Oh, in that case the factual answer should be obvious. Should we move this back to GQ? 
I concur to some degree that the atomic bombing appears to have saved lives…my father, a US GI in Europe, agreed with the sentiment one soldier gave in a documentary that the atomic bombings “meant we were going to live.”
Area bombing of population centers in general is substantially less ethically justifiable.
Also, holding Claus von Stauffenberg up as a heroic example raises at least this armchair historian’s eyebrow. Von Stauffenberg explicitly wanted to keep large areas of conquered territory, and considered Hitler’s putative death a stepping-stone to negotiating while Germany was still strong. To state that another way, he was trying to remove a weakness that might cost Germany some of the spoils of aggression. (Okay, his motivations were more complex than that, but that was a strong element.)
Considering like virtually all other Germans (excepting Communists and perhaps a few others) he was a patriot, what else would one expect? The Valkyrie plotters certainly would never have had any even the slightest chance of success at establishing a new government if they were doing all this just to immediately surrender. Certain Stauffenberg would have stopped the machinery of the Holocaust and willing to risk his llife for that.
I just want to ask the OP: why do you think feeling sorry for the people who got blown up is incompatible with the belief that it was necessary? Is compassion a zero-sum game?
In addition to other arguments in support of the W.W. II atomic bombings there is an argument that is almost always overlooked.
Nuclear weapons would be used in war at least once. If the A-bombs had not been dropped on Japan, they would have been used in another war, probably Korea. Why? The world had to fully grasp the horror of these weapons before it could decide not to use them. No harmless demonstration on an uninhabited island would have sufficed. (For some it would be too abstract; others would just be reminded of magicians like David Copperfield who can make the Statue of Liberty disappear.)
If the A-bombs had not been dropped on Japan, they would have been used against North Korea.
That sounds highly unlikely. Do you have a cite that indicates the plot having anything to do with what was going on in the camps?
I would doubt that any of the plotters were in the know at all.
Aren’t you rather forgetting the British, Indians, Chinese, Fillipinos, Indonesians, Dutch, etc who were also fighting the Japanese?
Don’t be silly, this is a patriotic rant to justify killing civilians. Can’t have other nations in that, now can you?
This has got to be the intellectually laziest and morally most bankrupt attempt to justify the philosophy of total war I’ve seen here. That you cite Paul Fussell, who was well aware of just how horrific an event WWII was makes it even worse. Believe it or not, human beings are capable of having more than one feeling about an event as complex and horrific as the Second World War. It is entirely possible to understand how things had progressed to the point that the civilian population of enemy countries was considered a legitimate target, that area bombing of cities, “dehousing” and firebombing the residential districts of cities was considered the norm and still feel bad for turning hundreds of thousands of women and children into human torches. Your central attempt to justify killing women and children:
Doesn’t even make sense. You don’t have to make any guesses about the majority being women and children. The idea that men fight for causes that they must necessarily agree with or they simply wouldn’t fight is patently absurd. The Second World War was fought by conscripts, not volunteers. Universal conscription of all men of military age to serve a year or two in the army and then be placed in the reserves to be mobilized upon the outbreak of war is one of the central tenants of total war. They fight because their country tells them to and if they don’t they’ll be shot or hung. You haven’t even described what exactly this amorphous ‘support’ that women and children is that they give to soldiers to justify setting them on fire.
Oh, and regarding the idea that men fight for causes that they must necessarily agree with, I’d like to introduce you to Yang Kyoungjong:
Do you want to make any guesses about what would have happened to him if he had told the Japanese, Soviets, or Germans that he simply wouldn’t fight?
My father didn’t complete his 25 missions. He was shot down over France in 1943 & evaded capture. To protect the Comet Line, he was sent to Texas to teach air cadets rather than back over Europe. The bomb probably kept him from returning to combat in the Pacific; instead, he ferried bodies back home after the war. Then went back to civilian life up in Yankeeland with his Texas wife. Only to be called up 6 weeks after my birth & killed in a plane crash when I was four; my mother took me & my two younger sibs back to Texas. (And we’ve pieced together details of the wartime experience of the man we do not remember.)
I am not sorry about Hiroshima in the sense of feeling personal guilt. But I feel sorrow for all the civilian deaths & many of the deaths in combat. (Men get drafted.) My lack of religion makes me regret that I cannot picture the war criminals & the bastards who started all that waste burning in Hell.
(The late Paul Fussell was a vet of WW2 but is most famous for his work on the earlier war–like The Great War and Modern Memory.)
Well, do most people think that way now?
This might surprise you, but some people in 1945 felt the atomic bomb shouldn’t have been used. People wrote letters to President Truman complaining about it. Strategic bombing was a politically controversial topic throughout the war.
As to not feeling bad about killing civilians, my grandfather was a bomber pilot who completed 35 missions in Europe. He felt bad about it the rest of his life. When he served in Europe after the war he visited one city he’d bombed several times and broke down in tears. He did his duty, but it was a horrible duty to have to perform. I don’t see how that’s illogical. War isn’t a zero sum game, it’s a negative sum game.
J.R.R. Tolkien, in Britain, was to say the least un-keen on the advent of atomic weapons. His “take” on the whole matter must admittedly have been out of step with that of most of his contemporary fellow-countrymen. A quote from a 1945 letter of his: “The news today about ‘Atomic Bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world ! Such explosives in men’s hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope ‘this will ensure peace’. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we’re in God’s hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.”
Ironically, the one maybe-positive thing which he sees in the whole business, is the likelihood of Japan’s being about to be knocked out of the war.
If the Holocaust had not occurred, I might not have been born. So I guess we should all stop complaining about it.
I’m not the OP but sorry, I don’t feel sorry <see what I did there?).
Should I feel sorry for every person who has died in every war, on all sides, equally?
Somewhere at the Hiroshima Peace Park is a guestbook from 1972 that visitors can sign at the conclusion of the tour. There’s an entry in that guestbook by a 15 year-old dba fred that reads I still think my country was right. My position has not changed.
I spent 2 1/2 years living 40 kilometers from Hiroshima; not once did a Japanese person ask me if I was sorry for my country’s actions during the war, not once did I ask a Japanese person if they were sorry for their country’s actions during the war.
To the OP’s premise, I too am a baby of the atomic bomb, my father enlisted in the Marines in April 1945, so it’d probable he would have been part of the invasion. It’s not certain he wouldn’t have survived but it would have thrown off his timeline in meeting and marrying my mother. While the Japanese didn’t get a shot at him, the North Koreans/Chinese did have 2 chances before I was born.
So many things wrong and so little time. I’ll see how far I can get.
OK, your math is completely wrong, as others have stated.
The odds where never that bad, although they were terrible, second only to the German u-boat force. Throughout the war, the average loss for the British Bomber Command was 2.6% per sortie. And although more than 50% of the flights were after June 1944, more than 75% of the losses were prior to that. Things were particularly bad for those in 1942 to 1943.
The casualty rates between Europe and the Pacific theaters were completely different. At that stage in the war, the losses to American bombers was quite small. The odds that your father would have survived were quite high.
This is simply silly and horrible math skills. My parents were both born before the war, and my father was too young to go.
In 1939 the US population was 131 million, and there were about 140,000 US military deaths. Without the atomic bombings and the Soviet entry into the war, and had it been necessary to actually invade Japan, there would be an additional 250,000 to 400,000 deaths. (A WAG I’m pulling out from one estimate of 1 million casualties with a 1:3 ratio of deaths to total casualties.)
While it’s a horribly large number, it still does not mean that everyone would probably not be here. While you are writing hyperbole, it detracts from any seriousness of your argument.
If we want to get into a “Japanese cred scale” for giving opinions, I was married to a Japanese and lived there for 25 years, including six months in Nagasaki, in the shadow of the Peace Park. Whatever, it doesn’t make us anything particularly special.
I agree completely with Dissonance in calling this the “intellectually laziest and morally most bankrupt attempt to justify the philosophy of total war” yet. This half-baked idea should have been seriously thought out and rejected before writing the OP.
Japanese civilians had no say into their entry and were prevented from opposing it. It’s absurd to say that those with no voice are to be held responsible for the evil actions of their leaders. Which brings us to the point that how the hell do babies and children support the men out fighting? It’s ridiculous enough to claim that all women “supported” the fighting men, and thus were legitimate targets, but to assert that babies and children were equally at fault is indefensible.
The atomic bombers were terrible things, and killed many innocent civilians. However, they were a necessary evil, and in the cold, horrific logic of total war, their use, along with the Soviet entry into the war, resulted in a net savings of far more lives than were destroyed, not only of Allied military, but also Japanese military are civilians as well. Even more so was the sparing of millions of additional deaths of civilians in Japanese occupied China and Southeast Asia.
Estimates vary, but the Japanese oversaw the deaths of more than 23 million civilians in the countries they invaded, either through direct killing or by famine and disease. The monthly deaths in '45 clearly out numbered those killed in the early August atomic attacks.
If the war had continued, more Japanese civilians would have died than those who perished in two attacks. Far more Japanese military fighters would have died and even the number of Allied POWs slated to be executed outnumbered the direct deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There was nothing really special about the atomic bombs. More Japanese died on the Tokyo Fire Raid on March 9-10, 1945. The only thing which was different was that it was a single bomb rather than a massed bombing involving hundreds of bombers.
I find this to be abhorrent. It is entirely possible, and even probable to feel pity for the loss of innocent lives, while at the same time, acknowledge the horror of total war which requires killing even babies.
The Japanese leadership needed to be stopped. There is no question about that. In order to stop them, there were no alternatives which would have resulted in the loss of civilian lives. Compared to the 23 million civilians in other Asian countries, the deaths of the 500,000 to 600,000 Japanese civilian, while always regrettable, was a necessary evil.
I have shared this on other threads, but I knew people who survived either the atomic or fire bombing. My ex-wife’s mother was a child living with her family in the Shitamachi area of Tokyo, the target of the great Tokyo Fire Raid. Her family went one way in their escape and their neighbors went another. They won the coin toss of fate while their friends died horrific deaths that night.
I went to a theater screening of The Day After in 1984 with a friend in Nagasaki who had survived only to lose both her parents.
I can’t imagine how to have absolutely no empathy for their losses.
You forgot to thank Stalin, while you are at it, as most historian agree that it was the combination of both the atomic bombing and the simultaneous Soviet entry into the war.
My father was 16 and in high school when the war ended. But if it had continued on a couple more years, he could have gone like his three older brothers already had. (They all survived the war. No war deaths in my family.)
I love Japan, absolutely love the place, but I still think dropping the bomb was the correct decision.
Dropping the bomb was the correct decision. However, far too many people, the above posters for instance, seem too blasé about 100000 people being incinerated in an instant.
Well, when a mommy sub-critical mass of uranium 235 and a daddy sub-critical mass of uranium 235 love each other very much, they have a special way of hugging…
Well, I do. Dying sucks, and dying pointlessly sucks even more. Naturally, my “wow, that sucks” would escalate to “wow, that really sucks” if I had any connection to the dead person—human nature.
As for the OP, I’m an American well under 70, but my grandfather had already made his genetic contributions to my father when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Further, WWII pretty much wrecked my grandparents’ relationship, and the bad choices they made under stress left an enduring legacy. So I have no personal reason to be grateful for the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb or WWII in general.
On the other hand, once that weapon was developed, it was bound to be used at some point. I’m sorry about the Japanese people killed, but if it weren’t them, it would have been the Koreans ten years later, or somebody else. Thanks, Japan, for taking one (well, two) for Team Human. The fact that we haven’t done it since makes me cautiously optimistic, though I’m not complacent: the people now in control of these weapons no longer rememer the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Considering the persistence of Japanese resistance at Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Saipan (read about Suicide Hill), the mobilization of the citizenry of Japan proper, and the predicted US casualty count, perhaps far too many people, the above posters for instance, feel there’s a difference between preferring the lesser of evils and seeming blasé about the deaths of 100,000 people (less than were killed during some non-atomic incendiary raids) that occurred 3 years or more before they were conceived?