Since, afaik anyway, no one is saying this, I’m unsure who’s nits you are picking.
-XT
[/QUOTE]
Villa and Shodan have both used Nanking as a justification for the bombings of Japan.
Uh, YES, in terms of total-war ideology. Note that I am not defending total-war ideology. But in terms of total warfare, every single human being on the other side is ultimately a resource. Ugly implications? Ugly as hell. But that’s how people at the time thought – and that’s how we might find ourselves thinking if it came down to the nitty-gritty again. Total war theory holds that those babies if left alone will eventually be turned into soldiers and sent to kill us.
Again – not my intention to defend it. But hundreds of millions of people apparently believed in and supported such policies. (Although there was always thoughtful dissent, especially regarding area bombing.)
I thought you were asking about the historical situation, so I gave a historical analysis. Really, the answer is easy. What we’re apparently confused about is the question.
Did toddlers count as legitimate targets in the time and ethos of the war itself? Yes.
Would toddlers count as legitimate targets in an idealized world? Of course not.
Would Dio have targeted them? No.
Would Sailboat have targeted them? Not with area bombing. Possibly as occasional indirect victims (“collateral damage,” to use the ugly euphemism) of “precision” bombing against really important targets.
See? easy, if we ask the right question.
All caveats about it being an impossible situation aside…
Yes. I think anyone who wouldn’t sacrifice their own child, assuming there was no alternative, to guaranteed to prevent the Holocaust, for example, needs to reassess their moral compass.
Could I live with myself afterwards? Probably not. But then again I couldn’t live with myself after if I spared my son thus condemning millions of others to death.
Of course, it is a choice I am never going to have to face. But if we had to do 1939-45 all over again, I’d give Bomber Harris more resources rather than fewer, and God Speed & Good Hunting, Lancasters.
No I didn’t. I used the prevention of future Nankings as justification. That you could happily sit back and read of the Rape of Dehli, and the Rape of Sydney, and the Rape of Honolulu, just as long as you didn’t have to get your hands dirty…
I think you’d have to reevaluate your moral compass if you even considered killing your own kid.
And what’s so impossible about a scenario where your own kid is in an area targted for bombing? Unlikely, maybe, but not far fetched. Was there not a single westerner present in Japan at the time of the bombings?
What did you do to stop the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur?
I’d have supported military action to prevent all three. Even if it had resulted in the death of some innocents.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
It’s called having a moral center.
[/QUOTE]
I call it being morally bankrupt, to be honest.
No, you tried to put people into a false position in order to score some obscure points that only you seem to be able to see, to keep this hijack of the thread going along the lines that seem to amuse you for some odd reason.
If I knew it would stop the war? Certainly I would. I’d be willing to be there as well, if I knew it would stop the war and halt the blood shed.
Through inaction, potentially millions of people who didn’t die during WWII would have instead died. Let’s see about your own convictions here, DtC. Would you be willing to have your family as part of that additional death toll to maintain your odd convictions? To prevent the burning of Japanese children in atomic fire, would you be willing to have your own kids burned to death by Japanese troops as they attack places they never got to, due to US intervention? Would you be willing to sacrifice yourself to keep your hands clean, and by doing so, sacrifice not only your own family but potentially millions more for your convictions?
-XT
This is an important point. We weren’t bomibing military targets and causing collateral damage. We were intentionally targeting civilians. Even if I was to go along with the idea that collateral damage is defensible, there’s still a stark distinction between that and civilians as deliberate targets. When other people do that, we call it terrorism.
Sorta. The reasons for the U.S. trade embargoes (of oil, steel, and other stuff) was the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria and China in general.
The reports out of Nanking definately contributed to the worsening of US (Presidential/Congressional) opinion against the Japanese prosecution of their war in China. Otherwise, it might have been more along the lines of “it ain’t our buisness”, which was closer to the man-on-the street opinion.
The US wanted an “Open Door” policy in/with regards to China, as a potential market for U.S. goods.
Specific to Nanking itself, there was a post-war war crime trial, which I don’t think would have happened if the U.S. (leadership) didn’t care about the atrocity.
While I agree that there were many “smaller” cobblestones in the road to war, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the U.S. didn’t give a hoot about atrocities, at least at the national leadership level anyway, where it really matters. (Joe the cab driver can’t shape policy like Cordell Hull could.)
The RAF wasn’t capable of precision bombing at the time. The best it could do was to bomb the industrial areas of German cities (and often not even that). There tended to be large concentrations of population in the industrial areas.
This is an unsupported premise. I don’t buy it for a second.
I do not accept the premise that there would be an additional death poll.
Yes. I am not going to kill somebody else’s children to save my own, or kill my own to save anyone else’s. I’m not setting any toddlers on fire. Full stop.
I would sacrifice myself in a second rather than kill a single child, but I don’t accept your premise that me not killing babies would cause millions to die.
Not area bombing. Many studies and postwar analyses have cast doubt on whether area bombing (as distinguished from precision bombing) materially shortened the war. It’s also fairly clear that the bombing chiefs in every county’s ir forces tended to promote area bombing (and all strategic bombing) out of a belief that their arm of service could win wars by itself, and only would have a chance to prove it if strategic bombing was vigorously pressed. So that inherent conflict of interest means we have to view the statements of the air force high commands with a dose of skepticism. Better analyses come from some of the studies conducted by these same air forces during and after the war, and from modern historians.
It’s not at all universally agreed that area bombing was militarily effective, leaving aside moral qualms. John Keegan (who is British himself) has argued that Britain’s “Bomber” Harris supported bombing the “built up areas” of industrial cities (a conscious euphemism for the apartments of the working class) out of class prejudice and nationalist blindness – he assumed that working-class people would be driven into a frenzy and eventually rise up against the German government, but ignored the fact that working-class Britons had cheerfully held up under the same kind of bombing during Blitz.
Precision-bombing the oilfields and the ersatz fuel production centers, on the other hand, seems to have helped a lot – I’ve seen statements that Germany would have run out of fuel and been unable to fight a modern war at about the same time it was overrun by the Soviets (so, in theory would have lost even without the Soviet invasion) and fuel shortages definitely constrained their operational decisions even as early as the Battle of the Bulge.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
This is an important point. We weren’t bomibing military targets and causing collateral damage. We were intentionally targeting civilians. Even if I was to go along with the idea that collateral damage is defensible, there’s still a stark distinction between that and civilians as deliberate targets. When other people do that, we call it terrorism.
[/QUOTE]
We would call it terrorism TODAY. But then, we are not in a total war, we have weapons actually capable of hitting a target closer than a 10 mile radius, we have air craft capable of hitting targets at night, and, our tolerance as a society (in the US and The West anyway) for such slaughter has grown much more stringent.
-XT
There was no pretense to be bombng military tagets in Tokyo, Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The explicit goal was to kill civilians. Intentionally targeting civilians is the accepted definition of terrorism.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
This is an unsupported premise. I don’t buy it for a second.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, but again, you are an uninformed shopper who seemingly doesn’t know much about the subject, so your purchasing choices are pretty much inconsequential. If you’d like to explain WHY you think that millions more people wouldn’t die had the US not involved itself in WWII, you are, of course, free to do so. Simply saying ‘I don’t by it for a second’, when you seemingly know so little, is, well, rather silly, don’t you think?
I’ll tell you what. You tell me why you don’t think millions more would have died had the US stayed out of the war, and I’ll explain to you why you are wrong. How does that sound?
That’s nice. People who think the earth is flat don’t accept satellite photos, but at least they give a tangible reason. Would you care to go into some additional detail concerning your convictions here?
Ok, so, you are willing to sacrifice your family, yourself and all those extra people you don’t believe would have died in order to not have to kill anyone. Glad we cleared that up.
Well, YOU not killing children probably wouldn’t do anything, really. The point is America not killing any children (which is your way of pulling the heart strings card).
-XT
We would call it terrorism TODAY. But then, we are not in a total war, we have weapons actually capable of hitting a target closer than a 10 mile radius, we have air craft capable of hitting targets at night, and, our tolerance as a society (in the US and The West anyway) for such slaughter has grown much more stringent.
[/QUOTE]
We weren’t missing the targets in Japan. We were hitting them. The civilians WERE the targets. If that’s terrorism now, then it was terrorism then. I have no patience for moral relativism.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
There was no pretense to be bombng military tagets in Tokyo, Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The explicit goal was to kill civilians. Intentionally targeting civilians is the accepted definition of terrorism.
[/QUOTE]
:dubious: Do you have a cite for this? Because the air force dropped leaflets urging people to flee the cities prior to many of the bombings. Also, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were all key military targets, rail heads, logistics centers and manufacturing centers that were certainly part of Japans military system.
-XT
Well having had family member who fought in the pacific, and one who suffered throgh the Bataan death march, I can assure you that the Japanese were fanatics who would have caused hundreds of thousands of americans if we had tried to invade. After all we had destroyed their air force, decimated their navy, taken Okinawa, and they still refused to surrender. If we had invaded, there is no way that it would have been a roll over for the american forces. Think about it, we dropped the first bomb and they still did not surrender, and considering the devestation, 3 days was enough time for anyone to understand that the war was over, yet they still did not surrender. Apologists for using the bomb on Japan simply do not understand the Japanese military mindset at that time.
There’s a definite area for discussion about the efficacy of area bombing, and strategic bombing generally. I’d agree, with hindsight, that it certainly didn’t meet the objectives originally set out for it - the idea was that London would be destroyed in a matter of hours by the pre-war Luftwaffe, for example.
But you don’t have hindsight at the time. The RAF did switch towards “precision” bombing as it became possible to do so successfully. But lets remember, precision bombing doesn’t involve no civilian casualties. And more importantly, especially early in the war, the RAF didn’t have the ability to do precision bombing. It was lucky to find the city, let alone a specific building.
I also think a lot of this ignores the reality of German geography and urban planning. The areas with factories and communications targets weren’t out of city industrial estates to which the workers commuted in their cars. German workers lived close to the factories in which they built Panther tanks and MPG-42s and Messcherschmidts and made Xyclon B. Bombing the areas with industrial targets meant bombing the workers residences too. German also was heavily dependent on small scale bespoke production for much of its war effort, with small workshops producing many specialized parts for important weapons systems (partially because German weapons were often ludicrously complicated, and also partially a response to the Allied raids). Dresden, for example, contained large numbers of such small war producing targets.
Once the Allies realized the German fuel situation, there was a shift in policy away from bombing cities towards bombing fuel targets. Not overly successful, to be honest, but it happened. I’d agree that individual bombing raids, and individual strategic decisions can and should be analyzed. It’s possible that Dresden wasn’t justifiable, given the stage of the war, but I’d come down on the other side on that.
So, in the 1941-42 time period, for example, what would you have had the British do other than area bomb? They simply didn’t have the capacity to precision bomb without ruinous losses (and even when they tried, the results were far from precise). The idea of the British “cheerfully holding up” under the Blitz is largely propaganda - there were major effects on morale, and localized industrial action/civil disruption in particular as a result of the failure to adequately provide protection in working class areas, and the refusal to open the Underground stations. The bombing of Germany also demonstrably did affect German morale - in particular the aura of invincibility many Germans attributed to the Nazis. Goering in particular became a laughing stock because of his promise that no British bomber would ever come over Berlin. Germany was forced by the strategic bombing campaign to shift far more resources in manpower, fuel and machinery into air defense, which meant they were not available to go to the East.
Lets also not compare the morale effect of the Blitz with the later raids on german cities and assume it is a level playing field. The 1000 plane raids were of a totally different scale.