When I was young in grade school, and learned about the bomb, and its terrifying aftermath, pictures, scars, I thought that this was clearly a wrong against humanity to have been dropped on anyone. Clearly the visceral kind of "this should never happen" reaction that any average person would have. "How could we put the Enola Gay on a stamp to glorify this?"
Then, in college and especially after, learning about the equal horrors of the Japanese war machine, and maybe actually more the non-horrific but relentless robotic support for the war (or obedience towards the emperor, government, etc) among the people, I realized that it actually did bring an end to the war. Which if it had continued, could have consumed far more lives. (whether it had to be this tool, of course, is certainly worthy of debate)
Now, my 3rd phase of thinking -- beyond any opinion on tactics or reaction or bombs in the moment of a war -- is how do we get people to help themselves get out of the path to war? Each and every one of us, who whether by support or indifference, or tacit approval, or compounded misinformation, or ego, get ourselves into situations that we look back 50 years from now and say, "what happened?".
Surely, we have the tools and desire, don't we? I hope.
I do believe the bombings were a strategic show-of-force to the Soviet Union since they were coming out of the war as a global power; USSR were instrumental in ending the war.
An interesting perspective summarized here [0] is that the bombings were not just unnecessary to end the war and were conducted as a show of force to the Soviets. They were conducted in an attempt to end the war ASAP, before a planned Soviet ground invasion of Japan so that the US wouldn't have to share control over post-war Japan with the Soviets.
The fact that the military is still awarding Purple Hearts that were manufactured for the invasion of Japan tells me that it was more than justified. Japanese intelligence itself estimated 20 million casualties during an invasion.
We also have Germany as a point of comparison. 1945 Was the bloodiest year of the European theater, a fact made even more palpable considering that the European war ended in May. Compound this with the fact that the ratio of troops killed vs surrendered for Germany was about 4:1 versus 120:1 for Japan (granted this isn't really a straightforward comparison, Japan was often fighting over heavily fortified islands that afforded little opportunity to encircle large formations which is what precipitates most surrenders).
> [Japan was] offering to surrender, before the USSR joined the fight.
This is blatantly false. Even after two atomic bombs had fallen on Japan, their military leaders -- and indeed most of their population -- remained committed to fight on until the nation of Japan ceased to exist. It was only the intervention of the emperor himself (who never gets involved in matters of war) that convinced the military and the people to surrender after the bombs were dropped.
Offering to surrender conditionally. Specifically, on the condition that it keep Korea and Taiwan (and maybe Manchuria, too), and that it's military government remain largely unchanged. This is was not a surrender that was acceptable to the Allies.
This thread is being rate limited, reply in edit:
Denying Korea and Taiwan is easier said than done. Remember that Japan essentially won the continental war against China. It's best equipped and most experienced troops are there. Japan is also in an optimal position to control ocean access to Korea. Any boats have to travel through the East China Sea, or sea of Japan to reach Korea. Both of which are in range of the thousands of kamikaze planes built for the purpose of destroying vessels that sail close to Japan.
At this point, you're talking about conducting an invasion of a landmass even larger than the Japanese home islands, against better troops, and with more difficult naval access. It would undoubtedly incur substantially more losses than the 100 to 200 thousand inflicted by the atomic bombings. And to what end? A hostile military government would still be in power back in Japan.
Not invading or dropping nukes would mean the deaths of millions. The Japanese would still fight, Japanese and Allied planes would still get shot down and warships sunk. Japanese Civilians would still be dying at a high rate, from bombings, starvation, lack of medical supplies, etc.
Before these bombs were dropped, tens of thousands were dying on days with no large military operations.
The counter argument for that is it took two atomic bombs for Japan to concede. And after the 2nd one it was 3 days before they gave up.
Could a blockade have worked? Maybe. But how long would it have taken? Would we all just sat and watched while hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians starved to death over a few years?
Not only did it take two atomic bombs, but there was still an attempted coup to continue the war after the second bomb was drooped. [0] On top of that, the tendency for Japanese troops to feign surrender as cover for suicide attacks, and the particulars of the attack on Pearl Harbour, plus some racism all added to a combination of justified and unjustified mistrust of the Japanese military and the chances they would adhere to terms of surrender without having an occupation force in the home islands.
I hope I wouldn't have dropped the bomb on a populated city if I were in Truman's shoes, but without the benefit of hindsight, I'm not positive I would have decided differently.
On a side note, Japan is a wonderful country, particularly the countryside. My wife lived there for 13 months while we were dating, and I have many fond memories of trips around Japan with her. Lost wallets more common than not are returned to the police with money still inside. One of my colleagues once saw a man in a business suit sleeping on a park bench one morning, obviously drunk, and someone had placed the man's dropped phone and wallet on his chest.
Not mentioned on that list: It made the sort of stories that circulated in post-WWI Germany, about the old men selling out while they could still have kept fighting, much less plausible.
If the war aim was the permanent political defeat of Japanese fascism, then this was important. You don't just want the leader's signature on paper, you want defeat to be undeniable to everyone.
In both cases, the naval blockade left a lot of civilians hungry, and was great military value-for-money. But politically, that was easier to forget afterwards. Your adversary's ability to destroy whole cities with one plane was not.
(In germany's case, having two different armies in Berlin for half a century was also kind-of hard to forget.)
I don't think the war aim was the defeat of japanese fascism - perhaps, japanese militarism. After all, the basic element of japanese fascism (the Zaibatsu) essentially persists today. It's also notable that japan, while technically a democracy, has had the same party in power since 1955.
This always seemed like an odd conspiracy theory to me. It supposes that the U.S. is one the one hand so cavalier about dropping atom bombs that they're willing to destroy Japanese cities merely as a show of force to a potential rival, but on the other hand that they're so reserved about using it that they wouldn't use it to gain victory against the country they're engaged in a destructive war with.
For example, the fire bombing of Tokyo killed more in a single day than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki (though radiation sickness would eventually bring the Hiroshima total to slightly larger).
The only real difference with the atomic bombings was it was one bomb from one plane.
I would recommend reading into the firebombing campaing against the Japanese civilian population.
It was specifically aimed at maximizing civilian casualties, the same as burning of Dresden.
Something which would be interpeted as a war crime and terrorism today, wholly sanctioned by US military high command in the philippines at the time.
At the time I don't think there were any serious discussions about whether the bombs where "necessary". They where a powerful new weapon, and the US was in the middle of a war. Of course they were going to use it, it is unimaginable that thew would decide not to use a powerful weapon which was available to them.
Possibly, historically speaking, atomic bombs had to be used - on cities - at least once for humanity to realise the full horror of these weapons. Maybe no-one would have believed the destruction had they not been used at that time, and instead a far more terrible demonstration (with multiple actors?) would have subsequently become inevitable.
As a tangent to your comment, it always good to remember that big geopolitical decisions are never made in a vacuum, so when someone says “country X did Y because of Z” it usually misleading.
Some of the most fascinating reading I’ve done is the Pentagon papers because they go into exquisite detail about all of the thinking that resulted in the US’s involvement in Vietnam. It wasn’t just the Domino Theory, it wasn’t just containment of China, it wasn’t just getting France’s support for NATO, it wasn’t just Truman’s, JFK’s and Johnson’s efforts to look tough on communism.
I also recommend The Shadow Peace, a short 14-minute video analysis on the utility of nuclear weapons and their role in our modern era of relative peace: http://www.fallen.io/shadow-peace/1/ (unfortunately no HTTPS)
It's a slightly more optimistic take on the tragedies of the 20th century.
> I realized that it actually did bring an end to the war
This may be the mainstream opinion in the US, but do note it's not the mainstream opinion in other countries. Alternative explanations include that the real purpose of the two bombs was to show the Soviets the nuclear might of the US (this view is suggested in the Hiroshima museum in Japan, but just in case you discount it because Japan is obviously not a neutral party, this opinion is also held in some countries in Latin America -- even some people in the US believe this). Even at the time, some people in the US army opposed the bombing and believed it had no military justification.
Necessity and justification are two different concepts. Few believe it was necessary - the United States' overwhelming industrial capacity was bound to prevail over Japan. The state of the two countries warmaking capacity was totally lopsided by 1945. Thus it was not necessary to achieve victory.
That is brought an end to the war with fewer casualties, both American and Japanese even moreso, is not a difficult claim to support. Japan planned to fight a defensive war against an amphibious invasion in order to negotiate more favorable surrender terms. The Japanese estimated that this would incur 20 million Japanese casualties, and this plan was approved. Even if we assume that Japan's war machine would collapse before this figure of lives lost was reached, it is almost certain that the death toll would be in the millions. Germany, without the advantage of being a mountainous island nation and having a lower population than Japan, fought on its own soil in 1945 to the effect of several million dead. Thus, it's almost certain that the atomic bombings resulted in an order of magnitude fewer Japanese lives lost than an conventional invasion.
Yes, but maybe the bombs would have had the same effect, if dropped on actual military targets (or even unhabitated land, but close enough to demonstrate the power) instead of an civilian city.
(a city with military production, sure sure, but they were choosen not because of military value, but because they were relatively undamaged, so the effect of the bombs could be studied. Concern for loss of japan civilian live was never an issue)
Given that the Japanese military wanted to continue the war even after both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, your conjecture is demonstrably untrue. Remember, the military was the primary power in the Japanese government, second only to the emperor, and were the driving force behind starting the war as well. Also remember that the firebombing campaign across all of the other major cities had already inflicted combined casualties far greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined; immense deaths of their own civilians was seen as an unavoidable necessity to defend their homeland.
Remember, it took not one, but two atomic bombs dropped on cities for Japan to surrender. And even after that, there was an attempted coup to continue fighting the war: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
There only existed two bombs at the time. Had the bombs been dropped as a show of force, it is very likely the US and Japan would have to suffer through a costly invasion anyway.
Specifically, the demon core[1]. It was the core-in-waiting for a third bomb if needed, and I believe that the uranium and plutonium production lines were ramping up by that time[2].
40 years ago I wrote a paper on nuclear weapons. My memory isn't perfect and the sources are 40-50 years out of date. But here goes.
The US built a massive manufacturing pipeline to make nuclear weapons. Little boy was a once off. Fat man was basically a functional prototype. And the manufacturing pipeline was running and kept running after the war. How much weapons grade plutonium they had left over after they bombed Nagasaki is kind of a quibble.
Minor elaboration: Nagasaki was not an undamaged city. It had been bombed multiple times by conventional American bombs. But then Nagasaki was just a backup target anyway. Kokura was the primary target for the second bomb but it was obscured by clouds and smoke during the bombing run on August 9 so the plane went to Nagasaki instead. By the time they got there it too was socked in by clouds which is why the Nagasaki bomb fell so far off target.
Why would a demonstration need to be told the japanese in advance?
And a dud could have also happened to the one used on hiroshima.
A shock effect could have been achieved by a bomb detonated close to Tokyo. And with papers dropped, saying, this will happen to all your cities, soon.
There is something you seem to forget, that lost Japanese lives counted for anything in American eyes. 4 years of war, reports of war crimes and propaganda effectively demonized them and thus their value as humans deteriorated to wholly expendable in American war plans. The reason there was no invasion, was to save American lives as much as possible.
You misunderstand - the belief is not that the US could have won the war even without the bombs, but that "bombs vs. invasion" was a false dichotomy, and that Japan would have unconditionally surrendered around the same time without the bombs, or perhaps even sooner had the conditional surrender they were already seeking been on the table.
The Japanese offered to surrender if they could continue to control their captured territories, essentially continuing to rape China. That’s a hell of a condition to allow them.
I'm curious where you found this information, because the best I could find was that negotiations regarding those conditions were never finished:
To this end, Stalin and Molotov strung out the negotiations with the Japanese, giving them false hope of a Soviet-mediated peace. [..] The Japanese would have to surrender unconditionally to all the Allies. To prolong the war, the Soviets opposed any attempt to weaken this requirement.[56] This would give the Soviets time to complete the transfer of their troops from the Western Front to the Far East, and conquer Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, northern Korea, South Sakhalin, the Kuriles, and possibly Hokkaidō - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Soviet_inte...
The article you linked doesn't support the claims you made about Japan's conditional surrender. The closest it comes is "Anami wanted retention of the emperor, self-disarmament, no foreign occupation, and trial of any Japanese war criminals by Japan itself". But that is what Anami wanted, not what was written down in some final, take-it-or-leave-it offer. And that's from before the Soviet declaration of war.
In fact the article basically contradicts your claim about the necessity of the bombs:
> The bomb played a part in Japan’s surrender, but it may not have been necessary, he said. Had the U.S. drawn Stalin into publicly supporting the Potsdam Declaration’s unconditional surrender demand, Japan might not have held out hope for a Soviet-brokered deal. Had it guaranteed the emperor’s position, Japan might have surrendered earlier, Hasegawa said, though this is yet another point that draws endless historical debate.
> “Other alternatives were available, but they were not explored,” Hasegawa said.
Choosing the bombs over merely exploring other options is rather damning, don't you think?
""Hoshina Memorandum" on the Emperor's "Sacred Decision [go-seidan]," 9-10 August, 1945
Source: Zenshiro Hoshina, Daitoa Senso Hishi: Hoshina Zenshiro Kaiso-roku [Secret History of the Greater East Asia War: Memoir of Zenshiro Hoshina] (Tokyo, Japan: Hara-Shobo, 1975), excerpts from Section 5, "The Emperor made go-seidan [= the sacred decision] – the decision to terminate the war," 139-149 [translation by Hikaru Tajima]
"An overview of the destruction of Hiroshima [undated, circa August-September 1945] (Photo from U.S. National Archives, RG 306-NT)
Despite the bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviet declaration of war, and growing worry about domestic instability, the Japanese cabinet (whose decisions required unanimity) could not form a consensus to accept the Potsdam Declaration. Members of the Supreme War Council—“the Big Six”[46]—wanted the reply to Potsdam to include at least four conditions (e.g., no occupation, voluntary disarmament); they were willing to fight to the finish. The peace party, however, deftly maneuvered to break the stalemate by persuading a reluctant emperor to intervene. According to Hasegawa, Hirohito had become convinced that the preservation of the monarchy was at stake. Late in the evening of 9 August, the emperor and his advisers met in the bomb shelter of the Imperial Palace.
"Zenshiro Hoshina, a senior naval official, attended the conference and prepared a detailed account. With Prime Minister Suzuki presiding, each of the ministers had a chance to state his view directly to Hirohito. While Army Minister Anami tacitly threatened a coup (“civil war”), the emperor accepted the majority view that the reply to the Potsdam declaration should include only one condition not the four urged by “Big Six.” Nevertheless, the condition that Hirohito accepted was not the one that foreign minister Togo had brought to the conference. What was at stake was the definition of the kokutai (national policy). Togo’s proposal would have been generally consistent with a constitutional monarchy because it defined the kokutai narrowly as the emperor and the imperial household. What Hirohito accepted, however, was a proposal by the extreme nationalist Kiichiro Hiranuma which drew upon prevailing understandings of the kokutai: the “mythical notion” that the emperor was a living god. “This was the affirmation of the emperor’s theocratic powers, unencumbered by any law, based on Shinto gods in antiquity, and totally incompatible with a constitutional monarchy.” Thus, the Japanese response to the Potsdam declaration opposed “any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of his Majesty as a sovereign ruler.” This proved to be unacceptable to the Truman administration."
That is a reference to what the Russians wanted, and this is after the nuclear bombs. Once the bombs were dropped terms acceptable to some of the Japanese changed. Japan wasn’t a monolithic government, you had competing leadership, the empowered, the military, the politicians, etc.
The military fervently wanted a US invasion, believing it could inflict millions of casualties and then negotiate better terms. And many Japanese didn’t feel like they had even lost yet, they were willing to endure bombings feeling their fortress island was unassailable.
> Japan wasn’t a monolithic government, you had competing leadership, the empowered, the military, the politicians, etc.
Many of who resumed as they did during the War in the re-construction phase, I highly recommend the book: A Nazi in Exile. Its about Martin Bormann, a high ranking SS lieutenant close to Hitler who was already making deals in what seemed like the inevitable defeat of Germany, Italy and Japan by 1943-44 or so and starting to ensure it funneled its funds out of Germany into Switzerland and helped the biggest corporations (on both sides) continue to thrive in the post-war economy.
Many of whom still remain as monoliths to this day.
I think all this does is re-enforce General Butler's claim that: War is a racket. Everything else is just footnotes that often contradict and conflict with one another to obscure the obvious fact that no one 'wins' in War except a very small collective few in Banks, Industry that shape war policy for other Poor people to fight.
Japan had actually repeatedly offered conditional surrenders. Specifically, surrenders on the condition that it keep some of its colonies (Korea and Taiwan), that the Japanese military government remain intact, and that nobody be charged for war crimes. This is as if Germany offered a surrender on the condition that it keep western Poland and Czechoslovakia, that the Nazi party remain in power, and that nobody be tried for war crimes. This is not remotely close to an acceptable surrender.
And the US ultimately did accept a surrender on the condition that the imperial family not be tried for war crimes (a particularly contentious point for China, since a royal family member was the commanding officer in charge of the forces that perpetrated the crimes at Nanking).
It’s worth noting that many in Japan sincerely believed it was the best way to end to the war.
I’ve changed my opinion on this topic many times over the years. Today I think it’s just arrogant to say it was obviously wrong or obviously right. Reality is too complicated. Counterfactuals abound.
One dimension that people haven’t discussed in this thread, is that ending the war with atomic bombs and napalm prevented a bilateral invasion of Japan, which would have led to a Korea or Germany-like partitioning of postwar Japan.
Instead of a speedy recovery and track to self determination, there would have been 50 years of Cold War tensions, perhaps proxy wars.
As someone who grew up outside of the US, I have found that Americans have a unique view on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. American schoolchildren are raised to believe that it was morally justified because it won - and therefore ended - the war. This attitude is so deeply and fundamentally ingrained into most Americans (including many who would self-identify as liberals) that it is very hard for them to see it as a war crime despite obviously meeting the criteria for such.
In a sense, the quibbling over whether or not it was a war crime is meaningless. If atomic weapons hadn't been available, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki would've undergone ordinary firebombing, likely resulting in immediate casualties just as high. See, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/world/tokyo-journal-10000... for a description of the effects of firebombing elsewhere in Japan.
One might argue that the lingering radiation effects made atomic weapons worse but, on the other hand, the firebombing would've been done more than once. Really six of one, half a dozen of the other, except you don't see that many people bringing up firebombings as a war crime.
Honest question: can it not be both a less fatal end to the war and a war crime? This classification of something as a war crime, even if appropriate, isn't the ending of a discussion.
A lot of people are uncomfortable with the concept that the best possible outcome should be considered a crime.
(And I'm not limiting this to the circumstances under discussion -- I'm talking about the view that, no matter what situation you're in, there should be a way out that isn't a crime. Such people will, for example, object violently if somewhat incoherently to the fact that, under Qing Chinese law, a man ordered by his father to commit a crime had no way to get out of that situation while following the law: following the order is illegal, but so is disobeying the command.)
Note that people who object to committing war crimes are not a kind of legalistic automata that require following the letter of the law no matter what. We do not always decide something is a crime because there's a law that says so. For example, the Holocaust would have been a crime even if the powers at the time had decided that it wasn't.
Complicated Chinese (and Japanese) laws about legal and familiar duty are really not the subject under discussion here, but a red herring. Murdering innocent people is an entirely different matter.
Finally, consider there are many people in this world who won't commit some crimes -- such as genocide -- even if there is no way out and refusing will cost them their own lives.
> Finally, consider there are many people in this world who won't commit some crimes -- such as genocide -- even if there is no way out and refusing will cost them their own lives.
Yes, this viewpoint is more or less the opposite of the viewpoint I describe above, and it is also common. But so is the other one.
It is hard to overstate how many civilians suffered and died in war crimes perpetrated by Japan before and during the war. The number vastly exceeds the number who died as a result of the American atomic bombs. Breaking Japan's will and ability to make war was the entire world's highest priority in late 1945. Any discussion of "American war crimes against Japan" is meaningless without discussing Japan's crimes against half the world, together with the very real possibility that the nation of Japan continues to exist today solely because those two bombs were dropped.
> "It is hard to overstate how many civilians suffered and died in war crimes perpetrated by Japan before and during the war"
I'll take a stab at it.
If one sums together the estimated deaths in Asia caused by Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties), both military and civilian, one gets totals in excess of 15-22 million. This compares to about 5 million dead in the Holocaust. So basically, Japan effectively committed 3 to 4 Holocausts, a fact not often remarked upon in these discussions. If we compare that to the roughly 0.25 million estimated dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, the US would have had to drop 40 more atomic bombs to catch up to the Germans and another 120-176 atomic bombs to catch up to the Japanese. (If one likes, they can subtract out military casualties or otherwise adjust the numbers but the ratios are still high.)
One should also factor in that the Nazis simply executed the majority of the victims of the Holocaust as efficiently as they could in concentration camps. The deaths inflicted during the IJA occupation, on the other hand was accompanied by rape and by torture, including on children, across significant parts of a continent. It's notable that even a diehard Nazi who was in China was so revolted by what he was witnessing that he intervened to protect civilians from the IJA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe. Given the option, it doesn't seem unlikely that many of the IJA's victims would have preferred a death by nuclear blast; at least it would have been impersonal.
So, were Hiroshima and Nagasaki war crimes? I think it's not unreasonable to say that even if they were, they were negligible in the grand scheme of things.
I don't subscribe to the moral calculus that has war crimes cancel each other. When one starts justifying a war crime against civilians because the enemy committed war crimes themselves, one is on very shaky ground.
For example, rape and murder against German civilians is not morally justifiable just because the Nazis were horrendous monsters.
There were 4 alternatives. Nuclear weapons were one.
2. Invade. The Japanese had 900,000 troops in Kyushu, plus militia forces. Japanese estimates were for 20 million deaths. Look up the battle for Okinawa some time.
3. Let the Soviets invade. Same deaths, just not US soldiers. Plus Stalin didn't like to give up territory the Soviets conquered.
4. Continue the blockade, with or without conventional bombing. Likely, the Japanese government would have surrendered or collapsed by mid-1946. Again, millions of deaths due to starvation. And civil war.
On #3, it would not have been the same deaths. Russia hated Japan and would have genocided the Japanese by the millions, torturing, starving, brutalizing, slaughtering them. Russia would have conquered and enslaved Japan for the next half century.
Instead the US occupied Japan and forced cultural changes upon them, which resulted in Japan becoming a democratic, peaceful economic power and tremendous contributor to the global economy and both global and regional stability.
We had a discussion about this in high school, I think my junior year. Most of these types of discussions were very lopsided, so the teacher would usually have to encourage people to take the “bad/unpopular” position somehow. But this one was right down the line in my class and produced a lively debate. I still think about it, but my opinion hasn’t changed — it was the correct decision.
My Modern World History class in high school also did this.
Our debate came down to whether or not directly / immediately killing hundreds of thousands of citizens was justified by potentially preventing even more dying in a subsequent invasion. The class was similarly split.
My school education about this was also essentially "bombs are bad, kids". The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...) is actually quite enlightening in this matter. A lot of people seem to think that the Americans didn't try anything else before. Likewise most people don't realize how much more death there would've been on both sides if the US invaded Japan by sea.
It strikes me as odd that practically any victorious military finds all of its actions optimal. If it had not done as it did, then the outcomes would be worse. The regularity of the superiority of the action taken is fascinating.
Curiously, this website has a large number of commentators that believe that luck is one of the biggest factors in startup success. Yet, in this other domain of antagonistic participants, war, the victor is always the better strategist, having seen through the flaws of his enemy. Mere luck plays no part here. A curious result to me. It appears that Man is elevated to supreme intelligence when tasked with war, and finds himself a mere leaf on air currents otherwise.
Of course, I’m no peacenik. I have no problem over-bombing a population so I don’t really see Hiroshima and Nagasaki as tragedies. Since no one has an incentive to reveal the true minimum that would cause them to capitulate, it is usually a good idea when you’re almost winning to make sure you’re definitely winning. I have no problem with the death of those who would prefer my death. Just fascinated at how we conquer luck in this sphere alone.
I have no problem with the death of those who would prefer my death.
The most memorable line from the movie Patton (I don't know if General Patton said this IRL):
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
> I have no problem with the death of those who would prefer my death
What about those who have no opinion one way or the other about your death, or are incapable of having an informed opinion, such as very young children?
Well, this is a personal position so I don’t see the value in sharing it, but since you asked: I’d rather be alive and evil than dead and good. After all, alive and evil I can be redeemed and die good after a fulfilling life. If I win, presumably following generations will talk about my courage at having turned my life around and any detractors of mine will find themselves outdone by my supporters - who will either be more numerous or will have the ability to call my detractors hypocrites since they only exist by my actions.
So the children will die if they must die. And they will live if it does not affect victory.
The children raised in bushido, who would grow up to make sure the enemy took no prisoners by having all prisoners suicide attack captors? Those who didn’t grow up to be warriors an just be innocent civilians would still fall in line with a culture that would gladly sacrifice every innocent civilian in its borders to fight. Murder until not even the dust of the bones of the society remain. It isn’t some historical fantasy. Japan was in a bloodlust.
There are many arguments about suboptimal strategies and missed opportunities. They don't usually appear outside of military history discussions, though. Strategic bombing, for example.
Strategic bombing is mentioned in the Wikipedia article, was attempted and didn't bring the desired results. There were large logistic problems and it took longer than expected to build a forward base.
> Likewise most people don't realize how much more death there would've been on both sides if the US invaded Japan by sea.
That's begging the question - was a US invasion the only alternative? https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/05/nuclear-war-or... argues that Japan would have surrendered without the bombings. And that's for unconditional surrender - a conditional one would be even more easily achievable.
I have read a lot on this topic, visited museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki etc. I'd urge you to compare this article to others, because I bluntly think the author has no idea what he's talking about and just glued together various opinions of soldiers and politicians who happen to have that opinion without presenting the other side at all.
Furthermore the article is self-contradictory, e.g. first it says the conventional bombings were so successful that a nuclear wasn't necessary, then it says since the conventional bombings were unsuccessful the nuclear strikes also wouldn't make a difference (pure conjecture by developers of the weapon, who are no experts in neither politics nor military strategy or history).
It's also simply a lie that the casualty estimates were pulled out of thin air. Ask yourself: don't you think the US army would try to estimate how many of its soldierd would die (cost) vs how many Japanese soldiers would die and how many military targets would be destroyed (benefit)? Of course they did a huge study on this topic!
The article also suggested the Japanese would've surrendered if key people had been left in power. Yeah, maybe (again conjecture). But for comparison: if the US had allowed Hitler to go unpunished, conquered territory to remain under Nazi possession, the Nazis would also maybe have surrendered earlier. But why would you even offer such a surrender? It would render the entire war pointless.
There was no conditional surrender possible. The Japanese were still demanding to keep their “colonies” in China and elsewhere. Agreeing to that would be agreeing to continue the Japanese holocaust against the Chinese and the peoples in their other captured territories.
And from the Allied perspective, after the Bataan death march, the massacre of surrendered US troops and civilians in Wake, and the hundreds of similar massacres of surrendered allied troops, and rape and murder of nurses and civilians, across the Pacific, no one was going to allow the Japanese leadership or military off the hook.
Western powers weren’t committing atrocities like the Rape of Nanking during the 30s and 40s. Japanese troops killed surrendered soldiers, raped and murdered civilians not as a rare or exceptional event, but as a standard act in every country they invaded during the 30s and 40s.
I thought it was settled now that the entry of the Soviet Union in the Pacific theatre ended the war, not the two (!) atomic bombs - it's a sad fact that Nagasaki is so often forgotten.
The US had already destroyed mostly all Japanese cities. There was no large difference between a firestorm bombing and the bombs to Japanese cities. In Tokyo more than 700.000 buildings were destroyed and in one night more than 100.000 people killed by fire bombing.
The only difference was one of efficiency. It took 280 B-29 to kill 100k people in one night in Tokyo while it took 1 B-29 to kill 100k people in Hiroshima.
I don't know how accurate this information is but they way it was completely explained to me, the Japanese government and population were not that affected by the first bomb in terms of morale. They had already suffered horrible large-scale bombings (e.g. Tokyo) and regardless of the initial effect, the US leadership had already decided to drop two bombs to give the impression that these bombs could keep coming 2-3 times a week.
Emperor Hirohito was nearly overthrown in an (unsuccessful)coup after he announced the desire to capitulate after the second bomb dropped, as his generals wanted the war to continue. So if anything, the two bombs were nearly not enough.
After the second bomb was dropped, and after the Soviet Union declared war and took Manchuria, defeating what on paper was Japan's strongest remaining army. Two bombs, the Soviet Union in, Manchuria defeated, and there was still an attempted coup to keep Japan from surrendering.
The second bomb coming so quickly was key to changing Hirohito’s mind. The military had argued that Hiroshima was a one time thing, and the US couldn’t possibly build another bomb any time soon.
Even after the second bomb, some Japan's military leadership wanted to keep fighting.
> The Kyūjō incident (宮城事件, Kyūjō Jiken) was an attempted military coup d'état in the Empire of Japan at the end of the Second World War. It happened on the night of 14–15 August 1945, just before the announcement of Japan's surrender to the Allies. The coup was attempted by the Staff Office of the Ministry of War of Japan and many from the Imperial Guard to stop the move to surrender.
> The officers murdered Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori of the First Imperial Guards Division and attempted to counterfeit an order to the effect of occupying the Tokyo Imperial Palace (Kyūjō). They attempted to place the Emperor under house arrest, using the 2nd Brigade Imperial Guard Infantry. They failed to persuade the Eastern District Army and the high command of the Imperial Japanese Army to move forward with the action. Due to their failure to convince the remaining army to oust the Imperial House of Japan, they performed ritual suicide. As a result, the communiqué of the intent for a Japanese surrender continued as planned.
“…many U.S. officials and scientists argued that a demonstration would sacrifice the shock value of the atomic attack, and the Japanese could deny the atomic bomb was lethal, making the mission less likely to produce surrender. Allied prisoners of war might be moved to the demonstration site and be killed by the bomb. They also worried that the bomb might be a dud since the Trinity test was of a stationary device, not an air-dropped bomb. In addition, although more bombs were in production, only two would be available at the start of August, and they cost billions of dollars, so using one for a demonstration would be expensive.”
The bombs barely performed their intended effect being dropped on cities. Even after Nagasaki the Japanese military argued they could continue to fight from underground bunkers.
The first response of the Japanese army to Hiroshima was that it was just a big conventional bomb. The second was to deny that the US had more (the Japanese had an atomic project of their own and knew how hard it was). The third (after Nagasaki) was that they were changing their air defense strategy.
The second bomb coming so quickly was key to convincing Hirohito’s to surrender. The military had argued that Hiroshima was a one time thing, and the US couldn’t possibly build another bomb any time soon.
The main argument against this, which I personally believe, is that the first bomb should have been dropped on a remote Japanese island or area. I don't believe this would have lead to an end to the war but I believe a second one in a more populated area would have, saving Nagasaki at least
The worry was that a remote nuclear explosion would not carry the same impact and they only had two bombs at the moment. It would have been easy for the Japanese militarists to downplay its effect.
And it turns out the Japanese military was exactly in such a deep denial. After Hiroshima they said it would take a longtime for the US to build another. After Nagasaki they said so what, we will just retreat to bunkers and force the Allies to invade. After Hirohito decided to surrender, the military attempted a coup.
Conventional wisdom is that you have to prove you can do it on demand rather than it being a one and done. If you have one, it could be the last one. If you have two, you could have infinity.
And the first one was likely to be a dud, thereby completely removing the psychological effect from further atomic bombs, of which there was only one for the next couple months.
An interesting point here, in the Wikipedia article on the atomic bombings, that Japanese nuclear scientists reported to their government that the US could be expected to have between two and four more such bombs ready to go. They were under no illusions that the US had hundreds of these sitting around.
Not to everybody it wasn't. Some Japanese officers wanted to keep fighting even after two cities were wiped out. (Three if you count the firebombing of Tokyo, which you probably should...)
As proven earlier with Operation Ten-Go / The Battle of the East China Sea, many in the Japanese military preferred spiteful suicidal attacks to surrender, even when the hopelessness of their situation was abundantly clear.
A quote from General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
“Japan at the moment was seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of face. It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
There are more quotes, but basically everything you were taught about the necessity of wiping out hundreds of thousands of people in a flash was after the fact American propaganda to justify a war crime.
> "Japan at the moment was seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of face"
Not really; some in Japan were seeking a surrender and some, notably nearly all of the Japanese military, were quite definitively not. Had the internal coup intended to prevent the surrender succeeded (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident), Eisenhower's quote would have been entirely false instead of a half-truth.
The Eisenhower quote is from 1963. He was not a general in the pacific theater, and was not involved in postwar Japan.
IMO, his quote should be read as that of a politician (which he was, at that point, having served two terms as president), rather than that of a military general.
So you do think you know more than Eisenhower. Fascinating belief.
The strategic bombing survey of 1946, subject to no objections about Eisenhower’s relative objectivity compared to your own, concludes that the Japanese government was well into the process of determining how to surrender, with predictable resistance from the military but endorsement by the Emperor as they were in the process of determining how to stand down. It also points out that the majority of the populace had already lost hope for the war effort, which is now the bomb’s justification.
I did not say or imply I know more than Eisenhower. I was contextualizing his words; something that’s necessary when you pull quotes from 60 years ago.
The document you link to would also benefit from the same treatment, being written in 1946 by the Strategic Bombing survey (a group that notably preferred precision bombing of industrial infrastructure, to the indiscriminate destruction of napalm and atomic weapons).
It not only makes the point you describe (that the Japanese population was war fatigued), but it also concludes that the use of atomic weapons (plus the Soviet declaration of war) gave the peace-seeking factions of the war council a platform to strong arm the army (which wished to continue the war) into accepting the Potsdam terms (unconditional surrender).
Prior to the use of atomic weapons, Japan was seeking a conditional surrender where they kept Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Manchuria. They were also sincerely developing strategies to prolong the defense of a home invasion. Even the emperor (who was pro-surrender) encouraged the simultaneous development of both plans. It is true that there were influential factions who preferred peace. Without the atomic bombs, we cannot know how long it would have taken for them to gain ascendancy in the government, and how many would have perished before they came to an unconditional surrender.
Again, I’m not saying it’s cut and dry that they were necessary. I’m saying it was and is complicated and nuanced.
Dwight was being disingenuous, as the terms the Japanese were seeking to “save face” including keeping all their conquered possessions, especially in China.
> Which if it had continued, could have consumed far more lives.
Everything along these lines are counterfactual excercises and a nice way of justify the crime of dropping nuclear bombs on cities full of civilians. I don't buy this. And something we all know is that history is told by the victors.
Tokyo was already firebombed and terror bombing of civilian cities was a tactic used by all sides in WW2. If bombing civilians is a war crime, then everyone in WW2 is a war criminal. As for the civilian getting bombed, whether the fire melting their flesh away has a hint of radioactivity is a really minor addition.
That kind of reasoning can be used to justify all kind of things that are considered crimes. Wipe out 200K in one action just to show power seems too much.
I don't accept that the amount of creativity used to create weapons cannot be applied also to use them more wisely in ways that don't wipe out 200k.
> [...] how do we get people to help themselves get out of the path to war?
Philosophically I find this revolting. Who are you, or me, or we to say what some other society should do? That should never be the goal and I don’t think anything good comes from starting with “other people are wrong, we should fix them.”
I realize I’m putting hyperbolic words in your mouth here but the point is nobody should be trusted with that kind of power.
> Surely, we have the tools and desire, don't we? I hope.
No, I don’t think we do. And if we did they would be more devastating than nuclear weapons. The closest thing is social media.
> and maybe actually more the non-horrific but relentless robotic support for the war (or obedience towards the emperor, government, etc) among the people
That is a lot of words to say "civilians trying to survive during a war".
To make it even worse, the war criminals, that ones that were part of the "horrors of the Japanese war machine" were spared by the USA after the war. Fearing an increase influence of Communism in Asia, the USA let the war criminals go unpunished.
Targeting civilians while sparing war criminals is hardly a moral stand point.
I've heard the idea that atomic bombs were the deciding factor in ending the war is in large part American propaganda. The fact is the Soviets had far superior divisions (in both manpower and fire power) lined up against the Japanese in Manchuria, and shattered them within weeks.
From wikipedia(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War), "Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's research has led him to conclude that the atomic bombings were not the principal reason for Japan's capitulation. He argues that Japan's leaders were impacted more by the swift and devastating Soviet victories on the mainland in the week after Joseph Stalin's August 8 declaration of war because the Japanese strategy to protect the home islands was designed to fend off an Allied invasion from the south and left virtually no spare troops to counter a Soviet threat from the north. Furthermore, the Japanese could no longer hope to achieve a negotiated peace with the Allies by using the Soviet Union as a mediator with the Soviet declaration of war. That, according to Hasegawa, amounted to a "strategic bankruptcy" for the Japanese and forced their message of surrender on August 15, 1945.[39][16] Others with similar views include the Battlefield series documentary,[2][11] among others, but all, including Hasegawa, state that the surrender was not caused by only one factor or event."
He also says: "Indeed, we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan's self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement."
The Jewel Voice Broadcast should not be read uncritically.
yes, USSR squashing Kwantung army may have naturally led to a scenario where USSR forces could flood down south into China, Korea, may be even invade the North Japan, etc. with US having no troops there to "meet" USSR forces like it happened in Europe. Whether USSR had such plans doesn't matter really.
It is very telling that USSR offensive on August 9 was according to the plans made together with US months in advance, and so US could hardly time the 2 bombs better - one on August 6 and another several hours after the start of the offensive - to make such an extremely clear message.
> When I was young in grade school, and learned about the bomb, and its terrifying aftermath, pictures, scars, I thought that this was clearly a wrong against humanity to have been dropped on anyone. Clearly the visceral kind of "this should never happen" reaction that any average person would have. "How could we put the Enola Gay on a stamp to glorify this?"
This is captured very well in Leiji Matsumoto's "The Cockpit" anime short, where in the protagonist, a Nazi Luftwaffe Pilot, is faced with the dilemma where Nazis had access to Nuclear weapons before the Allies but ultimately told from the perspective of the Japanese and perhaps even the Hibakusha themselves as he was born in 1938 and saw the the War in Japan first hand in this lifetime. It's pretty heavy stuff but conveys how this technology should not be in the hands of Humans in their current form, as its not worth the risk of the inevitable usecases we've collectively created thus far.
> Now, my 3rd phase of thinking -- beyond any opinion on tactics or reaction or bombs in the moment of a war -- is how do we get people to help themselves get out of the path to war? Each and every one of us, who whether by support or indifference, or tacit approval, or compounded misinformation, or ego, get ourselves into situations that we look back 50 years from now and say, "what happened?".
Honestly, War, especially to that massive destructive scale is only capable under the Nation-State model, which is what initially got me interested in Anarchism: as a tool for effective Anti-war measures.
I just fear Humanity may never truly be able to accept a Social model in which the State model is entirely absent and unnecessary before these things occur again, look how close this US vs CCP rhetoric is stoking the flames of potentially WW3 (both nuclear capable) when we have a so many ongoing crises that need the collective focus of all of Humanity to come close to even trying to solve.
Sidenote: The bombing of Horoshima and Nagasaki took place after the US had effectively crippled the Japanese economy and supply lines in a nation with no natural resources of their own. Its often speculated about how much longer they could have put up a resistance, prolonging Japan's defeat, and what would ultimately create a near permanent occupation by the US, but the War effort and the manufacturing of these armaments to the level they had before was impossible by the time Fat Man and Little Boy entered the Pacific theater.
Moreover, the constant conventional bombing and air raids of Tokyo by Allies (Tokyo Daikushu) claimed more lives (that still stands to this day) than both Nuclear bombs combined at the time of it being dropped, but the tragic thing being that that Hibakusha and their descendants still suffer long after the Empire fell, but still live with the horrible birth defects and health issues to this day. The way the US via GE and Westinghouse imposed Nuclear technology on them was perhaps the most cloaked dagger to Humanity I have ever seen in the reconstruction phase of all the 'axis' nations when you see how devastating Fukushima is (at the hands of TEPCO/Abe Government) that continues to pour massive nuclear contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean to this day.
The lesson (hopefully) being, that no one 'won' and all of Humanity 'lost' as we probably embarked on a very dark and destructive phase of our Human Condition that we probably would have been better not knowing we were capable of as a Species. Just look at the tragic plight of the Marshall Islands in the race for other nations to be Nuclear capable as well.
Also while we're on the subject of the Hibakusha, a seldom noted part of US History is not only the seldom spoken American-POW causalities from the Nuclear Bombings, but also less known are the American-born Hibakusha.
Here is a mini documentary [1] told from perspective of the grandson interviewing his grandfather on just this subject, who was a Californian-born Japanese who went back to Japan to live with his family in Hiroshima while his entire American Citizen family back in California were sent to the one of the worst internement camps of all but he was also an American-Hibakusha (Nuclear bomb survivor).
I'm may be biased as I grew up in the 90s when Japanese culture was mainstream and prevalent but also had Japanese childhood friends growing up in SoCal who were often the grandchildren of those sent to the camps, but it must be said that the way the Japanese were treated during this period is seriously one of the most dark and personally humiliating part of Californian History that I'm ashamed to admit took place. It shows how even being a supposed 'American' can be irrelevant if the State deems you as an enemy for actions that were done by a foreign nation completely unrelated to your own identity/citzenship if it its suits its end. Worse yet, all while lying how the US wasnot involved in WWII, specifically the Pacific Theatere as the AVG (American Air-force mercenaries) were contracted by the Chinese government training its soldiers but also in active combat against the Japanese under the guise of the 'American Volunteer Group' via Executive Order.
I have serious guilt issues, even though my military family actually didn't see active combat in that conflict but were in the Bay Area at that time and (indirectly) benefited from the Property seizures from that period.
Suffice this dark event is one of the main reasons why I'm anti-war.
There’s no consensus it ended the war. Rather the opposite. The Japanese generals had larger problems to consider, such as the fact that most targets were already rubble, and the fact that the Soviets were on their doorstep.
> horrors of the Japanese war machine, and maybe actually more the non-horrific but relentless robotic support for the war (or obedience towards the emperor, government, etc) among the people
When you think of the black ships of the Perry expedition, and then forward to the Japanese attack on England's Hong Kong colony, the French colonies in Indochina, America's colony in the Philippines (and Hawaii!) - then you see the above blurb is a perfect encapsulation of the western bourgeois mind.
A fascinating comparison with British steadfast resolve in the face of overwhelming force. Britons would fight on the beaches, and on the landing grounds and streets. They would never surrender, even against overwhelming odds.
Truly inspiring in comparison with the robotic obedience of the Japanese who would dig in to protect their island, whatever the cost may be.
* A rousing public speech is very different from actual policy. A sibiling comment to yours make reference to a plan by the Japanese, made in secret and actually started, that was known to cost millions of Japanese lives and wasn't even meant to secure victory but just better surrender terms. Your quotation doesn't come close to showing that the British would be prepared to do something similar. (In fact I'm sure I read about a plan Churchill had to surrender if Germans did make it onto British soil, but I'm not going to search for it now - the burden is on you to show that the British wouldn't have surrendered.)
* Aside from broad policy, the difference in attitude is clearly shown by actions of individual soldiers. Individual Britons in theatre would usually be prepared to surrender if their situation was hopeless, as shown by the number of actual British PoWs in WW2, whereas this was much rarer for Japanese soldiers.
To meet the first American invasion of their home islands, the Japanese had 10,000 kamikaze planes prepared. They had millions of civilians prepared to serve as suicide bomb carriers against the allied ground troops.
Let me know if the British prepared troops and civilians to use suicide as a weapon against a German invasion in any significant quantity.
>Truly inspiring in comparison with the robotic obedience of the Japanese who would dig in to protect their island, whatever the cost may be.
That's not quite the case. The conditions of surrender proposed, which the Japanese government rebuffed (or, 'mokusatsu'[0]) particularly included that Japan surrender its control over Korea and the island known now as Taiwan. It's more accurate to say that the Japanese empire would dig in to protect the areas they'd acquired, not just their island. In Korea, they'd put a lot of effort into trying to integrate the peninsula into Japan proper, for example linguistically.
I see the point you’re trying to make, and by no means am I saying that the British were without fault, but there is a very significant difference between the the British defending their liberal democracy from Nazi domination and a largely rural, largely uneducated Japanese population being conscripted into fighting a war of aggression on behalf of a totalitarian state.
Yes and no - UK was actually a colonial empire at the time of WWII and had conquered and subjugated more land and peoples than the Japanese ever managed. While the UK itself could be termed a liberal democracy, most of its subjects had no say.
If you're interested in this, I highly recommend watching In This Corner of the World. The perspective of a young woman who lives her life during the war, and her family's tragic experience with the bomb.
I have had the opportunity to visit Hiroshima and lived in the US where I had the chance to study under professor William Perry former Secretary of Defense and responsible for many post war research. The perspective and official version that Americans have is that dropping the bomb was the right thing to do and only way to finish the war in the Pacific.
The history is written by the winners simple fact to always keep in mind.
This is clearly a misunderstanding of World War 2. In Europe after England and France lost their hegemony as empires, it became a race between USSR and US for world domination. The Red Army after controlling Germany were on their way to Japan, and Japanese were really afraid of it. There was a previous dispute over Kamchatka peninsula and other territories that Russians would want to claim back. US already defeated Japan in the Pacific and most of Japan was already destroyed. US sent the bomb to send a message to the World and USSR: we have this weapon and we will use it. It was in their best interest to control a Russia-free Japan than get into the same mess as in Germany.
The allies had already started to resort to obliterating whole cities and their inhabitants before Hiroshima (see Dresden, Tokyo).
IMHO, this was not the result of how "evil" the German and Japanese regimes were (which seems to me to be a rationalization) but the result of 5 years of total war. I think that at some point people came to accept doing whatever it took to win and end the war.
In the context of what was going on I think dropping atomic bombs to precipitate the end of the war and send a message to the Soviets was perhaps not considered as big a deal as we might think because, as said, the result was already accepted looking at the conventional bombing raids that had taken place.
FWIW, the goal of the allied bombing campaign was always to cripple the adversary nation by bombing industrial infrastructure; the doctrine pre-dated the outbreak of WW II.
The invention of radar-assisted targeting thwarted this mission in the early phases of the war in Europe, and it took a tech arms race to get past it.
In the Pacific, the US’s primary objective was to secure an air base within strategic bombing range of Japan. It pursued this by capturing islands and investing in aeronautics (extending the range and carrying capacity of bombers).
Once within range of Japan, the Air Force tried strategic bombing at first, but found themselves unable to hit their targets. They had to fly above flak, and aim through the previously-undiscovered jet stream. They eventually gave up and turned from strategic bombing to recently-invented (demonstrated in 1942/3, mass produced in 1944) napalm. They knew it was awful, but considered it a trade of X lives now for 10x lives later.
All this to say, I don’t believe that war weariness significantly influenced the decision to use napalm and atomic weapons, in Europe or Japan. If the allied powers had encountered the opportunity to use them within the first year of the war, their military doctrine would have dictated their use.
This is such a remarcable piece of writing. I'm sure among americans this is already somewhat of a classic but if you haven't read yet it do yourself a favor and take half an hour to read it.
If you look up the author, one of the first things a you will read is that this was judged to be the finest example of 20th century American journalism by a large group at New York university.
It also arguably made The New Yorker magazine. It’s identity is still strongly influenced by this piece. Each article they have published since has had to “follow” this one.
Prior to WWII, its tone was more playful and humorous. The somewhat-detached, illustrative and poetic exposition originated in the war period, and resonates today.
If you ever get a chance to visit the Hiroshima Peace Museum, it is a moving and worthwhile place to go. Give yourself a few hours so you can spend time watching eyewitness interviews. The main tram line through downtown goes right past Ground Zero, which never stops being shocking.
Great article. It's worth considering the Japanese reaction to the bomb - people thought it was cluster munitions or other conventional explosives leading to them taking sub-optimal follow-on steps. While the physicists figured it out, it was not obvious at the time to many people who experienced it firsthand what happened.
I happen to have just started reading the book Made In Japan, and the first chapter's title is War.
It's been a good read so far. I found it quite interesting to hear about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings from the perspective of a young Japanese technician working in the war effort at the time.
A lot of comments in here are throwing around terms like "war crime". I'm not well informed on this subject, but the impression I get from this book at least, wasn't one of anger and accusation of wrongdoing WRT the bombings.
It comes across more as a humble acceptance of defeat, and perhaps a subtle criticism of his own nation's propaganda-washed populous, military-dominated leadership and authority, than anything accusing the Americans of committing war crimes.
He describes the bombings as clearly demonstrating how far behind Japan was technologically. Up until that point he had the impression that Japanese military technology was only slightly behind the Americans, based on reverse engineered equipment recovered from downed planes.
The thing I wonder is if the Americans could have just dropped a single bomb first on a relatively unpopulated area, near enough to a Japanese population center to witness its destructive force, without all the loss of civilian life. They might have surrendered after that. You still have the second bomb if they don't get the message. But I guess there wasn't exactly 100% certainty both bombs would function, and I don't know how long it would take to make another at the time - it's not like we had a huge stockpile of the enriched fissile material laying around.
In any case, so far I'd recommend the book, and I haven't even gotten to the stuff about Sony yet.
Nuking the Japanese was just the culmination of rather horrific methods used by the US against Japan.
Another one the US was quite keen on is firebombing (aerial incendiary bombing of urban areas). Grave of the Fireflies is a movie well worth watching that provides a depiction of the effect of war on society.
- Run by an eternal Emperor adored by population at large (not counting few remaining intellectuals he murders every year)
- Extremely religious-jingoistic national ideology as “strong spiritual braces of Russians”. Quite similar to militaristic Japan “warrior spirit of master race”.
- Already invaded and conquered few smaller neighbors in the wars of conquest
- On of top sources of toxic influence in every field in the modern world
Countries who blindingly follow some two bit God-Emperor aggressive trash should not be surprised to eat Gamma rays for breakfast one fine morning.
I highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I listened to the audiobook last year. It starts with the scientific advances, beginning in the late 19th century, and continues up through the achievement of a chain reaction and the dropping of the bombs on Japan. The final part of the book, detailing the eyewitness accounts of the bombings, is the most harrowing thing I’ve ever listened to.
The thing about all of this is that these bombs were dropped on children and innocents.
Children on their way to school, the innocent and the weak were the victims of nuclear bombs, people were left without skin, their faces melted, bodies deformed and with radiation poisoning.
Sorry but it's a disgusting and weak act no matter how you people try spin it, I can never truly get past the facts and some of the footage of the aftermath available.
Japan and Germany were both utterly humbled by the war. They learnt the lessons and are now respected and vibrant democracies.
UK and USA were on the winning side. This bred myths of British and American exceptionlism, which led eventually to Brexit, catastrophic handling of COVID19 and (perhaps) Trump.
Then, in college and especially after, learning about the equal horrors of the Japanese war machine, and maybe actually more the non-horrific but relentless robotic support for the war (or obedience towards the emperor, government, etc) among the people, I realized that it actually did bring an end to the war. Which if it had continued, could have consumed far more lives. (whether it had to be this tool, of course, is certainly worthy of debate)
Now, my 3rd phase of thinking -- beyond any opinion on tactics or reaction or bombs in the moment of a war -- is how do we get people to help themselves get out of the path to war? Each and every one of us, who whether by support or indifference, or tacit approval, or compounded misinformation, or ego, get ourselves into situations that we look back 50 years from now and say, "what happened?".
Surely, we have the tools and desire, don't we? I hope.