or much of anything else required for a modern economy.
The policy you advocate would have essentially turned back the clock and made Japan into a feudal kingdom with 1/10 the population. It would have been a mass starvation way beyond any blockade of Germany or other modern starvation's.
At the same time, massive amounts of Allied (mostly Chinese) POW would be die. The Japanese army in China and Korea would likely have continued and intensified their war on the local population. Revenge on local population for supposed help of the allies was something Japan did all the time.
At the same time it would have required the stationing of a gigantic navy and air force all over East Asia for potentially decades. Japan soldiers were still all over East Asia and had to be contained everywhere.
They would have started leaving their bases and attempting to extract food from local populations. Japanese bases all over East Asia would turn into quasi independent military dictatorships trying to insure their own survival.
There were still active soldiers in 1974 who didn't know Japan had fallen. The had to fly the commanding officer who had been 20 years retired in an old uniform to the island to get the guy to stop fighting. Now imagine that sort of thing the whole Japanese army in East Asia.
That’s an interesting thought. I’ve read a lot about the pacific war but nothing about a possible blockade/embargo scenario being considered. Maybe that’s because there were still about 4 million Japanese soldiers still in the field in China, SE Asia and the East Indies
I do know that Japanese agriculture had completely collapsed by 1945 and millions would have starved to death had the war been extended. An extended blockade would likely have been worse than the bombing.
Because lack of home resources and being so susceptible to the oil embargo is basically what led to Japan wanting an empire in the first place.
The prewar US trade restrictions/ blockade had a lot to do with Japan believing war with the US was inevitable, and that pearl harbor was a smart strategic target while no one expected an attack and while so many eggs were still in one basket.
> And yes, bombing civilians can be considered a 'war crime'
Not in the case of total war it can't. Such a conflict is a fight to the end, everyone dies or someone surrenders. The civilians are part of the production machine enabling the war on both sides and are legitimate targets, even if it's a horrible aspect to total war. The war in Europe and the war in Asia were both clear cases of total war (which is why Nazi Germany ended with Hitler blowing his brains out and why it took two nukes to get Japan to surrender, they were going all the way to the end with their war causes to the extent they could do it).
After what Japan had done in Asia, and having had to go to such great lengths to defeat Japan, the only rational thing to do was to force a complete surrender upon them and remake their nation to debase the military as the primary influence over the nation at that time. Going back and having to deal with the Empire of Japan again in another 20 years would have been obscene (both for the US and for Asia generally).
As the US had gained increased bombing capabilities over their territory, Japan had figured out to decentralize their war-making production to smaller buildings and households. In doing so, they further legitimized targeting their civilian areas. Japan was preparing to go to the end, the death of every one of its citizens.
Then please show the historical evidence for that. You can't just disagree based on your opinion.
The US government has opened up a lot of documentation, we have a deeper insight into that process then most things in history. And pretty much all historians who look at it come to the same conclusion.
There is. Let's call it the rule of being interesting to other people. Your mother cares how you feel because you feel it, but other people care how you feel because you argued it well.
You can disagree - but the evidence is pretty unequivocal. There was never mention in any of the decision making bodies of any context that it was a primary motive. What we have to go on was Stalin's paranoia.
It was very well documented that the entire push of the United States government was to involve Russia in the pacific theater. Major concessions had been given to get the Stalinist government to do so. While there certainly were hawks that viewed this as opportune to keep the communists in bay, the documentary evidence drives to the opposite conclusion.
> "You're not the only one, but most of the people who believe like you are Americans."
Conveniently forgetting about the enormous population of China and the rest of Asia subject to the depredations of the Imperial Japanese Army, who also overwhelmingly approve of the atomic bombings. I have relatives who lived during the war or its aftermath and, needless to say, they do not share your concerns in the slightest.
IMO, it's more accurate to say that the handwringing over the bombings is a small minority of Westerners advocating fringe theories that try to paint Japan as a victim rather than an aggressor.
I'm sure Japan, through their crimes, earned the hatred of many countries in Asia which welcomed the atomic bombings as retribution.
But the narrative I'm mostly arguing against is not that many welcomed the bombings, but the specific American narrative that there was no other way and that they "saved Japanese lives".
If you want to argue the Japanese (civilians and all) deserved it, that's a separate conversation.
US Navy wanted a longer term blockade that would literally lead to mass starvation and basically transform Japan back the Shogunate period in terms of population.
A good argument can be made that both of these would have lead to far more deaths.
I don't know that those were the only two alternatives.
> Please tell us what other strategy you advocate.
"Tell us": who is "us"? In any case, I'm thankfully not in the situation to decide, nor am I an armchair general, so I'll have to excuse myself from invading or bombing Japan.
To state my position once again: the narrative popular in the US, that the atomic bombings were justified as a terrible necessity and that they actually saved lives ("Japanese lives", like someone else stated) is only popular in the US, and it exists mostly to enable them to retain their sense of being the good guys. Other countries, unburdened by the necessity of always making the US look like the good guys, don't favor this particular narrative.
People in the comment section of this forum where we are having an argument about this situation.
> In any case, I'm thankfully not in the situation to decide, nor am I an armchair general, so I'll have to excuse myself from invading or bombing Japan.
Seems like the simple way out.
> is only popular in the US
Its actually popular with everybody who has studied WW2 in detail. I'm European and I watch content by other Europeans who agree with the argument.
In terms of popular opinion, I don't think most nations think about it much at all.
> it exists mostly to enable them to retain their sense of being the good guys
I disagree. You can be the good guy without arguing that it was the better option for Japan.
> Other countries, unburdened by the necessity of always making the US look like the good guys, don't favor this particular narrative.
Its a simple matter of military strategy. Anybody that has studied military history can engaged in those arguments. Ending a war is difficult, and threw-out history we see different how they can end.
Looking at the strategic options at the time and doing the best you can at evaluating the potential casualties will lead you to the conclusion that you don't seem to like.
If you disagree with that assessment, then you have to make an argument for an alternative strategy that would have saved more people.
Argument like that could potentially be made. One might argue for example that going away from unconditional surrender, and trying to make some kind of deal where Japan could keep Korea or something like that could have been made.
But again, you actually have to make that argument if you want to be the a moral critic.
You're trying to pull somebody into an argument that they're not interested in. The argument they were making is that approving of something that causes Japanese suffering because it causes Japanese suffering is not the same as approving of something that causes Japanese suffering for its strategic value or necessity to end the war.
You're arguing against a position that the person you're arguing against hasn't taken.
"It's a simple matter", "seems like the simple way out".
Well, if you have it all figured out, why engage with me in conversation?
> Its actually popular with everybody who has studied WW2 in detail
This is false, and an empty assertion. So the people who disagree with you haven't studied WW2 in detail? A variant of the "all non-populist historians agree that [...]".
> Well, if you have it all figured out, why engage with me in conversation?
I don't have it figured out. What I am trying to do is explain your policy. I'm trying to get you to commit to an actual viable policy rather then doing moral grandstanding.
> This is false, and an empty assertion. So the people who disagree with you haven't studied WW2 in detail? A variant of the "all non-populist historians agree that [...]".
It reflects my own experience with studying the topic, in media, books, podcast, forums and so on.
And generally the people who disagree refuse to make detailed historical argument or proposing alternative solutions and just relay on moral grandstanding.
In Australia, for undergraduate students studying history, this is the most commonly assigned essay topic in World War 2 studies.
Most of the students go into it thinking like you.
Nearly all of them change their mind once they look more deeply at the evidence.
The atomic bombings are a classic case where the popular assumed narrative differs significantly from the facts.
And that’s the reason this is assigned as an essay topic. The idea is to sober up the students a little bit and help them understand that their neat worldviews (USA bad!) are not reflected in the messy reality.
Thanks for your reply. One thing I want to point out, because I saw someone else also ask me this:
> [...] help them understand that their neat worldviews (USA bad!)
I don't know about Australian students, but at least I am not saying "USA bad". I'm describing a particular narrative about the atomic bombings as being fueled by the necessity of Americans to sustain their perception of always being the good guys.
For some reason some people read this and conclude I believe the US were the bad guys.
I obviously believe the atomic bombings were a war crime; but more generally, I do not believe the US were the bad guys in WW2. All moral grays and downright immoral actions committed aside, the US was on the good side of that war, and Japan on the bad side. I hope that clears up that part of my position.
The US had already formed an agreement with Stalin that the USSR would invade Manchuria (despite it's non-aggressin pact with Japan). This plan involved the USSR gaining control of territory they formerly lost to Japan during the Russo-Japanese war. That was the original US plan to end the war, not a ground invasion. When Truman saw the trinity test he decided that he could win the war using nukes without letting the soviets gain anything. Hence the scramble to drop them.
Or they could have offered Japan a conditional surrender rather than insisting on an "unconditional" one and then letting them keep their emporer anyway. Japan was already looking desperately for ways to surrender.
The conditions the Japanese Supreme Council was looking so desperately for were:
1. The form of the Japanese government remains unchanged. (I.e. the Emperor is guaranteed to remain emperor. This was not agreed to, but it did work out that way.)
2. Japan was not to be occupied.
3. Japan would be responsible for demobilizing its own forces.
4. Japan would be responsible for investigations and trials of war crimes.
Clearly there's a lot of depth here to exolore and I can admit to only a casual interest in the topic, but my understanding is that there were different factions within the Japanese leadership who were comfortable with different sets of conditions, and only #1 was a sticking point for everyone.
However, let's assume this is the only deal Japanese leaders would have accepted. Our discomfort about these conditions should be weighed against the discomfort of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in bombing raids and dropping nuclear bombs on two cities. It's kind of hard to argue, for example, that an overriding concern about war crimes is why you'd have to bomb civilians.
1937 Yet another incident reignites the war, leading to the capture of Shanghai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shanghai), the capture of Beijing, and the capture of Nanjing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre): ("Because of the myriad of factors, death toll estimates vary from 40,000 to over 300,000, with rape cases ranging from 20,000 to over 80,000 cases. However, the most sophisticated and credible scholars in Japan, which include a large number of authoritative academics, support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and its findings, which estimate at least 200,000 casualties and at least 20,000 cases of rape.").
"Some historical estimates of the number of deaths which resulted from Japanese war crimes range from 3 to 14 million through massacre, human experimentation, starvation, and forced labor that was either directly perpetrated or condoned by the Japanese military and government." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes)
Now, I realize you've said you acknowledge Japan's war crimes, and you might even invoke the sunk cost fallacy: those people were already dead. However, there are two points you seem to be missing: the goal of the allies with their "unconditional surrender" terms were the removal of governments that had repeatedly demonstrated that they were militarily aggressive and their replacement with governments that were not (successfully, I might add), and by the scale of Japan's own actions in the war that "discomfort" is a drop in the bucket.
> "Our discomfort about these conditions should be weighed against the discomfort of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in bombing raids and dropping nuclear bombs on two cities."
Think about the implications of what #1 is and what you're saying. The European theater equivalent would have been to leave Nazi Germany's government intact with Hitler as its head. If that's an acceptable deal to you, well, you're probably not going to find a lot of people to stand with you.
This is incorrect on a number of fronts:
1) The Japanese surrender was unconditional. The emperor's positions as very much at Douglas Macarthurs will. (And this was made clear before the surrender).
2) There was no move to cut the soviets out. Stalin immediately became paranoid (as he often did) and moved up his time frame once it became clear (before Trinity) that the USA would have the bomb soon.
3) Truman never decided any such thing - in fact, he announced ("with glee" according to the reporters present) that Stalin had entered the war. This narrative comes from Hasegawa's book, and it's completely incorrect.
Aggressor want to occupy as much land and resources as possible and kill as much opposition as possible.
Defender want to save people lives and protect status quo.
> But the narrative I'm mostly arguing against is not that many welcomed the bombings, but the specific American narrative that there was no other way and that they "saved Japanese lives".
In the US educational system you'll learn much more about the atomic bomb than Nanking or anything Japan did. I suspect this is due to China being a Cold War adversary. Chinese intervention in the Korean War makes much more sense when you consider China's security concerns.
No one wants hostile foreign troops on their border. I see parallels in Ukraine. Russia really doesn't want NATO to encircled them. We would have problems with Russian troops stationed in Toronto.
This is still recent history.
I recall a Filipino man telling me his grandfather forbid him from marrying a Japanese woman.
It can be argued that had the war lasted any longer millions would of starved. In fact even if we just blockaded Japan, mass starvation would of killed millions.
The post war Marshall Plan is above and beyond one of the greatest things we've done as a country.
> No one wants hostile foreign troops on their border. I see parallels in Ukraine. Russia really doesn't want NATO to encircled them. We would have problems with Russian troops stationed in Toronto.
Ukraine don't want members of Russian Federation and it allies to encircle Ukraine, so we are going to liberate Belarus and take Kuban back. The only important thing for us is what WE want, isn't?
>Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University
That assurance is a fake peddled by Russian propaganda, which goes completely against NATO's open door policy. Around 2000-2003 Russia was in talks about joining NATO ourselves; clearly, no regard to that "assurance" was given.
I always got the feeling that asians of that generation (at least at the leadership level) understood that the Japanese were just playing by the rules of the game established by the europeans. That's why both sides of the chinese civil war, for instance, were willing to work with the japanese - and why after the communists won, they were happy to work with the japanese to rebuild the economy. It's the same in South Korea - the post-war leadership's relationship to Japan is somewhat complex - consider Syngman Rhee, who was part of the Gapsin coup, or to a more extreme level, Park Chung-hee, or Chiang Kai-shek, both of whom had formative years in Japanese institutions, and were soldiers in the japanese army.
> Outside the US the prevalent view is pretty much against those atomic bombings
Sorry, what gives you (or anyone else) the right to speak for the "prevalent view" in the entire rest of the world outside of the US? In my experience, many Western Europeans love to decry American arrogance (okay some truth to that), but then go on to themselves claim the right to speak for the entire rest of the world. There are a great many countries in the world, and they all have the right to speak for themselves.
Some may have had the luck to have not suffered too horribly for various reasons during WWII. Other have suffered horribly under the Axis powers, and don't decry the brutal tactics that were sometimes needed to win the war against a far more brutal enemy as soon as possible.
> Outside the US the prevalent view is pretty much against those atomic bombings
Outside of the US is a big place, do you have some source to argue that this is prevalent view as a whole, and not just the prevalent view in whichever corner of the earth you happen to be in?
Speaking as a historian, The atomic bombs being horrible weapons that at the time where strategically justified is the consensus view among non-populist historians.
There is a secondary view that it was done to an eye of using the bomb as a threat to Stalin, but all research of the decision makers does not reveal this to be the case. In fact, the research shows over and over that the Americans where desperate to get the Russians into the pacific theater. The view that the use of the atomic bomb was a effort to threaten Stalin and keep the Russians from the war was popularized by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's book in 2005, but that book has been pretty much discredited in historical communities.
It's also not that the United States opinion diverges from much of the world. Outside of Japan, most countries have a similar percentage of people who view that it was justified or not. (79% of Japanese thing it was unjustified versus 44% of Americans).
You'd have to do more than "speak as a historian" to convince me. You'd have to convince me (with references of supporting and opposing works) that this is the mainstream view for historians outside the US.
"Non-populist" historians is a weasel word that will let you discard any historian's opinion that doesn't fit your thesis. I propose we simply divide between "American" and "not American", which is more objective.
> It's also not that the United States opinion diverges from much of the world.
That's wrong, most of the world disagrees with the "terrible necessity" narrative which is so popular in the US. Of course Japan disagrees with it, being on the receiving end (and having their own blind spots to their crimes), but the rest of the world disagrees as well.
It's normal, the US is fixated on a single narrative that lets them cling to the belief they are always the good guys. Any other country would do the same, agreed -- everyone is the hero of their own story. But only one country dropped two atomic bombs on civilian populations.
So you're trying to argue that the U.S. is actually the bad guys? Perhaps the good guy/bad guy dichotomy simply isn't that useful. The U.S. did terrible things during the war, and there is no excuse for that. The U.S. is also only directly responsible for a very small fraction of the total civilian deaths in the war, and for none of the genocidal deaths. The world today is a better place for the Allies having won the war, and the U.S. effort is a major reason that happened. It's silly for Americans to cling to the narrative that we're always making good choices, that's obviously untrue, but I think it's equally silly to argue that the totality of what the U.S. did during World War 2 was worse than anything any other country did, especially worse enough to make the U.S. the bad guys. But I don't think you need to call them the bad guys to acknowledge that they committed atrocities.
Good question! Genocide is not just another word for mass-murder. It is defined as killing with the intention to destroy the targeted ethnic group/culture/religion completely. That certainly wasn't the American plan anywhere during WW2. Germany's actions were obviously genocidal, and Japan's actions in China arguably were as well.
Haha yeah, I was reluctant just because I don't personally know much of that particular history and it was hard to imagine that the Japanese intended to commit genocide against all of China, but I agree that genocide is fair classification of their actions.
Different countries certainly have different biases, but that does not mean that rational analysis of the problem is not possible. Would Japan surrender on August 15 if the bombs were not dropped? Could the US drop the first bomb on the Tokyo Bay instead? etc.
> Could the US drop the first bomb on the Tokyo Bay instead?
Sure, but then the discussion would be around the morality of demolishing the capital of Japan with a manmade tsunami, so I guess I'm not sure I see what that would help?
I think Japan was on the verge of surrender anyway, just some careful wording and additional pressure from the Soviet Union's military might would have done it.
If this was truly about saving lives, like the traditional American narrative goes, then surely some concessions that allowed their emperor to save face would have been warranted.
If, on the contrary, testing the bomb on civilian populations and infrastructure was the priority, it stands to reason imposing harder conditions on surrender would be the course of action.
> I think Japan was on the verge of surrender anyway
What's your evidence for this. From what we can tell from the knowledge of the people that actually matter in Japan, they were not that close to surrender.
Even if you had gone away from Unconditional surrender they were not close to a majority.
Even after 2 nuclear bombs, the peace party didn't have a majority, it required the emperor taking a direct political role against the war party to manage getting negotiations.
Soviets were just mopping up in Northern Asia, they were no thread to a Homeland of Japan. At best Soviets was a hope held up by some in the War Party, that if somehow they would flip against the US with them.
> If this was truly about saving lives, like the traditional American narrative goes
It was about saving AMERICAN lives back then. And it did.
> It was about saving AMERICAN lives back then. And it did.
Some, in this very comments section, have argued it saved Japanese lives. I certainly have heard this argued elsewhere, too.
If it was just about American lives, ok, maybe. Sounds better than an invasion of mainland Japan, sure. Maybe there were even better alternatives. An hypothetical weapon which could simply evaporate all of Japan with all the people inside would also have saved American lives, but it doesn't seem so good, does it? The measure of "saving American lives" is a tricky one, and not every option is justified.
I agree that people in the comments make that argument. And I think its likely correct.
But it certainty was not a justification made back then. I don't think anybody argued people back then were considering that.
> Maybe there were even better alternatives.
If you disagree with the strategy followed, your argument would be more powerful if you had an alternative strategy that would have been more human.
I am very open to alternative strategies. I have fought about it a lot, but I don't really see it.
> An hypothetical weapon which could simply evaporate all of Japan with all the people inside would also have saved American lives, but it doesn't seem so good, does it?
Japan had 77 million people around there. If such a weapon existed. How many million Americans would you sacrifice in order not to use that weapon?
Would you for example kill everybody in New York even if 10-20 million would die anyway?
What is the calculation you would actually make if you were in the position. How many American 20 something would you sacrifice per Japanese civilian.
And how do you measure Japanese victims in China, Korea and other places that were suffering many causalities with every additional day of the war.
No - they would not have. In fact, the Soviet Union demanded a piece of the action with a "Soviet Zone" in Japan, just as it had with Berlin and Germany.
I honestly don't know. Maybe they would have stopped, maybe they would have steamrolled it. It's an alternative to nuking Japan, though, and that's my point.
>>I think Japan was on the verge of surrender anyway, just some careful wording and additional pressure from the Soviet Union's military might would have done it.
It can not be perceived as a sane argument, after Allies had to deal with Germans in Europe.
The narrative that Japan was about to surrender is a nice story, but has no factual basis. The entire Japanese political structure was where the Japanese political structure had been since 1935. A all powerful military junta ruled, with lip service given to a emperor. The emperor sent out feelers for peace, but the military junta (which could and would dissolve the government if anything they did not approve of was adopted) would not stand for it.
There's been some effort to recast the official Japanese response to the Potsdam declaring (黙殺) as ignoring instead of "be silent with contempt" - but the modern historical view was that Japan had used 黙殺 in the context that it was intended, and intended to ignore any further calls for surrender.
In terms of unconditional surrender - the Allies had agreed on that standard because of the end of World War 1. The conditional nature of the end of that war led to the "stabbed in the back" myth that Hitler rode to power
>>The narrative that Japan was about to surrender is a nice story, but has no factual basis.
I agree, if they were 'about to surrender' they would have surrendered after the first atomic bomb, but they didn't, and I believe they only surrendered after the second, because they assumed there would be a 3rd and 4th etc
Look at how many people that were killed on Okinawa - which wasn't even the Japanese homeland - does anyone really believe that the Japanese wouldn't have rallied every man, woman and child to defend their homeland once Americans started a ground invasion? I believe lives were saved.
> "that allowed their emperor to save face would have been warranted
It would have infuriated the Chinese and other Asian allies of the Allied powers. Granted, they might not have immediately been able to do anything about it but, as later wars and economic growth in the region showed, they were far from impotent and the Allies had to look toward the post-war future.
I doubt the emperor himself would have infuriated the Chinese, but regardless, we are no longer discussing saving lives, are we? So it wasn't about saving lives, is that what we are saying?
> had the US lost the war, the people who ordered those bombings would have been found guilty of war crimes and hanged.
Just gonna leave this here (from the wiki page)
> Many of the Allied airmen who were captured after being shot down over Japan were mistreated. On 8 September 1944, the Cabinet of Japan directed that indiscriminate bombing constituted a war crime despite the fact there was no international treaty or instrument protecting a civilian population specifically from attack by aircraft at the time. As a result, captured Allied airmen were subject to trial and possible execution.
Don't wish to discuss whether it was morally right or wrong. Just pointing out it's difficult to call something a "crime" if there was limited legal basis for it (no international treaty) at the time.
Let's not judge the people of yesteryear by today's moral standards. I sure as shit don't want to be judged on some of the stuff I've done based on standards in 70 years time.
Actually, a high ranking Germany naval officer was tried for ordering unrestricted submarine warfare during the Nuremberg trials and was successfully able to defend against this charge by pointing out that the Allies engaged in the same strategy [1]. The Allies did recognize the hypocrisy of punishing defeated enemies of the same actions they took.
> Just pointing out it's difficult to call something a "crime" if there was limited legal basis for it (no international treaty) at the time.
I can't help but wonder if you'd find it equally difficult if someone calls certain actions of the Nazis a crime -- assuming there was limited legal basis for it (no international treaty) at the time, etc.
Or is it only difficult when we're talking about American crimes?
No, but the ones who believe like you are mostly Western European and Canadian 20-something socialists. Who are interested in East Asian people who suffered under the Japanese Army only as an abstraction, don't actually know any, and don't care much about them anyway.
Maybe they even say "some people did something" about the Nanking Massacre, or the Korean comfort women.
- Reasons for the atomic bombings of Japan, and whether many Americans are self-deluded about their actual reasons (like I'm arguing).
- The horrible crimes Japan committed during WW2, and some alleged "defense" of Japan maybe? (As far as I know, everyone today knows about the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan death march, and the forced prostitution of Korean women).
It's possible to believe both that the atomic bombings of Japan were a terrible crime (and that Americans delude themselves about said bombings) and also that Japan committed heinous crimes and that it's good that it lost the war.
> but the ones who believe like you are mostly Western European and Canadian 20-something socialists
> You're not the only one, but most of the people who believe like you are Americans. Outside the US the prevalent view is pretty much against those atomic bombings; had the US lost the war, the people who ordered those bombings would have been found guilty of war crimes and hanged.
It's a good thing that the US did not lose the war, as otherwise the large part of the planet would be living under a xenophobic/racist, totalitarian regime that viewed foreigners of little value and did experimentation on human subjects:
The Japanese War Council were not planning on surrendering after the first atomic bomb:
> The Japanese Army and Navy had their own independent atomic-bomb programs and therefore the Japanese understood enough to know how very difficult building it would be. Therefore, many Japanese and in particular the military members of the government refused to believe the United States had built an atomic bomb, and the Japanese military ordered their own independent tests to determine the cause of Hiroshima's destruction.[84] Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, argued that even if the United States had made one, they could not have many more.[85] American strategists, having anticipated a reaction like Toyoda's, planned to drop a second bomb shortly after the first, to convince the Japanese that the U.S. had a large supply.[61][86]
Even after the second bomb there was still some disagreement:
> In the middle of the meeting, shortly after 11:00, news arrived that Nagasaki, on the west coast of Kyūshū, had been hit by a second atomic bomb (called "Fat Man" by the United States). By the time the meeting ended, the Big Six had split 3–3. Suzuki, Tōgō, and Admiral Yonai favored Tōgō's one additional condition to Potsdam, while General Anami, General Umezu, and Admiral Toyoda insisted on three further terms that modified Potsdam: that Japan handle their own disarmament, that Japan deal with any Japanese war criminals, and that there be no occupation of Japan.[96]
* Ibid
And even after the Emperor ordered the cessation of hostilities (note: he never used the word "surrender" in his address) there were still elements in Japan who wanted to fight:
> It's a good thing that the US did not lose the war, as otherwise the large part of the planet would be living under a xenophobic/racist, totalitarian regime that viewed foreigners of little value and did experimentation on human subjects
It seems you're under the impression I was arguing the Japanese weren't war criminals with many of their WW2 actions or that I believe they ought to have won the war, or at least that I believe the US ought to have lost WW2, or some variation of that.
But if you read carefully what I wrote, I'm saying nothing of the sort, am I? I'm arguing about the atomic bombings and American beliefs about their justification.
So spare me the description of Japanese war crimes: I'm aware of them and I wouldn't want to live in a world where Imperial Japan had won WW2.
> I'm arguing about the atomic bombings and American beliefs about their justification.
This is not complicated: the justification was it ended the war faster and reduced further death and destruction.
The Japanese were not planning on surrendering before the any atomic bombs were dropped. They were not planning to surrender after the first atomic bomb was dropped. They only just started to waver after the second.
There would be a lot more suffering as the US slogged their way through the Home Islands:
> In addition, the Japanese had organized the Volunteer Fighting Corps, which included all healthy men aged 15 to 60 and women 17 to 40 for a total of 28 million people, for combat support and, later, combat jobs. Weapons, training and uniforms were generally lacking: many were armed with nothing better than antiquated firearms, molotov cocktails, longbows, swords, knives, bamboo or wooden spears, and even clubs and truncheons: they were expected to make do with what they had.[63][64] One mobilized high school girl, Yukiko Kasai, found herself issued an awl and told, "Even killing one American soldier will do. ... You must aim for the abdomen."[65] They were expected to serve as a "second defense line" during the Allied invasion, and to conduct guerrilla warfare in urban areas and mountains.
> This is not complicated: the justification was it ended the war faster and reduced further death and destruction.
I don't understand what you think this paragraph adds to the conversation. It obviously is complicated, since this is what I've been arguing against for dozens of comments now: the rest of the world outside the US doesn't agree with this explanation.
How is it more complicated than (a) the Japanese were not willing to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped (and not willing even after the first was dropped), and (b) the Americans didn't want any more of their troops killed than 'necessary'?
You don't have to take anything the Americans said into account, but to merely look at the actions of the Japanese themselves:
Two atomic bombs being dropped on them was not decisive in getting the Cabinet to decide to surrender. It took the Emperor's involvement to break the deadlock and even then there was a coup attempt to stop the surrender:
And even those things were only barely over the line:
> When word of the emperor’s decision reached General Toroshiro Kawabe, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Imperial Army, he noted in his diary that he concurred with another senior general in doubting that the overseas commanders would comply with the emperor’s order. That these officers correctly doubted even an order from the emperor would secure compliance with key parts of the armed forces, was swiftly confirmed by messages from the commanders in China and the Southern Area, declaring they would not comply with the surrender. Their commands mustered between a quarter and a third of all Japanese servicemen. It took Hirohito’s personal emissaries to persuade these commands to surrender.
Those two reasons are IMHO sufficient to me (as a non-American).
How else would you get the Japanese to surrender? AFAICT, this could have been done in the (i) 'traditional' way with troops invading the Home Islands, or (ii) with the atomic bomb. The estimates on the land invasion:
> The U.S. Sixth Army, which would invade and occupy Kyushu, estimated 124,935 U.S. battle casualties, including 25,000 dead, plus 269,000 non-battle casualties (disease, accident, etc.) for Kyushu alone. The JCS came up with an estimate that a 90-day campaign on Kyushu would cost 156-175,000 battle casualties, with 38,000 killed in action. By late July, the JCS was forecasting 500,000 casualties at the high end and 100,000 at the low end. In late July 1945, the War Department provided an estimate that the entire Downfall operations would cause between 1.7 to 4 million U.S. casualties, including 400-800,000 U.S. dead, and 5 to 10 million Japanese dead. (Given that the initial Downfall plan called for 1,792,700 troops to go ashore in Japan, this estimate is indeed most sobering, and suggests many more troops than planned would need to be fed into a meat grinder).
The US (Truman and others) concluded that they were not willing to have Allied troops suffer just the Japanese refused to accept the reality that they were beaten (which the Japanese knew themselves in 1944). And while the deaths of a few hundred thousand Japanese from the atomic bombs is regrettable, the lives of several more million Japanese were spared.
What other method(s) of ending the war with Japan do you use besides the above (i) or (ii) above?
Please, I'm curious to know, what scenarios you / "the rest of the world outside the US" think were possible. Can you outline them?
It's not my burden, thankfully, to delineate scenarios for the endgame of the Pacific theater of WW2.
I'm just pointing out few outside the US believe in the narrative that the atomic bombings were used "to save lives" and therefore justified.
You want to drag this conversation into something it's not. I also invite you to read the other threads of this discussion, I'm not going to rehash it for you here.
I didn't mean the literature, I meant this discussion on HN.
You seem to want me to rehash my position (also asserting "it's not that complicated") when it's obvious it is complicated (otherwise people wouldn't hold disagreements so strongly, even here) and also you could simply read about my position or other's in this very comments section of HN.
The fact you mistook the position under discussion to be about Japanese crimes (which is why you so vehemently described them), when it was about alleged justifications for the atomic bombings, also makes me think it's indeed a complicated topic.
What I am telling you is that I am not going to rehash my position again for your benefit. Read it elsewhere in this comments section. If you feel like you must simply restate what others have already said, maybe don't? It adds nothing to the conversation.
What do you mean? Regarding the coming Cold War, then MAD, etc?
I find that kind of reasoning troubling. It can be used to justify pretty awful things. This is a completely made up example for the sake of argument, a reduction to the absurd, but suppose they decide that vaporizing Africa, Asia and parts of Europe is better for world peace long-term... should they do it? "Sure, billions will die, but trust us that long term more lives will be saved in the coming centuries". Ok, so do we push the red button then?
You seem anxious to bring Russia and Ukraine into this conversation, which is puzzling.
I'm uninterested in that, but let me give you a limited response in two parts:
1. I consider nuking a major city a war crime, regardless of who does it (the US, Russia or Ukraine).
2. If Ukraine or Russia nuke any city there will be world trouble of the sort that will make our little conversation here irrelevant. So pray it doesn't happen.
So, you see no difference between invading and defending.
If RF will kill millions of Ukrainian with conventional weapons, like they did in 1932-1934, or capture and destroy another major city, like Grozny, it's OK for you. If Ukraine will do the same for RF in return, then it's war crime for you, because victim of conventional weapon ≠ victim of nuclear weapon. Right?
> Thankfully this scenario is highly unlikely.
Two nuclear nations are at war since 2014. Where you live?
Using a nuclear weapon against another country with nuclear weapons is likely to result in the destruction of most of Europe at least. All military planners involved know this and nobody wants it, which is why this scenario is very unlikely.
Ok, so Europe should put more effort into taming RF and protect Ukraine. As I see, Germany, at least, doing the opposite, so it looks like EU ignores this scenario.
Europe, Russia and the US should all de-escalate enough to avoid a devastating nuclear war, yes.
To be fair, the only one even considering using nuclear weapons seems to be you, here on HN. No military or political planners are considering it because nobody wants to see Europe devastated in a nuclear war, and everyone understands this, which is why -- if there is war, hopefully not! -- it won't be nuclear.
If you think about it, YOU, an Ukrainian, don't really want Ukraine to attack Russia with nukes. Why? Because then you'd be dead, plain and simple.
Your subjective opinion does not account losses, that US had when they were fighting against Japanese - outside of Japan - only fighting over very tiny islands. So, in the end they saved ~1 million US soldiers, because fight on mainland(also in China and Korea) was nightmare hell scenario for US.
During WW2 US gave to Soviet Union materials, newest machines and technological secrets(including technology and materials of atomic bomb, that supplemented and sped up development of Soviet Union atomic bomb project), what other allies of US did not receive. This narrative, that US was bombing Japan, to put Soviet Union in fear does not account for that Soviet Union had infiltrated US, that even US president was not working for US, but for Soviet Union. Even nowadays those US traitors, that gave away more, that what was agreed on Lend-Lease, have not been prosecuted, because their positions were top positions and their deed and betrayal of US is not common knowledge to modern Americans.
We can also look from that side, that USSR was unreliable ally(also to Third Reich, which USSR was preparing to invade, while it hoped that it was busy invading Britain) and did not want to enter war with Japanese, who at that point still controlled Manchuria, Korea and very large parts of China. They only entered war, because they realised, that they might miss out on piece of Japanese territories, because US would make their own peace and Japan would surrender wholly to US - only because of those atomic bombs.
For those that would think, that USSR was sparing their troops - it has not been concern of USSR until the day it collapsed and was not concern for Stalin, when he was postponing attack on Japan, like he was playing with Germans.
> We can also look from that side, that USSR was unreliable ally(also to Third Reich, which USSR was preparing to invade, while it hoped that it was busy invading Britain)
This has been thoroughly debunked by most mainstream historians.
The view that the USSR had infiltrated the US and was commandeering its war effort during WW2 is so fringe I'm not touching it with a ten feet pole.
Those bombing Japan were already war criminals for the firebombing long before the Atomic bombs appeared on the scene. They were merely more efficient to deliver. But then, so were the British and German bombing efforts.
A lot of criticism of the atomic bombing is context free 20-20 hindsight.
Big armies are like huge complex ships: they take a while to get moving, are hard to steer and hard to stop. So one can criticize the destruction of Dresden, but you also have to remember that the UK had built a machine that threw planes into the air and there was little correlation between the amount of armaments being sent and the number of targets available (or accounting to reduced opposition). Yet that machine was a small part of a huge effort, and was probably only paid attention to by the high command when something went wrong. And not to mention the rage and anger on the part of a bunch of people who had been bombed themselves for years.
My wife grew up near a town in Germany that was bombed for the first time, and utterly flattened, in late April 1945. Absolutely no strategic value; they had simply wiped out everything above it on the list so now it was their turn. I never heard anyone complain about it (and boy old people were happy to give you an earful about all sorts of things).
For more lack of retrospective context: As for the atomic bomb, don't forget Turman only heard about it when he became president. And all sorts of facts that seem clear today were completely unclear back then. What would the soviets actually do? Was Okinawa an example of what the invasion would be like? Japan still occupied Manchuria and other parts of Asia. Intelligence on the risks the Allies faced was still thin.
And don't forget that allied troops in Europe were rebelling (even turning their arms against their officers) at the prospect of being shipped to the pacific theatre.
Was there industry in or near the town that supported the German war effort? Were there German military units stationed in or near the town? I'm not saying it's right but the term "strategic value" had a very different definition in WWII. Any and all war effort or suspected war effort had "strategic value".
> And don't forget that allied troops in Europe were rebelling (even turning their arms against their officers) at the prospect of being shipped to the pacific theatre.
I've never heard of this- was this really a widespread occurrence?
>> And don't forget that allied troops in Europe were rebelling (even turning their arms against their officers) at the prospect of being shipped to the pacific theatre.
> I've never heard of this- was this really a widespread occurrence?
I also never heard of widespread armed rebellion but definitely there was a lot of animosity over who got to go home, who got to stay, and who had to go to the Pacific. I would not have wanted that job.
Dan Carlin has a fantastic podcast episode on this, he called it Logical Insanity [0]. The main argument being that by the time of the atomic bombs, all powers had scaled their "strategic bombings" of civilians to a level that made the atomic bombs just a small step in the logical conclusion of the path of the war.
We should not judge the atomic bombings without the context of US, UK, USSR and Japanese bombings of civilians.
He describes the fire bombing of Tokyo in a way (using primary sources) that definitely makes getting nuked seem not so bad by comparison. Both physically and psychologically.
For many many years I didn't understand why the atomic bomb was considered somehow "worse" than mass firebombing like Tokyo or Dresden.
In the end a friend gave me a good explanation (ironically a Japanese friend who'd attended high school in the US). He said it seemed "unfair" because only one bomb was dropped, while in a mass attack, seemingly much more effort is expended by the attacker and, more importantly, the target has a "chance to fight back" (forget how ineffective anti aircraft fire was in those days, and still is).
After learning that, when this topic came up I would query about where the objections lay and surprisingly, my friend's explanation was quite common -- probably the majority -- even if the person didn't frame it that way.
> I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives.
Probably more of a modern rationalization/justification for the bombings and quite questionable. Consider:
The US strategic bombing survey (an "impartial assessment of the effects of strategic bombing") concluded:
> "Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
It's not generally a good idea to take contemporaneous sources out of context and uncritically. USSBS was basically the same people who had been advocating massive strategic bombing the entire war writing up a report on how effective their own efforts had been. They're not going to come out and say "Yeah, we achieved nothing in Japan and it was only the nukes or Soviets that had any effect". That's not to say the report is useless, just read things more critically.
Whether the bombs were the sole-cause of the surrender is a rather different discussion, and one I understand few historians would argue. It seems difficult to argue that they had no effect given that we now have records of what Japanese leadership was discussing at the time and atomics feature prominently, alongside the soviet invasion. That's why the whole consensus school thing exists, because neither was obviously definitive.
> It's not generally a good idea to take contemporaneous sources out of context and uncritically
Sure. But to be fair-- there were tons of civilian experts involved that had no great personal stake; It's not like it was written by arms manufacturer lobbyists or generals personally involved in past decision making.
And I'm mostly missing strong fact-based counterarguments, so my personal opinion is going to remain that the atomic bombings probably expedited Japans surrender, but were not necessary (nor would a ground invasion have been).
"The experience of the Pacific war supports the findings of the
Survey in Europe that heavy, sustained and accurate attack against
carefully selected targets is required to produce decisive results
when attacking an enemy's sustaining resources . It further supports
the findings in Germany that no nation can long survive the free
exploitation of air weapons over its homeland . For the future it is
important fully to grasp the fact that enemy planes enjoying control
of the sky over one's head can be as disastrous to one's country as
its occupation by physical invasion."
It does literally end with a call to separate the Army Air Forces from the Army.
I haven't found a copy of the whole report, including the hundreds of individual reports, but I've been given to understand that they are thorough, detailed, and contradictory.
You do realize that this statement was in the context of justifying further fire-bombing of Japan's cities? Each one of which would be more violent then the nuclear bombs?
First:
This was written after the war was over-- "justifying further fire-bombing" would be pretty ineffective at that point.
Also, to quote from the survey:
> We underestimated the ability of our air attack on Japan's home
islands, coupled as it was with blockade and previous military
defeats, to achieve unconditional surrender without invasion. By
July 1945, the weight of our air attack had as yet reached only a
fraction of its planned proportion, Japan's industrial potential had been fatally reduced, her civilian population had lost its confidence
in victory and was approaching the limit of its endurance, and her
leaders, convinced of the inevitability of defeat, were preparing to
accept surrender. The only remaining problem was the timing and
terms of that surrender.
This does NOT read like a justification for *more* fire-bombing to me, but rather like a "we bombed them much more than necessary before July already".
They were ready to surrender with conditions. In the end the US allowed them to surrender with a single condition regarding the emperor. Is there any information regarding what their other conditions may have been?
I've been looking for them from the official source I once had, but I cannot find it today.
IIRC, they were:
1. The form of the government is to be preserved; i.e. the Emperor's position is maintained. (I cannot remember if the rest of the government was included, but I don't think so.)
2. Japan is responsible for demobilizing its military.
3. There will be no occupation.
4. Japan is responsible for handling its own war crimes.
And I'm not the only one that thinks you could have achieved the same results by publicly dropping Fat Man and Little Boy on something besides civilian targets.
Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were civilian targets. Hiroshima was the headquarters for the Japanese 2nd Army, which defended half of Japan and Nagasaki was the production center for 90% of the Japanese fleet. Both were critical military targets.
This was debated at the time. It was ultimately rejected:
1) What if the bomb didn't work?
2) What if the bomb was recovered by the Japanese?
3) What if they ignored the demonstration?
4) What if a single Allied soldier died who would not have died if they had dropped it on a military target?
I suggest the first two books of Richard Rhode's book "Making of the Atomic Bomb", which goes into this.
(1) and (2) make no sense. The bomb is more likely to be recovered by the Japanese if it is dropped on a city.
(3) then you drop one demo and have two real ones if they don't surrender to the demo within a few days.
(4) that sucks but that's how it goes, you can't seriously be saying it's justified to kill 200k Japanese civilians to save a small handful of allied lives in the intervening days while we wait for their response to the demo bomb.
It wasn't "we have two and then can't make more", but rather slow production: ~10 days per bomb forecast over the next months. (a third one would have been ready still in August, a few days after the surrender)
This isn't really correct. They had extra material that they wanted to use - but the Army (get this) wanted to collect bombs after the first two, so they could use them to nuke the beaches prior to Americans landing there.
Yeah. a) they made the assumption that the nukes would not be enough, and b) planned for US soldiers to walk on post-bombing irradiated landings.
The scale and effect of radiation was not appreciated in the 40's and probably not into the 60's, given the scale of air testing. I thought much/most of the cast of a John Wayne movie (Ghengis Khan?) ended up with some kind of cancer after being downwind of a Nevada test?
Look for The Atomic Cafe on the 'Net to see what the training films from back then had to say.
From what I've read, the scientists were at least partially aware, but the secrecy of the project caused compartmentalization. Just as an indicator, only two people died of acute radiation exposure in the Manhattan Project, and both people were avoiding the established safety protocols. That seems prima facie evidence that they were aware that high-dose radiation was bad.
I think there was also pushback against those facts becoming more public after the war both due to the fact that the US used the atomic bomb, and also due to industrial uses of radioactive materials that no one wanted to pay for (a la the Radium Girls).
Then why couldn't they drop one demo bomb in a sparsely populated area, wait a week, then drop the second one in a population center if no surrender is forthcoming? Is the delta is probability of surrender really that much lower that it's not worth trying to save 200k civilians via this approach?
You've lost surprise - and the psychological shock that comes with it. Remember that the Allies wanted to maximize that shock, because it gave the dissident forces inside of the Japanese cabinet the most room to challenge the continue prosecution of the war.
Possibly, but it seems speculative to me that this was an important thing. I imagine it would have been very surprising and shocking to have a demo nuke dropped a few miles away from Tokyo. Maybe less shocking, and that difference in shock value reduces the probability of surrender by an unacceptable amount?
> you can't seriously be saying it's justified to kill 200k Japanese civilians to save a small handful of allied lives
I absolutely would argue in favor of this. In fact, I would argue that it would have been morally just to kill every last Japanese person, military or not, if Japan refused surrender (which was part of the Emperor’s plan for self preservation). Remember the context: 1) Japan attacked the U.S. to initiate hostilities and 2) Japanese resistance became more fierce, fanatical, and deadly (ex: suicide bombings by both military and civilians) as the U.S. approached mainland Japan.
You would trade off 200k Japanese civilians for, say, 1000 allied lives? What ratio is morally justified?
If you are arguing that a 200:1 ratio is acceptable, I believe this is a morally bankrupt perspective, given that the consequence of this is a genocide of a people who are otherwise perfectly normal without the broken software that was running in their minds and their society at the time, and given that it is a collectivistic perspective that assigns moral guilt to an entire civilian population (including children) instead of the specific individual bad actors that caused the situation.
Regarding the latter point - on this premise that every single Japanese person shared moral culpability for what Japan was doing - it can't be squared with an understanding of what actually happened. I mean, the existence of children is a QED against it. But even just talking adults - At that stage the country was a fascist dictatorship, with multiple democratically elected leaders assassinated by the military (which was taken over by a fanatical fascist contingent in the 1930s) and a tremendous propaganda effort by the military to control all information and brainwash the general public into thinking they were doing good and just work overseas. Combine this with a poor, ignorant farmer population, and I don't think the simple moral prism that you're applying works.
What ratio are you arguing is morally acceptable? Please give us a specific number with justification.
It's easy to act morally superior decades later. We're not the ones who were forced to make a hard decision in extreme circumstances. How could President Truman possibly morally justify telling Americans that even one more of their sons had to die in order to protect enemy civilians?
If it's 10:1, then that's basically saying that Japanese adult civilian lives are worth absolutely nothing and can be killed without any moral concern, but Japanese children are worth the same as allied lives.
Going any further (e.g 200:1) is unjustifible unless we adopt the collectivistic moral guilt framework where one has moral guilt (including children) simply for existing in that country at that time, irrespective of individual culpability.
"How could President Truman possibly morally justify telling Americans that even one more of their sons had to die in order to protect enemy civilians?"
Just because the general public would find it difficult to put moral worth into civilian lives of an enemy doesn't make those lives worthless.
I also don't like the language of calling them enemy civilians. They are civilians who live in a country that's currently an enemy.
You're engaging in pseudo-intellectual quantification that is meaningless and unbound by anything objective. But that's besides the point.
The point is, the U.S. was pulled into war by Japan and did not have had any obligation to lose even one more person to end the conflict. And yet the calculus was clear: the loss of life by the U.S. was going to significantly increase per unit of effort/victory as it approached mainland Japan.
> doesn't make those lives worthless
No one is arguing this. But when it comes to the life of my son or brother vs. the life of someone I don't know, I know what my choice will be every single time. And I would bet my entire net worth that 999 out of 1,000 people would choose similarly in that situation. The instinct to stay alive completely outstrips armchair intellectualism and 20/20 hindsight.
I am offering my opinion, but you already knew that and were just being sarcastic.
It is also not meaningless, you simply totally ignored the rationale I provided for the 10:1 figure. It's the ratio that roughly equalizes the moral worth of allied troops with Japanese children.
Admittedly this is all subjective, but that also applies to your opinions.
"The point is, the U.S. was pulled into war by Japan and did not have had any obligation to lose even one more person to end the conflict."
The US wasn't pulled into war by Japanese children, though, and you seem to be perfectly fine with their extermination under your perverse doctrine of collective guilt.
"No one is arguing this. But when it comes to the life of my son or brother vs. the life of someone I don't know, I know what my choice will be every single time. And I would bet my entire net worth that 999 out of 1,000 people would choose similarly in that situation. The instinct to stay alive completely outstrips armchair intellectualism and 20/20 hindsight"
People decide to do lots of shitty things for all sorts of reasons. The mere act of deciding to do said shitty thing and the fact that that shitty thing is a popular choice doesn't make it less shitty and doesn't serve as a moral justification.
Not if the Japanese person was running at you with a weapon in-hand:
> In addition, the Japanese had organized the Volunteer Fighting Corps, which included all healthy men aged 15 to 60 and women 17 to 40 for a total of 28 million people, for combat support and, later, combat jobs. Weapons, training and uniforms were generally lacking: many were armed with nothing better than antiquated firearms, molotov cocktails, longbows, swords, knives, bamboo or wooden spears, and even clubs and truncheons: they were expected to make do with what they had.[63][64] One mobilized high school girl, Yukiko Kasai, found herself issued an awl and told, "Even killing one American soldier will do. ... You must aim for the abdomen."[65] They were expected to serve as a "second defense line" during the Allied invasion, and to conduct guerrilla warfare in urban areas and mountains.
The entire concept of "war crime" is a post hoc rationalization for killing one's enemies after the conclusion of hostilities (see Nuremberg trials). It is also semantically redundant. It's like saying "candy chocolate" or "dirty mud".
Further, for much of human history, genocide (or the attempt thereof) was standard practice in warfare. In other words, this is a 20th century neologism and not some kind of timeless truth.
How many people would you kill to stay alive? Or to keep your loved ones alive? The truth is, you can't know as it is impossible to simulate that scenario unless you're actually in it. But if I had to guess, for the average person, the number would be much greater than 1.
> The entire concept of "war crime" is a post hoc rationalization for killing one's enemies after the conclusion of hostilities (see Nuremberg trials.)
The concept of universal laws of war to which all participants are bound and in principal accountable long predates the Nuremberg trials.
> Further, for much of human history, genocide (or the attempt thereof) was standard practice in warfare
For most of human history, slavery was a standard practice, both in and out of warfare, that doesn't make it right.
You seem to misunderstand me. I don't make an argument for its "rightness".
Rather, war crimes will always occur in war. And the primitive instinct to stay alive, at almost any price, is programmed into us. When faced with existential threats to our loved ones, these ivory tower questions about the relative worths of lives (100:1? 10:1?) are exposed for the nonsense they always were. Our biological programming kicks in: "survive at any cost - protect your own – eradicate the threat". It is only subsequent generations, from upon high in their ivory towers and far removed from the threat, who are able to condemn the savagery of the survivors.
In other words, it is always best to not enter a war. Perhaps even if attacked. 9/11 and the U.S.'s insane and disastrous responses in Afghanistan and Iraq being the latest demonstrations.
And yes - That's exactly the frame of reference that war planners used. The axis powers went further, not only was all of the Jewish, Slav, British, China, and American lives not worth any of their own, their own peoples lives were not worth it.
Not a pleasant thought to think of - but go look at the ideologies that the Axis powers actually embraced, instead of cartoon nazis and modern day revisionisms.
I am hardly apologizing for the Axis powers here, I believe the war against them was just and necessary. I am just trying to understand the points you raised above without having to read through the two books.
The first two risks are unchanged, a failed and recovered Little Boy always carried the same risk. Three, what if they ignored the bombings? And four I think you misstated, but how do we know a single more allied soldier didn't die because we dropped it on a civilian target?
The first two risks are only unchanged for a demonstration that was not announced to japan, and IMO a demonstration of a nuclear bomb without telling Japan to observe it would not have been effective.
After the bombing of Hiroshima, Suzuki stated to the press that Japan would not surrender, which suggests to me that bombing the middle of nowhere as a demonstration would probably not have persuaded the Japanese government to surrender. Why would a non military demonstration have been more impactful than bombing a city?
Politicians tell bullshit all the time. If they say they will surrender in a week, it's very hard to convince the cannon folder to continue fighting while they negotiate some kind of amnesty for the top level generals.
Perhaps, but at the time the supply of nuclear weapons was very small. US leaders weren't sure how many they would need to use in order to compel an unconditional surrender so they couldn't afford to waste one on a demonstration and then potentially be caught short.
We already "wasted" one on a demonstration, and what was the great risk of being caught short? Japan potentially faces another round of conventional bombing?
> The Trinity Gadget was officially a Y-1561 device, as was the Fat Man used a few weeks later in the bombing of Nagasaki. The two were very similar, with only minor differences, the most obvious being the absence of fuzing and the external ballistic casing. The bombs were still under development, and small changes continued to be made to the Fat Man design.
So, not identical. But "not anything close" seems wrong.
> I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives.
I heard of the relentless Japanese insurgency growing up. My own research did not produce that result for the time leading up to the atomic bomb and I find the atomic bombing unnecessary. It is noteworthy that I am not comparing potential death tolls. I am comparing ionizing radiation though and its long tail effects, to the lack of them.
I am also mostly of the opinion of the idea that Japan was going to surrender.
There were a lot of proposals between fire bombing and nuclear bombs, some of the proposals are actually hilarious and others are pretty interesting and some even seem practical.
My view of the atomic bombs were that they were dropped because we wanted to drop them. It doesn't cause me consternation to acknowledge that and I just wish other people would. We nuked two cities and told everyone else to never do it themselves, we even gave them their country back and let them whitewash all the education around the event, why not just say that? I view all of the moral and rationale arguments to be surprisingly juvenile, when at the end of the day we do things because we want to. Even when comparing potential allied lives saved, well, surprise!, we can still save allied lives by nuking everyone and its not an argument at all.
The Japanese surrender terms were flatly unacceptable: retention of the Imperial gov't, no foreign occupation of Japan, Japan surrenders occupied territories and returns to pre-war borders, Japan handles their own disarmament and prosecution of Japanese war criminals. The surrender they were attempting to obtain was basically a rollback to the status quo of 1935.
As early as mid-1944, the cabinet accepted that the war was unwinnable for them, and their strategy shifted to intransigent defence in the hope that by the time the U.S. cleared all the islands and showed up at the Home Islands, they'd be too exhausted to invade and would accept the above terms. At no time did they offer any terms of surrender less than the above, including after the dropping of the atomic bombs (according to the diary of the foreign minister Tojo). Indeed, after dropping both atomic bombs, half the cabinet still refused to surrender.
> The surrender they were attempting to obtain was basically a rollback to the status quo of 1935.
Can you tell me more about the status quo of 1935 and why that was a problem for the US or allies?
I know it is a different Japan that did brutal things in the region, but they didn't attack US then and they weren't doing.. anything relevant to the allies. The stuff in Europe was the issue.
okay, interesting similarity, another similarity is that we (the US) didn't go to war against Hitler over occupied lands or the murdered Jews. Some of the allies happened to feel obligated to go to war over the occupied lands of their own partners, with the latter reality about the killings being neglected for an entire decade. The US stayed out of all, until eventually it was directly attacked by Japan and went to war against the whole Axis.
There isn't a history to support that either outcome would have been an absurdity.
yes, I'm reading about the order of events now. Germany declared war on US after US declared war on Japan. Germany's agreement with Japan did not provide for this kind of assurance if Japan attacked another country first. Hitler dismissed this reminder and had low regard for US military largely due to his blind hatred and belief that the country was weakened by Jewish and African Americans. whoops. what dumb ideas.
I get what you are saying, the reason I think it is a stretch to focus on the Jewish people murdered in Europe, is because the US mistreated them too, before, then and for decades after. It relies on retroactively applying sympathy towards Jewish people, to make it seem like the US and allies were actually involved for moral reasons, and morals reasons that included oppressed Jewish people. Liberating the camps was a stretch goal that occurred once soldiers busted into them and saw how dire it was first hand. People suspected, of course.
Interestingly enough, that view is being challenged right now. (I have a book on my bookshelf waiting for my intention).
Taking Hitler's second book more at it's words - its more that Hitler desperately wanted to get Japan into the War to keep America out of the war long enough to knock Soviet Russia out. He committed to declaring war on America if Japan did (prior to 12/1) to try and get Japan to take the brunt of the damage up front front.
Hitler bet that like in 1918, it would simply take a long time for the USA to build up it's armament. But it's also clear that Hitler viewed the United States - as agents of World Jewry - and it's continent of resources as the ultimate opponent for a unified germanic Europe.
(The best source off the top of my head for this PoV is Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction).
No. The difference was, the actual terms didn't leave the existing government in power, didn't leave Japan in control of its own territory, and didn't leave Japan in charge of prosecuting their own war criminals. Those are some fairly big differences.
If you compare the Japanese government after the end of the US occupation to the Japanese government in 1935, the difference is stark.
no foreign occupation of Japan The U.S. occupied Japan and had absolute rule over it
Japan surrenders occupied territories and returns to pre-war borders Japan was occupied by the U.S. and had zero territorial integrity or control over the Home Islands.
Japan handles their own disarmament The U.S. disarmed Japan and actually did so, rather than hide a bunch of war materials
prosecution of Japanese war criminals. The U.S. prosecuted many Japanese war criminals, rather than hold a few show trials.
retention of the Imperial gov't The Imperial gov't was disbanded and replaced with direct rule by McArthur until the new democratic structure was set up. A figurehead emperor was retained because it was useful to do so.
In short, the Japanese surrender terms had to do with Japan as a nation pulling back from its conquests and making some notional gestures at disarmament and prosecution of war criminals. What they got in the end was complete surrender to their enemy who rebuilt their nation the way the enemy decided to.
They were lucky insofar as the U.S. desire was to rebuild Japan as a prosperous democratic nation to serve as an eastern bulwark against communist expansion. The German plan for western Russia was to depopulate it and repopulate it with Germans.
The Bomb was unique in that it was purely psychological in nature. It was a weapon that removed any chance that the Japanese leaders could sacrifice their own people to buy their escape from the war.
This was literally the policy of the Japanese government - "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million". Sacrifice every Japanese life to preserve the Emperor, and more importantly, his militaristic governments.
There is a awful lot of moral relativism in these threads. Frankly, I strongly recommend that people who think that there was some sort of equivilent between the Nazis and the western powers, or between the Japanese and the Americans in World War 2 put down youtube videos, and really do a deep dive into what these states were really about.
Weird thing is Imperial Japanese system was something the country adopted as part of modernization effort over military Shogunate system. During the Edo era under Tokugawa shogunate, the country kept the borders closed with little effort being made to expand for literally multiple centuries. Only after the Meiji government was established and it made efforts to "reach and surpass Europe" the Imperial Japan stuff happened.
How were they sacrificing the civilians that lived in the Japan island? They were just there, breathing, eating and doing their lives, not shooting soldiers or invading countries. The US decided that it was fine to burn them alive to defeat the emperor-military system.
You can argue that it was a better alternative than an invasion or some other strategy, sure. But the reality is that the civilians, who couldn't go anywhere else, were killed, en masse, by bombs dropped by the US.
>They were just there, breathing, eating and doing their lives, not shooting soldiers or invading countries.
Japan had factories, of course, but a lot of the ancillary things to war, like uniforms, etc., were made in people's homes, rice and so on was reserved for soldiers and the surplus was then distributed in the communities. The economy was massively focused on furthering the war effort --even moreso than the US.
I think you need to listen and watch Japanese programming from that era to get the picture of how involved the civilian population was in the war effort.
Just to be clear - the Japanese factories where in the cities. The Japanese pulled apart their factories and ran forges in people's backyards.
Japanese civilians in battle zones routinely walked up to Allied soldiers with grenades to blow them up. They threw themselves off cliffs rather then surrender.
We still have this concept that somehow the German and Japanese citizens where not involved in the actions of their governments. It's as much of a myth as the myth of a "Clean Wehrmacht"
They literally disassembled their factories in many cases, and put equipment into people's houses. The broke the factories into workshops, which where highly inefficient. The Japanese believed this would make them resistant to bombing, but also scale well since they didn't have to centralize at single sites. (the exact opposite of Fordism). They were incorrect on both counts.
And no, there are no documented records of people in Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima doing it - killing people tends to make them unable to engage in further violence (though it may encourage societies to further violence). but there are records in Okinawa, and in virtually every other sizable Japanese population engaging in violence.
That even includes in Hawaii. See the Nihau incident.
Well of course civilians will fight invaders in Okinawa, it's their homeland. The Nihau incident, on the other hand, involved hawaiians, not japanese. If you consider them part of the japanese population, what about the US? How many americans from japanese descent attacked soldiers there?
About the bombings, the targeted bombing wasn't working very well because of weather, so they decided to obliterate cities with incendiary bombs, civilians and all.
But returning to mass murdering civilians to advance military objectives: what would you think of the Soviet Union destroying with atomic weapons Munich and Frankfurt, to force Hitler to an unconditional surrender? Would reducing the deaths of soviet soldiers be a good justification?
The Hawaii's where the ones attacked by the Japanese natives who were on the islands.
Your point is good - that's a isolated event - but it was a isolated event that was taken into account in the military actions that followed.
And yes. If the soviet union had destroyed munich and frankfurt (Frankfurt was the transportation hub of the western front) to force Hitler to surrender it would have been justified. To draw the full conclusion - it would not have been justified to bomb Geneva (since it wasn't a military target).
And frankly, bombing Frankfurt would have been far far less heinous then what the Red Army did to East Prussia, which could not be justified. The difference there is that the soviets had already overrun Prussia when they committed their war atrocities. Likewise, what US solders did to German PoW in more isolated circumstances.
The Battle of Okinawa seems like an example - Both willingly and by coercion, a large portion of the civilian population was sent into the battle to die with minimal training or equipment, including children.
Is there some reason to think the populations of those cities would have acted differently if the front lines came to them at that time?
The US was doing exactly the same! Building planes, tanks, sending food, making uniforms and weapons. There were even food coupons. Do you think it would've been fine for Japan to attack with atomic bombs a couple of US cities? Would you consider that a mass killing of civilians?
And? If Japan could have, they would have done what they had at their disposal to neutralize us as their enemy.
War is not fine. Dropping bombs is not fine. But they would have. They had plans to build bombs for exactly that, to drop on US cities. they also had plans to engage in biological warfare on US soil. So, yes, they would have. Japan was indiscriminate when they attacked China. If they had had the ability to reach US soil, they would have waged the same here, no doubt about it at all.
Germany would have done the same too. I mean, those guys were not fooling around. Do you think the US, the UK and the SU should have taken it easy with Germany because eventually we would have won a "kinder" (no pun intended) war?
War is crime. It's preposterous to frame it as not a crime. Crimes will happen in war, whether a "good" war or war on the "bad" side. War is crime. There should be no confusion about that.
In the end, would have the Japanese population suffered more with a conventional ground war vs firebombings or atomic bombings? I believe the consensus is stopping the war as quickly as possible spared the population the worst of it.
Not "Allied" but all bombings, including Axis bombings of purely civilians were a crime. However, you have to make a decision do you engage or sit back and watch the larger crime happen?
In great wars like this the distinction between military and civilian is tenuous. Japan, like Germany, was thoroughly a martial economy.
If you start a fire, don't complain later you got burnt.
The point is the WWII Nazis and Japanese are famous for killing / torturing people even after they surrendered.
I'm not saying others didn't, but Nazis and Japanese took it to another level than the west. (Although to be fair Sovjet Communists should be mentioned together with them.)
Yes, you are correct, Nazis and Japanese committed war crimes. And the US dropped not one, but two atomic bombs to majorly civilian population centers. Different scales, different philosophy, but mass murder of civilians just the same.
The definition of "military target" was an arbitrary definition (like most definitions) done by those who decided to bomb them. Kyoto was also a possible target favoured by the military, and it was replaced by Nagasaki.
And as you know, Hiroshima was chosen because it was undamaged and the effects of the bomb could be studied. So we can add "weapons testing on civilians" to the list of crimes.
>Frankly, I strongly recommend that people who think that there was some sort of equivilent between the Nazis and the western powers, or between the Japanese and the Americans in World War 2 put down youtube videos, and really do a deep dive into what these states were really about.
There is no moral equivalence between the allies and the axis. But even a just war can be waged unjustly by the good side. Is it really a good look to compete with the most vicious regimes in history how cruelly one can treat one's opponents, particularly those who are just caught on the wrong side? Is it collective punishment to treat an entire civilian population under military dictatorship as culpable as the members of the junta themselves? Even if it's collateral damage, under what circumstances is it justifiable to burn to death 100000 men women and children in one night? I don't see moral relativism in raising these questions at all, rather a consistent moral stance which applies the same standards to all scenarios, friend or foe.
If it's a question of "[competing] with the most vicious regimes in history how cruelly one can treat one's opponents", then the US lost very badly to Japan.
"As can be seen, nearly one out of every one-hundred people controlled by Japan [between 1937 and 1945] was murdered, or almost three per thousand people per year." (https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM)
'...Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization...'
"...two days before President Roosevelt left for the Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin in early February 1945, he was shown a forty-page memorandum drafted by General MacArthur outlining a Japanese offer for surrender almost identical with the terms subsequently concluded by his successor, President Truman. The single difference was the Japanese insistence on retention of the emperor, which was not acceptable to the American strategists at the time, though it was ultimately allowed in the final peace terms...
"Specifically, the terms of the Japanese peace offers of late January 1945 were as follows:
Full surrender of the Japanese forces, air, land and sea, at home and in all occupied countries.
Surrender of all arms and ammunition.
Agreement of the Japanese to occupation of their homeland and island possessions.
Relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea and Formosa.
Regulation of Japanese industry.
Surrender of designated war criminals for trial.
Release of all prisoners.
"Other than retention of the emperor these terms were identical to the final surrender terms."
I would have agreed on the use of the atomic bomb if they didn't use it on a city. They could have demonstrated on a smaller island or a navy outpost near Japan or on Japan. The US have shown no pity bombing city and killing innocents during world war 2 so I think for the US generals showing off your new bomb by erasing two city is a good strategy for them.
You're thinking as a modern man. The public in Japan would have heard nothing about a show of force done in the middle of nowhere. Heck, for all the public was concerned, the naval war had been going great.
The public does not decide what to do on an ongoing war specially during the imperial Japanese rule or any modern war with an organized army. The Americans just have a habit of destroying city with non combatants during world war 2, they've done it in Europe and Asia.
IMO, the Japanese surrender had just as much to do with the USSR opening a new front against the country (less than a month before) with its massive invasion of Manchuria, and its capitulation was similar in a way to German forces moving west to surrender to the US instead of the USSR.
Don't forget that the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were early ones with very limited yields. Imagining a modern bombardment that's worse than a modern nuke is very difficult, especially when you take fallout, radiation poisoning and pollution into account.
"I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives."
You are absolutely wrong about that. A cursory examination would reveal that Japan was ready to surrender before the bombs were dropped. There was only one condition that they get to keep their emperor, but the allies ended up following that condition even after the unconditional surrender, so that just wasn't relevant.
And the logic that the atomic bombs were not that bad because there were even worse bombings is just wrong.
This is incorrect. We have the diary of Shigenori Tojo, foreign minister of Japan in August 1945. He describes in detail the cabinet proceedings before and after the dropping of the bombs. Even after the bombs were dropped, half the cabinet (the military half) was still holding out for the terms they'd been offering all along: no foreign occupation, Japan retreats to pre-war borders, Japan handles its won disarmament, and Japan retains the Imperial gov't, meaning the whole structure that started the war in the first place. The Emperor overruled them, but only did so after dropping the bombs because Japan has a long history of emperors being sequestered by the Shogun or cabinet when they did not respect the prerogatives of the actual governing entity.
What the Japanese actually offered for surrender was unconditional surrender except for being allowed to keep a figurehead emperor, which the U.S. recognized as useful for governing post-war Japan, and accepted.
> A cursory examination would reveal that Japan was ready to surrender before the bombs were dropped. There was only one condition that they get to keep their emperor, but the allies ended up following that condition even after the unconditional surrender, so that just wasn't relevant.
So what you're actually saying is, they weren't willing to surrender under the terms offered to them?
There’s a small bit of truth to the A-bombs saving japanese/American lives if negotiations of surrender were to fall through
But I think modern day, the A-bombs are largely viewed as a show of force against the Soviets. Sort of like D-Day was so Soviets couldn’t steamroll Germany & then take all of Europe as well…
Let me be blunt: what you believe isn't relevant. It happened the way it did and what the other leg of that choice contains is something that nobody knows and therefore debating it is pointless.
What we do know is that a great crime was committed, the balance of which is also irrelevant, because whether one, ten, ten thousand or 100,000 or even millions of Japanese lives would been saved we do not know. But we do know how many were lost.
I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives.
You can believe that if you want of course - but it seems simplistic at best to ignore other factors, such as the planned Soviet entry into the war on August 15. And some believe even that wouldn't have been necessary:
Asked in 1945 for his opinion on dropping the atomic bomb, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower replied: “I was against it on two counts. First the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.” Fleet Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff to both Roosevelt and Truman, flatly declared that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.” Even the official US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded unequivocally that “Japan would have surrendered if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
> And some believe even that wouldn't have been necessary:
Those people would be wrong as the historical record shows:
> The Japanese Army and Navy had their own independent atomic-bomb programs and therefore the Japanese understood enough to know how very difficult building it would be. Therefore, many Japanese and in particular the military members of the government refused to believe the United States had built an atomic bomb, and the Japanese military ordered their own independent tests to determine the cause of Hiroshima's destruction.[84] Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, argued that even if the United States had made one, they could not have many more.[85] American strategists, having anticipated a reaction like Toyoda's, planned to drop a second bomb shortly after the first, to convince the Japanese that the U.S. had a large supply.[61][86]
Even after the second bomb there was still some disagreement:
> In the middle of the meeting, shortly after 11:00, news arrived that Nagasaki, on the west coast of Kyūshū, had been hit by a second atomic bomb (called "Fat Man" by the United States). By the time the meeting ended, the Big Six had split 3–3. Suzuki, Tōgō, and Admiral Yonai favored Tōgō's one additional condition to Potsdam, while General Anami, General Umezu, and Admiral Toyoda insisted on three further terms that modified Potsdam: that Japan handle their own disarmament, that Japan deal with any Japanese war criminals, and that there be no occupation of Japan.[96]
* Ibid
The Japanese government were still split on how to proceed after two atomic bombs were dropped. They were willing to stop fighting but only under their terms.
If Germany was willing to stop fighting, but only if Hitler and the Nazis were allowed to stay in power (and keep a bunch of territory, etc), would that have been acceptable? Because that's basically what the Japanese were asking for.
Indeed the conflict (in favor of continuing the war after the nukes) within Japan's government was so widespread that literally right up to the arrival of MacArthur there was an intense effort internally by Japan to put down a constant bubbling of coup efforts from the military, which wanted to keep fighting to the last man (Hirohito in his famous broadcast to the people of Japan recognized those emotions and asked the people to suppress them). The Japanese people often also had no idea just how poorly their military was faring toward the end, they didn't know they were clearly doomed to lose (which only added to the cultural resistance to capitulation). And it's important to note that their military was by far the most powerful faction of the government, as such it held enormous sway as to whether the war continued or not.
People that pretend Japan was going to surrender without the nukes (they barely surrendered with the nukes), are either liar apologists (America bad) or extraordinarily ignorant of what actually happened (they should read a book rather than regurgitating Reddit propaganda).
> People that pretend Japan was going to surrender without the nukes (they barely surrendered with the nukes), are either liar apologists (America bad) or extraordinarily ignorant of what actually happened (they should read a book rather than regurgitating Reddit propaganda).
Comment above quotes Eisenhower giving that opinion. I don’t think he was either of those things.
Eisenhower was neither a Japanese cabinet official, whose accounts directly show that Eisenhower's opinion wasn't justified, nor did he have any significant involvement in the Pacific theater to give credibility to his opinion. Bringing up Eisenhower's hot take as a counterargument is really a stretch.
Nor did he have any significant involvement in the Pacific theater to give credibility to his opinion.
An odd thing to say, given that he was assigned to the General Staff to assist in long-range planning for both theaters immediately after Pearl Harbor. And it wasn't like being a Supreme Allied Commander kept him in an information bubble in regard to matters outside of Europe.
Eisenhower was neither a Japanese cabinet official,
Did we hear you correctly? Is that even an argument?
They were outvoted or simply not listened to, you mean.
Otherwise, the argument becomes circular: "Clearly there was no significant possibility that the Japanese Cabinet would have agreed to surrender had not the first two bombs been dropped. As evidenced by the fact that the bombs were dropped, and they did, after all, surrender."
It's more like "As evidenced by the fact that even after the first was dropped they were not willing to surrender, and after the second was dropped the Supreme War Direction Council or Inner Cabinet was still deadlocked on what to do."
Two atomic bombs being dropped on them was not decisive in getting the Cabinet to decide to surrender. It took the Emperor's involvement to break the deadlock and even then there was a coup attempt to stop the surrender:
What action(s) with less weight/influence than two atomic bombs and the Emperor could have swayed the Japanese Cabinet? And even those things were only barely over the line:
> When word of the emperor’s decision reached General Toroshiro Kawabe, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Imperial Army, he noted in his diary that he concurred with another senior general in doubting that the overseas commanders would comply with the emperor’s order. That these officers correctly doubted even an order from the emperor would secure compliance with key parts of the armed forces, was swiftly confirmed by messages from the commanders in China and the Southern Area, declaring they would not comply with the surrender. Their commands mustered between a quarter and a third of all Japanese servicemen. It took Hirohito’s personal emissaries to persuade these commands to surrender.
In 1942 the leaders of the US, UK, France, and Russia had agreed that unconditional surrender was the only acceptable end to the war - for a variety of reasons including partly that no ally would negotiate surrender terms separately from the rest. The Allies held true to that for Germany and Italy. In Japan, even after two atomic bombings, Japan was still trying to negotiate terms. Ultimately we did break from that by agreeing informally (not in writing) to one of their terms - not to execute the emperor - and with that Japan finally agreed to surrender.
Even so, a military group attempted a coup to stop the surrender the night before - after the emperor's surrender message had been recorded but before it was broadcast.
After the invasion of Okinawa but before the atomic bombs, Japan was a country that was clearly militarily defeated, but not close to surrender.
> After the invasion of Okinawa but before the atomic bombs, Japan was a country that was clearly militarily defeated, but not close to surrender.
The Japanese themselves knew that they could not win the war in 1944:
> Rear Adm. Soichi Takagi, who was attached to the ministerial secretariat of the Naval General Staff, made a study between 20 September 1943 and February 1944, of the war's battle lesson up to that time. He conclude that Japan could not win and verbally presented his findings in March 1944 to Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai and Vice Adm. Seibi Inouye. Takagi's study, interestingly enough, was undertaken at the end of the second year of the war--the time beyond which, the Japanese Navy's top command had estimated before hostilities, Japan could not fight a successful war. Takagi's estimate was based on an analysis of fleet, air, and merchant ship losses suffered to date, the serious difficulties in acquiring essential imported materials, the internal confusion in Japan, and a growing feeling among the "intelligentsia" that Tojo should be let out. It seemed clear to Takagi that potential long-range air attacks on the home islands and Japan's inability to import essential materials for production had created a situation which dictated that Japan should seek a compromise peace. In Takagi's view Japan at this time should have envisaged withdrawing from China and giving up both Korea and Formosa as part of the peace terms. His study in any case documented the fears Yonai and others held before the war and lent support to the increasing but still carefully guarded concern of their fellow Jushin that all was not well with Tojo's prosecution of the war.
* “It would have been a politically unpopular move domestically”
* “there was no alternative to end the war”
They are both true.
Well, there was another "option". It was for the US to invade the Home Islands and fight against the Japanese:
> In addition, the Japanese had organized the Volunteer Fighting Corps, which included all healthy men aged 15 to 60 and women 17 to 40 for a total of 28 million people, for combat support and, later, combat jobs. Weapons, training and uniforms were generally lacking: many were armed with nothing better than antiquated firearms, molotov cocktails, longbows, swords, knives, bamboo or wooden spears, and even clubs and truncheons: they were expected to make do with what they had.[63][64] One mobilized high school girl, Yukiko Kasai, found herself issued an awl and told, "Even killing one American soldier will do. ... You must aim for the abdomen."[65] They were expected to serve as a "second defense line" during the Allied invasion, and to conduct guerrilla warfare in urban areas and mountains.
Having the Japanese throw themselves against the US invasion and American troops slaughter them to defend themselves is not a viable "option" in my mind. Perhaps you feel differently.
The entry of the Soviet Union into the union was concurrent with the dropping of the atomic bomb. It’s impossible to say for sure whether that would have been sufficient to drive the Japanese to surrender if it were to have occurred without the bombs being dropped. However it’s perfectly reasonable to speculate that.
As to Japanese preparations… I’d you haven’t surrendered and invasion is imminent, then you’re going to do whatever is needed to prepare for said invasion.
The Soviets entering the war was not enough to push the Japanese to end the war:
> These differences continued to be examined and hope of favorable word from Russia had been all but abandoned when very early in the morning of 9 August the news arrived that Russia had declared war. Although considerable pessimism had prevailed regarding the outcome of the negotiations, the Government was not prepared for war with the Soviets, nor the military capable of any effective counter-plan. Suzuki calculated that he had a choice of resigning or taking immediate positive action, which could be either declaring war on Russia and continuing until the whole Nation was destroyed or accepting the Potsdam Declaration.
The Japanese were willing to declare war on the Soviets even though they knew they could not win.
Further, they new they could not win in 1944:
> Rear Adm. Soichi Takagi, who was attached to the ministerial secretariat of the Naval General Staff, made a study between 20 September 1943 and February 1944, of the war's battle lesson up to that time. He conclude that Japan could not win and verbally presented his findings in March 1944 to Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai and Vice Adm. Seibi Inouye. Takagi's study, interestingly enough, was undertaken at the end of the second year of the war--the time beyond which, the Japanese Navy's top command had estimated before hostilities, Japan could not fight a successful war. Takagi's estimate was based on an analysis of fleet, air, and merchant ship losses suffered to date, the serious difficulties in acquiring essential imported materials, the internal confusion in Japan, and a growing feeling among the "intelligentsia" that Tojo should be let out. It seemed clear to Takagi that potential long-range air attacks on the home islands and Japan's inability to import essential materials for production had created a situation which dictated that Japan should seek a compromise peace. In Takagi's view Japan at this time should have envisaged withdrawing from China and giving up both Korea and Formosa as part of the peace terms. His study in any case documented the fears Yonai and others held before the war and lent support to the increasing but still carefully guarded concern of their fellow Jushin that all was not well with Tojo's prosecution of the war.
* Ibid
Yet they continued to fight in the hopes of grinding down the US' / Allies' will to fight and get better terms.
There are no sets of facts that support the hypothesis that the Japanese would be willing to surrender without first being beaten down mercilessly. That beating could have been done in the 'traditional' way with troops, or with the atomic bomb. The estimates on the land invasion:
> The U.S. Sixth Army, which would invade and occupy Kyushu, estimated 124,935 U.S. battle casualties, including 25,000 dead, plus 269,000 non-battle casualties (disease, accident, etc.) for Kyushu alone. The JCS came up with an estimate that a 90-day campaign on Kyushu would cost 156-175,000 battle casualties, with 38,000 killed in action. By late July, the JCS was forecasting 500,000 casualties at the high end and 100,000 at the low end. In late July 1945, the War Department provided an estimate that the entire Downfall operations would cause between 1.7 to 4 million U.S. casualties, including 400-800,000 U.S. dead, and 5 to 10 million Japanese dead. (Given that the initial Downfall plan called for 1,792,700 troops to go ashore in Japan, this estimate is indeed most sobering, and suggests many more troops than planned would need to be fed into a meat grinder).
The US (Truman and others) concluded that they were not willing to have Allied troops suffer just the Japanese refused to accept the reality that they were beaten. And while the deaths of a few hundred thousand Japanese from the atomic bombs is regrettable, the lives of several more million Japanese were spared.
The Soviets would not have been able to make a meaningful entry to the war in Japan at that time. Firstly because almost all of their armed forces were in Europe and secondly because they didn't have a pacific fleet.
Just for context, the invasion of the island of Okinawa just weeks prior had consisted of more than 1,600 allied ships. Japan would have to be a much larger task. Where were the Soviets going to get thousands of ships?
The Japanese empire extended into mainland east Asia at the time. There’s no reason why the soviets couldn’t have made meaningful entry into the war against Japan through Manchuria and the Korea peninsula.
They had already done that. At that point, Japan didn't care a whole lot about those territories. The IJN barely bothered to make a defense and the Japanese Imperial Navy opted out entirely.
> At that point, Japan didn't care a whole lot about those territories.
They weren’t really in a position to care any more. I’m fairly certain someone at the top was fairly miffed all their hard won gains were quickly disappearing.
Japan wanted to defend the home island, and if it weren't for the threat of continued nuclear annihilation, they would have. This means either the Soviets would have to figure out a way to launch and maintain an amphibious assault, or they would have to sit on the sidelines.
Japan wanted to negotiate terms. Part of their belief that they could hold out came from the notion that the soviets would come to the negotiating table as a neutral third party.
One can debate whether the Soviets would have been able to invade the Home Islands, or whether this would have been necessary to press the Cabinet into surrendering.
But it does seem strange to say they were not in a position to make a "meaningful" entry by that point, given the order of battle employed in the Manchuria campaign (per WP):
Maybe they weren't going to help invade mainland Japan straight away but there were still plenty of Japanese troops in China that needed to be dealt with.
Considering that the Japanese where ready for full scale war against a US invasion, even using old people and children against the invaders...
I can't alse even imagine the scale of bloodshed that an amphibian landing in the style of Normandy would cost in dead soldiers for a territory the size of japan.
It was also a great bluff for the Americans, because after they used where able to produce 4 bombs. They tested on in the desert, droped 2 in japan they got only one left after that they where saving to clean the beaches for a possible invasion.
My late father who lived to 101 always felt Truman was the greatest president of his lifetime because he authorized use of those two atomic bombs. See my father knew he would have been part of that invasion of the Japanese mainland.
At the end of his life nothing angered him more than people trying to say that decision was a mistake. I told him that these advocates weren't alive at the time and thus couldn't understand his point of view. They focus on what horrible destruction it caused and not the price Americans would pay if it had not been used. If there had been a ground invasion of Japan far more people would have died, both Japanese and Americans.
Also, Germany did something very similar near the end of the war, as they got desperate for manpower and fighting moved into their own territory.
[EDIT] Oh, and see farther down the page for, "Civilian losses, suicides, and atrocities". The lived experience of Okinawa (one of only a couple "home" territories for Japan that the US invaded before the bombs) was surely part of why so many expected an invasion of Japan to be a bitter, horrifying bloodbath.
Read a little further down and the description has a different character: the Imperial Japanese Army showed, at best, an indifference to the lives of Japanese and indigenous civilians in Okinawa. Worse than the indifference, they propagandized civilians to believe that the Americans would rape, murder, and torture them and encouraged them to commit suicide or to launch suicide attacks and otherwise tried to maneuver civilians into harm's way.
At the time it probably did look like civilians were being turned into defensive soldiers- in the fullness of time, I think it looks more like a desperate and cruel army brutalizing a civilian population, sometimes pushing them into harm's way. I'd also presume that the treatment of the civilian population was worse for indigenous Okinawans-- maybe even today Okinawans can find themselves treated as 'not real Japanese'.
It's been a while since I read 'Embracing Defeat' but I recall its summary of the state of Japan towards the end of the war and a lecturer saying, in effect, that nobody had to invade Japan to cause the deaths of millions, the supply chain (Asian mainland colonies collapsing) / labor (men at all near military age gone to war and many of them dead or captured) / agricultural situation was so dire that the U.S. could have set a blockade and millions of Japanese would have died with 0 fighting.
The counter-argument to the necessity of the bombs is basically that the U.S. knew Japan could not effectively resist and though the U.S. might not have had a way of guessing, the highest levels of Japanese government were already in the process of discussing when and how to surrender right around the time the bombs were dropped. IIRC about the emperor's message of surrender, the bombs may have made it easier for the emperor to preserve face when surrendering, as such weapons make it easier to justify a surrender as a positive action.
They saw a city disappear from the map in a matter of seconds and did not surrendered. After the second bomb, some officials tried to kidnap the Emperor, in his way to the radio where he would do the surrender spech so they could continue the war.
If anything, when a country signals their willingness to use their children and grandparents as canon fodder -- it shows how close to collapse they really are (and that they know they are very close to collapse).
Even today, when doing constructions, sometimes japaneses works find weapons bunkers, that where to be used for the population in the last stand against western invaders.
That would be very prudish for Japan standarts in wwii.
The things they pulled in China and Indoshina would compete with the worst things that where made in the European Concentration camps.
Theo only reason they did not put Japan in a trial in the style of Nuremberg, was was the location of Japan, closer to the Soviet Union and later China.
If not for that, Emperor Hirohito and many of his followers would find themselfs in the end of a very short rope.
Also, history written by the victors...convenient to convey Curtis Lemay as a war hero vs. a war criminal that signed off on a raid designed to purposefully incinerate civilians. Whose ethnicity were constantly dehumanized as part of the psy-ops of conducting the war...
History is not necessarily written by the victors, fwiw. Victors frequently end up too busy running the government to write history books whereas the losers sometimes end up with a lot of free time and motivation.
See: Lots of pro-Confederate "history", lots of history from ancient times
"frequently" yes...but with the Pacific theater histories - most of what I've seen and also what's being quoted in the arguments below re "Would Japan have surrendered without the A bomb" are from books by primarily American or British historians, or even the Pentagon's own internal study. This is one conflict where I am not seeing a ton of Japanese academia weighing in. Why, who knows - maybe it isn't a hot topic for current academic research, maybe because of language barriers, engrained biases, etc, (maybe are a lot more Japanese academic works in Japan itself, but not getting a lot of traction here, who knows...)
To whit, a lot of the quotes being thrown around to support the "Japan would have never surrendered without the A-bomb" seem(at least on my reading) to suggest there was a lot more debate amongst the civilian and military (Japan AND US Navy) higher ups that were assumed at the time, and who knows what would have happened had more diplomatic measures been tried?
Don't you think that these quotes shouldn't be taken at face value, given that these officers could intend to maintain a public image? Who knows, may be some of those quoted here even dreamed about a political career after their military service.
Ending the war before the Soviets got seriously involved was another ways the bombs saved Japanese lives. Stalin would have demanded that Japan be divided just like Germany. How many would have died at the hands of an Asian Stasi?
Dropping the bombs was a terrible thing but war is even more terrible.
> the military dictators of Japan did not plan to surrender
The U.S. was on solid ground in its conduct of any form of bombing up until a Japanese surrender-including massive conventional bombing campaigns and atomic bombings. Japan launched an unprovoked attack on the U.S. at Pear Harbor to initiate hostilities. Fighting, as the U.S. approached mainland Japan, became more fierce and costly. Any number of dead Japanese—military or civilian, was better than one more dead U.S. serviceman.
Japan would have been willing to surrender, if the terms allowed for the emperor to remain in power. This was actually in the original surrender draft, but Truman wanted to drop the bombs so he removed the provision at the last minute.
In the end we dropped the bombs and then let the emperor stay in power anyway.
> At the time, the president seemed conflicted over his decision. The day after the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, Truman received a telegram from Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, encouraging the president to use as many atomic bombs as possible on Japan, claiming the American people believed “that we should continue to strike the Japanese until they are brought groveling to their knees.” Truman responded, “I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare but I can't bring myself to believe that because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in that same manner. For myself I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the ‘pigheadedness’ of the leaders of a nation, and, for your information, I am not going to do it unless absolutely necessary.”
...
> Looking back, President Truman never shirked personal responsibility for his decision, but neither did he apologize. He asserted that he would not use the bomb in later conflicts, such as Korea. Nevertheless, given the same circumstances and choices that confronted him in Japan in 1945, he said he would do exactly the same thing.
Your quotes are from the US government, my claims are paraphrasing things i learned via Japanese media while in Japan. the truth is probably somewhere in between.
America academia doesn't ignore things that are shameful in it's history (despite perceptions). For my thesis in college I spent a year studying differential behaviors between Into-European colonialism and Amerindian genocide. My son (a 7th grader) is learning about chattel slavery right now.
Japanese text books generally don't mention World War II beyond "we attacked Hawaii and got unfairly nuked in return". The Japanese historical community is remarkably unengaged from international scholarship on world war 2. This has been commented on at length from the rest of the international community. It causes massive friction today in South East Asia.
You keep casting aspersions with no factual basis or external authorities.
You wrote that "Truman wanted to drop the bombs" and I've provided a quote from Truman himself that refutes this assertion. You can't have a better source to Truman's state of mind than Truman.
>"I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives."
Oh please. Don't bring that saving lives bullshit here. The last thing the US cared about at that time was saving Japanese lives. War is an ugly business. So if you want to look warm and fuzzy stay out of it as much as possible.
It's totally bonkers that the Japanese leadership didn't surrender after this raid. Or at least after the next ones that showed that the US could do it basically at will anywhere in Japan. I just will never understand how they could sit around and watch their citizens burn and continue to fight. Think of how many Japanese lives they could have saved if they'd surrendered in June instead of August.
War can be like a freight train. It's hard to stop on a dime --especially when the population has been completely sucked into the effort through religion (emperor-god) and additional propaganda. Just about all the civilian population was directly or indirectly supporting the war effort. It's hard to over-state how wrapped up in the war effort he whole nation was.
It was untenable to just quit. Of course there we some seasoned military figures who knew better, but just like us, when our generals warn against war (Iraq invasion for example) when the wheels are set in motion, there is little stopping it.)
Germany as well. The war was over way before Berlin capitulated.
> War can be like a freight train. It's hard to stop on a dime --especially when the population has been completely sucked into the effort through religion (emperor-god) and additional propaganda.
Case in point:
After Japan officially surrendered in August 1945, Japanese holdouts in Southeast Asian countries and Pacific islands that had been part of the Japanese empire continued to fight local police, government forces, and American and British forces stationed to assist the newly formed governments. Many holdouts were discovered in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands over the following decades, with the last verified holdout, Private Teruo Nakamura, surrendering on Morotai Island in Indonesia in December 1974.
The civilian population had no control and their religious beliefs were irrelevant to policy. The emperor and the top military leaders could have just quit at any time. I understand why they didn't want to quit, but they always had that option.
With decades under their belt trouncing and prancing around the East and having their way, marauding, pillaging, raping, burning, invading, etc., it was unthinkable for most in their military leadership (as well as civilians) that they could be defeated on their "home islands". (You know, previous war doctrines and all). It was unfathomable.
I do think their religious beliefs were relevant to policy. The US was very cognizant of this when they demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan.
> I do think their religious beliefs were relevant to policy. The US was very cognizant of this when they demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan.
That's certainly the Chrysanthemum and the Sword take on it. I'd agree that American conceptions of Japanese religious beliefs influenced American policy. The extent to which emperor-worship was truly inculcated in the population at large is still subject to scholarly debate, but the trend is toward understanding that Japanese internal religious propaganda doesn't necessarily reflect deeply-held cultural beliefs. It's unquestionable that タケヤリで (with bamboo spears) was a thing to an extent and that an invasion of the mainland would have been a clusterfuck, but I personally see it (as described up-thread) as more ascribable to the comprehensive failure of the nation's autocratic elites at holding non-idiotic worldviews, rather than them (or the population at large) being hyper-fanatic State Shintoists.
The military-political establishment had spent the past decade or more basically purity-spiralling out anyone seen as insufficiently dedicated to the cause of imperial expansion.
To me, the most striking example of this is what happened to Ishiwara Kanji[1]. This is the guy who gekokujou'd Manchukuo into existence, so not exactly a cautious humanitarian.
Ishiwara later got purged for opposing further expansionism in China: he thought that grabbing Manchukuo had been enough to assure Japan's quest for autarky in vital military materials, and that continued messing around in China would accelerate confrontation with the West and act as a resource drain on Japan's ability to shape itself into a militarily self-sufficient state. He was totally right, of course, but got it in the neck anyway.
There's a lot more examples of this, both in the military branches and in elite political circles. I highly recommend the scholarly book Japan Prepares For Total War[2] if you're interested in the details. The result, though, was that many voices of reason were explicitly removed from power for being too reasonable. At this point in the war, the cast of characters running the show weren't able or willing to see sense and had insulated themselves from all advice and criticism.
The US was asking for surrendering without conditions. That was the part that was debated by Japanese internaly, it’s all documented. Remember, their Emperor was considered to be a God. Put yourself in their shoe, what would be consequences for the population to have the US potentially trial and give death penalty to their Emperor ? Would it still be Japan? (keep in mind, people were brainwashed). In the end, even the US decided that keeping the Emperor in place was for the best, however the Japanese had no way to know beforehand, because the US wouldn’t give guarentee.
You're right since this not only killed many thousands but demonstrated that the US was completely capable in destroying any Japanese city at their whim. Sure rearming and maintaining aircraft can take days, but at this point the Japanese military played no part in defending their cities, and it was just all up to US decision making whether to continue to quick destruction of Japanese municipalities.
I think the saga of the Japanese leadership considering surrender is fascinating. Obviously everything will be destroyed pretty soon without capitulation, but it's clear that the leadership had a difficult time admitting that their decades of confidence in the Japanese military's destiny were wrong.
A quote from Mitsuo Fuchida, a Pearl Harbor attack pilot:
"You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude at that time, how fanatic they were, they'd die for the Emperor ... Every man, woman, and child would have resisted that invasion with sticks and stones if necessary ... Can you imagine what a slaughter it would be to invade Japan? It would have been terrible. The Japanese people know more about that than the American public will ever know."
At the time the bombs were dropped in August 1945, there were also 900,000 veteran Japanese soldiers on the Home Islands. Even if the civilians didn't pick up sticks and stones, the Japanese death toll would almost certainly include that number.
Japan was run by the Emperor and a six person cabinet; the military held half the cabinet seats. The Emperor didn't rule the cabinet, and thus the country; the group governed by internal consensus.
Even after the atomic bombs were dropped, the military half of the cabinet would not accept unconditional surrender; the Emperor and civilian half would have accepted surrender much earlier, but feared the military would simply seize control, as had happened many times before in Japanese history. And even after the Emperor forced the decision in cabinet to accept surrender, there was an attempted coup by parts of the military.
Japanese obstinacy was driven mainly by a kind of hybrid fascist/bushido doctrine that dominated the Japanese military starting in the 20s.
The Japanese leadership believed (not without reason) that they could make the cost of invading Japan so incredibly catastrophic in American blood that the decadent, racially and culturally inferior United States would not pay it.
People forget but the bloodiest days of WW2 where not in the insanely large battles where the Hitler regime was defeated, but rather in the last months when obvious defeat was years earlier for the Nazis - and where where Eastern Europe was devastated between the Germans the Soviets. The flow of blood was unimaginable.
I personally would hope that would have been the case that the USA not invade, as the intelligence started to show that the two-stage Americans invasion plans for the Japanese home islands badly underestimated the Japanese. Washington was already concerned about the cost, but we know now that these estimates where off by almost 50%.
They still had options, even without the Atomic bombs. That alternative would have been a starvation blockade. Given the complete collapse of the Japanese economy, the complete inability to import food, that blockade would have made what occurred in WWI with Britain blockading Germany, or the earlier famines in Bangladesh, or even the systematic starvation program that the Bolsheviks unleashed in the Ukraine (The Holodomor) look like Child's play.
Edit - honestly curious why people are downvoting this?
People might down vote because they are uninformed.
Once you seriously look into Japan plans for suicide attacks on massive scales would have been very costly. They were doing series effort in transformed their air-force and navy into suicide attack armed forces.
And these suicide attacks are not crazy, they were well plant and well executed attacks designed inflict massive costly attrition on the US.
Think about literally 10000s of well planned and executed suicide plans and suicide submarines attacks, army willing to suffer mass sacrifice.
And the fact is, the US did not have any solution for these suicide wave attacks. They were literally designed to work around US air defense patterns, and by the end of the war, the US had not figured out how to decisively defeated these attacks.
Landing 100000s of troupes in Japan against massive waves of suicide plans would have been insane.
> the systematic starvation program that the Bolsheviks unleashed in the Ukraine (The Holodomor)
Just FYI, it was not a systematic starvation program, it was a systematic food export program. And it was not target at Ukraine, but was applied in much the same way all over the Soviet Union.
I know there are some books that push the ethnic angle (and doing so is very popular particularly now), but its pretty clear from the top level documents and policies that it wasn't some form of ethnic warfare.
It was do whatever you need to export food so you can buy machines from the West.
>Just FYI, it was not a systematic starvation program, it was a systematic food export program. And it was not target at Ukraine, but was applied in much the same way all over the Soviet Union.
Food production was initially fine. After USSR central planning shenanigans shaking things up production was less. Those crops were then allocated away from Ukraine because they were last in line to be fed and first in line to starve for political reasons.
Whether that constitutes "systemic starvation" or just "normal starvation" is pretty much an exercise in taxonomy because the fact of the matter is that intentional decisions by the people in charge are what lead to the problem.
What matter to the top people at the government was not total production, but rather total share of production controlled by the government. They didn't not care if total production went down.
> intentional decisions by the people in charge are what lead to the problem
And I am not denying that. What I am arguing against is the claim that this was ethnic derived warfare target at destroying Ukrainian nationalism. That is the story often told today.
Stalin certainty was engaged in class warfare ('taking a class approach' is the common translation used from his writings) and many different cultures and ethnicity were hit. Kazakhs, Ukrainians and lets not remember the many Russian victims too, and of course many more.
Their fundamental driver was getting the resources need for spending on industrialization.
Yes that's correct. From a practical standpoint that simply means lower overall production, that communist party logical for you. Gaining control over the means of production is what mattered to them. Anything cost was acceptable to achieve that outcome.
I think less of an export issue but mass collectivization all across USSR. My g-grandfather was sent to Siberia in 1932 for refusing to give up his cow to collective farm. That's one good farmer family less to produce. Now multiply it by one million and you get a famine on unimaginable scale.
Sure, the reason they did the collectivization beyond the ideology is so they could then control that production and channel it towards the uses they desired.
Total production was expected to go down. The regime was very well aware of that. But their control over that production was increased exponentially.
And considering the industrialization, a lot of that went into exports where it was exchanged for industrial goods.
Sorry for your g-grandfather, must have been a horrible time. Its insane that back then they considered anybody a 'wealthy farmer' who had like 1-2 cows.
It's fair to note that this is contentious - I would just point that the most recent scholarship has focused on (not surprisingly) Stalin's point of view with the Ukraine (and he absolutely did view it as a systematic way to weaken the Kulak's and the Ukraine), and Historians seem to now be generally viewing it as a genocide. That's not universal, but certainly the way that the scholarship (at the moment) is trending.
I do not venture in what is and isn't genocide. The legal definition and common use and so on. I don't know.
My point is that it is not primarily target towards ethnicity. It was certainty targeted towards Kulak's and of course, Ukraine had a productive land and thus a fair number of 'Kulaks'. The typical translation that is most often repeated in Stalin writing and the 'party line' was 'taking a class approach'.
What I dislike is the Ukrainian nationalist attempt to own the history. The same policy hit other ethnic groups just as hard. The Kazakh population was probably more effected in terms of %.
A huge amount of ethnically Russian farmer died as well, and they often get no mention in discussions of this.
I has become fashionable to portray it as a Ukrainian tragedy, rather then a Eurasian tragedy. It effect people between Moldova, Omsk and Arkhangelsk and beyond.
The most powerful version of that is Red Famine by Anne Applebaum. And that book as a pretty clear focus on Ukraine and a political message for the current situation for Western audiences. Ukrainian nationalism has been trying to use the Holodomor in the same way Israel does with the Holocaust, it gives it the permenent victim role and the moral high ground. She her self of course is a political commentator on those matters and her husband is politically active in trying to pull Ukraine into Europe. While here book does pay some small amount of attention to the other aspect and other victims, the overwhelming message is about Ukrainians suffering and overcoming basically intentional attempts at destruction of Ukraine and that is what the conversation around the book has universally focused on those aspects.
Steven Kotkin biography of Stalin that just came out spent a lot time at looking at the Presidential archives, meaning the archives of actual stuff on Stalin desk. With Stalin writing on it. Very often Stalin notes his responses directly on the reports he gets. And the overwhelming focus on that is showing how Stalin had on his desk lots of reports of starvation from all over the Soviet Union, his response a lot of focus getting his party to hit requisition quotas and that the reports about starvation were exaggerated or excuses by functionaries for failing to hit quotas. Very little is about 'lets plan a mass starvation because we are afraid of Ukrainian nationalism'. The overwhelming focus is on building and wielding a governmental machine to impose a new state dominate economic system on everybody, no matter the cost.
I have certainty not done an exhaustive study of all books and paper published on this topic in the last decade so your overall characterization of the debate might be accurate.
The term 'systematic starvation' implies that starvation was the goal. This is not the case in my opinion. The Soviet certainty expected economic disruption and people like Alexei Rykov (2nd most powerful guy in the Soviet Union) opposed the collectivization on those grounds. However even in Rykov worst prediction fell well short of what was actually required to push this all the way to the end. Their reports don't say 'great success, mass starvation achieved', they actually believed their own propaganda about how collective farms would be far more efficient and so on.
The difference seem to me that Soviets are willing to tolerate starvation to achieve their goals, not that they deliberately engineered starvation to achieve their goals. And their primary goals were not targeting Ukrainian nationalism.
All in all, its a difficult topic and has been used as a political weapon before it even started so its of course a minefield.
The Soviet system is the best example of what happens when the measurement becomes the metric - it produces all sorts of unintended effects, trains of freight being moved hundreds of miles to fulfill a ton-mile quota, ignoring what functionaries in the aparat say, because they dont fit the measurement-metric, etc.
Like you, I don't believe that mass starvation was the point, but it did have the effect of temporarily tamping down nationalism too.
> The Japanese leadership believed (not without reason) that they could make the cost of invading Japan so incredibly catastrophic in American blood that the decadent, racially and culturally inferior United States would not pay it.
They also forgot that right on the other side of a small channel was the world's largest army that was willing to pay it. The US has a total of 160,000 dead in the entirety of the Pacific war. That was a week of active fighting on the Eastern front.
To their credit, they didn't actually forget, they were simply hoping that the USSR would keep it's word and not break their non-aggression pact. It didn't, though, and overran Japan's continental holdings in a matter of days.
Losing Manchuria was huge in bringing Japan to the negotiating table.
The Kwangtung army had been stripped to the bone, and then the Japanese has built up the army with underfed conscripts. They were faced with a army that didn't think a thing of spending lives or even being economical about the lives they spent, due to years of radicalization on the western front.
That said, this point is usually very overblown by cold-war theorists. It was a factor, but not the Factor. The Atomic bomb was the critical factor in Hirohito's thinking and Kids in particular - and the imperial court is what forced the end of the war. Supposedly the Army was more concerned about the Russians, but the Army never cared about Japanese civilians anyways - and their concern went so far that leadership cliques in the Army tried to overthrow Hirohito.
The Japanese Government didn't want an unconditional surrender as it would have meant the Emperor (Who was seen as quasi-divine) would have potentially been tried for war crimes and executed.
They didn't care about their citizens, just the Emperor.
It seemed to me there was a sort of victory or death kind of dynamic.
If you think of defeat like death, then surrendering means you die sooner. Military leadership and civilian suicides in the face of defeat were not uncommon.
In the meantime I don't think Japan allowed for many different points of view on the topic and even expressing it might be risky / the same result.
What's worse is they didn't surrender after Hiroshima was destroyed. They reasoned that the US military probably only had a few of these weapons, and therefore losing a few cities was considered acceptable losses.
The leadership of Japan during this time was truly reprehensible: Willing to sacrifice millions of their own citizens to continue their failing war of aggression.
I think you're kind of pointing to the London V-II raids. If Germany had had the production, London would have had to surrender. Luckily their initial V-1 bombs were not very accurate and their V-IIs were slow to ramp up, so that bought lots of time.
We have more land, so I think we could have dispersed the population to the country to make the bombs or raids less effective. But at some threshold you do have to give up and fight another day.
No they would not have. V2 raids are very ineffective and basically didn't effect the population much at all. Its just out of a blue sometimes a building explodes.
99% of those bombs don't hit anything relevant for the war effort.
At the same time production of those rockets was far more costly then whatever they hit in Britain.
And sure, if they could magically have no limits then maybe. But in practice, Germany had mass starvation while huge amounts of bio-mass was converted into rocket fuel. Not to mention very inefficient uses other materials.
Even ignoring all that, the total payload deployed by German over Britain was laughably small compared to allied bombing raids.
I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that England would not have surrendered if every single blade of grass and tree stump on the island had been reduced to smoking ash.
If it were up to Churchill, probably but I don't think the military leadership would have followed all the way there. At some point, you have to be pragmatic. Yet, in this case, Germany would be thirsty for revenge (given the name of the V-II rockets), so that makes the calculus more difficult --on the other hand you had a Vichy France, so who knows.
A separate English peace would have made a lot of sense.
Hitler had no interest in expanding westward. His plan was a great German empire where the Volga would be what the Mississippi is in the US. If France & Britain had not attacked, Germany would very likely have left them alone.
In the east, it was a fight to the death, and both sides knew it. If the Russians surrendered, they faced extinction.
Yes, Hitler was mainly interested in moving expanding eastward. But he was intelligent enough to see that the (declining but still) empires of France and Britain would not have allowed this to happen. Thus his initial attack westward to neutralize this threat to his eastward expansion plans. It's a tragedy, that Stalin secured this westward move by signing the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, basically neutralizing the east while Hitler would sweep the west. We will never know what would have happened if Hitler had adversaries on both fronts from the beginning.
>We will never know what would have happened if Hitler had adversaries on both fronts from the beginning.
This is just one point among hundreds in this thread that I find fascinating for the same reason.
So many people here know exactly what they would've and what we should've done back then. Because we have the benefit of nearly a hundred years of analysis and hindsight.
Most of the disagreements here aren't actually about what happened, and why, but what the people in this thread would've done and why.
They're basically the equivalent of "Ha! If I were Yamamoto, I would have...." because they know what happened and when and what would have turned events. But had they been in Yamamoto's (or Nimitz's or Patton's, or Rommel's) position, would have made much worse decisions. As you say they have complete benefit of decades of study of the war and tactics as well as limitations we are privileged to know only after the war.
If they went on to do it to several other cities, demonstrating total control of the airspace and the ability to wipe any city of their choosing off the map overnight, and it was after years of losing battles... probably.
I’m not sure. Even then, knowing Japanese atrocities in all of Asia, it’s probably better to just keep fighting to the death as opposed to being subject to slavery, rape, or human experiments.
I’m sure a part of the reason the Japanese refused surrender was because their reflection in the mirror was not pretty.
I think all historians agree a US victory was almost certain, if not dead certain after Pearl Harbor. That attack didn’t destroy enough of the US fleet to buy the Japanese time to trie and get even with the USA in production capacity.
> In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.
Isoruku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese Navy.
The problem with this line of thought is that it's basically ignores the historical exemplar that Japan used to justify their actions in the first place - the Sino-Ruso war. Russia was a juggernaut compared to Japan, but two catastrophic attacks - one surprised removed all support for the war from Japan, and the Czar gave in and ended the war.
Historians are arguing that in a industrialized conflict, where the United States was committed to war, Japan had no shot at winning. And to some degree that's true. But it depended on political factors that were no means set in stone.
But was America truly that dedicated to war with Japan? Turns out yes - but it's not hard to see a world where Japan wasn't quite a closely allied to Germany and/or Midway had gone the other way, or after millions where dead in the home island where that commitment would be tested.
Or conversely - as Hitler hoped - Japan would hold off America just long enough for the Russians to be finished off by the Germans in the East and Britain would finally come to the table. In a "Germany First" Strategy, America could not have taken the offensive in 1942 in that scenario.
But it's also reflective of the dehumanization that Japan's leadership as - the West was soft, just as the Russians were soft, and Japan's greater fighting spirit would carry the day.
Especially considering Midway was so close, even with the gigantic advantages the US Navy has ( intelligence so they basically knew what the Japanese were doing, in what order and where, and radars).
If faced with massive destruction and extremely high anticipated civilian casualties with absolutely no hope of victory...yes, surrender is totally rational
Once the US took Guam, the war was over (Guam was close enough to Japan to enable the US to enact a campaign of unlimited bombing). From that point forward, continued conflict was a matter of Japanese leaders sacrificing their own citizens for absolutely no gain
When you're in the middle of a hard fought war you do not have the certainty afforded by history. Everything is at stake. You may think you're ahead but then you suffer unthinkable losses (the battle of the bulge, for example --for both sides and the Korean war). With large scale wars where both sides both have a chance at winning, it's not over till it's over. You have no idea what will happen you cannot afford to say, "I think we'll win, let's pull back". Your fleet can be sunk, your ally can fall unpredictably (leadership death), etc.
You also have to remember, the Axis Japanese were extremely brutal in war. The allies could not afford to think, "maybe they'll turn nice".
We can go back and forth and quibble over using the word “murder” as you have and quibble over who ultimately is to blame. I won’t convince you of anything and likewise you won’t convince me of anything. War truly is hell and after the way the Japanese conducted themselves during the war there’s a certain karma involved in terms of them getting the total war they so desired.
War sucks. My dad fought in World War 2. Frontline soldier in Western Europe in Patton’s Third Army. His battalion war book has the names of the dead and many are underlined in red because those are the ones he knew. He was a drunk and abusive and obviously suffered from untreated PTSD.
His division was preparing to transfer to the Pacific when the atomic bombs were dropped. He appreciated that as a result the Japanese surrendered (at least it appeared to be a causal effect from his perspective). Who can possibly calculate the efficacy of the alternatives even in retrospect? It’s easy to criticize after the fact. Are you so certain you’d have decided differently than Curtis LeMay were you in his position?
I am not necessarily saying the choice was wrong. It was one bad option out of many.
However, I am challenging the incredibly strong urge people have to absolve those who made the choice of any kind of responsibility for having made it. You will see it even in the responses to this comment. We absolutely refuse to even acknowledge that a choice was, in fact, made to kill all of these innocent civilians.
The person I responded to is struggling to understand how the Japanese reacted to this. But he is paying absolute zero mind to the actions and reactions of those on his own side, who chose to bring this tragedy about.
The very idea of thinking about the acts committed by your own side is strongly, strongly taboo.
I absolve those who made the choice of any kind of responsibility for protecting enemy civilians. Their only responsibility was towards Americans. If their choice saved even one American life then in context it was the right choice. How could they possibly ask Americans to contine dying if they had the means to shorten the war?
While it is true that many will absolve the decision makers without thinking, or with thoughts of revenge, a deeper analysis shows that it was a reasonable decision. You write them off as "strongly, strongly taboo". Is that as far as that goes then? Wasn't everything, starting with Pearl Harbor, strongly, strongly taboo? Is it ok to murder someone just because they are in a uniform, because two humans, who we will call "kings", or "emperors", or "presidents" have a disagreements? Bottom line you're walking into a moral discussion about war with the idea "killing is bad". Think you need to up your game.
Before there there was Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Those were violated in WW1 on a large scale and no alternative had been put into place.
All these things are good and nice, but the reality is, if disagreeing with these is vital to win a war, literally no nation followed them.
Those kinds of agreements are good attempts in peace time to improve the chance of good outcomes, but in reality, in major global they are just pieces of papers that can not be enforced.
If you want to run around and simply say everybody is evil, then you can do that. But if you actually put yourself in the position of those people and try to make decisions if you want to be critical, explain what and how you would have done things differently.
And what cost would you have been willing to engage in to achieve that moral high ground.
I'm pretty sure I didn't actually pass any judgement one way or the other on the actions of the US military in that post. The two are morally separate, we don't have to do a what-about-ism for it.
Indeed you didn't. But you jumped immediately very strongly to one question, rather than to another. You have been conditioned all your life to question the decisions of the enemy, but to never, ever question the decisions of your own side.
Or maybe I was making a conscious choice to comment on the one but not the other. In the last 20 years or so, there's been a wide reconsideration about the morality of dropping bombs (whether nuclear or conventional) on civilian populations during the war. I don't think we need to have yet another conversation about that. Instead, I'm trying to understand the Japanese viewpoint, where they get a telegram that 100k people have been killed in a raid and think "Bummer, but we fight on!".
This is a good questions and deserves an answer. The decision to murder one hundred thousand human beings was made not by the leadership of the United States but by the Japanese Imperial command when they decided to start and continue the war. So the blood of these people is on the hands of the Japanese Imperial Command and none else.
This is also the case when a murderer is put to death for their crime. The murderer is responsible for the person he killed and his own death; the state who put him to death is not responsible for his murder.
Absolutely not. Every person involved made a choice, of their own free will. You do not get to absolve the ones you like of responsibility and instead put it all on those who you do not.
Are you saying that U.S. leadership is responsible for the murders of those that were killed in the strategic bombing of Japan? If you are - then you are wrong.
You had a 67% chance of being killed on your first tour with British Bomber Command, rising to 85% after two tours. Were the airmen "alright" with that statistic too, when they were forced into a cockpit? There wasn't much of a choice in the matter for the average soldier on the ground (or in the air) on any side in that great conflict. Most of them were conscripts and desertion potentially carried the death penalty even on the Allied side. That loss of individual agency is part of the war's many horrors; whether you were alright with it or not was quite irrelevant.
It's worth noting psychiatric casualties for bomber crews, for the Allies at least, were sky-high with about a quarter of those not killed in combat being discharged for mental breakdowns. Whether that rate of breakdown is from the extreme risk, or from sometimes coming back smelling like burning flesh, is up for debate.
And then take Japanese soldiers, where that wasn't a 67% change, it was 100% that you would eventually get conscripted into a Banzai charge, or a Kamikazi brigade, or given a bamboo spike, and told to hold the Americans at bay.
We really do a disservice when we try to take WWII and put it into a modern relativistic historical analysis. The scope of evil and sacrifice here is completely different from our western conception of War as a video game where kids fly drones and random pixels die.
If I know the history correct Japan actually did get conditional surrender. The USA wanted unconditional surrender which the never got despite dropping 2 atom bombs on cities which were not really military targets.
"We hereby proclaim the unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers of the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters and of all Japanese armed forces and all armed forces under the Japanese control wherever situated."
That's a quote from the Japanese Instrument of Surrender.
Japan wanted to keep the emperor of japan this is why they wouldnt unconditionally surrender. I was under the impression that they got to keep the emperor thus it was not an unconditional surrender.
They agreed to unconditional surrender and then got to keep the Emperor. Which makes one wonder if the US had actually offered surrender terms that included keeping the Emperor maybe Japan would have surrendered. Instead they just demanded unconditional surrender.
As with almost everything there are countless reasons why Japan didn't surrender earlier. [1] By June of 1945 Japan's leaders did want out of the war, but were still hoping for a surrender that allowed them to keep much of their holdings (I think people often forget how much of East Asia Japan had solidly controlled for almost 10 years at this point). And they were being strung along by the Soviet union who was supposed to mediate peace, yet had their own motives to prolong the war until they could join.
And even after dropping 2 nukes, and believing the US had 100 more, it took days more, and some additional attacks, to convince Japan to surrender. And even after all this, there was a serious attempted coup.
The official Postdam Declaration (allied surrender terms) didn't mention imperial sovereignty one way or the other, but it appears the Emperor considered it to have been agreed upon prior to the "unconditional" surrender
Some more color, from Wikipedia:
"The Japanese cabinet considered the Allied response, and Suzuki argued that they must reject it and insist on an explicit guarantee for the imperial system. Anami returned to his position that there be no occupation of Japan. Afterward, Tōgō told Suzuki that there was no hope of getting better terms, and Kido conveyed the Emperor's will that Japan surrender. [...]
That day, Hirohito informed the imperial family of his decision to surrender. One of his uncles, Prince Asaka, then asked whether the war would be continued if the kokutai (imperial sovereignty) could not be preserved. The Emperor simply replied "of course.""
Hiroshima was a supply and logistics base for the Japanese military with 40,000 soldiers in the city roughly 1/2 where killed by the atomic bomb where closer to 1/4 of the civilian population was killed. It also supported a large war industry, manufacturing parts for planes and boats, for bombs, rifles, and handguns.
By WWII’s low standards that was very much a military target. In comparison Japan tried using unguided balloons to bomb the US which while completely ineffective targeted everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
I came here to post this, glad you already did. It's honestly one of the best things I've ever listened to. I find it amazing how he can paint such a nuanced picture of such a complex and horrific topic which lends itself so easily to taking a black-and-white view.
Seconding this recommendation. I’ve read a lot about World War 2, but this podcast was such a fresh, impactful presentation. Amazingly well done. And useful context for articles like this one.
I'm sorry! Though it did feel very wrapped up with the end corresponding with the end of the war. Personally I hope he does the Korean or Vietnam war eventually. I had very little insight into WWI until listening to his podcasts, and I think those could lend themselves to very interesting episodes.
The article fails to mention that at this phase of the war, when we were trying to convince the Japanese to surrender, we were warning target cities of pending raids by dropping leaflets a few days beforehand. These leaflets advised civilians to evacuate the cities. Unfortunately few did, since it was unfashionable if not dangerous to heed such a warning in a militaristic society like Japan was at the time. Still, we put our bomber crews in danger to reduce the number of civilian casualties while bringing the war to an end.
Malcom Gladwell did a great segment on his podcast Revisionist History about this. He talks about the schools of thought in the US military about who and what to bomb that lead to these campaigns. It is extremely tragic that these citizen-heavy areas were absolutely pulverized. There's evidence that the US military used similar techniques in the Korean war.
So just curious - the Japanese (unlike every other industrialized power) moved their factories into their urban and rural areas to protect them - What alternative would have you suggested that would still eliminate the ability of the Japanese to build machines of war?
From wikipedia:
"Over 50% of Tokyo's industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city's output in half."
If a single raid in Germany had cut the total Ruhr's capacity by 50%, allied bombers would have tried to do that every day of the war.
That Japanese did this decentralization even though it cost them the ability to scale up their production. This is why Japanese production completely collapsed as the war moved forward, unlike the Germans, Soviets and Americans who all had their production skyrocket throughout the war. That's how committed they were to using their population as shield to protect it from the inevitable bombers.
So tragic it was - but let's remember that this program was deliberate by the Japanese leaders - a deliberate effort to use their own population as civilian shield to continue their rape and massacre of the rest of Asia.
Yes, I believe he did multiple RH podcast episodes on this.
He has also released a book: "The Bomber Mafia: A Story Set in War". [1]
I think the first I heard of the Tokyo firebombing during WWII was in the Errol Morris documentary: "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara".
Robert McNamara was an officer under Curtis LeMay. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment. [2]
I found "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" to be an interesting lens to understand the US leadership context at depth.
Another interesting viewpoint is taken by the below Foreign Policy article "The Dangerous Illusion of Japan’s Unconditional Surrender"
A restive public and increasingly assertive political leaders questioned if victory, defined as Japan’s unconditional surrender, could be achieved at a tolerable cost. The atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war against Japan cut short that debate and produced swift decision where none had seemed likely. That sudden reversal of fortunes obscured for later generations the extent to which U.S. strategy had been unhinged by Japanese resistance and the splintering of unity at home. It also made the ceremony in Tokyo Bay seem inevitable and reproducible.
>There's evidence that the US military used similar techniques in the Korean war.
By our own army's admittance, we conducted similar bombing of basically every North Korean city and town. We dropped 160,000 tons of bombs on Japan, 635,000 tons on North Korea.
Tonnage doesn’t tell the whole story. While I’m unsure of the makeup of the bombs dropped on NK, a large part of the bombs dropped on Japan were incendiaries.
Japanese construction was uniquely suited to the creation of “firestorms”, and the vast majority of the effect of US bombing Japan is WW2 was caused not by the bombs themselves, but through the fires set by them.
We dropped over 30,000 tons of napalm on North Korea as well. Our firebombing was more effective if anything, here's Air force General Curtis LeMay's words on our actions.
>We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too."
Malcom Gladwell is a popular journalist, I highly recommend reading books on this topic from actual historians. Gladwell wrote on all kinds of stuff and its nowhere near as well researched as what actual historians bring to the table on these questions. He repeats poplar myth type stories.
Learning about Japan, go to something like The Pacific War Trilogy by Ian Toll. It is new and well researched with lots of original research.
Gladwell's and Toll's accounts of the firebombing of Tokyo don't differ in any radical way.
Hell, if anything, Toll and Gladwell reinforce each others' point. Toll also goes on to explain that the same thing that happened to Tokyo happened in Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, and pretty much every other major Japanese city.
I don't know about that specifically as I have not read Gladwell's book, I have just read a number of comments from people I tend to trust critical of some of his claims.
Yes. There's even some evidence that chemical warfare via bombing was done in Korea, something they really should have known was a terrible thing to do.
I'm quite excited for the Blowback podcast season 3, coming out this summer. The new subject is the Korean war. Season 1 and 2, on the Iraq wars and the Cuban missile crisis respectively, are my favorite podcasts.
It's a good lesson from history that if you as a nation or its leader decide to start a war take a good look at your people because you may be condemning them to death. Don't expect mercy from your newly made enemy.
The number of people estimated to be killed in the two invasions of Japan > the number of people killed in the atomic bombings. Worst-case predictions were O(million casualties). As was point out, the firebombing of Tokyo did more damage and killed more people but was less "efficient".
The Navy's option was to mine the harbours and blow up the trains and let them all starve. Not the quickest but possibly the harshest.
The problem was war weariness and a desire to play with the toy and to show it off to others. I don't have a good feeling as to the actual levels of these three positions because I don't favour political history but they were real concerns. They had already used bomb them back into the stone age to little effect.
Yeah, maybe it would have been sufficient to add "and you can keep the Emperor as a symbol of Japan" but the behaviour in the war in the pacific was far from civil.
(1) Because it's part of a general hatchet job against nuclear energy
(2) It erases history. Really crazy stuff went down during the Korean war and people don't know about it. If the Japanese had spent 1% of the effort making amends for their crimes against China and other Asian countries that's gone into hand wringing over Hiroshima things would be very different in Asia today. It's nearly forgotten that the U.S. was slow to demobilize after WWII because it thought war against the Soviet Union was likely, and it was just as much a goal to intimidate the Soviets as it was to intimidate the Japanese.
How is dropping a nuke any less acceptable than a firebombing run? It's the same number of dead civilians in both cases, yet nuclear weapons are the ones that get all the pushback.
Yes, I'm aware of the doublespeak used to justify bombing major civilian population centers. I still would object to being bombed merely for living in a city, so object to bombing others for the same reason.
Please tell me how the US should have reacted to how they would have won the war while considering your moral principles.
Please explain this when you make comments like that.
And please also explain how many additional US soldiers (not to mention soldiers and civilians in China and other Asian nations) would you think acceptable to fight the war according to your moral principles.
If for example the Nazi put a single German child into the guard house of the synthetic fuel production facility, would you not destroy it?
Its easy to be critical, but please actually explain what your moral principles would have been and how you would have applied them. And can you make a credible case that these principles would have lead to less overall suffering.
I am gently curious what your logic is and what alternative strategy you would advocate.
>Please tell me how the US should have reacted to how they would have won the war while considering your moral principles.
They could bomb military targets, not civilian populations. Yes, Tokyo contained some military facilities, that doesn't justify firebombing the entire city.
The entire doctrine of "bomb the civilians into war weariness" has not been found to be successful, and even in 1944 there were already examples showing that. It more often causes the bombed to rally together against a common enemy, like London in the Blitz or what still effects North Korea today.
Your example of one child in a synthetic fuel facility is ridiculous. I understand that some civilian workers of factories will unfortunately be victims, and that bombs will miss their targets. That's not comparable to wide scale firebombing or nuking the population.
Production was distributed threw the cities in Japan, that's a simple fact. And they did target military target when they had good target.
After attacks on city on we can literally see production output going down.
There is an argument that in Germany some of the attacks on cities were counter-productive and a more intense focus on certain industrial areas would have been more beneficial. But those were also better guarded.
Even so, economic historian Adam Tooze book shows pretty well that air attacks did have large economic attacks.
>If your enemies have more weapons to kill you then more of your people will die. This is a simple reality modern war.
I don't agree with the concept of killing a hundred civilians to save one soldier. While I can justify the civilian cost of destroying a factory building submarines, firebombing is a different story.
And while lowering production may drop them from having ten kamikaze pilots to eight, ending the war drops it from ten to near zero.
Finally it's ridiculous to claim the only two options were to nuke civilian population centers or invade. Peace talks are one obvious third option that is always completely ignored.
> They could bomb military targets, not civilian populations. Yes, Tokyo contained some military facilities, that doesn't justify firebombing the entire city.
You read this and, unless you have no trace of humanity left, will be left sympathetic to the civilians and children of Japan.
But you must remember that another group of Japanese were busy raping, and bayoneting babies, and killing and torturing captured soldiers, and instigating suicide attacks.
It's hard not to feel sympathetic for any group of civilians subject to air bombing. In WWII this happened mainly in Germany and Japan, which were massively punished after 1941, specially in 1944 and 1945, when virtually no bombs fell in allied territory, and they were a punching bag for the allies.
Even in 1940 and 1941 more bombs were dropped in Germany than in England, who incidentally started the air raids, given Churchill thought this was a highly effective way of mining the morale is the enemy.
This in addition to purely sadistic expeditions like the bombing of Dresden, when the war was already over.
the war was mostly over, but Germany didn't surrender until May 8th. Last bombs fell mid-April. I don't think it was at all sadistic.
Both of these cases show the impossibility of humanity decency when confronted with such extremely powerful and totalitarian militaristic dictatorships. Even the opposing forces, in many ways, are forced to resort to the tactics and morality of their enemy. So you loose your moral high ground real fast if you fight dirty. Or you fight fair and loose the war. Either way the worst is inevitable.
> As many as 100,000 Japanese people were killed and another million injured, most of them civilians, when more than 300 American B-29 bombers dropped 1,500 tons of firebombs on the Japanese capital that night.
Most bomb raids during WWII did absolutely nothing. Only very rarely a bomb strikes a target and does any damage.
Here you have an average of over 300 kills per aircraft and 60 per bomb. Absolutely mind blowing.
My grandfather was a US army tank commander who was part of the Okinawa invasion prior to the end of the war. As much as I’d like to criticize the atomic bomb, I probably wouldn’t be here had it not been used. My grandfather would have been required to continue the fight through the Japanese home islands, and likely perished.
These bombings were almost as tragic as Japan's treatment of China and Korea. Luckily they hastened an end to the war and Japan's exit from the rest of the Asian continent, and spared many GI's from needing to invade the main Japanese island.
HN is incapable of discussing this topic in any remotely intelligent manner. Any post that is one or two hops away from dropping the atomic bombs on Japan should be banned on this forum.
I just posted this in the commentary about safety of nuclear power in America:
"Of course there's a worst one, there has to be. Well Hanford didn't principally produce energy, so much as just plutonium, so really its mission was weapon production. So now we're changing the subject a bit, no longer is it about electricity, but defense.
So we can address that immediately: without the Hanford site, Japan would not have surrendered without an invasion of the home islands. Maybe not even then. It was the "new and cruel bomb," as the Emperor of Japan described it while citing it as the reason for surrender in his speech. That "new and cruel" bomb meant an alternative to reenacting the Battle of Iwo Jima (which I would describe as "fucked up" for both sides without question) a thousand times. Battles to the last cartridge. Forgetting completely about the lives of Allied and Axis soldiers, you realize the death toll that would have on the civilians of Japan? They were on the hook for all kinds of atrocities all over Asia and the Pacific, in the context of total war they pissed off the rest of the world way too hard for the Allies to declare a truce. Just in Korea alone, the stories are just...let's not talk about that, let's stick to what is fucked up within nuclear science.
Japanese were subscribed to the idea that their genocide was preferable to surrender. So that's why the bomb, and by extension the Hanford site, were so important. In practice the nukes in Japan explosives second, fireworks first. Napalm was a much better explosive for the money, in terms of the destruction it could produce. The really bad bombings in WWII were in Tokyo and Dresden, a hundred thousand dead per bombing, a new climactic event called a "Firestorm," terrible burns, pavement getting goopy, high winds--I claim those bombings were worse. But they weren't as flamboyant as a star."
I’ll throw in mine. I think if we look at Japanese culture and actions, Kamikaze, suicide, honor, they were highly averse to surrendering.
I think once two of their cities were completely disappeared, they realized that they, and everything they loved could be evaporated at any moment.
It would be utterly insane to continue under these circumstances.
The question of would they have surrendered otherwise - i don't believe so. I don’t think that’s something we should have had to find out, either. I think people were exhausted by that point and just wanted the war to end.
I can’t help but find a sick satisfaction from this article after recently reading rape of Nanking and a recent pacific war book about Japanese rape and cannibalism of Captured US marines and a book about the OSS in Burma and the Japanese routinely cutting off penises of young boys and shoving them in their mouth as they lay bleeding to death while the Japanese raped and bayoneted young girls and the village burned.
My grandfather flew a B-29 in the March 10 raid. His war journal noted that even with his mask on (oxygen/air-filtration), he could still smell the burning flesh from the destruction that had been unleashed from bombers sequenced ahead of his group.
Operation Meetinghouse[1] is/was the single most destructive bombing raid in human history. I really hope that record is never broken.
Like it or not, the civillian bombings of Japan were absolutely necessary.
Japan was a very sick and diseased nation and culture at the time. They had made a national, media broadcasted sport of beheading children. They had turned deadly human experimentation into science. They had waged wars of aggression on all of their neighbors, no matter how distant.
They brought their cultural disease to American shores and attacked my family. All of their civillian science and industry and culture brought about the war machine that came to American shores to murder us in a time of peace, on a continent far away from their own.
The bombings of Japan should stand as a warning to all nations and cultures for all generations. If your culture gets sick with that totalitarian ideology, it is a lot better if you fix it at home on your own terms than if you bring it to our shores and make us fix it for you.
You can all enjoy the peaceful world that resulted from American sacrifice, and posturing after WW2. Criticize us however you like, you have that right and luxury regardless of where you live.
Regardless, you would be wise to learn this one lesson from history: Don't start nothing, won't be nothing.
Germany and Japan learned that lesson the hard way and they deserved every thing they got in response.
I am not on HN to confront warcrimes denialism from foreign extremists, so this is about the extent that I am going to go.
>>At the time periods in question, de-facto segregation was still the norm across the entire U.S. and yet you're implying we were some sort of beacon of morality and human rights. Hell, the U.S. was performing horrific human experimentation before and _after_ the war.
No where near comparable to the horrors of what Japan was doing and not even close to relevant to this thread. This is pure whataboutism from a denialist.
The axis powers were not the same as the allies in some "weird and wacky" grey morality.
>>This part is just straight up racism.
No. Describing fascist cultures engaged in genocidal wars of extermination against the whole world as "diseased" during that time period is being polite and succinct. Maybe your view is that such a culture was healthy at the time? Tell us.
>>You're either a troll or you truly have bought into the entire breadth of American Propaganda.
I have seen the horrors of fascist Japan first hand. I have seen the devices and torture chambers they built. I have lived in Nanjing and heard the air raid sirens with my own ears.
I, for one, am not an ignorant denialist that wants to pretend none of this ever happened. Fascist Japan had a problem back home that needed fixing. America fixed it.
I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives.