It's funny how war is always glorious from the point of view of the aggressor and always sad from the point of view of the aggressed (sp?), even when they're the same person! How we feel depends on who's story we're reading at the time.
"She had not had an easy time. Her husband, Isawa, had gone into the Army just after Myeko was born, and she had heard nothing from or of him for a long time, until, on March 5, 1942, she received a seven-word telegram: “Isawa died an honorable death at Singapore.” "
In case you don't know what her husband would have contributed to in Singapore - "between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaya ... were rounded up and taken to deserted spots around the island and killed systematically." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_Singapo...
This reminds me of Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn's story when they were doing journalism in East Timor:
"Allan suggested we walk to the front of the crowd between the soldiers and the Timorese, because although we knew that the army had committed many massacres, we hoped that we, as foreign journalists, could serve as a shield for the Timorese. Standing with headphones on and microphone and camera out in full view, we went and stood in the middle of the road, looking straight at the approaching troops. Behind us, the crowd was hushed as some Timorese tried to turn away, but they were hemmed in by cemetery walls.
The soldiers marched straight up to us. They never broke their stride. We were enveloped by the troops, and when they got a few yards past us, within a dozen yards of the Timorese, they raised their rifles to their shoulders all at once, and they opened fire. The Timorese, in an instant, were down, just torn apart by the bullets. The street was covered with bodies, covered with blood. And the soldiers just kept on coming. They poured in, one rank after another. They leaped over the bodies of those who were down. They were aiming and shooting people in the back. I could see their limbs being torn, their bodies exploding. There was blood spurting out into the air. The pop of the bullets, everywhere. And it was very organized, very systematic. The soldiers did not stop. They just kept on shooting until no one was left standing.
A group of soldiers grabbed my microphone and threw me to the ground, kicking and punching me. At that point, Allan threw himself on top of me, protecting me from further injury. The soldiers then used their rifle butts like baseball bats, beating Allan until they fractured his skull. As we sat on the ground, Allan, covered in blood, a group of soldiers lined up and pointed their M-16s at our heads. They had stripped us of all of our equipment. We just kept shouting, "We’re from America!" In the end, they decided not to execute us."
There are many views on the bombing. The difference is that Americans do not hide it. It's controversial, but people know about it.
Same with Germans. People know about how the Germans behaved in WW2, they're not proud about it, it's learned in schools, and they do not hide it.
Japan on the other side, actively hide their actions. Japanese schools present a revisionist version of history in which all their horrible and brutal war crimes never happened. The Japanese people promote a vision of Japan with a tradition full of honor and virtue. Do they teach their kids that they dropped a bomb carrying the bubonic plague? or the massacre of Nanking? the mass beheadings of people? the sexual slavery? and many other horrible crimes, even targeting kids... probably not. This is the difference.
For the record, this doesn't reflect my personal experience in Japan in any way whatsoever. People here are quite well aware of their history, but they don't understand some people's focus on Japan's most recent expansion into China and Korea any more than Americans would understand someone whose sole concern is the eradication of native Americans. This kind of "they're not sorry enough for me" discussion is fruitless, because no nation or ethnicity has a moral high ground to stand on.
Edit: I want to add that in my personal experience, there is no place on Earth that is more peaceful and pacifistic than Japan in 2016. Don't pay attention to the government, which simply tows the line for America...I'm talking about the people in the cities and villages. Meanwhile, to my point above, America does nothing but wage wars since WW2. Make of that what you will.
I've been living in Japan for a couple years, and this reflects my experience too with regards to most people I've met. However, it's not just the government, but also a powerful and ageing elite which shares these views. Admittedly not people you'll meet everyday, yet they wield obvious political influence.
Anecdotally, I hadn't met any such people until yesterday, where I had to attend a rotary international conference for a scholarship I receive from them. The audience was composed of around 700 people, most of them CEOs of local corporations, politicians or otherwise wealthy and connected people. The average age must have been somewhere in the late fifties/early sixties. The invited speaker was Masahiko Fujiwara [1], a mathematician turned essayist, who probably should have stuck to number theory. It was basically an hour and a half of chauvinist propaganda, hailing the past greatness of Japan, the superiority of the Japanese people, and mocking (I quote and translate) "Americans, Europeans and white people" at every turn with racial stereotypes. And the entire audience was laughing and clapping their hands! It's scary to think that these people might well be a representative sample of the ruling Japanese elite.
Scary indeed. Those were the same people who dragged Japan into imperialism. I guess waters in Japan run deep, and there have those small-minded people in the ruling class that you find everywhere else, too.
I certainly don't see the current government of Japan reflecting the sentiments of normal people in any way whatsoever, but I think a lot of working class people feel like the government exists in a compromised world where influences of powerful nations like America and Russia use Japan as a proxy. Japan is not a passive player in that game, but the game itself doesn't seem to interest the average person. The people I know are just working hard to make ends meet and do a good job, raise a good family, etc.——normal human stuff.
I'm not so naive to think that Japanese people aren't capable of being racist assholes, but I would say the prevailing sentiment here is more humility than arrogance or conniving. I'm a white American who married into a Japanese family with a (very) distinguished naval history. My ancestry here is definitely elite, but the money and power are a shadow of what they once were——and that's probably a good thing. There's no room for hubris when you're on the ropes. Everyone just has their focus at the human scale.
Yeah, regarding the not sorry enough position, people of the West generally broadcast toward Japan rather than the other way around. Read a book like "Senso," a compilation of letters to a Japanese newspaper by Japanese people sharing their recollections of the war. The sorrow becomes apparent. The shame is not hidden.
>Meanwhile, to my point above, America does nothing but wage wars since WW2. Make of that what you will.
America is the reason Japan is pacifist. America forced Japan to become pacifist at the point of (quite a few) guns. While it's wonderful that the Japanese people have embraced pacifism culturally, their country's pacifist stance is nonetheless paid for with the obligation of American military violence.
Yea the snideness of that last sentence is a bit much, seeing as its current pacifism was bought with American blood and is secured by the Pax Americana.
That'd be accurate. I suppose my stance would be that Japan's current pacifism was imposed on them at the cost of all their soldiers. In my mind 'bought' assumes intentionality, and I don't believe that pacifism was the goal of Imperial Japan.
Fair enough, I removed the last sentence, but I stand by the snideness nonetheless.
If nihonde wants to contrast Japan's pacifism with America's violence, they would do well to remember how much easier it is to remain pacifist when someone else has to take the bullets for you.
You're employing a strawman in suggesting open military conflict is the only way in which Japan is a benefactor of America. In reality, America's dominance of the ocean's secures Japanese commerce and frees up money they would otherwise have to spend on defense - indeed, Japan's sophisticated economy benefitted a great deal by essentially having it's sovereignty guaranteed with no investment in a standing military. American power in the Pacific protects the Japanese from the ascension of China and probably somewhat from the belligerence of Russia - if America withdrew it's implicit military support of Japan, do you think the Japanese have the power to keep the Senkaku Islands from being annexed by China?
None. But AFAIK the US is obligated by treaty to defend Japan against any external military threats, meaning any potential conflicts Japan might have with its neighbors would be fought on Japan's behalf by the US. Japan is ostensibly pacifist because it's "military" isn't Japanese, it's American.
I guarantee you that "Japan is ostensibly pacifist" because the people who live here right now have no interest in war. The only signals of war and conflict here are American.
No normal people in Japan are interested in the territorial conflicts with China, or constitutional debates about self-defense, or where to stage American military hardware, except that they would like all of that nonsense to end so that they can get on with their lives.
Your 'Pax Americana' is doublespeak on the highest order, as Americans go around the world setting and lighting their own powder kegs.
Yesterday, a V-22 Osprey flew low over my house, and while it is a marvelous sight on many levels it is ultimately the only emblem of death and destruction on a landscape of almost unimaginable serenity. My neighborhood is all bamboo swaying in the wind, old people on bicycles running errands, kids playing baseball and catching beetles, some lazy cats and a lazy river...and here comes a fucking V-22 Osprey overhead.
Meanwhile, a Marine in Okinawa is accused of killing a young Japanese girl. These things just simply do not happen very often in Japan, so the attention on this murder is intense. Okinawa is a really nice place, and the people there would prefer not to deal with this cyclone of...death and destruction in their midst. It made sense at one time, but it really is not that time anymore.
I know that you have a hard time overcoming the urge (programming) to see America as the great liberator of the world, policing the wild streets of lesser, unruly regions that would be lost without Uncle Sam, but...at some point, the big bully protecting the block becomes the only problem that anyone on the block is having.
The ironic thing is that I agree with you far more than I disagree with you, and I'm anything but "programmed to see America as the great liberator of the world". I would like nothing more than for the US to reduce its global military presence, because I think the age of nuclear superpowers and the "Pax Americana" is coming to an end, and, as you said, the US is becoming the problem.
However, you seem to be incapable of perceiving Americans as anything but mind-controlled militarists, or of seeing Japan's relationship with the US military as anything more complex than a violent foreign intruder forcing its will onto a pure and innocent yamato nadeshiko, so I'm going to stop trying to engage you in thoughtful conversation on this topic.
To be honest, I enjoyed this conversation, even though I probably project some unfair assumptions onto you. I'm an American myself, so I'm also well aware of the beautiful side of American life. I guess we're ultimately in agreement that the best of America happens when we look after ourselves and our own homestead, and the same is true of Japan. I just get so damn frustrated when America can't seem to resist the urge to own everyone and everything, which is basically a destructive impulse. At the end of the day, national boundaries are not important, and the most useful qualities for the long-term preservation of our human race are humility and thoughfulness.
> no nation or ethnicity has a moral high ground to stand on
There are quite a few old and small countries and ethnic groups that have reasonably good human rights record in the post-Columbus times. See Iceland or the Sami people for example.
I bet even during WW2 Japanese civilian life was peaceful too, but that doesn't prevent Japan's brutal invasion into other nations. Your personal experience doesn't matter much. Also I don't think Asians reveal their true thoughts to foreigners easily. Besides what matters is Japanese government's take on the history. If Japanese government continue to deny their wrongs during the war and worship their war criminals in shrine, then it is a major problem to the neighbors.
It's not like Japan would be the first country to selectively remember history to make itself look good. I doubt they teach much about Dresden in the UK, or the extermination of Indians in America, or killing literally every Aborigine in Tasmania, or the British forcing the Chinese to buy opium.
I went to school in Japan and we didn't learn a sugar-coated version of history. We went to Hiroshima and listened to a talk from a bomb survivor who told us it was our job to make a world where something like that could never happen again.
In American schools an overwhelming amount of time is spent teaching about the sins of our country and other white people. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, the genocide of Native Americans. In a unit on WWII, a week would be spent on the entire war, and the other 3 specifically dedicated to the Holocaust. All in all I'd say we spent over half of our history lessons and a third of our English lessons covering subjects like these.
Very true, and a great point. There are still gaps, though. How many schools teach you the reasons that Germany turned against Jewish people after WWI? In fact, how many schools teach the history of WWI in any kind of detail at all? And what about the reasons for the Southern resistance during the Civil War? My recollection (and I went to an expensive private school) was that these wars were characterized as simplistic, binary good/evil conflicts, where a bunch of "bad" people went nuts and had to be sorted out by "good guys" who were obviously right. If someone asked a question like "why did National Socialism focus on Jewish people", that person would be immediately shunned and the question would be offensive——again my experience. If you don't let people ask difficult questions, and provide answers for them, it isn't so much an education as a program.
I was trying not to ruffle feathers, but that's what I was getting at. I was quite liberal as a teenager but even I could tell that history/social studies was mostly used as an opportunity to indoctrinate. The one teacher I had that tried to provide opposing views on every topic got canned.
I agree with you but the schools' focus on the Holocaust, in my experience, was heavily centered on the Jewish experience, despite that many millions of non Jews were also exterminated. I guess this is because America has lots of Jews but not so many Poles, handicapped, homosexuals, etc (or they don't have much political power).
Also I remember learning about measles blankets and all that, but it never got to the point of using this historical context to inform a discussion of the current social/economic situation Native Americans face. All in all it was portrayed as a romantic and fair battle between cowboys and Indians.
Tldr the only war crimes we teach our kids are those whose victims have survived and attained some political prominence.
In the UK, children are definitely taught a history to be proud of in general. Which is the opposite of how history is taught in Germany. But there were a few exceptions. I'm certain we studied the Allied bombing of Dresden and also the massacres that occurred during the Indian independence movement.
It seems only right to me that children be taught pride in their country and their history. There's no need to teach people to cringe at the mention of their nation.
There is a middle ground between hating their nation and blind national chauvinism. And if one must choose between extremes, "cringing" beats the heck out of falling in line and being a party to genocide
That's pretty straight-forward. Until the last ~30-50 years the vast majority of the US population held a high or at worst neutral opinion of Jackson.
From, say, 1928-1960 there was practically no wide-spread criticism of Jackson's personal history regarding Native Americans (or any of his other terrible beliefs).
Consider that FDR is still very highly regarded by the left in the US, despite the fact that he was a blatant racist and interned a hundred-thousand Japanese-Americans.
In Australia, the extermination of all Tasmanian aborigines was definitely not taught in highschool, in at least the late 80s when I went. It's not suppressed at all, and plenty of people are aware of it, but it's certainly not taught (or at least, wasn't at that time).
I remember wondering how it was actually performed. The story was told as a long line of men walking from on end of the island to the other, killing any aboriginals they found in the process. Tasmania is a very large island, so it seemed like they would need an inordinate number of men to form a line that joined all the way across it, and it would take a very long time to walk the length of it.
Turns out the line was a real thing, called the Black Line [1], and was part of a war called the Black War [2].
Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur decided to remove all Aborigines from the settled areas in order to end the escalating raids upon settlers' huts. He was also concerned about preventing the settlers from taking the law into their own hands and launching revenge attacks. To accomplish this he called upon every able-bodied male colonist, convict or free, to form a human chain that then swept across the settled districts, moving south and east for several weeks in an attempt to corral the Aborigines on the Tasman Peninsula by closing off Eaglehawk Neck (the isthmus connecting the Tasman peninsula to the rest of the island) where Arthur hoped that they could live and maintain their culture and language. This action was only directed against Aborigines of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes, since the conflict was only with these two tribes.
Do you know whereof you're speaking, or are you attacking a school curriculum you've imagined? Japanese education does cover these topics. There was a big controversy around 2000 when the government approved a new textbook that greatly downplayed Japan's military past but it was never used in more than a handful of schools.
Obviously there's a never-ending debate about precisely what gets taught, and right-wing activism to whitewash textbooks is always in the background. But the topics you're talking about do get taught, and discussed widely, and you'd have a hard time finding an educated Japanese person who isn't familiar with them.
Americans may not hide their actions, but they certainly paint the actions in a light favorable to the American self-image. Germany on the other hand exhibits complete contrition and there is no denial of the wrongness of the actions that happened. There are extreme and fringe holocaust denial beliefs in some sub-groups in Germany, but as a government policy what I've said is true.
As an American, this is a question I struggle with. The the atomic bombs did what they were meant to, a swift end to the war with a full capitulation by the Japanese, before the Russians were able to mount an invasion of their own. This is generally forgiven because it in theory saved the lives of American soldiers who would have had a hard fight to take Japan.
But all of this was done, and with an understanding that it would, cause a massive number of civilian casualties. The US and allies did this to Tokyo and Dresden with non-atomic weapons as well.
To me these are crimes that we as a country have never really admitted to. We discuss it openly, but we have never truly said that we were wrong to kill so many innocent people. I believe that this is partly why we today do not also hold ourselves accountable to the large number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Edit: I should include Vietnam as well in which we killed some multiple of millions. But even that has the list too short. We as Americans suffer from the Sam euro centric view we've always had, if your white, it's a death worth counting, if not, eh...
I should be more clear, there are many idividuals in the US who believe these actions were wrong, but the government continues to report civilian deaths as irreleveant in most cases.
Also, I'd say those movies you're referring to were much more from the perspective of the unjustly forced into war soldier, than the plight of the Vietnamese.
I was not alive then, my knowledge of Vietnam is all books and information from my parents and friend's parents.
Life is so strange. The other day, I joined a new Japanese language class. The only other person who was starting that day was a young Vietnamese man. So here is an American and a Vietnamese man in Japan, speaking to each other in broken Japanese. Fifty years ago, we might have been killing each other. Thank goodness we found our peace and became friends with a common goal instead.
Also, we're still killing civilians as collateral damage in the middle east through drone strikes. And the civilian death toll is officially underreported because of how they've chosen to define an enemy combatant. A quick googling shows counts in the 100k+ range.
My view is that the people who made those difficult decisions are all dead now. Let's study their reasons in the coldest, least judgmental light and try to make some sense of their dilemma. From there, maybe we can do a better job of avoiding the situations that lead people to have to make those hard choices.
There are also groups of Americans that condemn such actions. There is also compassion for the victims. There is a mainstream ethical debate, which is what allows society to move forward.
It certainly is hard to have contrition if all your lines of thinking start with the conclusion that you are never wrong about anything, and work backwards from there
At least in my experience in the US school system, not a lot talks about American behaviour in WW2
Besides the atom bomb, America basically bombed Japan out of existence. So much so that when the atomic bombs were dropped, it was first assumed to be just another part of that night's bombing runs. No major city was less than 90% destroyed.
The issues of Japanese war behaviour comes up very often, and the people have been very outspoken in not wanting to return to a militarised state. I would say that Japan has mostly behaved in a similar manner to Germany on the topic (if with several decades of lateness).
You can open up Japanese textbooks and find the history of the war (and the unrest beforehand that lead to the military getting so much power).
EDIT: another thing. There are movies/TV serials about wartime Japan. Every single one of them highlights the absurdity of the war that people are being sent out to. The lies the government propagated to keep the war going. The punishing of intellectuals for expressing even the smallest doubt. Some even covering how foreigners were mostly thrown out of the country. I have rarely heard doubts about whether we should have bombed Japan as much as we ended up doing.
When I visited the peace museum in Hiroshima, I was surprised by how honest the exhibits were about admitting their own ugly history that led up to the bomb. I was shocked by the forgiveness of the Japanese people. Some survivors actually work in the museum and greet visitors coming through. The peace museum is one of the most emotional places I've ever visited and it leaves such a vivid picture of the human cost of war.
It's not that Japanese people are hiding their history. If there are clear evidences that are not flawed and could not be denied, they will not deny, but admit and apologize. For example, there was the famous Korean sexual slavery issue coined by Seiji Yoshida that later he and Asahi Shimbun admitted it was a complete fiction. This revealed that the comfort women issue was not about slavery but prostitution.
Why do you apologize for the thing if it wasn't true? The thing which is making complicating is that the Chinese government is promoting hatred towards the Japanese government as a propaganda and is exaggerating the results.
Do you really believe the claims of the country which has the Great Firewall? Do you really believe the country which the government is officially producing anti Japanese movies? Do you believe the country which hides the Tiananmen Square Incident and the ongoing killings of the people in Tibet and Xinjiang?
There are suspicions of the claims and the numbers coming from such country.
Both articles refer to the same person Tamaki Matsuoka, which is known to be writing books based on logically mistaken interviews.
For example, there is a book written by her about 102 "anonymous" ex-soldiers, which she claimed that an 11 years old boy was sent to Nanking as a soldier and raped many women.
http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E5%8D%97%E4%BA%AC%E6%88%A6-%E9%96%8...
There were no Japanese soldiers of such a young age.
> Japan on the other side, actively hide their actions.
The US, like the rest of the Allied powers, do more than their fair share of actively hiding their crimes during the war years. They also love to gloss over the degree to which, before they saw him as a threat to their existence, the Allied powers actually admired and respected Hitler and even sought to emulate his leadership.
I mean, most Americans sure as heck don't know that FDR literally modeled the genocide in Puerto Rico after 'the methods which Hitler used effectively'[0]. Because very few schools actually bother to mention Operation Bootstrap in the first place, let alone acknowledge that that the US forcibly sterilized 40% of Puerto Rican women (on the grounds that they were 'unfit to reproduce').
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the exception only because the events directly led to the Cold War as we know it[1], and it's kind of hard to understand the next 50 years of world history without understanding that the Cold War was happening.
[1] Yes, the Cold War would still have happened even if the US had decided not to drop the bomb, but since we did, the bombings became the unforgettable, tangible symbol of the fear that the Cold War was based on.
Today, Chinese government says that Japanese army killed 300,000 people in Nanking.
In reality, Nanking's population had been doubled at that time.
Plus, there were only 200,000 people from the beginning.
I still think there had been something small massacres though,
why can't we find dead bodies for 300,000 people?
Talking about comfort women, the system was not only Japan.
USA and South Korea had also introduced exactly same system during Korean war.
Look at today's USA. How many Korean prostitutes are out there?
They would be called sex slaves 50 years later.
There are a lot of Japanophiles (be it culture, food, anime or whatever). Much of it seems to spring from disaffection for the West. All of that's fine but this revisionist view of history is one thing that's always bothered me about Japan.
Now we have China and Japan squaring off over some uninhabited rocks in the South China Sea and I think it's at least in part a byproduct of WW2.
The Chinese remember Manchuria, Nanking, etc. From the outside looking in it seems like "payback" might not be the goal of this but it sure is a nice bonus.
The Japanese on the other hand as a whole I think don't understand this motivation because they don't have this foundation in historical events. To them it must seem like the Chinese actions are unprovoked and unwarranted.
This sort of thing is a dangerous and inevitable consequence of ignoring the lessons of history. Population and economics are on the side of the Chinese here.
WWII is falling out of living memory very quickly. It should be of no surprise that it is becoming every more glorified. Europe is shifting dangerously to the right. The US is about to elect a hawk (both of them are hawks). An Asian nation (this time China) is talking expansion, in influence if not in literal territory. The western world is split on the issue of migrants fleeing local conflicts. And everyone talks of tightening boards. All the ducks are lining up nicely for the day we forget the lesson.
It took me about an hour to read this whole thing. If you are like me and find the Hiroshima event fascinating, I highly recommend doing this. The piece follows several people who ended up in a park together the night after the bomb, and hauntingly captures the mood of that night and the horrifying physical details of what people went through. I definitely think I'll remember some images from this article for a while.
The article was long ago published as a stand-alone book. I bought and read the book before I ever knew it came from the New Yorker. It's one of the most haunting things I've read, and I guard that book jealously, which is a long-winded way of recommending you find the book and keep it around.
The following summary by Alex Wellerstein represents his understanding of the consensus view. Notably the idea that the bombings where carefully motivated by some sort of ethical calculus is not something that historians now believe. From http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-us...
* It’s not really clear that Truman ever made much of a “decision,” or regarded the bomb/invasion issue as being mutually exclusive. Truman didn’t know if the bomb would end the war; he hoped, but he didn’t know, couldn’t know. The US was still planning to invade in November 1945. They were planning to drop as many atomic bombs as necessary. There is no contemporary evidence that suggests Truman was ever told that the causalities would be X if the bomb was dropped, and Y if it was not. There is no evidence that, prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Truman was particularly concerned with Japanese causalities, radiation effects, or whether the bombs were ethical or not. The entire framing of the issue is ahistorical, after-the-fact, here. It was war; Truman had atomic bombs; it was taken for granted, at that point, that they were going to be used.
* Defeat is not surrender. Japan was certainly defeated by August 1945, in the sense that there was no way for them to win; the US knew that. But they hadn’t surrendered, and the peace balloons they had put out would have assumed not that the Emperor would have stayed on as some sort of benign constitutional monarch (much less a symbolic monarch), but would still be the god-head of the entire Japanese country, and still preserve the overall Japanese state. This was unacceptable to the US, and arguably not for bad reasons. Japanese sources show that the Japanese military was willing to bleed out the country to exact this sort of concession from the US.
* American sources show that the primary reason for using the bomb was to aid in the war against Japan. However, the fact that such weapons would be important in the postwar period, in particular vis-à-vis the USSR, was not lost on American policymakers. It is fair to say that there were multiple motivations for dropping the bomb, and specifically that it looks like there was a primary motivation (end the war) and many other “derivative” benefits that came from that (postwar power).
* Japanese sources, especially those unearthed and written about by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, make it clear that prior to the use of the atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was still planning on fighting a long battle against invasion, that they were hoping to exact the aforementioned concessions from the United States, and that they were aware (and did not care) that such an approach would cost the lives of huge numbers of Japanese civilians. It is also clear that the two atomic bombs did shock them immensely, and did help break the stalemate in the cabinet — but that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also shocked them immensely, perhaps equally, maybe even more (if you have a choice between being occupied by Truman or occupied by Stalin, the decision is an easy one). But there is no easy way to disentangle the effects of the bombs or the Soviet invasion, in this sense — they were both immensely influential on the final decision. That being said, using the bomb as an “excuse” (as opposed to “we are afraid of Russians”) did play well with the Japanese public and made surrender appear to be a sensible, viable option in a culture where surrender was seen as a complete loss of honour.
This is an excellent post that anyone thinking about Hiroshima should read.
This post by the same author also makes a convincing argument that the beginning of the firebombing campaign against Japan with the bombing of Tokyo (in which more people died than at Hiroshima) was the unnoticed ethical turning point.
This article was written immediately after the war, and doesn't really pass any judgment. It's one of the greatest works of non-fiction of all time, in my opinion.
> Say as an armed soldier, you're about to be shipped out to run up a hill and killed by Japanese machine guns.
> Wouldn't you prefer Truman use a super weapon on civilians to end the war ?
I know WWII blurred the lines on what counts a legitimate target (military installations, civilian-manned factories, entire towns like the firebombing of Dresden). As a soldier, would you be able to justify indiscriminate targeting of unarmed civilians? I suspect some Americans lack empathy on that part because the US homeland has never had a hot war in a very long time to the extent that is not imaginable.
In that case I see no difference between a solder and a civilian. Truman's duty is to American boys who are dying in a war Japan started. He's wasn't the president of Japan
You also have to factor in with any negotiation Japan may of argued they still owned Korea, as they'd had since 1910
In the Battle of the Bulge children were drafted,they magically become disposable war machines.
> In that case I see no difference between a solder and a civilian.
Surely even when you're drafted, being trained and armed sets you apart from civilians? This WWII vet[1] is of the opinion that even unarmed soldiers (AKA ejected pilots who no longer have access to arms) are not legitimate targets, let alone civilians.
>And the logic of killing civilians to save soldiers is just .. no comment.
Since their was totally a way to invade Japan and not harm any civilians. Since Japan totally didn't kill millions of innocent Chinese , Vietnamese, and Philippinos. It's not a bad guy good guy comic
When exactly was the last no civilian casualties war ?
We firebombed Dresden too, but you don't see Germany getting a peace day.
And remember Truman's first duty is to save the lives of the drafted men on the front lines.
You're making the assumption that you -need- the other side to sign an agreement. Japan was completely contained by the US at this point in the war.
This was a decision to hasten the end of the war, but did we ever actually leave? We still have bases in Japan. This was about hastening an end with a guarantee that the US would have full control of Japan.
Please don't misunderstand me though, Japan needed to be defeated thoroughly, it had acted and performed gross injustices against many people in the world. But these bombs were not necessary.
I will check out a summary and if it looks good I will give it a read. My googling makes it look a bit revisionist but I will check it out. Since we are starting a book club try 'With the Old Breed' by Eugene Sledge and/or 'Flyboys' by James Bradley to see the hell on earth the Japanese military had exported all over the Pacific. I was actually somewhat mentally exhausted by the end of 'With the Old Breed' and was glad when it was over. The book described something horrifying and grueling with no end in sight so I can't imagine how it would feel to actually have lived it.
James Clavell's fictional account based on his experiences in a Japanese prison camp is wonderful read too, 'King Rat'.
I talked with my grandfather often about his service as a submariner in the pacific, brutal, but oddly he never hated the Japanese. He saved that for the French.
Well to be fair soldiers are humans and aren't just completely disposable. Read "With the Old Breed" by Eugene Sledge to see the fun and games a 19 year old kid from Mobile Alabama got to have as a US Marine in the Pacific. Spoiler alert, his experience was probably about as bad as anything a human could endure.
I read the book version of this essay shortly before visiting Japan. It is strange to stand next to the one preserved ruined building at ground zero and think that there was once an atomic fire storm in that spot.
The US started targeting defenseless civilians in Japan via fire bombing, and the majority of the Japan's cities had already been destroyed by the time they deployed the atomic bombs. The attacks on civilians in Japan were the first examples of what is now standard procedure in the air force, now known as "strategic bombing".
He points out how the attacks on civilians in Dresden, for example, were met with shock by Europeans at the time. But the Americans never reacted as strongly to the same bombings in Japan.
Several cities of civilians were destroyed in the Korean War. In Vietnam city bombins and chemical weapons were deployed against civilians. Carpet bombing was the term for targeting civilians in Iraq I. Etc etc etc. It's all basically the same.
Iraq II re-destroyed Baghdad and destroyed the city center Falluja. An estimated 655,000 civilians were dead by 2006 and another 2,000,000 displaced. The standard procedure of targeting civilians is still the central strategy.
Cool. I hope Americans remember this as we consider electing someone who thinks nuclear war is a bargaining tool.
"If they do, they do" is not something a President should be saying about other nations engaging in nuclear war. Go mess up someone else's planet, Trump.
The more searing question for me is the argument that the shock created by the atomic bombings has successfully prevented a WW 111. I cannot come to terms with this argument though I slightly tend to agree with it. On the other hand, the bombings were done just to force a japanese surrender, not with a foresighted view of stopping all the horrible future wars in this planet. Also, I'm not sure whether vietnam, gulf wars will be considered under the "world war" category as a lot of them happened after the japanese bombings.
Now, I just resign myself that for whatever reason it happened, and let us learn whatever we could from it.
It's one of the usual outcomes of war in general. Humans have been maiming, burning, torturing, cutting, asphyxiating, and otherwise abusing other humans for all of recorded history.
The only difference is that nuclear weapons are industrialised death machines - much more efficient than the usual manual methods.
Well, that is actually a good point. As President Obama said in anticipation of his historic visit to Hiroshima this year (paraphrasing): the relationship of Japan and the United States should serve as an example of how we can build a lasting peace from bitter enmity.
It's also worth noting that President Obama and the G7 will be meeting on Ise Shima, near Japan's most sacred Shinto site, Ise Jingu. It's significant because the most important shrines of Ise Jingu are rebuilt on the site every twenty years. I've visited Ise Jingu a few times, and the incredible craftsmanship of the buildings is jaw-dropping. Every piece of ancient Hinoki cedar used in the buildings is chiseled and sanded to perfection. They've been re-building the shrines every 20 years for almost a thousand years. Among other things, it's a metaphor for this whole conversation about forging a new tradition.
> In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed.
However I may feel about the bomb having been used, I don't doubt it saved more lives than it took. As for all the civilians and children and other non-combatants, I doubt the tragedy would have been less without the bomb. It's hard for me to reconcile how such an obvious force of destruction could be more desirable than an invasion, and that's probably because it's very hard for me to understand the destruction an invasion creates. An invasion's impact isn't as easy to put into neat pictures and anecdotes as a singular experience that a bomb explosion creates.
There's some question if the ramp up of the Soviets on their eastern border had more to do with Japan's surrender than the atomic bombs we dropped. I'm not sure there's a clear answer there.
This counterfactual loses much of its appeal when you learn that Japan was beaten and had been trying, through back channels, to conditionally surrender for months prior to the bombing. Their sole condition was guaranteed safety for the Emperor: the US refused to grant this, and so the fighting continued.
As history shows, the US had no intention of harming the emperor -- so why wouldn't it accept this condition? And why did it target civilians, rather than (as the Los Alamos scientists had called for) a demonstration just off the coast which would have made the point equally well?
As in backchannels of primarily just Shigenori Togo. The Japanese war council was unanimous in rejecting unconditional surrender, and bitterly divided on the terms willing to be offered for conditional surrender. The idea that it was the safety of the emperor they were stuck on is new to me. Perhaps you are referring to Togo's statement that the Potsdam declaration would be accepted provided the position of the Emperor was maintained? Firstly, this was not an official Japanese government offer, secondly it's not exactly as if it's a reasonable request to allow a defeated belligerent to maintain their existing government.
Togo reasoned
that "the introduction of a new weapon, which had
drastically altered the whole military situation, offered the military
ample grounds for ending the war." He proposed that surrender
be considered at once on the basis of terms presented
in the Potsdam Declaration. (When those in the peace party
talked about "accepting the Potsdam terms," they meant acceptance
with one crucial condition: retention of the emperor
system.) However, the military authorities refused to concede
that the United States had used an atomic weapon. Given the
army's intransigence, it was impossible for the cabinet to take
up Togo's proposal.
So, if it's established that the Japanese government was store concerned with its own political positioning that winning the war or defending the people of the country, and an appropriate response is to immediately bomb a quarter million civilians without any ramp up or targeting of military or government targets?
The morality of the action of dropping 2 nuclear bombs on Japan is separate from the question of whether the Japanese government was making a bona fide attempt to surrender.
Seems like every time this topic comes up, there are people who seem to "know" a lot of things, and on occasion they can point to real documentation -- letters that can be traced to people in the presidential cabinet, for example -- but very often the things people "know" turn out to be speculative, or after-the-fact rationalizations, or connecting dots that were known individually by people in different parts of the government but who didn't have a way to connect with each other.
So my question is, how well documented was the Japanese back-channel surrender offer? Is it documented that it was made to legitimate decision-makers through those back channels?
> So my question is, how well documented was the Japanese back-channel surrender offer? Is it documented that it was made to legitimate decision-makers through those back channels?
[Edit: I linked to a terrible source. I apologise.]
interesting. Based on that, it looks like the sticking point really was whether the Emperor's safety would be guaranteed (thought he was eventually kept as a figurehead, it's not clear the US leadership expected to take that path.)
EDIT: that said, do you have a source that isn't a holocaust-denial website?
Ugh, yeah, that's a terrible source. Apologies for the bad Google-fu.
I have heard this claim from decidedly less-terrible sources, but the hour is too late in my current timezone to pursue this thread. So until then I will need to relax the certitude of my claims.
It's many years since I visited, but the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima has an exhibit that appeared to cover the evidence surrounding this pretty exhaustively.
My vague recollection is that most of it was evidence of perception on the US side that Japan was ready to surrender - as opposed to evidence about specific back-channel negotiations.
I think he's implying that "why it isn't documented" might be "because it didn't happen" ("it" being serious offers of surrender by Japan that reached the ears of US decision makers.) And that asking "why wasn't it documented?" presupposes that it did happen, which makes it a leading question.
I'm not assuming that it did happened, I'm assuming that if you're going to kill hundreds of thousands of people, that every attempt to reach a outcome that does not require it should be tried and documented.
Does 'years of war and 50 millions dead' count as an attempt? Rather than an armchair, the decision-makers were coming from a viewpoint that included more of their friends dying horribly every week. As Tibbets, the guy that flew the mission said about critics of the event, "Those people never had their balls on that cold, hard anvil. They can say anything they want."
The parent comment was in a sense asking if nkoren's assertion was reality, or after the fact speculation. If it was in fact speculation (like "the moon landing was staged") then it would follow that there wouldn't be a large amount of documentation. Admittedly not the best comparison.
I'm not sure what to think, but here's an interesting argument. What would the counterargument look like?
"When Okinawa was finally declared secure, the cost had been horrific. Some 150,000 Okinawans died, approximately one-third the island's population. An additional 10,000 Koreans, used by the Japanese military as slave labor, died as well. Of the 119,000 or so Japanese soldiers, as many as 112,000 were killed in the battle or forever sealed inside a collapsed cave or bunker. Aside from the human cost, most of the physical aspects of Okinawan culture were razed. Few buildings survived the 3 months fighting. Collectively, the defenders lost more dead than the Japanese suffered in the two atomic bombings combined. The United States lost 13,000 dead: almost 8,000 on the island and the remainder at sea; another 32,000 were wounded.
The loss of life on both sides, particularly among the Japanese civilians, caused immense worry in Washington. New President Harry Truman was looking at the plans for a proposed assault on the Japanese main islands, and the casualty projections were unacceptable. Projections numbered the potential casualties from 100,000 in the first 30 days to as many as 1 million attackers, and the death count for the Japanese civilians would be impossible to calculate. If they resisted as strongly as did the citizens of Okinawa -- and the inhabitants of the home islands would be even more dedicated to defending their homeland -- Japan would become a wasteland. It was already looking like one in many areas. The U.S. bombing campaign, in place since the previous September, was burning out huge areas of Japanese cities. How much longer the Japanese could have held out in the face of the fire bombing is a matter of much dispute; some project that, had the incendiary raids continued until November, the Japanese would have been thrown back to an almost Stone Age existence. The problem was this: no one in the west knew exactly what was happening in Japan. The devastation could be estimated, but the resistance could not.
Thus, with the casualties of the Okinawa battle fresh in his mind, when Truman learned of the successful testing of an atomic bomb, he ordered its use. This is a decision debated since 6 August 1945, the date of the bombing of Hiroshima, and even before. Just what was known of Japanese decision-making processes before that date is also argued to this day. Was the Japanese government in the process of formulating a peace offer, in spite of the demand for unconditional surrender the Allies had decided upon in February 1943? If they were doing so, did anyone in the west know about it? Who knew what, when they knew it, and what effect that knowledge had or may have had on Truman's decision making is a matter of much dispute. Whatever the political ramifications of the atomic bomb on the immediate and postwar world, Truman's decision was certainly based in no small part on the nature of the fighting on Okinawa. Truman wrote just after his decision, "We'll end the war sooner now. And think of the kids who wont be killed."
Horrible as the effects of the two atomic bombs were, the number of casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as compared with the potential number an invasion could have caused is small indeed."
The invasion of Okinawa is not at all comparable to a potential invasion of Japan. I won't address your main point. I'm posting to correct a grave misunderstanding about the relationship between Okinawa and Japan during this period. Okinawa is a distinct cultural entity, and the island was viewed by Japan as occupied territory. Japanese forces slaughtered Okinawans, going so far as to use them as human shields. Some Okinawans were ordered to kill themselves and their families to avoid the horrific fate that the Japanese promised at the hands of American troops. Others, including schoolchildren, were pressed into front-line service or sent on suicide missions. Others were simply murdered, whether for their food or supplies, out of paranoia to root out "spies" (those who made the grave mistake of speaking in Okinawan within earshot), or for entertainment. I'm not saying Americans didn't kill Okinawans too. What I'm saying is that the Japanese could not have cared less about the survival of Okinawa: the land, culture, or people.
While the Japanese were certainly willing to use civilians for tactical or strategic gain, one cannot assume that their military forces would have raped and pillaged their own populace in the same manner.
I don't think many people doubt that a land invasion to the bitter end would kill more people than dropping the bombs, but the argument is was the bomb necessary? Some higher ups in the military at the time thought Japan was on the brink of total surrender.
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." - DWIGHT EISENHOWER (in 1963)
"It is my opinion 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 because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." - Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief military advisor
Remember, on an average week in WWII more civilians died than from either of the bomb blasts. Together they might have equaled an average week, but probably not. That's the scale we are talking about.
The month was likely below average for the war. So, it's not just a question of would we have invaded, but just how many days it shortens the war.
Further, it is likely more people died in Tokyo than either of those city's.
If the Japanese were so willing to surrender, why did it take two atomics bombs before they finally did? And keep in mind they tooks days to surrender after the second one.
> Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, estimated that no more than one or two additional bombs could be readied, so they decided to endure the remaining attacks, acknowledging "there would be more destruction but the war would go on"
I know very little about this topic, but the last quote is interesting to me because I have heard that something like 1 million people died of starvation in Japan after the end of the war. The blockade was so successful and the Japanese infrastructure for delivering supplies was so disrupted that even when food became available, they couldn't get it to people. As an aside, for those who live in Japan, this is why the JA exists: it was set up by the Americans to ensure good food distribution in the years following the war. I constantly marvel at how good the JA is for ensuring the local produce makes it to a local market.
In any case, even now, virtually every person who was a child during WWII in Japan suffers from severe osteoporosis which is apparently a result of malnutrition as a child. For those who have never been here (especially in the countryside), a huge percentage of the population over the age of 70 is doubled over, unable to stand upright (they are still out in the fields working, though... which blows my mind on a daily basis). The difference between health issues for the elderly in Japan and my home country of Canada is really amazing.
Again, I have no idea about any of this stuff, but my experience here in Japan lends some credence to the idea that a land invasion of Japan would have been completely unnecessary. Just keep mining the seas and in a year the war would have been over, I think.
One of the most ironic things about thinking about this is that without the unconditional surrender of Japan, I think it is unlikely that MacArthur would have had as much success in rebuilding the country. I think I would get no argument from anybody here that some of the best things of modern Japanese culture arose from that period.
To be honest, when I see articles about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I wish people didn't dwell so much about the decisions made at the time. However you slice it, war produces incredible amounts of suffering. The idea that no matter how atrocious one side behaves, we can always pull out an atrocity that will shock them out of their behaviour is crazy. Possibly it is the only way we know how to operate, but I refuse to believe that it is the only way that can be effective.
They used to say that WWI was the war to end all wars because we would remember how awful it was. But it didn't take us long to realize that we didn't have the tools to stop another world war. We need to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only to avoid these disasters, but all of the disasters that come from the situations that led up to it. To think that we allowed the situation to get so bad that we can justify nuclear weapons -- that is what is scary. To think that we weighed the possible outcomes of hundreds of thousands dying in a land invasions, millions dying in a mass starvation, or tens or hundreds of thousands dying in a nuclear explosion. That's lunacy.
www.defence.gov tells me that the budget for the military is 585 billion this year. I assume that does not include the CIA. Where is the government "department for avoiding war"? I seem to see that the budget for the UN is $5.5 billion. 1% of the military budget. Will history repeat itself, or will we try to remember and learn from it?
That's a straw man. There were many alternatives apart from an invasion, such as a submarine blockade (as the navy was proposing), or simply accepting the conditional surrender which Japan had been offering through back-channels for weeks.
A blockade would have meant total famine for the Japanese people, probably killing many more than the bombs did. In fact, in the aftermath of the surrender, millions were close to starvation. And that was with tens of millions of dollars in food aid. It took years to end the threat of famine to Japan.
If the U.S. had instead somehow parachuted in 200,000 troops to Hiroshima, and then lined up and shot to death 100,000 men, women, children, elderly people, hospital patients, etc., and then burned every building down to the ground, would that be okay? What if by doing so it would end the war?
Even if there were going to be many U.S. military casualties (which I doubt, although I know this is debatable), that doesn't in any way justify killing civilians. It's a tragedy of World War 2 (and Korea and Vietnam to lesser extents) that our leaders thought this was an appropriate way to fight a war.
> that doesn't in any way justify killing civilians
WW2 wasn't just a war, it was absolute war: the survival of nations and perhaps hundreds of millions of people were on the line. In absolute war, most of the resources of the nation, including most of its labor pool, is put into war supply mode. That is a critical distinction. Killing civilians was inherently necessary, as they worked the manufacturing plants that supplied the weapons. If you intend to destroy the factories to stop the flow of weapons and supplies, you are going to kill very large numbers of civilians. And before the reflexive comment: simultaneously I'm not condoning intentionally targeting civilians as an appropriate means of instilling terror or capitulation.
Why do soldiers deserve to die more than civilians? This is not obvious. Soldiers by and large are not enrolled in war by virtue of free choice among competitive options.
By this logic, the US should just nuke any area causing problems for it.
Iraq invades Kuwait? Nuke it.
North Korea developing weapons of mass destruction? Nuke it.
Why mess around with invasions.
Note the scientists who developed the bomb begged the US government to first drop one off the coast of Japan to demonstrate to them what they were facing.
Instead we killed tens of thousands of civilians on purpose, not once, but went back a second time. The lucky ones were vaporized instantly. The unlucky ones died over weeks in horrible pain from radiation and mass organ failure.
> By this logic, the US should just nuke any area causing problems for it.
I don't think you actually understand said logic. US was in war with Japan for a long time, and was steadily winning; however, against self-interest of their country, Japanese command would not surrender. Continuing assault, US inflicted enormous civilian losses on Japan. The firebombing of Tokyo alone was at least as deadly as Hiroshima atomic bomb. And yet, Japan command did not want to surrender. Only atomic bomb finally succeed in ending the war.
It didn't happen because of some abstract "score"; it happened because of sheer moral shock of how one bomb was able to destroy an entire city. If US had decided to just bomb Hiroshima with conventional methods, inflicting exactly the same amount of death and destruction, it most likely wouldn't have ended the war.
Iraq, North Korea and other situations you can link with "this logic" are _not_ similar to this.
Well not really. Estimates for the cost of invading Japan were approx 1m US casualties, 5m Japanese. None of the above issues produce anything like that.
Japan's refusal to surrender - so as to bring an end to the vast war Japan started in Asia, and the separate war Japan joined with the Axis on when they declared war on the US and Britain - was the justification for the second bomb. The fact that they refused to surrender after being nuked once, very strongly makes the case that it was unlikely they were going to surrender without an invasion or more nuclear bombings.
One could note that the two bombs were of different design, that both were tested on real cities and real human beings. As for whether or not Soviet or the bombs won the war - or if the bombs made much difference that waiting would not have; it's hard to judge. Here's one take on it:
I think the poster meant that first [many] were killed in Hiroshima; and even if that was justified - would that justification apply to dropping another nuclear bomb on Nagasaki [a few days later]?
I'm not sure why this post gets downvoted as it makes a really good point I see from time to time when discussing this matter: why drop the first nuke on heavily populated city? Dropping few on the biggest military bases or naval fleets, would be enough to scare the shit out of anyone. Why shooting civilians is considered a war crime, but deliberately nuking (Hiroshima Nagasaki) or mass bombing (Dresden, Tokyo, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) them somehow makes it acceptable?
I grew up in the Balkans and was taught in school that assassination of Franc Ferdinand in Sarajevo was jusified act to free South Slavic people from German oppression. To justify the aftermath of WWI - the education at the time said the World War I would have happened anyway.
Moved out West and obviously introduced to a few different interpretations of the event, but it took a few years to start to question what I was taught early on and that maybe it is not 100% what would have happend in regards to WWI if not for the assassination.
maybe what you were taught wasnt so wrong - I've heard that the British (but I assume Germans, French too) were beginning to prepare for war and were expecting it to start
One particularly nice detail in the piece, the kind of detail you could only get from talking to real survivors shortly afterwards, is the kinds of theories and rumors that were going around the day of/after the bomb. People thought the Americans had sprinkled gasoline and lit it on fire, or thought that there had been some kind of trick involving dusting the city with magnesium. The weird rumors remind me of the kind of stuff I heard on the day of 9/11.
I think the "why" would have been obvious to anyone -- there was an ongoing, active war in which both sides had been bombing each other and killing civilians, and Hiroshima was contributing significant production toward the war effort.
Having gone through Katrina and been deployed for Fukushima, I assure you, there is plenty of time for the survivors to contemplate all the questions. That is arguably part of the tragedy of survivorship: facing down all the questions, and knowing with cruel certainty there will be time to face them.
I also went through Katrina and the thing in this piece that reminded me the most of that experience was how people quickly became numb to the horror of their situation and dealt with things practically, one thing after the other. Or alternately became totally nonfunctional.
Eh, when the gadgets fell the US had been terror bombing Japanese cities for 10 months: "why" probably wasn't very pressing at that point. Burning Japanese civilians was simply an American thing to do at that point.
I have no problem with America bombing Japan with nuclear weapons. They (and Germany) deserved what they got, they started a world war and we finished it. All this American angst and apologia is coming from the anti-American intellectuals in the US. They have been spreading their propaganda unopposed for decades. The US is NOT GUILTY and owes no apologies whatsoever, Obama's pathetic mea culpa trip to Japan notwithstanding. For all you rationalists who like thought experiments (pretentiously called gedanken experiments by the same intellectuals); imagine what the world would be like if Germany and the Japanese had won WWII.
You're accusing others of propaganda while trotting out the old right-wing hobbyhorses of "anti-American intellectualism" and Obama apologizing for American foreign policy.
Your claim that he's making a "pathetic mea culpa trip to Japan," despite the White House having stated clearly that he doesn't intend to apologize for the bombings when the visits Hiroshoma, is itself propaganda.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, Germany and Japan were both incapable of winning anything when the bombs were dropped (Germany had surrendered, and Japan was wrecked,) so the outcome where they won WWII if the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped simply couldn't exist.
Do you mean the same anti-intellectual "right-wing" who thinks the USA should be a faith-based, Christian nation? You have me confused with somebody else and need to consider the fact that both the left and right are wrong.
I do consider them both wrong, but it's nevertheless the case that the bogeymen of "anti-American intellectuals" and Obama's international "apologies" have been props of the right for years. If you don't share their views, maybe don't repeat their arguments or prop up their strawmen.
So if the Right says the sun rises in the East should I repudiate that because they say it too? The American intellectuals hate America and blame America regardless of the context. That is a fact and if you are honest you can discover that fact for your self.
At least we can agree to agree, the Left and Right are a false alternative offered to the American people.
It was a joke, but to be honest, I always make exceptions for self-contradiction and the possibility that I am unaware of my own ignorance. I believe humans are by nature contradictory, we're wired for bias confirmation, not truth. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
"I was just joking" ...always the refrain of the scoundrel when called on their BS, at least in my experience.
It is a strawman to imply that my position is that no one is allowed any contradiction or errors whatsoever. The issue is not errors of knowledge or mistakes but the failure to correct such errors when they are found. An honest man works to correct his errors and contradictions, i.e. is consistent, while the dishonest like to wallow in them or pretend they don't exist or rationalize them by misquoting Emerson.
Hitler offed himself and Germany surrendered months before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Your thought experiment has no bearing on reality because Germany had already long lost the war.
"She had not had an easy time. Her husband, Isawa, had gone into the Army just after Myeko was born, and she had heard nothing from or of him for a long time, until, on March 5, 1942, she received a seven-word telegram: “Isawa died an honorable death at Singapore.” "
In case you don't know what her husband would have contributed to in Singapore - "between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaya ... were rounded up and taken to deserted spots around the island and killed systematically." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_Singapo...