The aiming point was actually a bridge in the middle of the city, (It was almost a bulls eye, in Nagasaki they missed the actual target by 2 miles.) and I remember reading a harrowing tale of a coupe of American POWs that survived almost unharmed because they were forced that day to move cargo inside a ship in the harbor. The guards that were on the deck were not so lucky as they suffered severe burns from the bomb explosion that took place about 3 miles away.
Mind you, I agree with all the rest what you said, but it is a pet peeve of mine to notice that the harbor was not actually the target.
I have to specify that it was not the case in Hiroshima, that is what I missed to add at the beginning of the last post. The point remains that I have to doubt that the A-bombs were used with more “clean” objectives.
You’re really going to make me type again on this silly phone for such an argument?
Let’s review: you said
So by saying either, you effectively said “there are no moral arguments against the A-bomb” AND
“there are no moral arguments against the firebombing of Tokyo” in the frame of reference during WWII.
I pointed out that moral arguments against area bombing (by definition, both firebombing and atomic bombing are area bombing) were advanced by numerous people during the war itself.
Your comeback, trying to define some difference between atomic and firebombing, is classic moving the goalposts. I specifically refuted what you said.
FWIW, there is at least one significant difference between fire bombing and the A-bombs – that is the number of airman put at risk by the attacking side. Large fire bombing raids put hundreds of planes and thousands of airmen into the air and at risk of being shot down. The A-bombings, just one plane and I think a couple of accompanying observation planes.
I’m not sure how this consideration might have played out in the minds of the Allied commanders, or indeed if it was a factor at all.
Don’t forget that that made so many Purple Heart medals in anticipation of that invasion that it wasn’t till the year 2000 that the military ordered new ones made.
Yes. My Dad was in MacArthurs HQ, and the plans were full bore, ships were being loaded, supplies piled, Orders of Battle drawn up, and so forth. The Navy did consider opposing Mac’s plan, going for blockade, but that was a political move.
The Americans weren’t amateurs. Ask the Native Americans. Hell, ask the Filipinos and the Hawaiians. What were the Philippines and Hawaii before 1942? That’s right, American territory. Not exactly by choice, either. That’s not at all to defend the Empire of Japan. But WWII was a colonial war, nothing more and nothing less. To view it through any other lens is naive and jingoistic.
Well, no, that’s way oversimplifying. The early phases of the African campaign, when Britain kicked Italy out of Ethiopia and Libya, may have resembled colonial wars, but by the time you get to Midway and Stalingrad, no more: then it became a clash of great powers.
Maybe, maybe not. The problem with plans is, they can always be delayed, redrawn, whatever. There were also plans to produce, ship, and drop more nuclear weapons on Japan until they surrendered “unconditionally.” In fact, they didn’t surrender “unconditionally;” Japan retained their emperor.
Not quite correct (at least not if I’m interpreting your post correctly).
Not at war with the Soviets yet, and yet the Soviet Union declared war on Japan toward the end of the conflict. The Soviets began taking territory almost as soon as the Yalta terms permitted them to do so. I agree that the Japanese military high brass was hellbent on an honorable surrender, but that doesn’t change the calculus that America all along had its eyes on the Soviets, and with good reason. The United States did not want what happened in Korea to happen in Japan. There were communist sentiments in Japan. There still are communist sentiments in Japan to this day. They don’t constitute a significant proportion of the electorate, but communism is not entirely out of character for the island country.
*An interesting movie is “Japan’s Longest Day.” Shows the batshit insanity of some of the militarists in Japan’s militia.
Colonial wars are clashes of great powers. The UK and France fought over US territory. They were great powers; they also fought colonial wars. WWII was really no different, as much as we try to sanitize it and claim that it was
Most people who think of WWII in the Pacific, for instance, assume that the war began in the late 1930s. It didn’t. It began in 1854.
They did surrender “unconditionally”. Retaining the Emperor was not a term.
“*We hereby proclaim the unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers of the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters and of all Japanese Armed Forces and all Armed Forces under Japanese control wherever situated.”
*
Japan surrendered unconditionally, just like Germany did, the Allies never wavered from the demand for unconditional surrender, and were prepared to keep fighting until there was nothing left to fight if need be. The Allies absolutely didn’t want Japan doing what Germany had just done, taking a conditional surrender, deciding that it wasn’t really beaten because of that, and starting a fresh major war a couple of decades later. It’s a policy that certainly seemed to have worked, since neither Germany or Japan had any interest in trying become conquerors again in the 20th century.
The fact that the US let Japan’s Emperor remain in power after her surrender doesn’t make that a condition of the surrender, it’s simply a decision made by the US on how to handle occupied Japan. It was entirely within the US’s power to remove Hirohito from office and try him for crimes, or to dissolve the office of the Emperor entirely (though that was never the goal), and in practice the US turned the office of Emperor into a figurehead, so the Emperor really wasn’t in power anymore.
To the extent that there was a difference between the firebombings and the atomic bombs at all, it was in favor of the bombs. Both had comparable effects in terms of civilian deaths, an evil. Both had the aim of ending the war, a good. But the atomic bombs were much more effective at achieving that good aim. An attack that kills a city full of civilians but which ends the war is better than an attack which kills a city full of civilians but which doesn’t end the war.
Now, there is also the consideration of fallout, but that first of all wasn’t really known to the decision-makers of the time, and secondly isn’t actually nearly as bad as most folks nowadays think it is, as evidenced by the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are both again prosperous cities.
According to the text of the Declaration, yes, that’s true. However, there were many, many discussions prior to the Declaration. There were debate within the American government and among the Allies about how to treat Japan. In reality, it wasn’t really an ‘unconditional surrender’. That Japan was allowed to retain the emperor and much of its core governmental structure wasn’t a decision that was made autocratically by Douglas MacArthur in 1946. There had been considerable discussion and treatment of this subject prior to the war’s end. If you want to see total and unconditional surrender, Germany’s a better example. Absolutely nothing was left of the Reich. That was quite different from Japan.
It’s questionable, even doubtful, that the bombs themselves ended the war. It’s not like the Japanese generals and government didn’t know that Tokyo’s population had been cut in half from 8 million to about half that after the bombings. It’s also likely that they were very much aware of the fact that bombing raids had destroyed probably 3/4 of most major Japanese major urban population centers like Osaka, Nagoya, and other cities in addition to Tokyo. And yet they continued fighting. They continued fighting even after the 1st nuclear attack on Hiroshima. IIRC, it took the government / military’s top advisers three days just to meet, at which point Japan was bombed again. And again, they didn’t act with the greatest of urgency even after that attack. The timing makes it seem like the bombs did all the work, but the evidence to support that theory is pretty flimsy.
The entry of the Russians into the war probably had a more significant and immediate effect on the Japanese psyche. The Japanese had defeated the Russians and taken land from them in 1905. The Japanese probably were already well aware of Stalin’s desire to expand his territory, especially when one considers that the Russians had gradually assume a more hostile posture over the preceding year. Although the Japanese hoped they could count on ‘neutral’ Russia to broker at least partially favorable terms for the Japanese in the Potsdam agreement, the Russians had already declared they were not renewing the non-aggression pact. While pretending to negotiate on behalf of Japan, the Russians had actually favored adhering to strict terms unconditional surrender. And it was the Russians who ultimately invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria and the northern islands such as the Kurils, which they still hold to this day.
Japan wasn’t sure just how committed the Americans and British were to invasion and occupation, but the generals felt confident that they could make an invasion messy, and they hoped that by making it messy that a war-weary American nation would eventually compel Truman to accept a conditional surrender. When the Russians entered the picture, all of that changed. They knew they could not fight two massive armies at one time and they also knew that Russia was in a position to invade and take territory, and Japan had no doubt that the Russians would be back for brutal revenge. If you doubt that, visit Berlin sometime. The bullet holes are still there, and so are the ghosts of civilians gang raped and murdered by bloodthirsty Russian soldiers.
The idea that it was the Russians and not the A Bombs is a new idea. It is simply propaganda put out by two sources- the Communists and Soviet Apologists, the ones that say the USSR won the war without any help. And the anti-Nuke folks who want to show that Atomic Bombs are worse than useless.
I’m afraid I don’t see your point. There is no “maybe, maybe not”, the reason Operation Downfall didn’t take place is the same reason the plans to drop additional atomic bombs on Japan didn’t take place: Japan surrendered. Had they not surrendered, Downfall was going to take place, there was no maybe about it. That Japan was allowed to retain the Imperial institution was a very, very minor condition. The emperor’s role in government was entirely removed, and Hirohito was forced to renounce his divine status and that of the imperial institution.
Prior to the Soviet entry into the war, Japan looked to the USSR to broker a surrender through and was quite stunned when the Soviet Union joined in the war against them as well. American eyes were on the Soviet Union because the US had requested Soviet entry into the war, which Stalin agreed to do within three months of the defeat of Germany. You and I are most definitely not in agreement that the Japanese military was hellbent on an honorable surrender; the terms that they wanted and were trying to broker through the Soviets was one that would allow them to not only remain unoccupied and with their government intact, but would allow them to retain their pre-war empire and conquests so that at an absolute minimum Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan would remain under Japanese rule. The Japanese militarists running the government were quite prepared to sacrifice the entire Japanese people and commit national suicide before accepting surrender. Ichioku gyokusai (100 million die together) had been the propaganda slogan drummed into the heads of the Japanese people since 1944. There was nothing honorable about it, and it wasn’t surrender.
Utter nonsense. Japan didn’t retain any of it’s core government structure, much less most of it. The Japanese government was dissolved, much of it was put on trial for war crimes and Japan had to write a new constitution - one that not only forbade the military from running the government but forbade Japan from having a military at all.
Not all new ideas are bad. Remember when the news came out about the Enigma code-breakers? It was a huge revision in our understanding of the war.
I think, more than anything, it’s a self-replicating meme, which people repeat because it sounds knowledgeable and wise. I don’t believe it is intentional propaganda, or really ever was, and it certainly isn’t “simply” propaganda. There’s a lot more to it than that.
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If bombing was a “War Crime” surely we’d have accused the heads of the Luftwaffe for bombing London.
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Well, we couldn’t any more, could we ? Even after a won world war, that much hypocrisy would have been too shameless to pass :D.
Which is actually a thing that came up when the Allied prosecutors considered accusing the heads of the Kriegsmarine of prosecuting unrestricted submarine warfare. Except a) the Kriegsmarine specifically did not do that, at least not early on b) but the US Silent Service sure as hell did in the Pacific, explicitly and as early as December 7.
So that one charge was dropped and Dönitz didn’t hang. Which was for the best, really - he was one of the least reprehensible of 'em.
[QUOTE=GIGOBuster]
Mind you, I agree with all the rest what you said, but it is a pet peeve of mine to notice that the harbor was not actually the target.
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My mistake. Chalk that up to the stuff everybody knows, which I should know by now is wrong more often than not :smack:
I’m not suggesting that it was the Russians who won the war without any help. Obviously the American attacks bludgeoned and weakened Japan. The offensive capabilities to wage war was crippled, which is not insignificant. The atomic bombings were indeed significant, but other than the timing, the facts don’t necessarily support the idea that two atomic bombings in and of themselves ended the war.